Healthcare. Why is it such a problem?

I live in a country that purports to have “universal” healthcare. Like many countries that have such a system, there are problems. Availability of care, or rather difficulty in properly accessing care, is a major issue, as I believe I have already written about.

Still more about language

You might have missed yesterday’s entry in which I spoke at length about how everything that comes out of the collective mouth of curebies and “person first” tossers is, to quote the pertinent British English term, bollocks. I also explained in indirect terms how curebies prefer “person first” bullshit for reasons that in and of themselves make this mode of speech invalid.

The Peculiar Visitor, a short story I have brought out of storage

(Before we begin: What follows is a short story that I (re)wrote around two and a half years ago. It is based on a very similar short story that I wrote a little before that, in a time that I sincerely wish I could erase from my life. Apart from previously unnoticed spelling errors and some formatting to clarify the text, none of what you see in this document has been edited or altered in any manner. I hope you find the content enlightening or even enjoyable.)

Social services should be about investment, not charity.

A common argument used by conservative shitheads who do not wish to pay the “enormous” costs of welfare to people other than themselves is that if welfare transfers to the poor were eliminated, small organisations that are formally known as charities would pick up the slack. Aside from the usual stupidities associated with this argument, it is well worth examining a few concepts associated with it. For one thing, the idea that privately run, disparate, and highly specialised charities can collectively replace a centrally organised and carefully planned system of allocations is laughable at best and complete bullshit at worst. Furthermore, because charities are only beholden to the people that finance them, impartiality is a big problem. A certain “charity” in America, for example, refuses to even talk to the people that it makes most of its money by claiming to represent, not even allowing them a spot at the table, so to speak. If a government organisation were to treat the people that it claimed to represent in this manner, the media would go after it with a vengeance.

Society has failed us, part one of many

As I was growing up, the level of hostility between one generation and another was quite palpable. The way I saw it both as a child and as an adolescent was that we had one faction who thought they were entitled to demand the respect of the other, and the other faction felt the first was only entitled to a “fukk you”. Now that I am old enough to have taken the place of one of these factions, I think it is worthwhile taking a look at the situation in more eloquent terms and exploring the question of who is wrong as well as who is right. Because, as with all questions of this kind, the answer is none, both, and a little of one mixed with a little of the other. If that statement confuses you, well, let us just say that it confuses me a bit, too, and I am the idiot who is writing this waffle.