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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • This subsequent post of yours is more substantial in explaining your position and I generally agree with all of your points.

    My post was with the absurdist position that critiquing the Biden performance around the time of the last debate made you an enemy of progressive politics. Joe had fired his last good shot in 2016. He’s a good man, a heroic fighter for his age but Trump was always going to steamroll him this time. It doesn’t matter that Joe had a cold, or that he sometimes made excellent policy points, the optics were that he was meandering and frail. It wasn’t that the debate done him in by itself - Obama sometimes had a bad debate (particularly his first one) it was that his performance on the night confirmed what was evident for months. By the time Joe started arguing with Trump about who could beat who in golf the jig was up.

    Despite Trump’s own senior moments, despite his atrocious behaviour, despite his obvious lies, the feeling was Joe is doomed. And so was the most important election since last time, and that says a lot. The fact that it is not impossible that he still won’t get in again is beyond worrying. But with Harris there is a decent chance.

    I hope that clears up my position? It was more a vent against all those who insisted that we ride the Joe bus over the cliff and disbelieve our own eyes while we did it.


  • I think that your metrics for picking covert Trumpers based upon that appaling debate is incorrect and simplistic. I watched every second of that shit show and believed that we were doomed for another 4 years of the orange turd.

    Trump lied during the debate. Some estimates were that he lied upwards of 250 times in his 45 minutes at the mic. Those numbers seems off, but who knows? I don’t know the true figure, but it was insane. However, it is also not the fucking point. Trump is a serial liar. He lies to his family, he lies to the people, he lies to the courts, he lies non-stop. He would have lied if Biden performed outstandingly in the debate. He would have lied if Biden put in a middling performance. And, he lied when Biden performed badly. Are we supposed to be clutching our pearls in shock that Trump lied?

    So, we can’t judge Biden’s terrible performance by the ‘other guy’. We need to judge whether Biden could win in November. And if you had of watched all 90 minutes, like I did, there was zero confidence that he could. The GOP campaign would have portrayed Biden’s lost moments a million times, over and over and over again. And they’d be stupid not to. And yes, Trump lied in the debate. Let’s try and turn the broken bus around on the seemingly new information that a serial liar lied on stage.

    The proof of this was the instant jump in the polls once Harris became the candidate and the growing support since. Is the argument that all these covert GOP critics suddenly turned Dems? Or, perhaps, changing to Haris was the sensible thing to do, and perhaps, just might keep the orange turd out of the white house.


  • The constitution is decided by the Supreme Court in the end. The American system of government makes the selection of justices political appointees for life. That is why you have Republican and Democrat justices. Political. So the constitution gets bent into any political shape according to power possession.

    Don’t for a second believe that the United States can’t sleepwalk into a dictatorship. People are already describing Jan 6 as an ordinary tourist visit. What will it take for the public to see the danger with their own eyes.


  • I can’t compare the US or German situation in any depth because I’m neither American nor German. Like you I can only go by appearances when viewing the other. I think that big pharma has got you guys around the balls to a larger extent. For instance, insulin medication has never been expensive over here and we have a thing called the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) that lets Australians get necessary prescribed medicines without paying full price. The scheme began in 1948. Some medicines which costs thousands in the US are subsidised to the tune of about $10 a month here. That is the extreme end, but drug subsidy is a thing and is tax payer funded.

    As to why other rich western countries don’t do as well, I’m not sure. I speculate that social policies probably have a great deal to do with it. The US seems to treat socialised anything with a degree of contempt, at least according to the horror stories we hear about. You know, patients without sufficient insurance being refused treatment or massive bill shock after an operation. I’m sufficiently ignorant about this matter to be confident about the detail.

    All I can say is that something structural is at work that might explain why the Aussie medical experience is better, and I doubt that it’s better or different fast food.


  • I don’t understand the points of this post.

    Australia is very urbanised with the vast majority of the country clinging to the coastal rim. The interior of the country is vastly unpopulated.

    Australia has a much better health outcomes than the US. Our fast food culture, although not great, cannot be compared to Americans.

    The ‘everything can kill you’ thing is a meme. Yes, we have tons of venomous creatures but as we mostly live in the cities the rare deaths cause headlines and are not common place. Plus we don’t experience mass shootings every week, let alone single gun deaths.

    The single biggest benefit for Australian life expectancy is socialised medicine. It’s not perfect, and insurance is encouraged, but a poor person in need of major medical intervention has almost identical access to health care as a fully insured person, and mostly with no financial outlay. In fact, an insured person may lie side-by-side in a hospital bed next to an uninsured person getting the same treatment.

    Medical insurance is not tied to employment.

    All this is under threat. Conservatives are attacking our health system and underfunding it. It is only a matter of time before we start tracking downwards like the US. The secret to a longer life expectancy is government regulation and social responsibility, a healthy personal lifestyle and not feeding the corporate medical parasites that sit between the patient and the required healthcare.