Hard News: Can somebody hook a brother up with some Twiglets?
97 Responses
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Sigh. Which is why the left will keep on losing in the US - they keep trying to patronise people into submission. 'You should listen to me, dumbass!' doesn't really work that well, oddly enough.
Sigh. Not everyone lives in the US, or even gives a shit about the place.
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I am still in Singapore and still don't know where the best food halls are. This means even more to me than commenting on Michaels Moores new film...blimmin hot here.
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Does anyone know of other places to get real ale in NZ?
Check out Real Beer NZ for good coverage of proper beer. And can I just put a small plug in for the Nelson area. With Founders, Harringtons, Light House, Mussel Inn and the Renaissance Brewery over the hill in Blenheim, we're pretty well sorted for a pint in this part of the world.
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This discussion seems to indicate that as a nation, are we now concerned about the availability of real beer and the origins of HP sauce than another brainless performance by the All Blacks.
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I am still in Singapore and still don't know where the best food halls are. This means even more to me than commenting on Michael Moores new film...blimmin hot here.
They're all pretty good, and I thought the ones in the basements of malls and department stores were less challenging (yes, I find the stalls marked 'Pig Organ Soup' challenging), if not quite so stunningly cheap.
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Just to re-iterate Russell's comment regarding Singaporean food malls - find a tower block, in the basement will be a good cheap food mall.
They can't really get their heads around the concept of socialised health care to start with
The problem is with the use of the word "socialised". In America that is the equivalent of using the word "treason" (socialists == communists). "Treasonous Health Care" is how it will be heard.
Call it "Fair Health Care", "National Health Care" or even better "American Dream Health care" and I think most of the problem would disappear.
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His loving depiction of the French social system ignores the social and economic slough the system has helped produce there.
I haven't seen the movie, but - unless he starts drifting well beyond health care you are mistaken, I think
It isn't France's high level of social spending (with the possible exception of benefits) that are causing its economic malaise. The most likely cause is labour market rigidities combined with over aggressive European Central Bank inflation targeting and downwards wage presures associated with Globalisation. Even then the problem doesn't appear to be across the economy IIRC - it's limited to certain groups (the young, those new to the labour force etc). This in turn, is amplified by France's failure to find viable multiculturalisms
Free doctor's visits, they're innocent sorry.
He doesn't acknowledge that, although it is plainly and unforgivably awful at safeguarding the welfare of many citizens in most need, the US system does provide incentives for the development of novel treatments that help the rest of us.
I'm genuinely interested, how does a private insurance mediated health care system provide such incentives (or, why would they not still exist under a public insurance mediated system?)
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Sigh. Not everyone lives in the US, or even gives a shit about the place.
Fair cop. Although since the thread is partially about the US public's response to Sicko, it's not like it's totally out of left field or anything.
(Tangentially, I've always found the 'not giving a shit' attitude perplexing. The whole country is such an awesome, crazy, inspiring, fucked-up, ridiculous mess - how could anyone *not* be interested in it? To say nothing of its general effects on the rest of us...)
Anyway, I suppose my initial post was badly worded. I think that the left in general, in most western societies (and this is most prevalent in the US), seems to have divorced itself more and more thoroughly from ordinary working-class people. So when someone says something about not wanting to 'dumb myself down to their level', referring to ordinary people - the same kinds of ordinary people who fifty years ago could have created a civil rights movement, or one hundred years ago could have created a women's suffrage movement, or a labour movement... it kind of makes me irritated. I think it's counterproductive. That's all. (However, I think this may be more about my issues than yours, Ben. :))
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I await for the usual suspects in our own little country to start discrediting the film before they view it.
Really? Well, I'd have been quite keen to see __Manufacturing Dissent__ at the Film Fest this year, but sadly working around my work schedule isn't much of a priority for the wonderful NZFF crew.
And I'd actually give 'usual suspects" Peter Calder and a certain Mr Russell Brown kudos for actually treating Moore's work as something other than holy writ. It would be nice if some of the other superb documentarians you'll seldom if ever see if you miss 'em on the festival circuit got 1% of the publicity Moore does.
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(Tangentially, I've always found the 'not giving a shit' attitude perplexing. The whole country is such an awesome, crazy, inspiring, fucked-up, ridiculous mess - how could anyone *not* be interested in it? To say nothing of its general effects on the rest of us...)
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Agreed - case in point being last night's episode of Top Gear on Prime - it's a mad, mad, mad world over there.
And that's just Alabama!
There's a whole continent of crazy places to explore. Brilliant!
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Danielle, no worries. I'm having issuez recently too, and have low tolerance for silly yank shenanigans. But of course the place is of interest, and not everyone there is a moron. Just making my point that we do pay them far more attention than they are really due. Sorry if the tone was rough.
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Thanks Russell and Don. But 'pig organ soup'!? Really! I have seen some peculiar unearthly 'star wars' type beasts lurking in some of the Mall's Food Halls, but I'm not that game to try them. Thanks for the tips.
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Sigh. Not everyone lives in the US, or even gives a shit about the place.
Yeah, we just:
watch their movies
listen to their music
wear their jeans/shoes/t-shirts/brands
buy their fast food
drink their coffee
and
accept their dictates on security -
well I'm late to the party .... but I have lived under both systems - there's good and bad - I paid tax at a higher rate in the US and my bosses always paid for good health insurance in the US on top of that, here it's included in the lesser tax I pay, good deal I say - dealling with an HMO (insurance company) there is like pulling teeth - both my doctor and my dentist had a person on staff full time who's sole job was to harass HMOs so they could get paid. Seeing a specialist took 6 months, first to get the HMO's OK then to get in line for the specialist to see me, in pain several times every week, mind you once they'd decided to pull my gall bladder they whipped it out right away. I haven't had to do the same since I moved back to NZ but I hear it's just the same, except you wait at different places in the process.
Mind you from an economics point of view queues are healthy, not having a queue means there are expensive people and machines sitting on their hands waiting to see you - you want to have queues that occasionally dip down to 0 length if you can - the big decision is really "how long do you want the average wait to be?"
Which comes to the main point I wanted to make - one of the healthiest things I've seen in NZ after coming back is the public discourse about health care, people are up in arms about X being covered and Y not and why do I have to wait and ..... frankly is wonderfull, no one needs to make a Sicko here - we argue about it on the nightly news every day .... it's the way a democracy in a caring society ought to be - I think we all understand that there's no way we collectively can afford to pay for every health procedure and we argue to decide what we will do, and if we don't some group raises money for the kid down the road that needs the 1 in a million operation that's not covered, or to buy a body scanner for the local hospital because the govt can only afford 3 or ....
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International:
-You got me on the movies. There's so many on Sky it's hard to avoid.
-'Listening' is stretching it. Hearing is even possibly taking it too far. It's amazing what the brain can learn to filter.
-I've got nothing against employing Chinese textile workers
-What's "their" about something I had to make myself, out of supposedly 100% NZ products? I think that was the lowest point in my employment history.
-They don't make coffee. I did once drink a soapy vanilla milkshake with coffee written on the side at Starbucks though, so you've got me there.
-I suppose not going to war with the US is technically accepting their dictates. We're also accepting everyone else's dictates in that case. -
the big decision is really "how long do you want the average wait to be?"
Personally? 0 days, 0 hours, 0 mins, 0 seconds. Which is exactly what happened last year when my newborn son had a stroke shortly after birth and nearly died. There was no pissing around with insurance companies, just a child being fixed up by the best people in NZ, because that's what decent doctors, and decent systems, do. I couldn't give a stuff if occasionally some machines lie idle. That's the fat that's built into a system which prioritizes life and happiness over profits.
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Agreed - case in point being last night's episode of Top Gear on Prime - it's a mad, mad, mad world over there.
To which my only response is to quote Simon Schama from the latest Listener, on what he's not trying to do with the series he's currently working on for broadcast just ahead of the American elections next year, called The American Future: A History:
Those programme that treat America as a collection of grotesques seem to me, in a dangerous way, very deeply lazy and condescending, and I hate that, actually.
Thanks, Professor Schama - and in my not so humble opinion, both the United Kingdom and little old New Zealand have a lot of shit to clean up in our own backyards before going anywhere else and sniffing at the natives.
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I don’t think many people have treated Moore as holy writ for sometime, no matter what their political leanings may be. However I’d wager Stupid White Men must be one of the most popular political books coming out of the US (or English speaking area) for a decade, if not the most popular but that cannot be said for any of his other recent work. Most people have long since developed the ability to critique Moore’s work.
That being said, Moore made one of my all time favourite TV moments back during his TV Nation days – where he took Communism for one last road trip through the southern US states. He got a big truck/trailer unit, painted it Communist red, added in the Hammer and Sickle then filled the back up with memorabilia. The encounters with police were the best.
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going anywhere else and sniffing at the natives.
oh no, we woudn't want to criticize the US, no, no, no. I mean, it would be so...hypocritical, you know, because we're...well, we're not perfect. In fact, we're totally... f***ed up. So you just quieten down, you antipodean rabble...otherwise we might get to see the business end of an ICBM. HA!
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Ben - I was more referring to totally non-urgent stuff, no sane hospital in the US or NZ is not going to do the same thing (but woe betide you if in the US your HMO thinks you possibly could have rung them to get permission first, you may be stuck with the bill).
Like anywhere they do triage at the hospital, I sat in the waiting room in the ER once for 12 hours one Sat afternoon/evening with a broken toe - not the best medicine on the plant despite what people say
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I’d wager Stupid White Men must be one of the most popular political books coming out of the US (or English speaking area) for a decade
Ben, once upon a time, you'd have said the same thing about William F. Buckley or (a few decades later) Alan Bloom. Now, what passes for a conservative public intellectual in the United States is Ann Coulter. I don't think that says anything about the quality of her work, apart from providing another data point to feed my suspicion that there's a sucker born every minute - and hucksters in every marketplace.
And stephen walker well...
oh no, we woudn't want to criticize the US, no, no, no. I mean, it would be so...hypocritical, you know, because we're...well, we're not perfect. In fact, we're totally... f***ed up. So you just quieten down, you antipodean rabble...otherwise we might get to see the business end of an ICBM. HA!
Oh, Stephen... Like Simon Schama, I'm all for criticism and debate - I'd just like it to be a little less smug, hysterical, and reliant on mindless stereotypes. And, yeah, I do actually think we're got a few problems in our own backyard that might respond to the same amount of chattering class energy that seems to get expended on sniffing at the evil Yanquis.
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A couple of points on the health and insurancen issues as they relate to NZ.
The new-born baby with a stroke is pretty irrelevant not only for the reasons someone subsequently gave but because insurance companies don't cover new-born babies anyway. In the US - or here - you'd be whipped into public care. Rightly so.
As for wider insurance coverage...there's currently a review of the Human Rights Act rules as they apply to insurance cover. It's being run out of the Human Rights Commission. I think submisisons have closed: not sure about that, but some here may be interested.
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Really! I have seen some peculiar unearthly 'star wars' type beasts lurking in some of the Mall's Food Halls, but I'm not that game to try them.
Oh, in that case, there is a Starbucks on Orange Road. I hear it does coffee in a mug and muffins.
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...
watch their movies
Correct.
listen to their music
Correct
wear their jeans/shoes/t-shirts/brands
Correct
buy their fast food
Pffft, I don't think so. Can't even stand Subway to be honest, with it's strange unnatural bread smells and sweet syrupy sauces.
Also, does anyone else find the food on American shows on Food TV a bit scary looking? It always looks soft focus and mucusy to me. Bluk.
drink their coffee
You're havin' a laff! Are you havin' a laff?
and
accept their dictates on securityCorrect
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Thanks, Professor Schama - and in my not so humble opinion, both the United Kingdom and little old New Zealand have a lot of shit to clean up in our own backyards before going anywhere else and sniffing at the natives.
Now Craig, what's the world coming to if we can't have a good laugh at foreigners? Have we learned nothing from the teachings of Homer?
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