Today on The Current

[james_davis_nicoll]

Diane Francis argues that it would be best for Canada to abandon our health care system, to adopt a native relations system even more brutal than the one we have, and embrace a sky-rocketing Gini Coefficient while inextricably tying ourselves to an unstable nation forever flirting with government shut-down and default.

On balance, I am against this. Their crazification factor outnumbers Canada more than two to one.

She also advocates policies known have contributed to gendercide in China.

Comments

[resonant.livejournal.com]

It's very puzzling - I have many friends in the US, and they are all very nice people. I don't see how so many odd things can be widespread and common, considering how almost everyone I've met is so kind and considerate.

[eagle]

Answer one: third largest country in the world by population, which provides a lot of room for subgroups of self-sustaining oddity (and worse).

Answer two: the United States is full of cultural narratives and bits of cultural mythology that are at worst harmlessly eccentric on the personal level but which scale into "awful" when applied across the whole country. Libertarianism is an excellent example. It makes very little practical difference whether an individual person you know is a libertarian provided that they're not full-blown objectivists who apply those principles to every social interaction (which is exceptionally rare, even among libertarians). But application of the philosophy at scale quickly becomes toxic.

Basically, the US is full of ideas that don't scale to 320 million people and nonetheless have been scaled that way. Other countries sometimes do better because they lack those principles but, honestly, also sometimes do better because, despite having their own oddities, they've never had to scale those oddities to 320 million people and had them break down in the same way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The US political apparatus has still not completely recovered from the legacy of the slave system and resentments left over from the US Civil War. Some of the bad effects are constitutionally locked in, giving some of the worst people in the world effective veto power over everything, regardless of national majority sentiment.

[noelmaurer.typepad.com (from livejournal.com)]

Yeah. What he said. If the readers are really interested. Which I strangely suspect they are not ...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Here's an illuminating article, mapping the districts whose representatives are driving the move for the shutdown and looming default:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/meadows-boehner-defund-obamacare-suicide-caucus-geography.html?currentPage=all&mobify=0

These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.

Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.

The current mechanics of Congress are such that this 18% of the country are able to manipulate the House Republicans as a whole, and, on that basis, shut down the entire government and threaten default. Basically, the Crazification Factor has been endowed with veto power.

[ice-hesitant.livejournal.com]

"How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him."
- Pauline Kael