Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Wednesday open

Now it can be told.

5 comments:

Lesley Aine Mckeown said...

Hooray! The penguins have landed!

BearWhizBear said...

I want to go back to a comment I made a while ago about the management of a society's common resources.

Maybe we could make some progress on health care by reframing the debate. It seems to me that question that underlies a lot of the shouting is whether or not the health of the American people is a common asset that should be managed in common.

The answer to that question for any given American may depend on whether or not that person believes that the good health of Americans in the aggregate has advantages to any individual American.

So what's it going to be, people? Are we all individually responsible for our individual health? Or is the health of all our people important enough to merit our joint effort?

BearWhizBeer said...

Has anyone else noticed that Rush Limbaugh routinely alters the playback speed of interview clips from people he doesn't like to make them sound chipmunk-like?

It's just enough to make them sound ridiculous without being an obvious alteration. If you only listened to Rush, you could be forgiven for thinking they really sound like that. Appalling tactics.

He did it yesterday to Obama and Barney Frank.

Steven Ayres said...

BWB: I'm not at all confident that there's any political traction to be had in the idea that "the good health of Americans in the aggregate has advantages to any individual American." It's a good and true thing, but ultimately altruistic, and Americans are no good at that.

What we do understand as a society is lower prices for a group, and that's where the higher good meets low self-interest.

Further, a public health system should make us more responsible for our individual health, since unnecessary cost in the system costs us all. Make it a pocketbook issue.

Steven Ayres said...

BWB: I hadn't heard about the sound tracking trick, but for years O'Reilly has been distorting photos of convicted liberals to make them look wrong. Maybe Limbaugh just picked up that idea and ran with it.