I've believed for years the first shots of the revolution would be fired on Wall Street.

You know, I'm pretty sure this was an episode of "Law & Order" once. Five bucks says someone in the gunman's life (spouse most likely) died as a result of being denied care because of coverage.

Shocked Picuku Faces:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/132136403

You know that's a disingenuous argument, right?

BorderCount wrote:

You know that's a disingenuous argument, right?

I think you meant "spurious" but what do I know?  I would have tagged the killer as "Gun Laws" and the victim as "Capitalists".

Hey, I just had a fun memory lane moment.  Remember when Barbara Streisand hired a team of bodyguards and then declared that owning guns should be illegal in California?

Baywolfe wrote:

BorderCount wrote:

You know that's a disingenuous argument, right?

I think you meant "spurious" but what do I know?  I would have tagged the killer as "Gun Laws" and the victim as "Capitalists".

Hey, I just had a fun memory lane moment.  Remember when Barbara Streisand hired a team of bodyguards and then declared that owning guns should be illegal in California?

No, I think I said what I meant. My point was going to be that even the gun laws I advocate for wouldn't have stopped this from happening. I've never advocated for banning all guns, and I'm not enough of an idealist to think we'd be able to stop all crime. I'm just sick of hearing about schools getting shot to hell by asshats with assault rifles.

On that, we agree.

SpacePuppy wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/kyUWRyO.png

Here's a better one the wife and I collaborated on:

Scotty wrote:

SpacePuppy wrote:

https://i.imgur.com/kyUWRyO.png

Here's a better one the wife and I collaborated on:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ … 20988390b&

Spreading it around Scotty!

Time for a little jury nullification for our boy, Luigi. Hopefully the internet can get the word out to all the prospective juror pool that they don't have to find him guilty.

Even though Luigi, and perhaps soon his brother Mario, is in custody, they didn't get their usual help from the public sector.

Internet Detectives Are Refusing To Solve UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder. Here's Why

Last edited by Baywolfe (2024-12-09 21:42:23)

A few years old but sadly still current.

“The American healthcare system is a leading example of an institution that, under political protection, redistributes income upwards to hospitals, physicians, device-makers, and pharmaceutical companies while delivering among the worst health outcomes of any rich country,” the economists write.

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who won the 2015 Nobel prize for economics, say the pursuit of profit by medical corporations has played a leading role in the surge of “deaths of despair” since the 1990s, led by opioid overdoses, alcoholism and suicide.

The Princeton economists were the first to reveal the phenomenon which by 2017 was claiming the lives of 158,000 Americans every year – a number they liken to three 737s’ worth of passengers falling out of the sky every day. Case and Deaton, who are married, also discovered that the surge in deaths of despair was overwhelmingly among white working-class Americans without a university degree, and that it was forcing down life expectancy in the US.

Now their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, explores why this tragedy is an unusually American phenomenon and concludes that the greed of the US’s medical corporations was both an important driver in creating the conditions for the rise in deaths of despair and in providing the means for many to kill themselves.

To be fair, it's not McDonald's fault one of their employees ratted the guy out.

"The CEO has distressingly become something of a folk hero to shareholders of Nerrexhealthco, eliciting messages of support on social media and votes for a compensation bonus."

I gotta be honest: this whole thing has been... testing the limits of my worldview.

Scotty wrote:

The pandemic did that for me. Really showed me what the average person was like deep inside.

I found most people to be compassionate, at least for the first year of the pandemic. My lungs are pretty shot, parents smoking, me doing the same stupid stuff up until my son was born, pneumonia, bronchitis every year for years, pertussis in my 50's. Therefore, I wear a mask everywhere. This pisses some people off. Fuck Em, Snowflakes.

In the story, this was indeed only the beginning of the violence. But in real life, Doctorow imagines very different solutions to the crisis of American healthcare.

“We have historically done things about oppressive corporate systems that are destroying people’s lives, and we’ve done them, if not in living memory, at least not that long ago,” he says, speaking of the trust-busting movement to break up Standard Oil and other monopolies in the late 1800s and early 1900s. “Corporate power was significantly more dystopian than it is today, and we figured out how to deal with it, and it’s not like the political movements and the organizing that they undertook to get that done were the lost arts of a fallen civilization.”

The movement that brings single-payer healthcare to the US, Doctorow believes, will be a trust-busting one. “People don’t know that they’re all angry about the same stuff right now,” he says, noting higher costs at grocery stores and tech monopolies. “They’re actually all angry about the same thing. And when they figure it out the coalition will be unstoppable.”


Five years ago, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks’ news.

In Radicalized, one of four novellas comprising a science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow charts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers whose partners or children have been denied healthcare coverage

Radicalized - A short story about health care, and desperation.