Jul 31, 2012

Romney praises Israeli health care system

Mitt Romney praised Israel's health care system on Monday, saying:
When our health care costs are completely out of control. Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the GDP in Israel? 8 percent. You spend 8 percent of GDP on health care. And you’re a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our GDP on health care. 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, let me compare that with the size of our military. Our military budget is 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of GDP. We have to find ways, not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to finally manage our health care costs.
So, what sort of health care system does Israel have?  The Washington Post reports:
Israel regulates its health care system aggressively, requiring all residents to carry insurance and capping revenue for various parts of the country’s health care system.
Israel created a national health care system in 1995, largely funded through payroll and general tax revenue. The government provides all citizens with health insurance: They get to pick from one of four competing, nonprofit plans. Those insurance plans have to accept all customers—including people with pre-existing conditions—and provide residents with a broad set of government-mandated benefits.
In short, if Israel's system were proposed in the U.S., the Republican party would label it socialism and throw a hysterical fit.

Jul 30, 2012

Who's who in political discourse

A recurring theme in George Orwell's essays and books is his commitment to facing facts head-on, without flinching.  It's appropriate that the kind of sterilizing political language Orwell opposed--exemplified in extreme form in 1984--has come to be called "Orwellian" (a more subtle contemporary example is the phrase "collateral damage").  What Orwell advocated for political discourse is essentially the style of argument used in scientific / scholarly discourse:  use plain language which does not distort the facts in your favor.

The student of Orwell carries with her a toolkit of critical-thinking skills to avoid slipping into Orwellian abuses of language in the service of political ideology.  I'd like to add a tool to this toolkit:  keeping track of who's who.

In the William F. Buckley essay I blogged about a few days ago, there is a colossal Orwellian distortion of who's who.  The phrase "the South" does not mean the people who live in the South.  It actually means the white community in the South.  The black community in the South, however, is arbitrarily excluded from "the South".  This linguistic sleight-of-hand serves the author's ideological purposes, but at the expense of plain language and respecting the demographic facts:  blacks are as much a part of the South as whites.

The same who's who violation occurs in Western newspaper articles about the conflict in Afghanistan.  I have seen the term "Afghan forces" abused to mean the NATO-backed forces of the central Kabul government.  It is sometimes said that a certain number of "Afghans" were killed by insurgents--including such-and-such number of civilians, and such-and-such number of soldiers.  But when Taliban insurgents are killed by government forces, they are never "Afghans" or even "Afghan forces".  They may as well be invaders from Mars as inhabitants of Afghanistan.


Should the who's who tool be added to the critical thinking toolkit?  Or am I making a fuss over nothing?

Jul 29, 2012

In China, sometimes brains need washing

“If there are problems with the brain, then it needs to be washed, just like dialysis for kidney patients".  Those words were spoken yesterday by Jiang Yudui, chairman of the China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong.  His comments came ahead of today's protest of tens of thousands in Hong Kong, accusing the government of attempting to brainwash children with the introduction of Chinese national education.  The Financial Times reports:
Course materials made available to schools include a teaching manual describing the Chinese authoritarian government as “progressive, selfless and united” while assessing the US system as one that allows politics to disrupt the lives of ordinary people, and a prescriptive guide on how to be a “good child of China” that directs children to shout out in class: “I am proud to be a Chinese”.
The materials discuss contemporary Chinese history but leave out the June 4, 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square.  A blogger from Singapore provides these translated excerpts from the teaching manual:
“Questions to prompt students to share their experience in singing and hearing the national anthem: When you hear the national anthem, does it bring to mind the Motherland? Does it remind you that you are a Chinese national? . . . Does it not evoke your sense of national pride and move you to tears? . . .
Note: Should the teacher find that the student does not display strong emotions of patriotism/nationalism, do not criticize him. Accept his behavior but ask the student to reflect upon himself.” (emphasis mine)
... [The teaching guides] ask students to reflect on themselves should they fail to display strong patriotic feelings when cheering for the national team etc. "
I can't verify the accuracy of this translation, but it is consistent with what is being paraphrased in Radio Free Asia, Associated Press, Asia Sentinal, and an article at a Hong Kong-based newspaper hilariously called "Class Struggle".

Jul 28, 2012

Why the Negro had to Lose

I came across an essay on the life of William F. Buckley, Jr. written by his on-again off-again close friend Garry Wills ("Daredevil" in The Atlantic, 2010).  It is a mostly glowing piece about Buckley's wit, charm, and generosity, but the following passage took me by surprise:
It was not surprising that Bill and I would initially disagree about the civil rights movement.  In a notorious 1957 editorial called "Why the South Must Prevail," he defended segregation because whites were "the advanced race," and "the claims of civilization supersede[d] those of universal suffrage." 
Here's more of what Buckley said in "Why the South Must Prevail" (as qtd. in Philadelphia Tribune; a complete quotation of the article is available here):
The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal — is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of white over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the white community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.
Buckley also wrote "On Negro Inferiority", published in National Review on April 8, 1969 -- almost exactly one year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.


Yikes.  Talk about being on the wrong side of history.  



Jul 16, 2012

Supreme Court to Rule on Defense of Marriage Act?

The ACLU reported on its website today that the Supreme Court will probably decide the constitutionality of DOMA in the coming term:
"Edie is an 83-year-old lesbian widow who spent 44 years with her partner and then spouse, Thea Spyer.  Over the course of decades, Edie and Thea dealt together with Thea’s multiple sclerosis and the progressive paralysis that it caused, deepening their love and commitment as Thea gradually became a paraplegic.  When Thea died, two short years after they finally married in 2007, Edie learned that she owed the IRS $363,000 in estate taxes on her inheritance from Thea.  When Edie found out that a straight widow wouldn’t have owed a dime, she decided to challenge DOMA in court.  Her case was one of two that prompted the Department of Justice to stop defending the constitutionality of DOMA and instead to acknowledge that it violates the federal constitution.
There are now over 130,000 married same-sex couples in the United States.  DOMA harms each of those couples in a wide variety of ways, since it treats them as unmarried in each of the 1,138 different contexts in which federal statutes determine protections or obligations based on marriage."