The death of insurance companies
By Rahm’s brother Ezekiel.
A personal note: I sometimes have found insurance companies annoying, but in general they’ve done right by me. I don’t understand the generalized hatred of them. They’re a business, responding to business pressures and the need to make a profit at the same time they provide a service.
Here’s Emanuel’s Brave New World of the transformed and/or eliminated insurance company:
Some people may be concerned about the prospect of having to choose among large integrated delivery systems with selective physician and hospital networks. The worried well might wonder what happens if they contract a serious illness, such as cancer or some rare disease, will they be restricted only to the physicians in the delivery system? We should note that many people pick Kaiser or Group Health and get all of their care from those integrated systems, and they don’t seem to worry that they are not getting the highest-quality care. The real issue is not whether there is a selective network of physicians and hospitals; the real issue is whether the network is of high quality. Having the assurance of a high-quality network is the key. These integrated-delivery systems will begin competing with their objectively validated, high-quality networks.
More importantly, health systems have learned from the managed-care backlash; just saying “no” really aggravates people, especially well-off, powerful people. Although it may be cheaper in the short run, it can be expensive, especially in terms of reputation, in the longer term. There are better ways to approach this.
I suspect these integrated delivery systems of the future will adopt two strategies. For rare but serious conditions they will identify recognized centers of excellence””the absolute best places in the country”” and contract special arrangements for the referral and treatment of their patients. These centers of excellence may have slightly higher sticker prices, but forging these special arrangements will be worth it for integrated delivery systems because then they will be able to boast negotiated rates, better outcomes, and fewer complications. Second, richer and, thus, more expensive benefit packages, such as platinum plans in the exchanges, would cover second opinions. In addition, there will be a market for supplemental insurance that covers second opinions for serious conditions. The well-heeled and worried will be a prime target for such plans.
Kiss your choice goodbye—unless you’re rich. And remind me again why this is better—much much better—than just tweaking the health insurance system we had in place by making insurance portable and having a national high-risk pool?
Neoneocon,
“I don’t understand the generalized hatred of [insurance companies].”
A classic understanding about insurance of any kind (life, health, disability, auto, etc.) is that it is a product that is never bought, but must be sold.
Insurance is a tool and as such it mitigates risk in a way that nothing else can. Because it must be sold, however, many people fall prey to agents who are more concerned about making the sale than using the tool to fit the need of the consumer. Think of Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day who says to Phil Connor something like: “Do you have enough insurance? Of course you don’t. No one does.”
Aside from the fact that Ryerson’s statement is not true, people resent being pressured and victimized like that and I don’t blame them. Add to that the fact that many insurance companies constantly goad newly hired agents to sell to their family and acquaintances to build their book of business (the old A.L. Williams Company was famous for this), and IMO it’s easy to see how such antipathy quickly and deservingly finds its way back to the company.
I’ve always thought of this classic insurance ploy as a salesman selling circular power saws. They demonstrate how well the saw cuts two-by-fours. The target responds: “Well that’s nice, but I really need to hammer some nails.” “No problem,” says the disreputable salesman, “Just turn the saw on its side and pound away. You’ll drive that nail right into the wood.” So you purchase the saw and two weeks later find out that there’s a tool called a “hammer.”
Now all insurance agents are not disreputable; in fact from my experience, most are not. Still, just as one bad cop taints the entire force or one ambulance-chasing attorney, taints the entire profession, disreputable salesmen of any product have given all sales a bad reputation. The classic perception of a good salesman is one who “can sell snow to Eskimos.” In fact that’s not a good salesman; that’s a swindler and a thief. A good salesman finds out exactly what those Eskimos need and then sells them, for example products like blankets and heaters.
(Sorry, accidentally posted too soon.)
And one additional comment.
Snow to Eskimos.
T:
I meant specifically health insurance. I guess I thought that was understood in the context of the piece, but I didn’t make it clear enough.
Most people don’t buy their health insurance directly from the insurance companies. Their employers do. But I have done all those things: had employment-based insurance and individual insurance, as well as been covered by a high-risk pool. I’ve probably had more direct dealings with insurance companies while buying health insurance than most.
I think most people dislike health insurance companies because they feel they MUST have it, it’s expensive, and they don’t like what they perceive as hassling with them for claims. I have had a few hassles in that latter regard, but mostly not.
Insurance in general is a product used by purchasers only when something BAD happens to them. Not an emotionally happy relationship. You must pay for life insurance every year while you are alive, and with your death someone else gets the moolah. See Bastiat; one keeps paying when the window is not even broken. Not the same as buying any other product or service, be it a car or a haircut.
Health insurance has morphed since the 1950s into something everyone wants (thru their employer) and no one pays more than a small fraction of its actual cost. But to get “benefits” one must usually interact with the insuror, whose info requirements are, at the least, irritating to the “beneficiaries’. And the beneficiaries never had to sign the policy or read the fine print, and the details always come as a rude shock to their tender sensibilities.
So it is easy to dislike or hate insurors, and easier to demonize them as the Dems routinely do.
Rush had some excellent points re-this NR article by Ezekial today.
The complaints about the insurance cartel must be as nothing compared to the insanity of government management and control.
I give you the Veterans Administration — the Bureau of Indian Affairs — both of whom are massively involved in administering ‘single-payer’ health care systems.
Then, take a look at Medic-Aid / Medi-Cal.
Dental ‘care’ consists mostly of pulling teeth.
Their ‘caries panel’ has determined that no-one gets more than one cavity per year — so that’s you budget. It’s considered wise policy to let a cavity cascade into a root-canal, thence a tooth extraction. Thus $40 is saved today — $250 is paid tomorrow. Perfect.
&&&
And, of course, the proles lose all standing to sue. The Feds have sovereign immunity. You see this dynamic all over Europe.
Going to single payer is to leap from the frying pan — straight into the bed of coals.
We all know that the goal is single payer and ObamaCare was always created as a transition step toward that goal. With that in mind, neo’s question, “remind me again why this is better”? is definitively answered by a quote from Lenin; “Socialized medicine is the keystone, to the arch of the socialist state.”
PS for those unfamiliar, “A ‘keystone’ is the wedge-shaped stone piece at the apex of a masonry vault or arch, which is the final piece placed during construction and locks all the stones into position, allowing the arch to bear weight.” Thus Lenin is indicating that socialized medicine is absolutely essential to the formation and maintenance of a socialized State.
I was self employed for most of my life, and carried no health insurance, till I married a woman who worked for a hospital. So now I was covered, not only for the body but for the mouth. I still didn’t need much medical care and then my wife’s hospital collapsed. That happens in NYC.
I was in my early 60’s at the time so I went on the internet to look for an insurance company. I found one and signed up, it was complicated but no more than any other contract I had signed over the years so now I was covered again.
Then I got sick. A chronic bone marrow condition, no more business, and working with specialists. All these specialists hated my insurance plan. To be expected they were all socialists, and wanted me on Medicare. No problem I was 65 by that time and the switch over was semi-seamless.
Only problem, they don’t seem to be so happy with their ACA as they wanted to be. All I can ask is what’s next?
Neoneocon,
No you weren’t unclear that your focus was health insurance. I just used the topic to compose some general thoughts on the insurance industry (and why it is disliked) in general.
Like homeowner’s insurance, health insurance is viewed as unnecessary especially by the invulnerable young. If my house doesn’t burn down I’ve “wasted my money”; if I don’t get sick much, why do I need health insurance?
It’s clear that the Obamacare designers understood this by putting in place the mandate/tax/penalty (call it what you will), but that penalty was made so abysmally insignificant it has no coercive effect. If only for that reason, it almost appears that Obamacare was intended to bankrupt the industry in order to usher in single-payer insurance (see related commenters above).
This observation has been made by many, but comparing health insurance to car insurance makes an important point. Car insurance does not cover gas, oil changes, wipers, batteries or routine maintenance. It is for serious stuff that costs lots of money. Requiring that health insurance cover all kinds of routine stuff for “free” runs the cost way up.
For them? Because in a fascist social insurance framework, they get to lay off the costs of their autogenic disorders on others in a way they would not in an actuarial system.
Which is why the leftoids like it so much. They can hang the costs of their dysfunctional albatross asses around your neck and call it fairness.
After all: everyone is equally liable to catch type 2 diabetes or schizophrenia or alcoholism, right?
No? Well ….
Let’s look at the buried predicate contained within Emanuel’s introduction. When I read it yesterday, it pi**sed me off so badly I saved it as an example just what kind of morally insane people live on the other side of the gap.
All of this presumptuous “we” and “the system” shite aside, what is assumed here is that people ought to be able to float free of the consequences of being themselves.
Underwriting partially indemnifies one against these expected or probable costs, by calculating the level of expectation in relation to a reasonable forward payment or premium.
Social insurance steals life from one person in order to free another from either the cost of being himself or from facing up to moral hazards.
Well, I had better stop now before I really say what I think regarding grizzle bearded alcoholics, and middle aged druggies, and those fascists who use them in order to murder human freedom.
DNW:
But it also contains a fiction about the insurance market prior to Obamacare. In fact, most people with pre-existing conditions were not underwritten. Most such people were either part of a large group that got employment-based insurance as a group, or could enter high-risk pools if they had to buy on the individual market. I’ve addressed this elsewhere, and will probably address it again, but most states either had high-risk pools or were guaranteed issue. So the insurance market was already such (because of state regulations) that underwriting was relatively rare. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, of course, or that high-risk pools aren’t more expensive than standard insurance. But usually high-risk pools were capped so the extra expense was not incredibly great, and those with lower incomes were subsidized.
Again, prior to Obamacare, insurance was already so regulated by the state that it was not a pure market. I am so tired of pundits and politicians ignoring and/or distorting and/or lying about this fact.
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The graft, baby!
(evidently, << don't work well here. sorry!)
" remind me again why this is better–much much better–than just tweaking the health insurance system we had in place by making insurance portable and having a national high-risk pool?"
The graft, baby!
Just remember that Ezekiel is a graduate of theJosef Mengelee School of Medicine and Social Cleaning of the Undesirables.
Even a cursory reading of his writings reveals that he is nothing short of a monster.
neo-neocon Says:
March 4th, 2014 at 5:15 pm
As a number of advocates of the PPACA now proudly admit, they told lies, “white lies” they say, in order to get the law passed and the results in law they wanted.
“And we don’t feel guilty either”, they assert.
They don’t feel they owe you the truth if it makes you and those like you, harder to manage.
You are not a peer to them Neo. You’re a resource. Take a closer look at those left-wing friends next time you meet; and consider what and who it is you are really engaging with.
DNW:
Most of my friends are garden-variety liberals. And most are relatively apolitical, although they vote.
I do have some friends who are more on the leftist end of things. But they are bleeding-heart leftists and really have very little idea what it actually is they’re supporting, for the most part, and are not particularly activist or even political. They are not of the hard left, although they are helping it without realizing what they’re helping.
My daughter is one of those ‘young invincibles’ that Obamacare needs so deeply to sign up. Being young and relatively healthy – she organized her own health care insurance policy, which is good for another year at the affordable price that she pays for it. (The Obamacare version offered through Humana is about double and then some of her current monthly premium.)
Honestly, I am thinking that catastrophic care insurance is what we all should be looking at, and paying out of pocket for routine. I have Tricare myself – and I chose to be seen at BAMC (Brooke Army Medical), which is just down the road from me. So I am OK for now, my daughter is OK for this year … but I really wish there was a strong push for ACA to be rescinded. Really – wiped out as if it had never been, just like Prohibition. Bad idea – go back to basics and do over.
They want single-payer. So they can own us.
neo-neocon Says:
March 4th, 2014 at 7:14 pm
Neo … how could they not? How could it be that they [as liberals] imagine they can grasp the indirect and remote environmental effects of a burning incandescent bulb, yet not grasp the transformation the fascist “individual mandate” has worked on our most fundamental predicates of political association?
What matters to them, and makes their lives worthwhile? Where’s their focus? Brute satisfactions? Dancing in that G’damned circle you mentioned, ecstatically liberated from themselves, until the lights go permanently out?
How can the implications be missed, and the inferences not be drawn?
And, if they are not in fact unapologetic coercive collectivists, mustn’t they be … and I do hesitate to say it … the so-called “good Germans who (supposedly) didn’t know”?
How can they shrug at and be complicit in, the destruction of the only thing that made this country worthwhile in the first place: our freedom of self-direction and responsibility?
The world’s already full to the brim with stinking social hothouses where everyone runs around with their nose up everyone else’s ass; sniffing for traces privilege or advantage. Probably many of them have ancestors who fled from just such cultures.
And now they complacently point to these cultures as moral models to be emulated.
What, in God’s name, is going on …
DNW:
Have you read my “A mind is a difficult thing to change” pieces? Remember: I was a liberal for most of my life. I was raised one, nearly everyone I knew was one, all my media sources were liberal and I didn’t even know it, and although I knew something about history I didn’t know all that much (except for certain topics such as WWI and how it affected the culture). I was interested in all the arts and especially poetry, in people in general (friends, family), psychology, all sorts of things really. Politics seemed like a dirty nasty business, and although I kept up with it in a surface way I really didn’t go all that deep with it.
Most of my friends are some variation on that theme.
You ask, “How can the implications be missed, and the inferences not be drawn?” My answer is EASY. At least, earlier in my life, it was very easy. Obviously, something changed, beginning in 2001. I became interested, and these things seemed more intensely important. I realized there was a lot I had missed and needed to learn. But I have no problem whatsoever understanding how it is that many people still are more or less on automatic pilot. To know what’s happening and why it’s significant, you have to have a knowledge base and a context, or else it’s just blah-blah-blah noise.
And of course, there are some people I know who do know quite a bit about history, etc., and are still liberals. I think, however, that most of them have never been exposed to alternate sources of information. They don’t read conservative media or watch Fox or anything like that, although they hear about Faux News. Since everyone—almost literally everyone—they know agrees with them, and they know smart, educated people, why would they be curious?
Yes, the Democrats want single-payer. Same as 1945 (Truman), same as 1993 (Hillarycare). What has changed this time is that the the insurance industry knows that the status quo system is dying and threw in with the Democrats for one last feeding at the trough.
Please read CH 2 of Dr. Rich Fogoros’ book Open Wide and Say Moo – The demise of the Healthcare Industry and understand the history.
Neo,
I hope some of these liberals figure out soon that the autopilot is malfunctioning and finally hear the GPWS repeating “Glideslope! Pull Up!”
I am not hopeful.
I’m all for an HSA that can’t be used for anything but medical and is 100% transferrable to heirs. Of course, then the government will figure out some way of skimming of the top.
Neoneocon,
Above @9:02 you wrote of your left leaning acquaintances”
Compare that thought to Pauline Kael’s quote (the actual quote not the mythical one):
The difference between the left leaning folks you cite above and most of those who inhabit the upper echelons of govt is that Pauline at least recognized that her world was rarified; they, on the other hand, haven’t a clue.
The excuse of ignorance gets thin every year. With the internet, people cannot say any more that they have no access to alternative sources. They have as much access to foreign and domestic viewpoints as they wish to read.
The fact that they have abdicated their human free will, is proven by the fact that not even access to the internet interests them in knowledge.
They will be given a choice. And they will fail that test. They don’t want to know what’s on the net, free information. They only want packaged data.
How can they shrug at and be complicit in, the destruction of the only thing that made this country worthwhile in the first place: our freedom of self-direction and responsibility?
People continue to treat the Left’s cannonfodder as equal human beings. Thus confusion sets in.
Much as a dog won’t stop his owner from committing a crime, the Left’s cannonfodder do not have the capability to stop the Left from doing evil. That’s what happens when you trade in the human soul for Leftist promises of Utopia.
There is a long ton of ostrich behavior going on. My cousin, for instance: a Georgia man, in finance no less, reared by an engineer (Ind.) and homemaker (Rep.) who are very patriotic: yet he, though he has a good mind, has been very adamant about deflecting anything that makes him uncomfortable or threatens his world view. This is exacerbated greatly by his liberal-birdbrain wife, who has him under her thumb and thinks purely emotionally (a devout vegan, inter alia).
For him to rethink his bleeding-heart liberalism would be to put himself on the rotisserie and possibly even endanger his marriage. BUT I do fault him for not, in the privacy of the voting booth, being his Own Man. Remember that phrase? “be your own man.” I.e., not anyone else’s vassal.
I’m furious with him and his sister; his other sister, God bless her, is a lifelong Republican (also an engineer) as is her husband, a stockbroker with conservative-libertarian views. He has cousins with their heads up their fundaments who live in Manhattan after having graduated from Ivy League colleges (genuflect, genuflect!), and would rather eat a Bug than vote for those people.
The only thing that will “burn through” the veil the propaganda industry has woven, I fear, is an almighty conflagration. And even then, there will be another long ton of people who would literally die rather than admit that they’ve been votaries of a wicked and destructive creed.
Think of any totalitarian hellhole in history that fell. Think of the millions of survivors who still harbored a furtive, but passionate, attachment to the old order. People are, well, Nuts. Like someone said, “Man isn’t a rational animal — man is a rationalizing animal.”
“I don’t understand the generalized hatred of them.”
Insurance companies separate the price from the benefit. It may be years between paying for the product and receiving the goods. This loosens the mental relationship between the benefit that insurance provides and the bills that the company sends.
Besides this, insurance is a product that the company can deny you. If you walk into McDonalds, pay for a cheeseburger, and the clerk refuses to hand you a cheeseburger, you demand your money back. In insurance, if you contract Raretitis-Unheardivicus Diseasicus, and your policy doesn’t cover that, you get nothing.
Someone else also mentioned that insurance is a product that prevents a harm, rather than gives a benefit. People want to eat cheeseburgers. Nobody really wants heart surgery.
Insurance companies have to be overly cautious about paying out money, because if they forked over the cash for every hangnail and every alleged headache they would go broke. This gives them a miserly vibe that doesn’t sit well with people.
Combine that with the fact that insurance payments, by their nature, are based on a highly complex statistical system that only insurance people really understand. This gives an air of capriciousness to the payout system.
Finally, insurance doesn’t have any cheerleaders or fan boys. People who feel cheated will complain about their insurance. People who are cheats will also complain about their insurance. The people who use it will claim it isn’t enough. The people who don’t use it will claim its too expensive. There isn’t any group of people who have a great urge to extol the virtues of insurance. Nobody drives down the street in their hospital gurney bragging to their neighbors about their shiny new insurance plan… well, except for Pajamacare boy.
Ymarsaker,
“Much as a dog won’t stop his owner from committing a crime, . . . .”
That is an excellent observation.
Despite coming in at the tail end of this thread, I think observations on Ezekiel’s use of words, which is standard for Leftspeak, are worthwhile.
He stakes his platform around the unspecified: “Some people”, “might wonder”, “many people”, “having the assurance”.
Also, imbuing the inanimate with consciousness: “Health systems have learned”; “these integrated delivery systems of the future will adopt two strategies”; “They (health systems) will identify….”
These are all Tells that a Leftist is staking out a position based on belief, not fact. The Leftist personalizes inanimate systems.
Read Neo’s quote of Ezekiel again. He is as bad as Bill Ayers–he is a “medical ethicist” without ethics. The Left wants zombies, does whatever it can to create them.
Speaking of Leftist zombies,
http://www.bookwormroom.com/2014/03/04/a-story-showing-everything-thats-wrong-with-bureaucracies-rules-have-replaced-morals-and-human-decency/
Book wrote something interesting. While I cannot verify the truth or illusion of those stories, what I can tell people is this.
The Left will obey the death squads and rape squads when ordered to inform on the locations of Republicans and Tea party neighbors.
They will be obedient to their Authority and God just like the teachers are obedient to the administrators, unions, and their sugar daddies. Even at the expense of a student’s safety and life.
Especially at the expense of the sacrifice. That is what it means to be a death cult, a Jim Jones camp. Life and protecting the innocent, are not higher causes than the Left’s Religion that dictates Obedience above all else.
But the difference between a cog that obeys and a human that obeys is that the human first chose out of his own free will what good or evil master to serve. The cog never had that choice.
The only thing that will “burn through” the veil the propaganda industry has woven, I fear, is an almighty conflagration.
I would say that is correct.
3% of the population are like Neo neo or other changers. They are driven by an internal curiosity or belief in humanity. Those are the only people I would ever recognize as “misguided”. But the majority of humans are obedient to their laws, their authority, and their gods. Even the atheists are obedient to a god, not just the Christian god.
For the vast majority, 68% of the normal curve even, pain and suffering are the only keys that will unlock enlightenment and self change. As with alcoholism and drug use, they aren’t going to change until they want to change and they won’t want to until they hit rock bottom.
Yes, I suppose. A knowledge base, a real knowledge base, is probably essential. Otherwise it’s a matter of biological preferences or innate or inculcated moral sensibilities. And, if you are in addition brought up collective minded, to believe that “society” is a thing more or less in itself and not merely a word for people associating, and you imagine that your “role” in this society is directive and improving, there is probably very little reason for you to consider that there is anything wrong in manipulating or managing the little people for some higher social ideal. An ideal which just happens – what a coincidence remarkably enough – to be self-serving.
Republicans are thus Neanderthal outliers living in the backwash of the march of history. In the real world, food comes from the supermarket, water from the tap, electricity from the wall socket, and the provision of these and the like constitute your inherent rights. To provide, correlatively, is the bounden duty of your support system; i.e., those more or less dependent and not quick witted enough or morally liberated enough to seize the tiller, or to at least insinuate themselves into the command structure or vanguard class.
Poor slobs filled with imaginary moral inhibitions and stultifying attachments to God, family, and country. How can self-realization as a member of the collective take place with those impediments in place?
And in some ways, one can see it their way. All you have to do is ignore the reality of the production of material wealth and imagine that no one but the stupid who can do no better in life would want to be an engineer or run a construction company or design machine tools or fighter jets – much less run a Bridgeport. All you have to do is abandon the idea that human life has inherent meaning and there is dignity in work and freedom, and embrace the idea that a life lived as art accompanied by the applause of your clique is the highest value. How can petty bourgeois property rights or a “right” of free association for the selfish stand up against that?
And when you as a liberal observe the mass of people tuning into American Idol, your contempt for them is only, and in this case justifiably, reinforced.
And of course also the sources they have may be radically corrupt and polemical, as anyone who participated in the Great Debate (on the right to keep and bear arms, self-defense and the locus of sovereignty) realizes. We cite here only the most infamous cases such as that of the fraud historian Michael Bellesiles, or apologists for statism like Garry Wills.
I can’t bring myself to watch much of Fox news either. Except for the occasional straight news report. That elf-looking anchorman they have is pretty annoying.
But to your point: How many doctors do you know on a socially intimate unguarded level? Probably quite a few. If so you will probably then have noticed that although some have the ability to speak cogently and at length about philosophy or political history, it’s not a given by any means. And of those who do attempt it, many will cite bankrupt or discredited sources of information.
Intelligence, and the ability to brandish “information” rhetorically doesn’t equate to real knowledge, as you know. Think of those high school teachers authoritatively delivering the party line on some topic you had already read up on in your Dad’s old college text books.
It’s amazing how many credentialed people don’t know what the hell they are talking about impromptu … even when it relates, as with lawyers and legal philosophy, to their own fields.
I think that they know they don’t know. But that they have just been getting away with it for so long that it seems natural.
Perhaps the mass of brainlessly hedonic nihilists which make up a noticeable portion of the American electorate, makes it – the pose, the hypocrisy, the scam – seem like less of a moral issue than it otherwise might.
That’s an important point that can’t be made too often about the people we call leftists. How ironic that they so readily and habitually personify the mindless and reify the abstraction, while deconstructing the actual and treating it as an illusion.
DNW:
Yes, experts in one field (such as doctors) don’t necessarily know much about another field. That’s the basic premise of a book like Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society, which also posits (and I agree) that they usually don’t know that they don’t know.
However, you are again mischaracterizing the liberals I know. In fact, many of them are devoted at the very least to “family,” a not insignificant number to “God,” although mostly not to “country,” which they continually seem to think is an awful place (we were mean to the Indians, racist, imperialist, etc.). They do not think in terms of the “collective” or anything of the sort. Their politics could be described mainly as the desire to be nice, kind, peaceful, and generous, both at home and abroad. They conceptualize the things they support as leading to those goals, and Republicans as mean, stingy, racist, etc.. It’s really that propaganda has reached them and stuck in their minds, and they think it’s reality, and are focused on their own lives.
By the way, I often watch American Idol.
Tim Turner:
Actually, it occurs to me that I stated it wrong. Instead of saying “I don’t understand” the hatred of them, I probably should have written “I don’t share” the hatred of them, and don’t think it’s valid for the most part.
It seems a fair enough point to say that I have mis-characterized the liberals that you know. I obviously do not know them, and the majority of influential liberals who I know about are either Marxist ideologues with a strong emphasis on postmodernism or their disciples in government.
Those I personally know, tended to be academics of some sort or another.
And I will admit that those who are run of the mill academics, don’t themselves seem to have read deeply from their own source books – the EPM or the early 20th century progressive philosophers, the Frankfurt School types, or the current postmodernists. This, I find, extremely puzzling. You would think that they would know their own catechism.
Those who do, those more aggressive types seen in news reports, I don’t personally encounter … unfortunately.
Oh. In that case, I must have been referring to some other show.
Just to demonstrate to you that my mind is broad and my heart’s in the right place, I’ll mention that I bought my folks half a dozen DVD’s featuring 1950’s Fred Astaire movies. As you know they include singing and dancing and all of that kind of stuff.
Maybe not exactly the kind of work you like best, but I admit I got a laugh out of seeing Astaire striding around in a ten gallon hat and cowboy boots as a rich Texan.
By the way also, does anyone know if there is a generic term for the kind of broad stroke watercolor graphic design that appears in these films with regards to painted set “building” facades, etc.
It seems to be a kind of art style popular in the 1950s and is seen in the titles and credits of a number of movies, as well as old warranty cards, and instruction manuals: from home appliances to mixology books. It’s a colorful, visually arresting, and minimally abstract style. It probably has a name.
The only problem with American Idol are the judges and the record companies making bank on somebody else’s talent and popularity.
Neo Neo, intellectuals in the ancient past used to be multi discplinary. When a book was worth more than a car and a car didn’t exist back then, intellectuals and self learning autodidacts didn’t get a choice about what they learned or read. They had to learn to process anything and everything, tie it all up together.
That’s what Robert Frost seemed to do.
But modern day intellectuals are like pigs fed a special kind of fodder that makes them plump, fat, and good eating. They aren’t the natural real deal. They are artificially implanted and grown.
In Ancient China/Greece, a philosopher was noted for both knowledge about the art of war, physical prowess, and philosophical pursuits. You weren’t considered educated if you didn’t have one foot in the dealing of death (war) and another foot in the realm of effete aesthetics (philosophy and rhetoric).
Neo says, in part:
“Their (the liberals) politics could be described mainly as the desire to be nice, kind, peaceful, and generous, both at home and abroad. They conceptualize the things they support as leading to those goals, and Republicans as mean, stingy, racist, etc.. It’s really that propaganda has reached them and stuck in their minds, and they think it’s reality, and are focused on their own lives.”
“They think it’s reality.” Hmm, a breakdown of reality-testing, which in psychiatry used to be a landmark on the road to psychosis.
I think it was Michael Savage who first shouted out that “Liberalism is a mental disease.” Some ten or so years ago. Wrote a book, too.
Don Carlos:
I disagree that there’s “a breakdown of reality-testing.” Although that’s certainly true of some people, the majority just haven’t been, as they say, “mugged by reality.” Their own reality—the world in which they live and move—does not ordinarily challenge their assumptions much, if it all. Maybe it just bumps them on the arm now and then and says “excuse me” and moves on. And when it does, the others around them and the articles they read give them answers and interpretations of what just happened that align with a liberal viewpoint and vision.
Without sufficient pain and shock, people won’t change themselves. For the 3%, that pain is provided internally. for the rest, it must be externally applied.