Healthcare

A couple of years ago I ran some numbers to compare income and tax levels in the US versus the scandinavian countries. Since the scandinavian countries top out most world-wide statistics on quality of life and because they have a public health care system.

What I found might surprise you.

In order to have roughly the same amount of buying power after taxes, insurance, living costs etc. Americans living in urban parts of the US need to make at least twice the amount of money scandinavians need.

Also note that this is "if all goes well". If you develop a health issue in the US, you are at the mercy of your insurance company and then the comparison breaks down completely. If you are very lucky you can get back to work and just have a slight increase in the cost of living due to higher premiums. If you are really unlucky you end up uninsurable and your health problem persists or returns and you find yourself in a downward spiral heading for poverty.

At which point you are screwed bigtime.

In scandinavia the state takes care of you. But if you want, you can still supplement what you are given by the state with a private option. You won't get any tax rebates, but then again, while the taxes might seem high, the total cost of living is a lot lower because you do not have to pay exorbitant insurance premiums.

Of course the quality of living in Scandinavia is vastly higher than in the US. Ask any US expat in either Norway, Sweden or Denmark.

Rule of law.

It wasn't like the criminal acts of the previous administration came as a huge surprise. What I find so astonishing is that now, in the face of hard evidence that the former president and vice president violated the constitution repeatedly, nothing seems to be happening to those responsible. Ultimately Mr Bush and Mr Cheney.

They provably undermined the constitution they took an oath to uphold and they will walk away from this without any due process or adequate punishment. Meanwhile, thousands of ordinary citizens will land in jail this year for relatively minor offenses -- adding to the already obscenely inflated prison population of the US.

The contrast is amazing. On one hand you can get away with multiple counts of high treason and murder and on the other hand you can get thrown in jail for a minor infraction.

The rule of law should mean that the law is applied equally. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

I think it is the responsibility of the current administration to bring George Bush and Dick Cheney to justice. I certainly understand the pragmatism of looking the other way -- it would be extremely unpleasant to put a former president in jail -- or worse. Unpleasant, but necessary.

By doing nothing means that the United States is a fake in every way. It is not a real democracy and it does not have a real constitution, it does not honor its agreements with other countries and its laws only apply selectively.

Obama, you have to make sure that the criminal acts of the previous administration are prosecuted. These crimes are too great for you to sweep them under the rug. Please see to it that you are not remembered as the president who let some of the worst criminals in the history of the United States off because you did not have what it takes to uphold the rule of law.

Just another day in the free world.

Keeping fear alive.

Nothing like keeping the population in a state of fear to make them more compliant.

Careful with those values.

If you want to gauge the decency and morality of people, keep a close eye on them when dealing with an enemy that has been totally and utterly defeated.

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and a despotic madman. There is no question about that. In the end he had his trial, was found guilty and had to pay the price. All fine with me.

What bothers me is that although it is really easy to judge Saddam as a criminal and a morally bankrupt person, I don't think that this should make it OK for "us" to act in an undignified manner. To effectively lower ourselves to the level of those we despise.

Today I stumbled across an article about the South Park creators being presented with an autographed picture of Saddam Hussein. Apparently, Saddam was forced to repeatedly watch an episode of South Park in which he is portrayed as the gay boyfriend of satan.

Yeah, I watched the episode and I enjoyed it. It was funny. But as much as I think Saddam was a brutal, murderous, criminal deserving of his ultimate fate, and as much as I found the episode funny, I found it very disturbing that it should be okay to torture the prisoner in this manner.

This is not how we treat our prisoners. We are supposed to be better than this. A lot better. This is the sort of nonsense that validates any hatred our enemies feel towards us.

For those who only care about "winning": this is the sort of base behavior that detracts from victory. The sort of behavior that brings us closer to those we despise for their uncivilized behavior and hollows out victories and reduces them moral embarassments. It is the sort of thing that detracts from the sacrifices made by serious people.

As much as I enjoy South Park: I think Matt and Trey should be be deeply ashamed of themselves for taking pleasure in someone else's suffering. They should be ashamed of expressing, not only consent, but a generous measure of joy in knowing that their work was used in this manner.

What sort of dickless, unprincipled weaklings take joy in the humiliation of a beaten enemy.

Careful what you believe in.

When watching this video question pops up in my mind: why is it that many religious people are so spineless when it comes to questioning the morality of what their canon preaches?

In some ways, christianity has a militant structure.  The most important principle is obedience. Not love, not doing unto others, not tolerance -- obedience. In fact,  the ten commandments start off by stating that you are not allowed to even think about following other gods.  (Which is a curious thing to say if you claim to be the only god in existence.  Then again, would you attribute any credibility to some guy with no sense of direction who claims to have spoken to God and would like to share some notes with you?  Perhaps a few thousand years ago)

You do as you are told.  Unquestioningly.  If God orders you to commit such unspeakable crimes as slitting your offspring's throat, you are supposed to comply.  And compliance is hailed as virtuous -- as the right thing to do.  

The inclusion of this story in the christian canon can only mean that a significant number of people (or a number of significant people) think this is illustrative of what being a good christian means.  It is disturbing to ponder that this sort of utter moral perversity is served up in churches with a straight face.  One has to wonder how ministers and priests manage to distance themselves from such vile and base atrocities.

Fortunately, since christianity cannot be trusted to provide a modicum of morality, we have secular values that represent at least a minimum of decency.  The difference between the militant dogmatism of the church and the military itself is that the military does not absolve you from your responsibility.  In the military you are responsible for your own actions and if you have reason to believe that your commanders are in the wrong, you are not only required to not follow orders, but you are obliged to remove your commanders from their duties.  By force if needed.

It is telling that in the secular world, one values morality and decency higher than in the christian world.

It is also telling that the new testament largely seems to be some sort of apology for the hard-line tyranny propagated by the old testament, yet no church of note seems to have seen it as much of a priority to purge the blood-thirsty, petty, unforgiving and morally objectionable god of the old testament from their canon.

He is most likely going to get away with it.

What we have become.

Following the BART shooting, I've seen a lot of people ask why none of the civilian bystanders intervened. 

To me it would have been a big surprise if someone had intervened.

If there is one thing that we have been taught over the past 8 years, it is that you need to fear anyone in uniform.   If you so much as speak in a firm tone of voice to them, pointing out that they are in the wrong, you risk much unpleasantness -- from being physically subdued to, well, getting shot. The message that they can and will do as they please, has been so effectively driven home that the threshold for approaching them has become much higher.

By now, people also understand that there is a certain asymmetry to these situations.  If you put your hand on a police officer, there will be dire consequences.  If a police officer steps out of line and abuses his or her power, a proper disciplinary response of an appropriate magnitude generally does not seem to occur.

Not unless there is massive public outcry, serious injury, death or significant investment in legal muscle.

Injecting yourself into a tense situation with armed police would amount to stupidity on a scale where you are very actively competing for a Darwin Award.  This is more true now than it has been in a long time.   

And imagine what would have happened if the civilians on the train had managed some sort of concerted effort to stop what was happening.   It would most likely have resulted in a phenomenal number of deaths and it would only have made it easier for the police to justify shooting unarmed civilians.

And besides, why should the bystanders have intervened?  If you look at the videos: up until the moment when the shot was fired, nothing out of the ordinary was taking place.   Some men were being detained, albeit brutally so, but that is normal these days.  It is the norm accepted by society.  There was nothing, nothing, out of the ordinary about the situation. The bystanders had no way of knowing that one of the police officers was about to execute one of the men being detained.

The bystanders did not intervene exactly because we, as a society, do not want them to.  We accept that the police are held to a lower standard when it comes to being punished for their wrongdoing.  We accept that they are allowed to use excessive force.  We accept that if you do intervene, then force may be directed at you.  We accept that they are armed.  We accept that they can ruin our lives on a whim and terrorize us for no good reason.

We must have accepted all these things because we did have a choice.  It's a democracy.  It says so right there in the CIA world factbook -- it says that the US has a "strong democratic tradition".  If we didn't want this, we would have made sure we chose leaders who would address these issues.  But we didn't.

In this we are all bystanders and we all did nothing and we are all guilty of doing nothing.

Instruction manual for Life.

Religion and politics.

In the past months I have been reading up on various religious groups that are active within the US -- what they believe in, how membership in a particular religion affects their approach to life and the world around them etc.  My initial goal was to learn more about where politics and religion intersect and how one influences the other.

Trying to keep an objective mind when reading about prominent religions in the US isn't easy. Engaging in any sort of meaningful debate is even harder.  The world often views the middle east as the melting pot for aggressive manifestations of faith, but it is hard to ignore that there are often more frightening manifestations of the same in the US.

The types of religious directions I have been reading about almost always contain a very strong self-defense mechanism wherein even posing questions can be seen as a transgression.  It is hard to ask critical and important questions without being accused of hate speech -- which does look a bit odd since what you often end up being on the receiving end of is a mixture of hatred and fear being directed towards you should you attempt to engage in debate and ask difficult questions.

This, of course, does color what you read.  When trying to understand a debated topic, you need to ensure that you consume a balanced diet of writings from both sides.  

For instance, during the election I tried to follow news sources across the political spectrum to see if I was able to separate spin from fact. (Unfortunately, not all news sources are as easily available online).  It isn't always an easy thing to do -- especially when your own opinions seem to align with one side or the other.  We tend to trust those who confirm our biases and distrust sources propagating opposing views.   Of course, being aware of this and constantly asking yourself what your bias is helps, but it is easy to fool yourself.

Even worse, news media make a living entertaining us -- not necessarily informing us.  At the end of the day, revenue is what really matters.  News media aren't doing what they do out of kindness and concern for their fellow man. Their task is to dumb things down and present us with easily digestible tidbits of information that do not necessarily represent reality with any degree of accuracy.  Add to that political bias and political manipulation of the media, and you are faced with the task of dissecting what effectively becomes propaganda disguised as entertainment disguised as reporting.

I spent a lot of time trying to separate noise from signal, separating exaggerations and outright lies from truth, and to ensure that whenever I read about something I try to find what the opposing side has to say in the matter. And if possible, attempt to analyze my own bias, and how it affects my judgement of what I read.  

This is hard for politics.  

It is even harder for religion. 

I got a bit sidetracked from my original goal of reading up about the interactions between religion and politics as I spent more time trying to understand how, for instance, the mormon church works.  These were necessary detours.  But what I have read relevant to this topic is fairly scary.  There seems to be a great number of very unhealthy interactions between faith and the way leaders are chosen, empowered and enabled.  It would appear that any aspirations of the founding fathers to keep church and state separate have failed.

This amounts to a very fundamental failure of the US to uphold some of the core values on which it was founded. 

This not only constitutes a threat to democracy, but it also ends up being the enemy of religious freedom.