Finally feel free enough to speak more of my mind

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

Shakespeare is like this

One of the funniest True Believer things a liberal in the UK believes is that the NHS is good and that one of, in fact the primary, reason it's good is that it has a large immigrant staff. They then, in turn, use this as the number one argument in favour of immigration. This is their causa dilecta. It's their ol' reliable. They will say this while complaining out of the other side of their mouth about waiting lists for appointments, the time-sink of the ER, the incomprehensible level of incompetent staff & medical malpractice, all while knowing that we also see these same problems. Yet this is their immigration sacred cow. The problems cited prior? Somehow ontologically separate from the very cogs of the machine that they're lifting up like the great Simba for us all to praise. You see, it's actually the funding that's the issue! Underpaid and overworked staff. Not enough beds. The NHS simply needs more money! Let's ignore the fact that almost 1/3 of our expenditure is on public healthcare...it's an underfunded institution, it's in mortal danger, it's a few elections away from being privatised! Basically, don't question the impact of immigration. Can't find good doctors and nurses because immigrants keep the wages artificially low, hamstringing negotiations by native staff because, well, we'll just hire someone from Bangladesh to replace you and we didn't even have to spend money on their education! Can't get appointments because the immigrants working in the hospitals, the numero uno reason we're told we should support letting in eleventy trillion people on dinghies from Africa (via France), are outnumbered by those very same eleventy trillion Africans, most of whom will not only never put on scrubs, they will never put on a work uniform of any sort. They sure as hell will be using the NHS though! Over and over and over again, forever. We must accept it because to not accept it is to be against immigration and to be against immigration is to be against the NHS and to be against the NHS means you want granny to die and on and on spins the justifications of the liberal mind, ad nauseam, until they're frenzied and foam mouthed. They never get off the merry-go-round long enough to realise that the immigrants are not magical high priests and priestesses with esoteric knowledge previously unknown to Brits. Ultimately, they're doing a job to fill demands. That's it. If we're being generous, they're neutral artifacts of policies from successive Tory and Labour governments who decided that things must be so. If we scaled back immigration, incentivised homegrown staff, made economic & cultural decisions to encourage native birthrates to fix the problem of the top heavy aging population who need healthcare, then the favoured argument for immigration from the left vanishes like a speck of dust in a sandstorm.