Wolves don't have Alphas

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Havlová commenting on this article. 

LOVE this definition of feminism!

This never occurred to me. Not once. That Americans are against Health Care because they think it actually costs tens of thousands of dollars for a broken arm, hundreds of thousands for a complicated birth, millions for cancer treatment.

I’ve had these same drops before living in the UK. They cost me seven GBP.

It’s the exact same drug, same steroid, same strain of antibiotic. But somehow the US gets away with charging $100 for a generic non brand version of a drug which is easy to create and widely used. It’s downright robbery, but also a form of eugenics through poverty and class warfare. You keep the poor poor by making sure basic necessities remain unattainable and then you make it seem like the norm so no one fights it.

The rest of the world is not like this.

I’m in the exam room, post diagnosis and with pill bottles in hand, and in walks the one nurse I’ve been able to speak to the entire time. She pats my hand and tells me (and this is verbatim—I will never forget this conversation as long as I live), “I’m so sorry. We had to run those tests, and they are expensive. You don’t have insurance so you will have to cover the full cost.”

I start crying.

She continues, softly, as if telling me someone has died, “It’s going to be three hundred.”

I start sobbing, certain I’ve misheard, certain that I would be absolutely fucked, broke and going into debt in a foreign country. “Thousand?” I clarify.

Her entire demeanor changed, and she looked at me as if I had sprouted four extra heads. “No,” she says, “euros.”

I went to the UK for graduate school, and being there for that long meant I had to buy insurance for the duration. 18 months was something like £800 (this was in the early 2010’s). I, being American, figured “oh ok, that’s the premium and if I need serious medical care, I’ll get charged deductibles and all other kinds of fees at the time of care), because that’s how it works here.

Some time in the early part of that winter, I got incredibly sick. I’m immunocompromised, so sometimes that happens. But being a broke ass grad student in a foreign country, and dealing with unrelated financial abuse from family members, I figured I couldn’t afford going to the hospital. I figured I’d go to their version of Walgreen’s (Superdrug, and yes that is really that store’s name, load up on cough drops, some OTC meds, and try to ride it out as best I could.

One of my friends in my program came over to check on me and offer help. When she got to my room and saw how sick I was, she asked why I hadn’t gone to hospital. I was near tears and said I couldn’t afford it.

This is when I suspect my friend knew she was dealing with an American who was ignorant of how socialized healthcare actually worked, and realized that I couldn’t really be reasoned with. So she said, “I’ll pay for it- let’s go.”

Off we went to hospital, my friend did the talking bc my voice was so shot. The receptionist said, “as you don’t have an appointment, you may need to wait quite a bit.” I heard that and figured 5+ hours was at least what I was in for.

23 minutes later, my name was called.

My friend went back with me, bc I was pretty out of it. The nurse leading us back apologized for the “huge wait” because having a sick patient wait “nearly half an hour just for medical care” was unacceptable. I was stunned.

The nurse and doc asked some questions, looked at the medical records I had on my phone (bc I was a foreigner with very little medical history in the country), did a few rapid tests. The whole time, I’m seeing an old-timey calculator ringing up charges and freaking out… even though my friend said she’d pay, I was so conditioned to believe this would cost a fortune.

About 30 mins later, the rapid tests confirm I have both bronchitis and pneumonia. Doc writes me a prescription for some serious heavy-duty meds. My American ass is thinking, “ok, so now I go home, wait for 4 days for the pharmacy to fill it, then go get it.” The doc tells me that there’s a pharmacy counter on the way out, and I can stop there to collect the meds before heading home.

I’m skeptical but thank him. My friend gets me to the pharmacy counter. I give my name and hand over the paper, fully expecting to be told that it’ll take days to fill. The pharmacist turns around, pulls a bag off the shelf, hands it to me. Because my meds were already filled and waiting.

Me: you had them already?

Pharmacist: of course- there’d be no point in sending you home without medication, that’s why you came here. To get medical help.

Me: that’s so fast? (I am very confused)

Pharmacist: well, we expect people to have these illnesses at a higher rate this time of year, so we do our best to stock up on our end.

Me: that’s so nice? Also, what do I owe you?

Pharm: sorry, love?

Me: what do I owe you? For the medication? And the visit. All of it, how much do I need to pay?

Chat, her whole fact changed. She realized I didn’t just sound funny because I was in respiratory distress. I had an American accent. She reached over and patted my hand.

“Love, that’s what the health insurance is meant to be for. You’ve already paid for this. We’re not taking extra money off you, we don’t do that here.”

The entire visit was less than 2 hours, absolutely free, and everyone worked to be as efficient as possible in the goal of providing comprehensive healthcare for me, the patient.

Once I got home with the meds, I did actually recover pretty well (and relatively quickly, as far as I’m concerned). I talked to the friend after, and she admitted that she knew it was going to be free, but that I wouldn’t or couldn’t understand that in the brain fog of serious illness, so she said what she had to in order to get my stubborn (and terrified of bankruptcy) ass to the doctor.

And if you went to Accident and Emergency (hospital) with bronchitis and pneumonia, unless you were triaged as short of breath and about to collapse, you normally would have a server hours wait nowadays.

JK is stating that if you're wealthy enough, you never have to use public spaces or the spaces she feels should be sex segregated/trans exclusionary, and therefore your opinion isn't valid.

This is surely ad hominem of some kind...

"Needy, unable to cope" (<- you try coping with chronic pain)

"Comfort seeking" (<- you mean.. having a preference for not being in pain.. how criminal)

"Using or trying to obtain drugs on a long-term, chronic base" (<- do you understand what 'chronic pain' means.)

"Asking for pain med then returning to sleep."

"States he’s level 10 pain, but does not appear to be in pain (or ‘5= on appearance)." (<- it is well-known that chronic pain patients tend not to display pain in the same way as acute pain patients)

"Dramatic response to pain" (<- notice how this directly contradicts the comment above. you cannot win)

"Gets IV med, then leaves unit to smoke or walk around" (<- wow requiring medication and then going off to do something you needed pain meds to be able to do is so suspicious)

These people do exist. It would be naive to claim otherwise.

This is an interesting thing. Looks like testimonies of people who left the MAGA movement- how they got into it and why.

Yes, actually.

Look, I know people want to react to the 'leopards eating faces party' with a big fat 'told you so,' but these are ex-cultists who are reaching out to people who may need an exit with a soft landing.

People who are deeply in a cult are afraid to leave it and MAGA is no exception! There's a fear that once you leave, you won't be accepted by anyone, so they stay even if they no longer believe in their rhetoric.

A very intelligent person can fall for a cult if they feel that it can offer them something they're missing. The outside world is perilous and you can be safe here. Your friends will reject you now that you've joined us, but we will accept you. Decisions are hard, we can make them for you. The secular world has broken you, we can give you new life through christ.

If you read some of the testimonies (and so many of them are young people) you'll see how much of it is 'I didn't see it, it took someone I love to show it to me, I can't unsee it now.' We've all done things we regret. Some regrets are bigger than others. I would rather forgive them and allow them to do good work than berate them for a decision they made when compromised by anxiety.

If you want to punish them, that's up to you.

People in this discussion never specify what actual actions are involved in welcoming ex-MAGAts. I have lived experience of this kind of thing. When I was twelve I was told I needed to be an Ambassador For My Race, that it was my responsibility to convince racists that Black people are people too. I worked at that for ... far, far too long, and all it earned me was pain.

The following examples are drawn from my personal experiences, before anyone tries to tell me they can't happen.

Black kid, you don't have to be the only one at your parents' dinner party fielding all the questions about why rap is so violent and Black people are so inherently criminal.

Girls, you don't need to gently discuss with your uncle why you know that women actually do think as deeply as men and are capable of doing math and science as well as men do. And you definitely don't have to explain to your date who is "just asking" why there is absolutely no justification for rape, not even to repopulate a hypothetical post-apocalyptic Earth or whatever malarkey he comes up with.

Immigrant kids, you don't need to try to use your family's and communities' examples to dissuade the other students telling you in the school cafeteria that immigrants are destroying this country.

Trans kids, you don't need to debate your existence with ANYONE.

And so on and so on. I could recall examples for queer kids, disabled young people, people who grew up in cities, etc. But I'll just say this. When someone tells you they voted for Trump's <i>second</i> term they are telling you who they are. You are allowed to step back, turn on your heel, and walk away. You aren't required to set yourself on fire to enlighten them. In my experience they will just refuse to see.

I know dozens of people who use meth, coke, and fentanyl. While heroin is harder to get I do know some folks who use it when they can. Some of these drug users are my neighbors, some are my clients, and some are my friends & family. One does not cease to be human just because they use a substance you find scary.

Community doesn't mean you need to invite them to your home and look away if they smoke there. It means you don't call your property manager because you suspect your neighbor uses. It means you don't require drug tests for homeless shelters and housing services. It means the very idea of someone who smokes meth in your community doesn't make you go, "what the hell."

That's it. Those are your options. Homelessness doesn't go away based on "crime crackdowns." You will imprison the unhoused, and when they are free, they will be unhoused again. Or they will die in prison.

When you burn encampments or force people out without their stuff, they remain unhoused or freeze to death.

After working with the unhoused, it's become abundantly clear that those who don't want to support them instead want them dead.

And that is to designate an area away from homes and businesses for them to camp in.

Fence them in and leave them be. But not on taxpayer dime. It has to be completely funded by those who want it to be an option. Maybe use some of those 6 million acres of BLM land that the gov is selling all hush-hush.

When the homeless have destroyed and contaminated the land that was given to them, bleeding heart sjws can legally adopt them into their homes and be held 100% responsible for their financial, medical and psychological upkeep as well as be 100% responsible for any crimes, destruction, etc their homeless commit.

The rest of them get bulldozed under and the site declared a biological hazmat zone.

Stray/feral animals or humans: both are disease and parasite vectors. Both are crapping and peeing either on public property or private property. Both are prone to fighting, damaging property, and breeding more of themselves, ever increasing their populations.

People are saying they would like society and the government to understand and agree on how we treat unhoused people.

The average person does not have the resources to tackle this problem individually. That's why we have governments, for bigger problems than we can deal with alone.

Men defend rape games with shit like "BUT WHAT ABOUT GRAND THEFT AUTO WHERE YOU KILL A BUNCH OF PEOPLE????"

But I'm not sure how I reconcile that and my agreement with the sentiment that, "There is no such thing as thoughtcrime." And with my support for no censorship on AO3.

Secondly, I think the issue here is a combo of 1. the nature of purely narrative vs. interactive media like video games, 2. the intentions and execution of a particular work. No. 1 isn't meant to suggest the old anti-video-game "violence in video games means you'd do it in real life" thing, but i do think that because you are making choices and playing as the main character (if it's that sort of game), because you have agency over what happens in a game, it feels more personal and more immediate, at least to me. You feel more directly responsible for what happened than you would in a more traditional work of narrative media where you have no impact on it. And that's why a decent person wouldn't find anything enjoyable about simulated rape or mowing down people based on their ethnicity. There's a reason that even a lot of the classic "violent" FPS games have some framing for why all the killing that you do is justified/necessary in some way! It's just a lot more direct, and a lot more of a feeling that you are having a role in this as opposed to just observing somebody else's twisted fantasy, compared to, say, watching a famously bigoted movie like Birth of a Nation (which I watched in a film class, as with most people who've viewed that movie in the 21st century).

As for no. 2.... the thing is, I could buy a game that is designed to explore the mentality of being a monstrous person like a rapist or a white supremacist in a way that is supposed to make you uncomfortable and help you examine how these people think and how they become that way, in a similar vein to a book like Lolita having it narrated by Humbert Humbert and you spending a lot of time in his head. I don't buy into the mentality that there's no value in art in spending time in the head of a monstrous person, and not purely in looking at these issues from their victims’ perspectives. I think video games have a lot of potential in that vein that has been underexplored (there are games though that do force you to make different uncomfortable choices and aren't "fun" in a traditional way, e.g. Papers Please making you decide in an authoritarian system between detaining innocent people and feeding your family). But these rape games and Ethnic Cleansing are not like that. They're purely designed to be wish fulfillment for the player. There's nothing contemplative and nothing critical about them. The horrible things you're expected to do are framed as good (from not having played these, but having heard enough of them, including having read Ethnic Cleansing's TVTropes page).

Like, I think we can draw stuff like this as clearly Apart without getting into Tumblr-esque reductionism about "bad things need to be CLEARLY condemned to be ok in art!" I don't believe that, I think it's ok for media to ask you to use your brain. But I think we can also say that stuff that's designed as and has no interpretation possible except as "pro-rape/pro-racism propaganda by and for rapists/white supremacists" is a category apart from whatever debate people want to have about Lolita or whatever.

And I still don't think these should be censored! I think people should be able to make whatever games they want. I just am going to judge the fuck out of anyone who got enjoyment out of a game where the entire objective is to rape someone or to kill racial minorities. Come on. I'd also judge the fuck out of anyone who sincerely and uncomplicatedly, no caveats about "they were important in the history of the art of film BUT" etc., enjoyed Birth of Nation or Triumph of the Will lol.