I have a friend whom I have this argument with frequently, not about health care specifically but other socialized benefits (e.g. SNAP). He’s even a leftist, but still thinks he shouldn’t have to pay for people who “take advantage of the system” (e.g. spend their SNAP benefits on things he doesn’t believe should qualify, or receive SNAP benefits while spending their ‘real’ money on things he considers non-essential).
The fact that there are corporations getting orders of magnitude more in handouts, or that we’re spending an unreal amount of money on the military, or that there’s unfathomable amounts of corruption in the government, and that those benefits are in actuality a tiny fraction of what his taxes go to, makes no difference. He doesn’t want people at the bottom to get an ounce more than he believes they strictly need or deserve, and I cannot for the life of me understand that line of thought.
A while back, I was listening to a podcast that apparently had a fairly sizable conservative Christian audience, because there were a good number of ads for Christian “Health Care Sharing Ministries,” into which subscribers pay a voluntary “share,” and from which they draw when they need it.
I don’t remember the specific language the ad used, but I do remember it saying something that sounded almost dangerously close to “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” I started laughing at that one.
My parents are the most MAGA-pilled, Evangelical, racist, sexist, etc., folks you’ll find. Fully on board with all of the ‘conservative’ messaging, and have been their entire lives. They fully think that Communism is some existential threat…
They’re also poor. My mom never held down a full time job in her life. Her husband was a Janitor. They live in a community of other like-minded poor people that are close-knit and trade goods, labor, and services to help each other out. Its a while network where people come together to met each other’s needs. My mom grows food in her garden and will trade it for chicken eggs. Her husband will use his tractor to help someone grade a road, and get ‘paid’ in meat by someone who raises cattle, etc. Its a wonderful system and they and their network of friends working within this system are literally communists.
No matter how I’ve tried to point that out, there is NO getting through the propaganda they’ve spent their lives bathing in. Its baffling.
Oh, absolutely. People from the church I grew up in sometimes say such baffling things about socialism and communism. I want to tell them, “know how I learned about social economies? From Sunday afternoon pitch-in dinners. Even though there was going to be food there, people who could bring food still brought it! We all ate until we were sick, there was food left over, and it all tasted fantastic. Sure, we had to cut Elaine’s chess pie extra thin so that everyone could get a slice, but there was literally a vat of mashed potatoes and two whole turkeys.”
There’s a Fundamental Christian influencer named Aria Lewis who has that “insurance”. She’s been dealing with dental problems and basically made a post one day asking her followers if that insurance was a scam because she wasn’t able to get the care she really needed
It’s crazy what problems people fall into when they choose something has “Christian” in the name over what everyone else is using
Agreed 100%. Even as a Christian myself, I avoid businesses with “Christian” in the name. At best it feels like they’re trying to say that they’re the “Jesus-y” choice. At worst it means they’re crooks trying to look legitimate. In either case they’re probably maga.
The one that breaks my heart is the Christian counseling services, which are so often not true therapy. There are absolutely licensed therapists out there who are Christian and can advertise that. Just hate watching people who have serious mental health problems go to counseling and hating themselves because prayer isn’t usually enough to help.
I’m a firm believer that if there is a God, he provided the tools and people to help his flock deal with modern problems. But people often turn away from using these tools or services :(
I’m a firm believer that if there is a God, he provided the tools and people to help his flock deal with modern problems. But people often turn away from using these tools or services :(
One of the most clear expressions of how I feel about such things is 411 years old:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”
It was originally written by Galileo Galilei, and it’s still as relevant now as it was then. This was made into a satire with the joke about the man on a rooftop during a flood who rejects a helicopter, a boat, and a raft, saying that “God will save me;” and who, after drowning, confronts God at the gates of Heaven, who answers his complaints, “I sent you a helicopter, a boat, and a raft, what more did you want?” The fact that something is available to believer and nonbeliever alike should be a cause for rejoicing, not for distrust.
Theologically speaking, God gave us sense, reason, and intellect; not the devil. Trained therapists and mental health professionals are gifts of God, whether they’re Christians or not. And, going back to healthcare for all, another gift of God is community; and being able to help one another as a group. But the conservative Christians have been hoodwinked by rich con men into believing that that’s socialism, and that mental health is wokeness.
dental insurance is kinda of a scam, if you are not using an employer-sponsered one, they dont cover most things outside of cleanings. the ones i looked from the 3 well known dental insurance, have approximately the same kind of coverage for all 3 plans, the only difference some of them are more expensive. Employer- sponsored plans have very different coverage from the individual plans.
i like how they rail about dental/health insurance as a scam, while they use a more expensive version which is likely paying the full cost of dental care. i would imagine the fund would drain pretty fast if people are getting multiple cavities filled, and not even for other things like extractions, root canal and crowns, or periodontal care, or implants.
I ALSO notice some dental offices, offer thier own “insurance” in house, may or may not be expensive but that could be another avenue if people dont want to pay for better insurance.
so every time he says he doesn’t want to pay for people taking advantage of the system, ask if he means the wealthy people denying healthcare to people so they can afford more yachts, their 8th mansion, their 30th sport car, their second helicopter. Because he’s overpaying for his private healthcare so they can take advantage of him.
are you sure hes a leftist, or one in NAME only. almost everyone that believes welfare should not be for POORs/POC is almost always a conservative. i know a couple people that are ON THE left in name only, but says alot of talking points of a republican and would rather vote R, if not for the pontential ostracization from thier immediately circles.
I mean, I only know what I’ve gathered from our conversations, but his views align with mine on almost every other topic. That’s why it baffles me so much that we don’t agree on this one.
Biden/Harris had the entire Epstein file suite and did absolutely nothing with it
Obama/Biden built the policy power to do the mass deportations and city-deployments of ICE that Trump is now using
Biden knew this and changed literally nothing about it when he was president
Obama/Biden deported more people than Trump has
Obama/Biden appointed Tom Homan as deportation czar - same guy Trump appointed in both terms
Biden/Harris deported/repatriated over 4M in only 4 years
Biden/Harris participated in the Israeli-led genocide of Gaza
Obama refused to provide arms to Ukraine. Trump was the first president ever to approve arms transfers to Ukraine.
Obama/Biden + HRClinton continued the Bush2 strategic plan for destroying 7 countries by completely destroying Libya, laughing at the public torture and execution of a 70-year-old man sodomized with a blade by people the HRC State Dept coordinated
800k people, on average, have died every year for the last 50 years due to US sanctions, and both parties are totally OK with it.
We could keep going, back to Clinton and the Biden-authored Crime Bill, back to every war and military action, to the School of the Americas and the training of death squads and terrorists. We can go through and show how these programs were continuous across party switches in every part of the government. We can show how every mass movement of people for self-liberation and self-governance was met with mass murder at the hands of the USA regardless of which party was in charge. We can show how the USA was the model used for EuroFascism and how the USA absorbed and protected the failed EuroFascists and then spread them around the world for decades with their protection, bi-partisanly.
The USA is the global reservoir of fascism, which, of course it is, because the USA is the torchbearer, inheritor, executor, and protector of EuroImperialism, which is what EuroFascism fundamentally is.
No, we don’t. We are always here. But you fucking dilletantes show up a few months before every election thinking that you can both rustle up some blue no matter who votes while spreading your blue MAGA bullshit and then accuse everyone else of being Russian bots and Republican trolls and you smug schmucks think it’s working without any sense of how propaganda actually works and how you are creating every opportunity for people to see how completely bankrupt you all are.
The crazy thing is, I actually agree with you about your list, and that the US has told a fairy tale for the past two and a half centuries about how we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and so forth. But then
The Democrats are just as fascist
is just laughable in pretty much every conceivable way. Are they still bad? Yes! But have they sent a secret police around the country to tear “undesirables” out of their homes and send them to countries they’ve never been without due process? Are they currently plotting to overthrow the election or stay in power despite losing that election? Did they, in the past two years, allow an unelected billionaire to destroy entire government agencies by fiat?
Ah-ah-ah! I hear you saying “but they voted to approve ICE funding” or “but they didn’t do anything to stop any of it” or “but Obama deported a bunch of people too” or “Democratic gerrymandering”—no. I didn’t ask if they allowed it to happen. I didn’t ask for whatabouts. I asked if they were behind the worst, most criminal activities being perpetrated by the US government at this very moment. I asked if they are doing it now. Are they the prime movers?
No? Then you can’t say “just as fascist.” That might’ve been true ten years ago—actually, aside from the election fraud, it almost definitely was—and I could maybe even see an argument that their evil was in the same order of magnitude as recently as two years ago, but equating the two since Trump 2 is like comparing a viper bite to a meteor entering the atmosphere. They’re both imminently dangerous, sure, but the difference in the scale of damage would be almost laughable if the harm wasn’t currently in progress.
The country needs to be fixed. I don’t think the Democrats are going to do it. But I’m not going to do anything to aid the people who are going to make it more broken, so I’m going to leave off turning on people who will be on our team until after the existential threat to our loved ones and ourselves is past.
You’re making an attribution mistake. The DNC and RNC are PR firms that get people elected and manipulate the population through storytelling. Elected from both parties collaborate together to run the government of the USA.
Yes, Obama/Biden actually did create the policies necessary to deploy ICE inside US cities that Trump is using. But why didn’t Obama/Biden deploy them in that way? Because it’s off-brand. They created the conditions collaboratively with the Republicans, but they stayed within their narrative roles. They were no less fascist, you’re just choosing to draw an arbitrary line around what fascism is, and you happen to be choosing it around what makes white middle class people uncomfortable. Obama’s drone strike expansion was insanely fascist, but you didn’t have to experience fear because of it. Biden’s management of the border was no less fascist, but you didn’t have to see it. Trump’s use of Obama’s ICE is a narrative shock, but by the raw numbers it is less effective. Why? If Trump was such an evil fascist, why wouldn’t he absolutely dwarf Obama’s numbers and Biden’s numbers? Because Trump is playing a narrative role when he uses shock and awe.
And let me tell you, shock and awe is not what makes something fascist. Deliberately targeting weddings, funerals, and double tapping them with unmanned bomber jets is just as fascist, or more so, then deporting people loudly.
Did the Democrats plot to overthrow the elections? Narratively, no. Functionally, yes. If the Republicas so obviously did so, then what else can you possibly call Biden’s total inaction except tacit approval? He had the Epstein files in hand, he had a whole dog and pony show of an investigation, the SCOTUS said that the sitting president was immune from prosecution in carrying out the duties of the office even if that meant doing something totally illegal and Biden said “you know what, the voters will save us”? No. That’s not credible. The Democrats spent a massive amount of time and effort to make us feel a certain way and absolutely zero effort in stopping what they claimed was an existential threat that literally targeted our ability to vote. So how the fuck are the voters going to solve this? They already voted in a D administration and they did fucking nothing to stop the threat. So we’re supposed to vote them in again because this time they will stop threat? It’s so obviously bullshit.
Did they, in the past two years, allow an unelected billionaire to destroy entire government agencies by fiat?
That’s not fascism. That’s factionalism. The faction that Trump is the figurehead for did that and dismantled the operations that other factions relied on. They were all factions of fascism, but even within fascism there are factions. Musk destroying e.g. USAID was an intra-fascist conflict, which is easy to see when you understand that the good things USAID did were cover for all of the covert CIA operations they facilitated.
The Democrats are not on your team. They are not trying to fight the Republicans. They are co-managing the fascist empire and a large part of that is narrative control. The fascists aren’t stupid. They can’t win if they only act evil and overtly. They have to both ham it up for their base ® and they also need to co-opt any opposition they will face (D).
Sometimes, thought doesn’t have to be original. Sometimes, when something rings true, many people have the same thought, and can talk about it and agree with people who share the same thought and that isn’t an issue.
I have a friend whom I have this argument with frequently, not about health care specifically but other socialized benefits (e.g. SNAP). He’s even a leftist, but still thinks he shouldn’t have to pay for people who “take advantage of the system” (e.g. spend their SNAP benefits on things he doesn’t believe should qualify, or receive SNAP benefits while spending their ‘real’ money on things he considers non-essential).
The fact that there are corporations getting orders of magnitude more in handouts, or that we’re spending an unreal amount of money on the military, or that there’s unfathomable amounts of corruption in the government, and that those benefits are in actuality a tiny fraction of what his taxes go to, makes no difference. He doesn’t want people at the bottom to get an ounce more than he believes they strictly need or deserve, and I cannot for the life of me understand that line of thought.
“I’d rather 99 people get support they might not need if it means one person gets the support they definitely need.”
I’ve used that reasonably successfully.
A while back, I was listening to a podcast that apparently had a fairly sizable conservative Christian audience, because there were a good number of ads for Christian “Health Care Sharing Ministries,” into which subscribers pay a voluntary “share,” and from which they draw when they need it.
I don’t remember the specific language the ad used, but I do remember it saying something that sounded almost dangerously close to “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” I started laughing at that one.
My parents are the most MAGA-pilled, Evangelical, racist, sexist, etc., folks you’ll find. Fully on board with all of the ‘conservative’ messaging, and have been their entire lives. They fully think that Communism is some existential threat…
They’re also poor. My mom never held down a full time job in her life. Her husband was a Janitor. They live in a community of other like-minded poor people that are close-knit and trade goods, labor, and services to help each other out. Its a while network where people come together to met each other’s needs. My mom grows food in her garden and will trade it for chicken eggs. Her husband will use his tractor to help someone grade a road, and get ‘paid’ in meat by someone who raises cattle, etc. Its a wonderful system and they and their network of friends working within this system are literally communists.
No matter how I’ve tried to point that out, there is NO getting through the propaganda they’ve spent their lives bathing in. Its baffling.
Oh, absolutely. People from the church I grew up in sometimes say such baffling things about socialism and communism. I want to tell them, “know how I learned about social economies? From Sunday afternoon pitch-in dinners. Even though there was going to be food there, people who could bring food still brought it! We all ate until we were sick, there was food left over, and it all tasted fantastic. Sure, we had to cut Elaine’s chess pie extra thin so that everyone could get a slice, but there was literally a vat of mashed potatoes and two whole turkeys.”
There’s a Fundamental Christian influencer named Aria Lewis who has that “insurance”. She’s been dealing with dental problems and basically made a post one day asking her followers if that insurance was a scam because she wasn’t able to get the care she really needed
It’s crazy what problems people fall into when they choose something has “Christian” in the name over what everyone else is using
Agreed 100%. Even as a Christian myself, I avoid businesses with “Christian” in the name. At best it feels like they’re trying to say that they’re the “Jesus-y” choice. At worst it means they’re crooks trying to look legitimate. In either case they’re probably maga.
The one that breaks my heart is the Christian counseling services, which are so often not true therapy. There are absolutely licensed therapists out there who are Christian and can advertise that. Just hate watching people who have serious mental health problems go to counseling and hating themselves because prayer isn’t usually enough to help.
I’m a firm believer that if there is a God, he provided the tools and people to help his flock deal with modern problems. But people often turn away from using these tools or services :(
One of the most clear expressions of how I feel about such things is 411 years old:
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.”
It was originally written by Galileo Galilei, and it’s still as relevant now as it was then. This was made into a satire with the joke about the man on a rooftop during a flood who rejects a helicopter, a boat, and a raft, saying that “God will save me;” and who, after drowning, confronts God at the gates of Heaven, who answers his complaints, “I sent you a helicopter, a boat, and a raft, what more did you want?” The fact that something is available to believer and nonbeliever alike should be a cause for rejoicing, not for distrust.
Theologically speaking, God gave us sense, reason, and intellect; not the devil. Trained therapists and mental health professionals are gifts of God, whether they’re Christians or not. And, going back to healthcare for all, another gift of God is community; and being able to help one another as a group. But the conservative Christians have been hoodwinked by rich con men into believing that that’s socialism, and that mental health is wokeness.
Makes my blood boil.
dental insurance is kinda of a scam, if you are not using an employer-sponsered one, they dont cover most things outside of cleanings. the ones i looked from the 3 well known dental insurance, have approximately the same kind of coverage for all 3 plans, the only difference some of them are more expensive. Employer- sponsored plans have very different coverage from the individual plans.
i like how they rail about dental/health insurance as a scam, while they use a more expensive version which is likely paying the full cost of dental care. i would imagine the fund would drain pretty fast if people are getting multiple cavities filled, and not even for other things like extractions, root canal and crowns, or periodontal care, or implants.
I ALSO notice some dental offices, offer thier own “insurance” in house, may or may not be expensive but that could be another avenue if people dont want to pay for better insurance.
so every time he says he doesn’t want to pay for people taking advantage of the system, ask if he means the wealthy people denying healthcare to people so they can afford more yachts, their 8th mansion, their 30th sport car, their second helicopter. Because he’s overpaying for his private healthcare so they can take advantage of him.
are you sure hes a leftist, or one in NAME only. almost everyone that believes welfare should not be for POORs/POC is almost always a conservative. i know a couple people that are ON THE left in name only, but says alot of talking points of a republican and would rather vote R, if not for the pontential ostracization from thier immediately circles.
I mean, I only know what I’ve gathered from our conversations, but his views align with mine on almost every other topic. That’s why it baffles me so much that we don’t agree on this one.
guess he dint fully buy into the manosphere/ right grifting circuit.
When you say “leftist” I assume you mean liberal Democrat.
Let’s maybe save the purity tests for when we’re not staring down the barrel of a fascist coup already in progress, eh?
The Democrats are just as fascist:
We could keep going, back to Clinton and the Biden-authored Crime Bill, back to every war and military action, to the School of the Americas and the training of death squads and terrorists. We can go through and show how these programs were continuous across party switches in every part of the government. We can show how every mass movement of people for self-liberation and self-governance was met with mass murder at the hands of the USA regardless of which party was in charge. We can show how the USA was the model used for EuroFascism and how the USA absorbed and protected the failed EuroFascists and then spread them around the world for decades with their protection, bi-partisanly.
The USA is the global reservoir of fascism, which, of course it is, because the USA is the torchbearer, inheritor, executor, and protector of EuroImperialism, which is what EuroFascism fundamentally is.
Geez, they really do come out of the woodwork just prior to elections.
No, we don’t. We are always here. But you fucking dilletantes show up a few months before every election thinking that you can both rustle up some blue no matter who votes while spreading your blue MAGA bullshit and then accuse everyone else of being Russian bots and Republican trolls and you smug schmucks think it’s working without any sense of how propaganda actually works and how you are creating every opportunity for people to see how completely bankrupt you all are.
The crazy thing is, I actually agree with you about your list, and that the US has told a fairy tale for the past two and a half centuries about how we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys, and so forth. But then
is just laughable in pretty much every conceivable way. Are they still bad? Yes! But have they sent a secret police around the country to tear “undesirables” out of their homes and send them to countries they’ve never been without due process? Are they currently plotting to overthrow the election or stay in power despite losing that election? Did they, in the past two years, allow an unelected billionaire to destroy entire government agencies by fiat?
Ah-ah-ah! I hear you saying “but they voted to approve ICE funding” or “but they didn’t do anything to stop any of it” or “but Obama deported a bunch of people too” or “Democratic gerrymandering”—no. I didn’t ask if they allowed it to happen. I didn’t ask for whatabouts. I asked if they were behind the worst, most criminal activities being perpetrated by the US government at this very moment. I asked if they are doing it now. Are they the prime movers?
No? Then you can’t say “just as fascist.” That might’ve been true ten years ago—actually, aside from the election fraud, it almost definitely was—and I could maybe even see an argument that their evil was in the same order of magnitude as recently as two years ago, but equating the two since Trump 2 is like comparing a viper bite to a meteor entering the atmosphere. They’re both imminently dangerous, sure, but the difference in the scale of damage would be almost laughable if the harm wasn’t currently in progress.
The country needs to be fixed. I don’t think the Democrats are going to do it. But I’m not going to do anything to aid the people who are going to make it more broken, so I’m going to leave off turning on people who will be on our team until after the existential threat to our loved ones and ourselves is past.
You’re making an attribution mistake. The DNC and RNC are PR firms that get people elected and manipulate the population through storytelling. Elected from both parties collaborate together to run the government of the USA.
Yes, Obama/Biden actually did create the policies necessary to deploy ICE inside US cities that Trump is using. But why didn’t Obama/Biden deploy them in that way? Because it’s off-brand. They created the conditions collaboratively with the Republicans, but they stayed within their narrative roles. They were no less fascist, you’re just choosing to draw an arbitrary line around what fascism is, and you happen to be choosing it around what makes white middle class people uncomfortable. Obama’s drone strike expansion was insanely fascist, but you didn’t have to experience fear because of it. Biden’s management of the border was no less fascist, but you didn’t have to see it. Trump’s use of Obama’s ICE is a narrative shock, but by the raw numbers it is less effective. Why? If Trump was such an evil fascist, why wouldn’t he absolutely dwarf Obama’s numbers and Biden’s numbers? Because Trump is playing a narrative role when he uses shock and awe.
And let me tell you, shock and awe is not what makes something fascist. Deliberately targeting weddings, funerals, and double tapping them with unmanned bomber jets is just as fascist, or more so, then deporting people loudly.
Did the Democrats plot to overthrow the elections? Narratively, no. Functionally, yes. If the Republicas so obviously did so, then what else can you possibly call Biden’s total inaction except tacit approval? He had the Epstein files in hand, he had a whole dog and pony show of an investigation, the SCOTUS said that the sitting president was immune from prosecution in carrying out the duties of the office even if that meant doing something totally illegal and Biden said “you know what, the voters will save us”? No. That’s not credible. The Democrats spent a massive amount of time and effort to make us feel a certain way and absolutely zero effort in stopping what they claimed was an existential threat that literally targeted our ability to vote. So how the fuck are the voters going to solve this? They already voted in a D administration and they did fucking nothing to stop the threat. So we’re supposed to vote them in again because this time they will stop threat? It’s so obviously bullshit.
That’s not fascism. That’s factionalism. The faction that Trump is the figurehead for did that and dismantled the operations that other factions relied on. They were all factions of fascism, but even within fascism there are factions. Musk destroying e.g. USAID was an intra-fascist conflict, which is easy to see when you understand that the good things USAID did were cover for all of the covert CIA operations they facilitated.
The Democrats are not on your team. They are not trying to fight the Republicans. They are co-managing the fascist empire and a large part of that is narrative control. The fascists aren’t stupid. They can’t win if they only act evil and overtly. They have to both ham it up for their base ® and they also need to co-opt any opposition they will face (D).
Well, you know what they say about assumptions. Of course, when I see a post from .ml, I assume the poster is a tankie, so I guess we’re both guilty.
Ah, I’ve engaged a person without an original thought. My mistake.
Sometimes, thought doesn’t have to be original. Sometimes, when something rings true, many people have the same thought, and can talk about it and agree with people who share the same thought and that isn’t an issue.