The stupid it burns us

[lexin]

Via lyorn and her friend bellatrys I discovered this.

It's an attempt at a salvo in the argument currently going on in the US about healthcare or "socialised medicine" as the right wingers term it. But can there be any more of a 'I have just shot myself in the foot' argument than this one:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Unless of course there's another famous scientist called Stephen Hawking that they haven't told us about. Which seems unlikely.

I suppose someone must have told them, but it's still right up there - Investor's Business Daily seem content to have their arse hanging out all over the net.

ETA: Oho, they found themselves looking stupid and took it down. However, we have the evidence.

Comments

[legionseagle]

This is not helping my current view that all of the US should be torched back to bedrock (It's a long story involving people trying to superimpose US preoccupations on Torchwood - no, the BBC did not make Ianto die on 11 September unless in addition to all the screwed up ways in which the Day 5 plan wasn't going to work you seriously suppose the UK Government had decided arbitrarily to bring everyone into school on a Saturday and expected them to comply and co-opting 2000plus people's death in a terrorist outrage to make you feel Super Specially Aggrieved is sick as well as being egocentric).

[lexin]

trying to superimpose US preoccupations on Torchwood

Or onto any UK TV series. I get tired of trying to explain that it's class, not race, which is uppermost in the British mind most of the time.

[legionseagle]

They probably tell you "that's a standard derailing tactic" I expect.

[lexin]

Not yet. Or possibly they have and I didn't notice. I have a certain amount of respect for the 'let's not derail the argument' argument - having had to use it in trade union situations. Just not as much as they expect me to have.

[legionseagle]

I argue for a living (not always as well as I hope) and it doesn't take too long to notice that there are valid arguments and there are arguments deployed to disconcert. And they have to look as indistinguishable from each other as possible, otherwise they wouldn't work. And "That's your white liberal guilt talking!" is a stunningly good argument in a) cases when it's true; b) cases when it's not true but it looks true - for example, when someone on the other side has come out with a barefaced lie and everyone is in that gob-smacked position when faced with a barefaced lie of wondering if it can be an honest mistake. And one's a valid argument and the other is designed to disconcert.

In fact, the Ianto death business is a good example of b). It's a nasty urban myth being circulated for reasons I'd not like to speculate about by people for whom I otherwise had some respect (I have contradicted it with full evidence three times on a particular lj and not been acknowledged once). And it plays into a particular kind of US victimhood. The fact that US citizens were, with the encouragement of senior US politicians (yes, Ted Kennedy, I'm looking at you - though I'm sorry for your loss, all the same) sponsoring and paying for terrorism on British soil for very many years (Kipling has a story from the 1880s about US sponsored terrorism)is of no interest to these people - they want us to be disrespecting their glorious dead, and choose to lie to achieve that end.