FOX's Abby Huntsman and Morgan Ortagus just put on a master class in how to speak Conservative:
Fox’s Huntsman ‘Asks’ If Democrats’ Criticisms Of Trumpcare ‘Risk Inciting’ Violence
C'mon, guys. You heard those criticisms of Trumpcare! Let's get violent!
Huntsman
kicked off the propaganda by saying, “Lawmakers promised to clean up
the fiery rhetoric on Capitol Hill but it didn’t last very long.” As the banner on the screen read, “DEMS RETURN TO
INFLAMMATORY RHETORIC,” clips were played of various Democrats, plus
independent Bernie Sanders, blasting the bill:
Oh, this should be good. If there's one group known for their fiery rhetoric, it's Congressional Democrats!
Woah, woah, dial it down a notch, fellas!
Sen. Sanders: This is a barbaric and immoral piece of legislation.
Rep. Steve Cohen: It’s kind of like a death part two.
Schumer: The Senate Republican Healthcare bill is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Warren: These cuts are blood money. People will die.
Huntsman
gave a melodramatic “whooooo” to suggest an answer to her “question”:
“But do Democrats, with their latest attacks on health care risk
inciting further violence?”
Okay, you obviously have no idea how to do "inflamatory rhetoric" re: healthcare. Let's see how the experts do it:
See, there's no Trump as Hitler, or Trump as the Joker, or Trump as a racist caricature.
Also, if you want your rhetoric to incite violence, you're probably gonna want something like this:
So, that's lesson number one in how to speak Conservative. Always accuse your opponent of doing whatever your side has done and/or is still doing while never once acknowledging the fact that your side has done the thing in question. In this case, pretend that Democrats are engaging in dangerously violent rhetoric, AND act as if this is some new thing that they invented that has never been seen before, certainly not from conservatives anyway!
Huntsman
turned to conservative Morgan Ortagus. . . “What do you make of the most recent
rhetoric coming from the left?” Huntsman asked.
“It’s actually quite disturbing… If you’re a child in the 4th grade
and you’re watching the nightly news, you’re seeing Kathy Griffin hold a
picture of the president’s severed head.
Lesson #2:
It's always about the children! The children's delicate ears and eyes must be protected while they're sitting in the living room watching the evening news because that's a thing that children do.
Whether it's a fear that they will hear about Bill Clinton getting a bj and be scarred for life, or see a report about Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women by the p**sy, the important thing is not that Bill Clinton should never have been impeached over his gross personal life or that the current President is an admitted sexual assaulter, the point is that children are being exposed to bad things and it's the Democrats' fault, or the liberal media's fault, or anyone's fault other than the sexual predator in the White House.
You’re seeing crazed liberals literally shoot congressmen at a baseball practice
Lesson # 3. Find an example, a single example. of something outrageous and pretend that the person doing the outrageous thing represents the left as a whole.
Back in the old days, before podcasts were invented, I used to sometimes catch bits of the Rush Limbaugh while flipping through the radio channels. I would usually listen for a few minutes for the same reason it's hard to look away from a car crash, and I remember one time he had a report about a professor of philosophy in some college in Florida, I think, who had postulated the exisrence of the "male lesbian." Well, every time I ran across Limbaugh for the next couple weeks at least, I would hear him referencing the "male lesbian" as if it was somehow emblematic of the foolishness of liberal academe or something, like it wasn't one guy in one school and not knowing the context, Hell, he might even be right.
In this case, there was ONE crazed person (liberal? Maybe) who shot a Congressman. So, to a Conservative, that one deranged person can be made to represent the entire democratic party, and having seen one shooter morphs into "you're seeing crazed liberals literally shoot congressmen."
and
you’re hearing major leaders of the Democrat Party tell young children and tell the whole United States that
Republicans want people do die. This is irresponsible!
Lesson #4: Criticize vaguely.
Your opponents warn that your healthcare bill will cause needless deaths? Complain that they are saying you want people to die. Don't attribute the statement to anyone in particular, just say "Major leaders" of the Party. Or "many on the left are saying. . ." That way, you can never be held accountable. If an actual leader of the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi for instance, challenges you saying "I never said that Republicans want people to die!" You can simply smile and say "I never said that YOU said that, Congresswoman. But some of your party's leaders have!" Bingo, you're libel-suit-proof!
“The
leaders of the Democrat Party need to stand up and criticize Hillary
Clinton, criticize Johnny Depp and all these people that are calling for
the death of our president
Lesson #5: The Lump-in
Did Johnny Depp call for the death of the president? Maybe. I know he said something along those lines, I don't care enough about what a wife-beater has to say about a p**sy-grabber to look it up. But Hillary Clinton certainly didn't. And technically, Ortagus never said she did, but by lumping her in with Depp and "all these people" calling for the President's death, it definitely sounds that way. And when your audience consists of people who think it's plausible that Hillary ran a child sex ring out of a DC pizzeria, that's going to register.
As someone once said "oh, the things you see when you haven't got a gun!"
First up, Twenty-First Century Cotton Mathers and man who has never pooped without feeling guilty Vice President Mike Pence:
Before summer’s out, we'll repeal/replace Obamacare w/ system based on personal responsibility, free-market competition & state-based reform pic.twitter.com/JzCyxX9kJb
"Personal responsibility." That's Republican talk for "if you're sick, it's your own damn fault. Shoulda been healthier!" Which is an argument you could, if you were fairly heartless, make about someone who has lung cancer from smoking, or cirrhosis of the liver from drinking too much, or an std because they don't like the way condoms feel or whatever. But most folks don't get to choose their illnesses. Many are born with them. I know a couple whose son was born with MS. I guess that was pretty irresponsible of him.
Second: The guy who replied to this perfectly reasonable, factual tweet:
It seems fitting that, with the #TrumpCare debate raging, I got this bill in the mail today from Ethan's most recent open heart surgery. pic.twitter.com/pyUE2UxbWW
Okay, first of all, the only part of a hospital that is required to treat you whether or not you can pay is the Emergency Room. Now I'm no expert, and maybe it differs from hospital to hospital, but I don't think you can get open-heart surgery in the E.R. unless you're currently dying of a heat attack, and even then they would probably just stabilize you and then you'd go into the regular hospital procedure? I don't know, maybe you could try getting shot in the heart?
Second, let's say she had no insurance and she did take her son to the ER and they did do open-heart surgery on him even though she had no insurance so, ya know, "he good." Let's say she did that. Then what? Then she gets charged the entire $200,000 fee, and I'm guessing it would be more if it happened in the ER, but let's stay with 200k. If she can't afford insurance, you think she has $200,000 in her bank account? You think she has $200,000 equity in her home? If she did have that kind of money, she would probably already have spent it on her son's previous surgery/ies. So it's bankruptcy court and a life of poverty for her! But yeah, our healthcare system is the greatest in the world!
Third: Republican who used to be considered the far right of the party until the party went so far off the rails that he is sometimes considered a "moderate," and winner of the greater DC-area Jeff Sessions look-alike contest, Utah's Orrin Hatch:
The brief time when we were *not* accusing those we disagree with of murder was nice while it lasted. https://t.co/qr1rzon1cg
— Senator Hatch Office (@senorrinhatch) June 23, 2017
Oh, and that was in response to this Tweet from Senator Bernie Sanders:
Let us be clear and this is not trying to be overly dramatic: Thousands of people will die if the Republican health care bill becomes law.
So, I'm not really sure that ol' Orrin understands what an accusation of murder is. If I say, "hey, don't put the barbecue so close to the house, you could start a fire and kill us all!" That's not an accusation of murder. It's advice. It's how-to-not-kill-a-bunch-of-people advice. Same as saying "hey, don't pass this horrible healthcare bill, it will result in the deaths of thousands of people" isn't an accusation. It's a statement of hope that you are a decent and intelligent enough person to avoid doing something which will cause many many deaths. Is that confidence misplaced? Obviously. But Bernie is an eternal optimist and hope springs eternal. The rest of us know that you're a cold, soulless, un-dead entity that feeds upon the misery of innocents. Which is why you fit in so well with the rest of the GOP ghouls.
Also, where was your phony umbrage when your entire party was howling about "death panels?"
Last up: Author of much of our nation's collapse into third-world status and anthropomorphized rodent dropping Grover Norquist:
How Republicans are born...
Daughter, 8, has been savings up to buy her first Guitar.
Found it for $35. She had 35 exact.
Then...sales tax
Well, to be fair, he's right in a way. This is how Republicans are born. They are born when their parents are too stupid, too ignorant, or just too plain shitty to explain to them the connection between taxes and government services. Any sane, rational parent would tell his daughter something along the lines of "yeah, I know, it's no fun paying taxes, but you know how we had to drive on some roads to get to the guitar store? Well, it's our taxes that payed to build those roads and to fix them when there are potholes or broken pavement or whatever. And you know how we got here without your $35 being stolen from you? That's because we pay a little bit of tax and that allows the city to hire policemen and put the bad guys in jails and hire people to guard the jails so the bad guys don't get out! So maybe it's not so bad that your $35 guitar is going to cost about $39 instead, right? What do you think, sweetie?"
But no, someone with the infantile mindset of a Grover Norquist either can't make that connection himself, or is willingly leaving his daughter ignorant of the basic facts if how societies work so that she too can grow up to be another angry, ill-informed teabagger who thinks it's just totally unfair that the government gets to take some of her money.
I am reminded of an episode of Parks & Rec in which Ron Swanson somehow gets the assignment of teaching a child about how government works for some homework project she had. He illustrates this by taking a bite of her sandwich and saying that he represents the government. "that's not fair, it's my sandwich," says the girl,and Swanson says something about how that's just how government is, they just take some of your stuff as if they were the mafia or something.
Never does it occur to him that without the government there would be no sandwich.
Without government, there is no road to get to the grocery store.
With no government, as you're walking to the store, there's no reason to think you won't be robbed, because there are no cops, no courts, no jails, so criminals just roam free.
In fact, the grocery store is probably out of business because it was getting robbed every day.
And if there is no government, there is no money, no legal tender, so you're having to barter at the store, hopefully the grocer will want some of the apples from your tree enough to trade them for bread, meat, cheese, etc.
Without the FDA and the CDC, you have no reason to think that you won't get salmonella from the mayo, or E. coli from the lunchmeat or listeria from the lettuce.
You get the idea.
Because you're not a 61-year-old Libertarrian man-baby who doesn't understand how life works.
A federal appeals court says Mississippi
can start enforcing a law that will let merchants and government
employees cite religious beliefs to deny services to same-sex couples.
Merchants and GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES!
Because, you know, equal protection under the law sounds nice om paper, but in real life. . .meh?
U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves had ruled that the law
unconstitutionally establishes preferred beliefs and creates unequal
treatment for LGBT people.
Yeah, I think that's a feature, not a bug.
Republican Gov. Phil Bryant and other supporters say the law protects
beliefs that marriage can be between only a man and a woman, and that a
person’s gender is determined at birth and cannot be changed.
A: No it doesn't. You are free to believe whatever you want. Having to issue a marriage license or bake a weeding cake for a same-sex couple doesn't prevent you from believing whatever awful shit you want to believe.
B: Those are false beliefs. The Supreme Court has ruled on what marriage is in the United States and marriage is NOT only for hetero couples.
North Carolina is the one state where the law
explicitly says you cannot revoke consent once it's given. A bill that
would remove this "unacceptable loophole" has little traction.
I don't have any smart-alecky comments to make about this truly horrifying piece of news.
The state Supreme Court, however, disagreed with the lower court's
interpretation of withdrawn consent. "If the actual penetration is
accomplished with the woman's consent, the accused is not guilty of
rape, although he may be guilty of another crime because of his
subsequent actions," the High Court wrote. As a result, for the
past 38 years, women in North Carolina—like 19-year-old Aaliyah Palmer,
who allegedly agreed to have sex with a man at a party but changed her
mind when he got violent—have been unable to legally revoke consent
after sexual intercourse begins. "It's really stupid," Palmer recently told the Fayetteville Observer. "If I tell you no and you kept going, that's rape."
Yeah, I got nothing. It's really just too horrible for words.
Horror # 3:
Using Birth Control or Getting an Abortion Could Disqualify You From Jobs in Missouri
Reproductive rights have been taking a hit left and right, and now folks living in Missouri may be facing another setback. Their state Senate has just voted to pass a bill
this past Wednesday night after 10 hours of closed-door meetings that,
if fully approved, could legally allow hiring managers to discriminate
against those who have gotten abortions in the past, as well as
applicants who use birth control.
The legislation. . . would repeal a St. Louis ordinance that bans
employers and landlords from discriminating against women who have had
an abortion, use contraceptives or are pregnant.
Read
more here:
http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article156309839.html?utm_source=nar.al&utm_medium=urlshortener&utm_campaign=FB#storylink=cpy
You know, when I saw the movie The Handmaid's Tale back in the 90s and I read an interview with Margaret Atwood in which she warned that this could be the future, I thought she was a bit nutty. Obviously I owe Ms Atwood an apology. Also Susan Faludi, whom as a naive young college boy I thought was way off base about the Backlash..
Also, I owe an apology to the English language for the structure of that last sentence.
Striking Portraits of Fathers and the Daughters Whose Virginity They’ve Pledged to Protect
The shocking thing is that only one of them has been arrested for child molestation.
After all these horrors, I feel like we should close on some good news. And as an indication of how horrible everything is right now, the "good news" has to do with a man being stabbed by an alleged terrorist.
Reuters
Suspect in Michigan airport stabbing attempted to buy gun before attack
The man charged with stabbing an airport police officer in Michigan
unsuccessfully attempted to purchase a gun before the attack, which is
being investigated as an act of terrorism, federal officials said on
Thursday.
That's right. He attempted to purchase a gun, was unsuccessful, and instead turned to another handy murder weapon, a hunting knoife, which is what the NRA degenerates always say will happen if the bad people are not allowed to get guns. They'll just commit murders with knives and rocks and pointed sticks instead, right? Guns don't kill people etcetera etcetera etcetera.
Oh, that's not the good news. This is:
The suspect, Amor Ftouhi, 49, of Quebec, Canada, has been charged in
federal court with violence at an international airport for stabbing
Jeff Neville, an officer at the Bishop International Airport in Flint,
in the neck on Wednesday. Neville underwent surgery and is expected to
recover.
IS EXPECTED TO RECOVER! Hmm, how about that? The bad guy couldn't get a gun, used a knife instead, and the victim SURVIVED! This asshole's inability to get his hands on a gun saved a life today. Gun control works.
I
was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the
Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising
serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the
nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in
Arkansas.
Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays.
But that didn't stop me from gleefully printing each and every one, no matter how far-fetched!
Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those
essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the
intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell
revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A
special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected.
Speculation became the national sport.
And op-ed page editors continued using the passive voice as if they had no culpability in the matter at all!
I mean, you do realize you're confessing to journalistic malpractice, right? Publishing allegations for which you have no evidence and which you do not even understand. "These accusations are incomprehensible, I can't make heads or tails of what is even alleged to have happened. Well, I guess I'd better publish them in a major national newspaper!"
In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown.
Really? You think Whitewater might have been "overblown?" A manufactured pseudo-scandal which never produced any evidence of wrongdoing (other than a BJ), you think that might have been "overblown?" You know, most of us didn't need the help of retrospect to see that. But, you know, most of us don't have cushy jobs with major media outlets. To land that kind of gig, you have to be dead wrong in public over and over again, especially when it comes to the Clintons and whatever phony scandal Richard Mellon Scaife can dream up to feed to Matt Drudge.
In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed
that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive
than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.
Yeah, you can tell that this Russia thing has no substance by the number of people having to recuse themselves and how many administration members are lawyering up.
There may be a giant revelation still to come. But as the Trump-Russia
story has evolved, it is striking how little evidence there is that any
underlying crime occurred — that there was any actual collusion between
the Donald Trump campaign and the Russians. Everything seems to be
leaking out of this administration, but so far the leaks about actual
collusion are meager.
Jeezus, do you hear yourself? When a Democrat was in office, no scandal was too ridiculous to be given credence and trotted out on to the national stage. But when it's a Republican, even an incompetent, deranged Republican like Trump, suddenly all this smoke surely doesn't indicate a fire!
I'm hearing echoes of Iran-Contra. "Sure, the Reagan Administration directly violated the law, but come on. What harm was done? Surely his intentions were good!"
Or the Iraq Invasion: "Well, sure they lied, manipulated intelligence, cherry-picked any bullshit from any unreliable kook that seemed to support their story and ignored all the relevant experts, but obviously, this was a failure of the intelligence community!"
There were some meetings between Trump officials and some Russians, but
so far no more than you’d expect from a campaign that was publicly and
proudly pro-Putin.
Well, maybe my standards are a bit different, but I would expect ZERO meetings between a candidate and the KGB! Especially when that candidate is not a part of government, not involved with foreign policy and has no earthly god damn clue what the hell he's doing.
Second, there is something disturbingly meta about this whole affair.
This is, as Yuval Levin put it, an investigation about itself. Trump
skeptics within the administration laid a legal minefield all around the
president, and then Trump — being Trump — stomped all over it, blowing
himself up six ways from Sunday.
Wait, there are Trump skeptics within the administration? The Trump administration? The administration who gave us this sickening display of obsequious devotion?
Now of course Trump shouldn’t have tweeted about Oval Office tape recordings. Of course he shouldn’t have fired James Comey
But
even if you took a paragon of modern presidents — a contemporary
Abraham Lincoln — and you directed a democratically unsupervised,
infinitely financed team of prosecutors at him and gave them power to
subpoena his staff and look under any related or unrelated rock in an
attempt to bring him down, there’s a pretty good chance you could spur
even this modern paragon to want to fight back. You could spur even him
to do something that had the whiff of obstruction.
Okay, first of all there was no special prosecutor until AFTER Trump fired James Comey. How are you gonna sit there and pretend that firing Comey is some sort of pushback against a special prosecutor?
And secondly, Bill Clinton is hardly a paragon of presidently virtue, hardly a modern-day Lincoln, but an unsupervised, infinitely financed team of prosecutors with subpoena power and direction to look under every unrelated rock in order to bring him down is EXACTLY what happened to Bill Clinton, and you didn't see him firing the guy investigating him or implying blackmail against Ken Starr. It's one thing to say that Trump can't be expected to live up to the standards of Imaginary Lincoln, but shouldn't he at least be held to the standard of Slick Willie?
And third, firing the director of the FBI when the FBI is investigating you is hardly a "whiff of obstruction." It's pretty much textbook obstruction.
There’s just something worrisome every time we find ourselves replacing politics of democracy with the politics of scandal.
Yes, and I'm sure you said the same about "Fast and Furious," the IRS "scandal," birtherism and Benghazi, right? Haha, I'm kidding. Of course you didn't, you disingenuous piece of shit.
In democracy, the issues count, and you try to win by persuasion. You
recognize that your opponents are legitimate, that they will always be
there and that some form of compromise is inevitable.
My God, it's as if he's completely unaware of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and the entire Freedom Fucking Caucus!
And how do you reconcile "recognizing your opponents are legitimate" with King Birther himself, the Oaf in the Oval Office? What the fuck was birtherism if not an attempt to delegitimize the Presdient?
Donald Trump rose peddling the politics of scandal — oblivious to
policy, spreading insane allegations about birth certificates and other
things — so maybe it’s just that he gets swallowed by it.
Oh my GAWD! So he is aware of Trump's "politics of scandal," or as it's known in the real world "racist conspiracy-mongering. But somehow there's always an excuse for a Republican - in this case, that he's gotten "swallowed" by the culture of Washington scandal or something.
The people who hype the politics of scandal don’t make American
government purer. They deserve some of the blame for an administration
and government too distracted to do its job,
Good! The best possible outcome of all this is an administration too distracted to do its job! Although, to be fair, it is already distracted by petty Twitter feuds, golfing, insulting foreign leaders, and shiny objects.
Also, when you say "the people who hype the politics of scandal," I assume that includes former op-ed editors of the Wall Street Journal?
Things are so bad that I’m going to have to give Trump the last word. On June 15 he tweeted,
“They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero
proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story.”
Unless there is some new revelation, that may turn out to be pretty
accurate commentary.
Oh, yes. Very accurate. Right up there with "I did not have sex with that woman," "I am not a crook," and "there is no doubt that Sadam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction."
You know, if there's one type of statement that can be relied upon for truthfulness, it's a statement from the accused that he didn't do it. I mean, if he says he's innocent, he must be, right?
Apparently, this is really how conservatives think. Or at least how one Megan McArdle thinks.
Beware of Blaming Government for London Tower Fire
Perhaps safety rules could have saved some
residents. But at what cost to others' lives? There's always a
trade-off.
by
Megan McArdle
Oh, fuck you! Lives could have been saved, but at what cost? What kind of inhuman monster asks a question like that?
A few days ago fire swept through Grenfell Tower, a large apartment
building in London. It’s not yet known what caused the fire, and we
aren’t conclusively sure how it spread so quickly, consuming the entire
24-story building. Nor is it known how many died in the fire; as of
Friday, the count is at least 30. What
we do know is that there are ways to help control the spread of fire in
apartment buildings, such as sprinkler systems. This has the makings of
a scandal for Prime Minister Theresa May’s beleaguered government. Her
immigration minister, Brandon Lewis, was formerly the housing minister.
He declined to require developers to install sprinklers. The Independent
quotes him as telling Parliament in 2014: “We believe that it is the
responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to
market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider
installation. … The cost of fitting a fire sprinkler system may affect
house building -- something we want to encourage -- so we must wait to
see what impact that regulation has.”
Now at this point, any sane, reasonable person would conclude the column with a call for the ouster of May and Lewis and an appeal to make fire safety systems mandatory in all housing developments.
But no. This is not a sane, rational person. This is a conservative.
People who died in the Grenfell fire might be alive today if regulators
had required sprinkler systems. This does not play well for the Tories.
How this plays for the Tories, or any other political party, should hardly be relevant when you are talking about the deaths of dozens of innocent people.
But before we start hanging them in effigy, there are a couple of things
we should consider. The first is that, even if the regulation had
passed, and required existing developers to retrofit sprinklers into
older buildings, Grenfell Tower might not have gotten a sprinkler system
before the fire occurred. Regulations are not implemented like instant
coffee; they take time to formulate, and further time for businesses to
comply. All the political will in the world cannot conjure up enough
sprinkler systems, and sprinkler-system installers, to instantly
transform a nation’s housing stock.
Really? You don't think they could have complied between 2014 and now? You think three years is not enough time to install life-saving sprinkler systems?
This, however, is only a quibble; even if Grenfell Tower could not
have been saved, there are surely other buildings where fires will soon
occur that would benefit from sprinklers. Must we wait for those deaths
before we can say that his was a bad calculation? Well, no. But we should wait until we can establish that it was actually a bad calculation.
Well, let's see. . .
. . . They chose to not do a thing. People died because they didn't do that thing. . .
Yup, you got yourself a bad calculation there.
It may sound heartless to discuss life-saving measures as a calculation.
But the fact is that we all make these sorts of calculations every day,
about ourselves and others. We just don’t like to admit that we’re
doing it. Consider the speed at which many of you drove to work this morning. I’m
sure you’re all splendid, careful drivers. Nonetheless, when a vehicle
is being piloted at 50 or 60 miles an hour, the margin of error for
avoiding an accident is pretty small. To drive a car even at 5 miles per
hour is to accept a small risk of killing oneself and others. To drive
at 50 miles per hour is to accept a much higher risk of doing so. It’s a
calculation: risk versus reward.
Yes, and that is why our government, back when it was sane, put in rules requiring safety belts, air bags, bumpers, etc so as to minimize the risk. Also we have speed limits, licensing requirements, and police and highway patrol to enforce safety by ticketing those who drive in an unsafe manner. Does this eliminate risk? Of course not. But at least we're trying. At least we're not saying "I think the seat belt manufacturers should just try to encourage automakers to install their product. and convince motorists to use them." Or "the auto insurers should just encourage drivers to maintain a safe speed." We don't let the car companies decide whether or not they want to spend the extra few bucks to include safety features.
In the U.S., tens of thousands of people were killed in auto accidents last year.
We could probably eliminate most of those deaths if we simply made sure
that no one ever piloted their personal vehicle above some prudent
speed -- say, 25 mph -- which would reduce both the likelihood of
crashes occurring, and the damage any crashes would do.
Are you
willing to make that trade-off? To avert 40,000 deaths a year, all you
have to do is move closer to work, take public transportation (where
available), or spend a lot more time in the car. Americans have
made that choice: Nope, not worth it. We are manifestly not willing to
exchange personal convenience for lower auto fatalities. Nor, as far as I
am aware, is anyone anywhere else. Government sets much higher speed
limits -- speeds that are still quite deadly! -- and most drivers opt
for even deadlier speeds. Every speeding driver knows, at some level,
that what they’re doing is dangerous; they simply care more about what
the boss will say when they’re late than they do about the increased
risk of killing other people.
Which is why those decisions should not be left up to individuals. That's why we have traffic laws. Are they enough to keep us safe? No. Of course not. But they do a hell of a lot better job than letting every motorist decide for himself what his speed should be or how closely he should be allowed to follow the car in front of him, or whether to use turn signals, etc.
Now, I won’t defend the folks who go 90 in a 50 mph zone. But in less
extreme cases, the broader calculation is probably correct. Auto
accidents cost lives. But automobile transport has also saved a lot of
lives, by enabling the economic growth that has made us richer and
healthier.
Um, source?
On what are you basing that claim?
And would our economy be hurt in some way by lowering speed limits? Or if more people started taking trains and buses to work?
And how does economic growth make us healthier? Especially if that growth is tied to CO-spewing automobiles?
When the cost is as personal, as glaring and obvious, as restricting
every car to a snail’s pace, we can see that not all safety trade-offs
are worth it. However, when the cost seems to be borne by someone else,
we suddenly become safety absolutists: no price is too great to pay.
Ah, the straw man argument. Classic conservative "technique." If people want builders to have to install sprinkler systems, that's the same as wanting them to spend untold zillions of dollars on any ludicrous over-the-top safety measure that could be imagined.
Unfortunately, “other peoples’ money” has a way of ultimately coming out
of our own pockets. If it costs more to build buildings, then rents
will rise.
Yes. No one is unaware of this. Just like the price of a car is slightly increased by the inclusion of airbags and safety belts. Everyone knows this.
People will be forced to live in smaller spaces, perhaps farther away.
Some of them, in fact, may be forced to commute by automobile, and then
die in a car accident. We don’t see those costs in the same way as we
see a fire’s victims; we will never know the name of the guy who was
killed in a car accident because he had to live far from work because
rents rose because regulators required sprinkler systems. But that is a
distinction for public opinion, not for good policy making. Good
regulations would take into account the proximate and distant effects.
Yes, we certainly shouldn't have a common-sense safety rule because of the off chance of a butterfly effect rippling outward and resulting in the death of an unnamed hypothetical motorist! Because if safety measures are required, obviously, the rent would just skyrocket, forcing people to move far away and drive to work, because it's not as if the cost of the sprinkler system would be borne by a large number of tenants over the course of many many months!
Back to the case at hand: Maybe sprinkler systems should be required in
multifamily dwellings. It’s completely possible that the former housing
minister made the wrong call. But his comment indicates he was thinking
about the question in the right way -- taking seriously the fact that
safety regulations come at a cost, which may exceed their benefit. Such
calculations have to be made, no matter how horrified the tut-tutting
after the fact.
WHAT?!?!?!
That's the "right way" to think about things? Worrying about the price tag for saving human lives? You're seriously going to sit there and say putting a price on the lives of human beings is the "right way" to think?
FUCK YOU!
And what you call the the "tut-tuttimg" after the fact is the sobs of people who have lost parents, sons, daughters, friends that were apparently just dollar amounts on a spreadsheet and not worth the cost of saving in your sick conservative logic.
Yes, "tut-tut" indeed.
And he is certainly right about one thing: When it comes to many
regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost
to the market, rather than the government.
Seriously? Because they did that and now at least 80 people are dead. People. Dead. Not embryos, people. Actual living, breathing people with families and friends and hopes and dreams are dead because your goddammned market didn't think the cost of protecting them made sense for the bottom line.
Heck of a job, Free Market!
It’s possible that by allowing large residential buildings to operate
without sprinkler systems, the British government has prevented untold
thousands of people from being driven into homelessness by higher
housing costs.
Sure, and it's possible that the vomiting caused by reading this column might cause me to lose weight and avoid a heart attack! Anything is possible. Why not deal with what we actually know to have actually happened? People died for the cause of saving money.
And how much do you think that rents would have been driven up by requiring safety measures anyway? According to the Guardian UK:
Some estimates suggest that the additional cost of fitting the fire-resistant product would have been as little as £5,000.
Also:
. . . in 2012 the British Automatic Fire Sprinkler
Association (BAFSA) commissioned a report on the economics of fire
sprinkler retrofit in residential apartment blocks of this type. The
study concluded that fire sprinklers could be retrofitted with tenants
in place at a cost of about £1150 per flat. (source)
At a cost of £1150 per flat, the sprinklers could be completely paid off in one year by raising rent £96 per month. Or rent could go up a mere £48 per month and the sprinklers would be paid for in two years. If you paid them off over 5 years, you're looking at less than £20 per month increase in rent. Who is being "driven into homelessness" by that?
Grenfell Tower, of course, was public housing, which changes the
calculation somewhat. And yet, even there, trade-offs have to be made.
The government spends money on a great number of things, many of which
save lives. Every dollar it spends on installing sprinkler systems
cannot be spent on the health service, or national defense, or pollution
control. Would more lives be saved by those measures or by sprinkler
systems in public housing? It’s hard to say.
Ah, the false choice. More classic conservative argument.
Because we all know that there is no way for the government to increase the amount of revenue it has to spend. No, hard choices must be made, whether to spend money on public safety, or to continue following the US into disastrous, pointless wars that cost millions of pounds. I mean, they both save lives, right? Fire sprinklers and fire-retardent panels save lives in apartment buildings, invading and bombing Muslim countries saves, um . . . lives. . . uh, somehow, I think? Right?
Regulatory decisions are never without costs, and sometimes their benefits are invisible.
Yes, invisible. Like you don't actually see buildings not burning down, people not being killed. That's how it works. When regulations are effective, you don't see anything. It's like they say about offensive linemen in American football: If they're doing a good job, you don't notice them. They only get mentioned when they miss a block and allow the quarterback to be crushed or a runner to lose yardage. That's how regulations are. When they work, you don't notice anything. You just eat a meal and don't get food poisoning.
Or you go fishing and you don't catch any three-eyed mutant fish.
I'm not sure you're making the strong anti-regulation case you think you are.
Oh, fuck you! Lives could have been saved, but at what cost? What kind of inhuman monster asks a question like that?
