Oh... not sure where to go with that
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
Because shouting at impoverished Midwesterners to check their white male privilege and vote for Hillary in spite of being told to pound sand sure did work out well for her, amirite?
This is what grinds my bicuspids to powder with the current age of leftists.
I'm a leftist from waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay the fuck back. Name any thing a modern leftist activist believes in and I'm there. Racial and sexual equality? Fuck yeah! LGBT rights? I'm down with it! Single-payer, state-funded medicine? Preach it brother! Welfare? Bring it on!
But HOLY FUCKING SHIT are they incompetent at this game! The election of Trump should have been a major fucking wake-up call that their "tactic" (for want of a better word) of shrill, accusatory screeching is an unmitigated, disastrous FAILURE.
So what's their response?
Obviously they need to double down on the shrill, accusatory screeching because people didn't hear them the first time.
No, whackjobs. People heard you just fine. They voted the way they did to spite you because you fucking suck. And in the process you set your (and, ultimately my) goals back a decade or two (or more). And you want to make it even fucking WORSE!?!?!?
Thanks, assholes. Now I'm going to die without seeing the USA join the civilized world and have socialized medicine. Fuck you very much. Fuck you in the ear with a rusty chainsaw.
Thanks, assholes. Now I'm going to die without seeing the USA join the civilized world and have socialized medicine. Fuck you very much. Fuck you in the ear with a rusty chainsaw.
Speaking as someone who would have actually died about three months back without what little we do have, as much as I love ya, hearing you rant about how we all suck so badly at getting the rest of it done that you won't get to see it happen, wow, man. Wow.
Oh fucking well.
@surreality Well, he's not wrong. While what you have is good, it's not as good as it could be. As good as it should be. That's one of the foibles of a democracy - no matter how far removed the people are from the actual decisions. Every success is everyone's success. Every failure is everyone's failure.
He/Him
@surreality said in RL Anger:
Thanks, assholes. Now I'm going to die without seeing the USA join the civilized world and have socialized medicine. Fuck you very much. Fuck you in the ear with a rusty chainsaw.
Speaking as someone who would have actually died about three months back without what little we do have, as much as I love ya, hearing you rant about how we all suck so badly at getting the rest of it done that you won't get to see it happen, wow, man. Wow.
What you got will likely be disassembled by President Rump Roast, or at least so badly damaged that it will set back a civilized medical system by at least two decades.
Given that I figure I've got about two decades left…
Well, go ahead and do that math.
@Tinuviel Not arguing that.
Without the thing he's screaming about sucking so badly, I would actually be dead right now. Full stop. There's not a question, an 'if', or 'maybe' there.
Yes, it is terrible we won't likely see it in our lifetimes.
This horrible disaster that had finally gotten here? Is the only reason I'm still sitting here writing this now. So shitting on it for being so awful? We all suck so badly at this, there's no perfect answer, but even due to the flawed one, I'm still breathing.
And yes, it's true that with the changes likely coming? That will no longer be true. It doesn't change the fact that the imperfect answer saved the lives of a pile of folks, and most of us are not so foolish as to not be grateful for an imperfect answer that means we're still here at all, even if we're back to being shit out of luck in the coming soon.
If we had waited for a 'the perfect is the enemy of the good' approach to succeed here, we'd have more dead people than we do, and I would be one of them.
So be mad that it ain't perfect all you want, and be mad that you don't get to see the perfect. Acting like the good didn't do any? Yeah, no. We're all so bad at this I'm not invisibly scattered on a beach somewhere in New Jersey right now.
Oh fucking well.
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
@WTFE I mean, to be fair, the two major candidates we had on offer were pretty bad for different reasons. And while I'm all for gay wedding cakes and tranny bathrooms, I'm not all for telling me that I'm not allowed to say "tranny" anymore by pain of totally ruining my life. This might sound nuts, but I'm really quite reluctant to discard the Western liberal enlightenment in the interest of cheaper birth control for women or not offending Muslims.
I'm not down for that whole hypersensitivity-followed-by-dogpile thing either. It's the GOALS of the modern left I agree with and emphatically not the techniques.
So, yeah. I voted for Trump, because this election to me came off (in part, anyway) as being about having to choose between letting Trump say outrageous shit and letting Rachel Maddow et al dictate to me which opinions won't get me fired. I'm just plain not on board with living in a country where remarks like "maybe you should just pay for your own birth control" (a statement I don't even agree with btw) can provoke a large-scale public meltdown/riot followed by someone's permanent exclusion from polite society.
I'm not sure I would have actively voted Trump were I unlucky enough to be an American. I'd have inactively voted Trump by not voting at all. (I don't believe in the whole "you have to vote" bullshit because it puts forth a false dilemma whereas I believe I should have a "none of the above fuckers" option.)
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
But please, reign in the rhetoric about how I'm an evil white man when I say "but we should also try to balance the fucking budget."
And the day I do that, go on with all the ranting you want.
Edit: I am a stereotypical libra, registered independent, and have no qualms voting a split ticket based on the actual human beings who are on it at the time, because I have the good fortune of living in a reasonably moderate state in which party politics have historically been less dramatic than in others, and until the days of the Tea Party, politics were sane here. I live in the land of Christine O'Donnell, man. Where we were all -- irrelevant of party -- looking forward to voting for Mike Castle until he got kicked off the ticket in the primary. Go on back and look into that one. So you can seriously blow me with that assumption.
@Shiggy First: there is a politics forum for a reason and this really ain't it.
When you find in the party platform the bit about screeching at you for being a straight white man, do please post it there. I will even join that part of the forum to read it.
Also, I am the last person you want to get into an abortion debate with.
Frankly, I am still pissed Uncle Joe got discouraged from running, and it's not just because he's the home town hero in these parts. The ability to talk to people as people and exercise common sense and moderation and compromise are pretty fucking essential, and the more either party screams about gatekeeper issue 'test cases' and similar, the more ridiculous shit gets. Everything becomes an 'alternative fact' when no one is paying real attention to what anyone not within their own echo chamber is saying, which is a fundamentally dangerous situation for all of the people trying to live under such conditions. Namely, all of us.
@surreality The healthcare problem is seriously what has me the most anxious about moving to the US. The rest we can work on (we being... Americans, I guess. Since I'll be living there eventually.) but basic medical services - or rather what I'm used to having as the 'basic' - are so, so important. If I had to pay market rate for any of my medications I'd be bankrupted within six months.
The idea of not having that kind of a safety net is so alien to me, so I'm sorry if my understanding of both of your arguments isn't really there. Cutting funding to our health service would be (and has been) political suicide. I guess it's just a cultural thing, somehow.
He/Him
@surreality The healthcare problem is seriously what has me the most anxious about moving to the US. The rest we can work on (we being... Americans, I guess. Since I'll be living there eventually.) but basic medical services - or rather what I'm used to having as the 'basic' - are so, so important. If I had to pay market rate for any of my medications I'd be bankrupted within six months.
The idea of not having that kind of a safety net is so alien to me, so I'm sorry if my understanding of both of your arguments isn't really there. Cutting funding to our health service would be (and has been) political suicide. I guess it's just a cultural thing, somehow.
Under our current imperfect system, I was able to get insurance for the first time in over 12 years. It is not great insurance. Not by a long shot.
Literally five days after it kicked in, I was in the hospital, and they did not know if they could get me into surgery fast enough to prevent me from dying right there.
I was in the hospital for about two weeks. All of the testing/medications/the literally dozens of doctors I saw/the three surgical procedures/catscans/x-rays/MRI -- all of it. Some things, multiple times. Thousands of dollars in blood testing from four to eight times daily, throughout.
At the end of the day, we owe roughly $6k, because for the first time, acquiring insurance was possible. We may, actually, not even owe that, because we're right near the income line at which the hospital, under current policy, says, "Nope, we've got this, we understand you're poor folks." We'll find that out when we do our taxes to find out the exact number, because we're literally that close to the line. (This is entirely aside from the 'actually still alive' thing.)
The actual itemized bill for all of this was well over a quarter of a million dollars.
So I get scared. I get that being incredibly daunting. But seriously: look at that, and tell me that ain't better than dead or owing more money than I will likely earn in my lifetime, because those were the previous options available.
Oh fucking well.
@surreality Oh I totally understand that, the Affordable Care Act - though somewhat flawed in my inexpert opinion - was a super amazing first step. At the same time though, I have trouble understanding a culture (not necessarily one of which you are a part, but one that definitely shines through in the arguments about this topic) that says "why should I pay for other people's healthcare?" Is supporting your fellows just... not a thing that matters over there?
It's not so much the healthcare issue itself that scares me - though it does, because of course it does - but the whole culture shift. The.. I don't know, is selfishness too moderate a word? It just doesn't make sense. It goes against everything I've ever thought. Except against the French. Fuck those guys.
@Shiggy Hence the 'first step' bit. And, unless I have my facts very much wrong, Obama had to do a great deal of compromises else the ACA wouldn't have been passed in the first place.
Again. This isn't the politics section. So. Y'all whine about the politics if you want, I'm gonna be here being RL angry at the indifference and the angst.................
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
I'm not sure I would have actively voted Trump were I unlucky enough to be an American. I'd have inactively voted Trump by not voting at all. (I don't believe in the whole "you have to vote" bullshit because it puts forth a false dilemma whereas I believe I should have a "none of the above fuckers" option.)
Civic duty, my man.
If they want to call it a "duty" then give a viable option, even if that viable option is a "none of the above motherfuckers" with actual legal teeth. (In my dream elections, if "none of the above" gets the plurality, ALL parties have to field DIFFERENT candidates and hit the polls again.)
If you don't give me a viable option, it's a duty only in the same sense as it's a duty for me to hand over my wallet when someone has a gun pointed at my head.
@Shiggy I frankly wish everybody would leave all the political talk to that space, because many of us come here to get away from that shit. You'll notice my first reply was to yell at someone I consider a friend of mine about it. 
I really don't care what you think about abortion. Having formerly been a mod on a board about that debate for years, I have seen more crack-pottery on that front than you can even begin to imagine. I'm also that chick who got "legitimately raped" even by the crackpot definition and thought she was pregnant from it and should never be pregnant (yay for luck breaks that I wasn't) because it'd do me major bodily harm at best, and was very pro-life at the time (not now, hello learning experiences), having been raised Catholic.
To say I have investment in the subject would be an understatement.
So please, want to ban it all you want! I will be over here laughing at you about how all the shit people claim never happens to support their merry visions of handwaving away the issues actually does fucking happen to real people all the fucking time.
Then we can get into the time the docs thought I had an ectopic pregnancy, and when I was sent in to have bloodwork to test for pregnancy, the pro-life med tech drawing blood not only did not know what an ectopic pregnancy was, which is horrifying for a medical professional, but how my not being thrilled with the idea of it and starting to merrily decorate a nursery was totally awesome justification to break the actual law and leak my personal phone number and address to the people who covered my car with the word MURDERER, throw flyers and hand-written in my door for literally years with the same, and call the house with abusive bullshit. That one was fun times.
The irony that it was a burst cyst and the pregnancy test came back negative, I suppose, was lost on positively everybody but me.
Zealots don't tend to bother with education, or, apparently, actual facts. And plenty imagine they're well within bounds to break the law, harass, or abuse others in pursuit of their zealotry. I am frankly watching every aspect of political life in the country dissolve into precisely the same sort of zealot-think, and there is no single issue that sends up a tornado alarm so loud about the negative consequences of that than the abortion debate.
That's why you don't want to get into that one with me.
On the ACA costs: ours is about $850+/month, which is a huge chunk of what we earn. We can't get subsidies for it since it's through an employer; we could buy something similar on the exchanges for about the same, but since there's an employer option available to us, we would get no subsidies for it. Yep, there's broken shit in there, to be sure. That is still better than dead.
The year I didn't have coverage (not married; unable to afford it; my income qualified me for medicaid but our state is funky on 'this month you made $200, the next you made $3k, even if the $3k month is a single month aberration' and they need to sort that shit out, seriously) I would have had to pay a fee that would have been under $400 or so, tops, but my income was low enough I didn't have to pay it anyway, because they do, actually, take that into account at a certain point. Which is less than half a month's coverage currently. While that sucks, it is not the insurmountable sum that people scream about; it's the principle of the thing, and I don't entirely disagree with that.
A friend of mine worked in a bank. Regularly, she would get calls at the call center about how the percentage of a penny shaved off this or that should be rounded up instead of rounded down, and these calls would descend into endless screaming about 'the principle of the thing'. Even I would earn more money than a penny for arguing with someone for twenty minutes about a fraction of a penny. There is a point at which the argument costs us more than what we're arguing about, and rather than digging in heels to scream about principles, practical common sense awareness needs to kick in at some point. Collectively, people are moving away from that practice to factionalize, and down that road lies an equally collective ruin.
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
@WTFE Well, legally, it's not a duty at all. I just want to make my country a livable place, which does entail a concept of "civic duty" that is applied in real life. The reality is that nations are made-up of the people who live in them, which in turn means that if you're a piece of shit, and this is the norm, then your country is going to be a piece of shit to live in. Hence, voting, among other things. Shoveling the snow on the street that you live on (municipal funds for that dried up last year), and so on.
See, I'm down for the snow shoveling as a civic "duty" (legal or moral), but voting? I don't see how choosing from two candidates who both deeply repel me helps society in any meaningful way. And, indeed, I think voting for the one that is microscopically less offensive DAMAGES society in that it normalizes the process of offering only candidates that are palatable to the lunatics because sane people feel they "have to vote".
Unfortunately, a friend is getting reamed a guy who cannot tell the difference between the two companies, despite being repeatedly told and explained and given links. Nope. In his mind, they are one and the same and she is a horrible, evil person.
Why isn't he boycotting Facebook?
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
Yeah, health insurance is important, but Obama "compromised" with Republicans too much and gave us Romneycare. The biggest criticism of him can be that he pussied out on single payer.
No, not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for the ACA.
Obama's "compromises" were with moderate democrats.
@Shiggy said in RL Anger:
I'd really like to have a conversation about how to make Trumpcare better than Obamacare, but instead all we can have are rabid defense of Trumpcare or rabid defense of Obamacare, both of which are deeply flawed in different ways.
This is a common sense, realistic, sane human being approach to the current problem, even if we may not ultimately agree about what 'better' would look like.
Have some coffee, spike it if you gotta, because yes, pretty much this, this is the point I see from where I'm sitting.
I do not agree with you about the idea that people think white, straight men are the devil. Some, yes. Some people think any grouping of individuals is precisely that.
Any realistic discussion of privilege? Recognizes that it exists on a spectrum, and any given individual is going to fall at different points in different ways. You will never have to live in fear that if you become pregnant, you will be relegated to spend the remainder of your life in a wheelchair at best; that is a privilege, and it's real. I will also never have to face the potential of a former sex partner come to me out of nowhere and, a decade after I have heard from them, say: I have had your baby, and you need to give me money going forward for the support of that child. That is a challenge you could face and I cannot; that is a privilege I have that you do not.
Both of these things require an attempt at understanding and human empathy is required to even begin to achieve that understanding, because these things are outside the realm of our possible and personal experience. When we make decisions about them, we cannot only think of ourselves and what we want.
You and I will not face the problems someone who is not white will face in America. That's just a fact. It does not mean that as white people, we cannot have problems, we cannot face suffering, we cannot be subject to unfairness or harsh circumstance. It means that there is a subset of experiences we have the privilege of not being subject to in this country that have a real impact on people's lives.
This is not a difficult principle to understand on the most basic level. Most people of my generation and those after -- I'm 43, for whatever that matters -- understand this as a general principle.
Most of us have internalized the idea that the color of someone's skin or their gender should not matter in regard to how we treat that person as a fellow human being, for instance, but our lack of being someone different than ourselves is still something we cannot understand in the same way, and the lesson of listening to those experiences in order to enable us to come to that understanding is a more difficult lesson to internalize. As a result, we treat others 'just like us', and think this is enough to balance the scales; in an ideal world, this would be the case, but it is not functionally so in a reality that is still riddled with flaws, because our experiences are different, and we are still in some ways blind to the ways in which this is so.
Broadly speaking, intentions are good. Very few people actually embrace hate and shrill horribleness and othering with the intent to do so.
It still doesn't change the basic fact that you and I might face certain class or income-based suffering that someone of another race in another social class or with considerably higher income does not. That's something that happens, it's something that's real, and it's something we collectively ignore at our own peril. It also doesn't change the fact that that same person of another race may face suffering that we do not, even if it isn't the same suffering, which we also ignore at our own collective peril.
For crying out loud, @Shiggy, you've got me agreeing with @surreality. How dare you?
@surreality Well, he's not wrong. While what you have is good, it's not as good as it could be. As good as it should be. That's one of the foibles of a democracy - no matter how far removed the people are from the actual decisions. Every success is everyone's success. Every failure is everyone's failure.
