Thursday, January 15, 2015

The Arc Of White Supremicism

I should have known better but I started reading Dan Simmons' spectacularly racist screed Flashback. The book is about how terrible things became for America after, you know, the Muslims and the Japanese took over.

I think that the zeitgeist of white supremacists in America can be found comparing and contrasting Flashback to the white nationalist bible The Turner Diaries.
The Turner Diaries are written in a post-apocalypse where the race war was being raged (it's implied it's being won) against Blacks and Jews.
Flashback takes the more modern Right tack in being pro-Israel (although Israel has been destroyed by the Global Caliphate before the beginning of the story), but still plenty racist against Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics.
The biggest zeitgeist aspect of all this though is that all the stuff that was supposed to have happened by now (2015) in The Turner Diaries didn't go down. Packs of roving Black FBI agents aren't having their way with White women, the Day of the Rope didn't happen. Sure, some assbucket blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City but it didn't set off a race war like he hoped it would. So the new thing in the White Power movement is the feeling that they've already lost.
America is doomed, and there's nothing the White Man can do about it. The President is Black. The head of the Justice Department is Black. And it looks like this will be the last generation with a majority White electorate.
To the White Power movement this is a disaster. And where before they felt that getting some more guns and blowing some things up would get their White brethren to wake up, now it just seems too late.
Worse, I suspect, is that even they are realizing that their racist belief system is based on nothing. America isn't falling apart. There isn't chaos and anarchy in the streets. In fact, things are more stable no matter what the howler monkeys of the Right-wing media screech.
It's gotta be hard to be a White supremacist when nothing, nothing you've predicted has come to pass. Well, it's not like White supremacists have ever been that self-reflecting anyway.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Are We Even Bothering to Think Anymore?

60 Minutes this week did a hit piece on Obamacare.
They followed a family where the husband was diagnosed with cancer and the family went broke when they went to a hospital in Texas (even though they were from Ohio.) And the hospital charged them all sorts of crazy prices and they're in enormous debt.

The thing mentioned in passing is that all happened before the ACA. But then Leslie Stahl points out that even though the family is on Medicaid now, they would have had the same problem because Texas doesn't have a Medicaid reciprocity agreement with Ohio.
So why wouldn't they go to Kessler instead? If the same man were diagnosed now then he could.
The point of the whole piece was that the ACA does not do anything about controlling prices of health-care. This is a bit of intellectual sleight-of-hand. No, the government does not negotiate prices. Yes, everyone has private insurance.
The insurance companies as, you know, part of the "free market" may negotiate with health-care providers all they want. The 60 Minutes piece even briefly mentioned that fact pointing out that insurers would never have paid what the Texas hospital charged that family.
At this point they may as well put Lara Logan back on to talk about Benghazi.