Lonerbox takes a hard look at hard times and hard men

An obsession with “hard” masculinity is a very old trope, but one that continues to plague us. It’s often supported by facile historical comparisons that fall apart upon closer inspection, but it remains one of the most reliable tools for manipulating men into a whole array of harmful behaviors. Self-destructive showing off, domestic abuse, abusive relationships between friends, violence, support for political “strong men”, support for war, hatred of “weakness”, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia – all the traits we currently categorize as “toxic masculinity” tend to be supported by the notion that being a “hard man” is a good thing, and being not that is a bad thing. I think this Lonerbox video is a good companion piece to Thought Slime’s earlier look at the same topic, from a different angle. The reality is that this psuedo-historical “ancient wisdom” is both a-historical and (in my opinion) instrumental in creating hard times.

Video: Why “Net Zero” Emissions Targets are a Scam

As public awareness of climate change and desire for action have both increased, corporations and their bought politicians have been working overtime to find ways to misinform the public, shift blame, and convince people that everything is under control, and no systemic change is needed. One of the tools that has been developed to help that effort is the concept of “net zero”. It’s a reasonable-sounding concept that could be perfectly valid, if we lived in a world run by honest people who want to do the right thing with their power.

Sadly, that’s not the world in which we live, so let’s take a closer look at this “net zero” thing:

 

COVID-19, Jimmy Dore, and eugenics

Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

–Thomas Malthus

The concept of eugenics is fairly simple. It’s sometimes described as applying our understanding of evolution to the “betterment” of humanity, but what that amounts to is using animal breeding techniques on the human population. When it’s talked about “in theory”, some people – including those who should know better – claim that the basic concept is sound, it’s just that there are moral reasons not to do it. This is false. There are moral reasons not to do it, and we’ll get into that a bit, but it’s important to state up front that eugenics is an inherently faulty concept that cannot work. If you want a video breakdown of why that is, I’ll refer you to Rebecca Watson’s response to that time Richard Dawkins decided to demonstrate his ignorance to the world. For everyone else, here’s a quick overview of why eugenics is a vicious fantasy that could never work.

Step one would be determining what counts as “better”. Is it physical prowess? Intelligence? You can’t just breed for “better”, you have to have a clear trait in mind. Shaun’s thorough takedown of The Bell Curve does a good job of demonstrating how “intelligence” is not just a very poorly defined concept, but we also have very little idea how much of it is related to genetics vs. environmental factors. You could try to breed for brain size, but we’ve known for a while that size isn’t what determines intelligence. As I understand it, it’s much more about how the brain is organized, and how different sub-sections of the brain interact with each other. We could try to breed for “health”, but again, that’s a very nebulous concept. Do we want a metabolism that works a certain way? An immune system that works a certain way? What about allergies?

What about creativity and independent thinking? What about pro-social traits like empathy?

And once we have a clear goal in mind, what tradeoffs are we willing to accept? You can breed a dog to “point”, but then you have a compulsive behavioral trait that can be extremely inconvenient if you don’t actually need it. You see something interesting, and instead of noting it and moving on, or maybe taking a picture, or taking notes, you just freeze, and stare intently at it pretty much until you’re forced to move away. We could ignore science and breed for brain size, but then you run the risk of developing things like the skull being too small for the brain, or the head being so heavy that you risk breaking your neck if you’re startled. So we could make the whole body bigger, to support a bigger brain, right? Sure, but after a certain point, being bigger tends to come with its own health problems, and would generally lead to a decrease in longevity. Even if we could wave a wand and make everyone geniuses, would we be willing to lop three decades or so off of our average lifespan?

But let’s assume, for the sake of the argument, that we have a clear trait we want to breed for, and we know we can breed for it, and we can easily detect that trait. Maybe we decided that making humanity “better” means breeding us all to have the pointiest possible elbows. Our vision of human perfection is big, bony, elbow spikes a few hundred generations down the line.

Now we run into the moral problems.

Have you ever looked into how animal breeding works?

To be perfectly frank, it’s a horrific process. Don’t get me wrong – I appreciate the generations of work that went into making livestock and some pets, but really think about the process. If your goal is to have an entire species of spiky-armed apes, that means that you don’t just need to encourage pointy-elbowed people to breed with each other rather than us inferior dull-elbowed people (Dullbows, for short), you also need to ensure that only the pointiest of elbows are allowed to breed. Even if we assume that everyone is on board with this, and Dullbows all volunteer to abstain from procreation for the greater good, you’re going to run into the same problem you encounter with every effort to breed for one trait to the exclusion of all others – you get inbreeding.

But exiting our fantastical scenario, when an animal breeder is going for a particular trait – or even broad set of traits – any babies without the desired trait tend to be “culled” – removed from the breeding population. The most common method is to just kill any individual that the breeder has decided should not be allowed to reproduce. Other options are forced sterilization, or lifelong confinement to prevent breeding.

That means, for our elbow example, that all of us Dullbows would either be murdered, imprisoned, or forcibly sterilized, for the greater pointiness of humanity. Basically, applying animal breeding techniques to humanity starts with routine and ongoing mass murder, as we saw most famously in Nazi Germany. It’s important to note here that “most famously” should not be taken to mean “only”. I didn’t learn about it in school, but long before the rise of the Nazi party, the German empire was carrying out genocides in its African colonies in the name of eugenics, overseen in part by the father of Hermann Goering. The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t come out of nowhere. A lot of what went on in Nazi Germany was not particularly exceptional for imperial governments then and since. Forced sterilization, genocide, cruel and destructive medical experiments on minorities, convicts, and disabled people have happed all over the globe, both within empires, and in colonies under imperial supervision.

The United States was the first country to have official forced sterilization laws, beginning with Indiana in 1907. The practice was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1981, but it continues to be done to disabled people, and to prisoners (including disabled prisoners, in case that needed to be made clear), both in exchange for shorter sentences, and involuntarily. Further, numerous women detained by ICE have allegedly been sterilized against their will, and the report from what was supposed to be a DHS investigation into the whistleblower’s allegations just… didn’t mention the whole nonconsensual hysterectomy thing. The DHS did, however, find the time to put music to their slideshow, resulting in this deeply weird video. Given the state of the U.S. law enforcement system, I feel no worry saying that I believe the accusers, and I don’t think it’s just some kind of mistake that the DHS just happened to leave out any mention of those allegations. Supposedly they’re doing a separate thing for that, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Eugenics continues to be practiced in the United States, and I presume elsewhere, and if anything it seems to be gaining popularity in that country’s increasingly fascist right wing, with Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, being interviewed by conservative media on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, explicitly eugenicist actions like murder and forced sterilization are not the end of the story. That quote up at the top represents a different approach to eugenics, informed by the rather Calvinist perspective that a person’s “unfitness” could be seen in their position in life. In this view, the troubles of the poor are due to their own personal failings, which makes them both unworthy from a moral perspective, and unproductive, otherwise why would they be poor?

And so the recommendation was to deliberately engineer conditions calculated to bring about sickness and death among the poor as a means of “decreasing the surplus population”. This perspective was popular among the “elites” of the past (and I suspect of the present as well), probably because it both excused and even glorified their wealth, while blaming all problems on the poor. This concept of a “surplus population” is probably most famous in the English-speaking world as one of the reasons why Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge refused to give to charity. He preferred instead to rely on prisons and workhouses, both of which tended to have poor sanitation and lots of people crowded together, being worked hard on inadequate rations – all conditions that, to quote Robert Malthus, courted the return of the plague.

Malthus, for the unfamiliar, is probably the most famous figure in the field of freaking out about overpopulation. His book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, foretold eventual famine as a result of exponential population growth at a time when food production was only increasing in a linear fashion. His recommendations about trying to increase the death rate among the poor were a vicious and misguided attempt to prevent future famine by deliberately inflicting the conditions of famine on a politically powerless subset of the population on a more or less permanent basis. Malthus’ work is considered to be an inspiration for Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which re-invigorated the overpopulation panic in the mid to late 20th century.

Malthus taught at the East India Company College, and one of his students there was one Charles Trevelyan, who went on, in time, to become an assistant secretary to the royal treasury. In that capacity, he oversaw English aid efforts during the Great Famine in Ireland, and his opinions and policies – informed by what he learned from Malthus – are widely considered to have driven up the death toll. Of particular interest to me is his belief in the laissez-faire approach to economic governance, and his belief that if, for example, the food that was exported from Ireland throughout the famine were diverted, and the Irish were given what they needed to eat, then they might become dependent on the government. A million people died of starvation and disease (which had an easier time killing people because they were starving), in the name of the so-called Protestant work ethic, and what we now know as The Invisible Hand of the Free Market. Trevelyan was knighted for his work on famine relief.

This disdain for the poor and powerless, and this dogmatic belief that “The Market will provide” remain the governing philosophies of much of the world, and the United States in particular. It’s central to the “Welfare Queen” propaganda, and other efforts to attack social safety nets, and it plays a leading role in environmental racism and the lack of response to climate change. It’s also constantly present in arguments that support the U.S. for-profit healthcare system, and recently it has been woven into a lot of the rhetoric surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic:

It is hard not to read eugenic implications in this kind of thinking: the “herd” will survive, but for that to happen, other “weaker” members of society need to be sacrificed. And while Johnson’s right-wing political milieu is associated with the recent revival of racial science, there are no hints of a far-right conspiracy in Sweden, for example, where the centre-left government has confidently stood by the advice of the Public Health Agency, firmly opposing suppression measures.

In Norway, where the government has reluctantly embarked on several weeks of lockdown, a Norwegian Institute of Public Health director has recently said the epidemic cannot be stopped, and between 40 and 60 percent of Norway‘s population might be infected. Once many people build immunity, they can spend time with the sick without getting infected, and with people in high-risk groups without risking infecting them.

The Norwegian and Swedish states have a long history of adopting policies based on eugenics that continued well after World War II. Eugenics was deployed throughout the 20th century as a branch of scientific state management, part of a social engineering project that envisioned a society made of physically healthy and “socially fit” individuals.

It was closely associated with the development of the welfare state, and resulted in cruel practices, such as the forced sterilisation of mentally ill people.

Setting aside the long shadow of the past, it is the very argument that the economy is more important than people’s health that is based on a eugenic logic. Instead of the ethnos and the nation, we have the market that rules supreme over people’s lives, and is given the power of life and death over its subjects.

Most people who push the lie that COVID numbers are overblown, the vaccines are bad, the lockdowns are tyranny, and so on – most of those folks are conservative, and opposed to universal healthcare. Their arguments tend to revolve around “personal responsibility”, and whining about having to pay for the bad health “choices” of other people. In other words, anyone who dies because of the wealth-based rationing of the U.S. healthcare system deserved to die, and we’re better off without them. Similar arguments often come from liberal sleazebags like Bill Maher – anyone with a “pre-existing condition” is, deemed Unhealthy, in a way that makes their premature deaths irrelevant, never mind the decades of life people regularly have with said conditions.

What I didn’t expect was to see these arguments from someone claiming to be on the left, and claiming to be a standard-bearer in the fight for universal healthcare:

 

 

Note what the “point” of Dore’s clip was: the numbers are artificially inflated because out of the roughly 170,000 people in the UK whose deaths were attributed to COVID-19, only around ten percent had COVID-19 with zero comorbidities. That means, for example, that a 20 year old who is overweight and dies of COVID-19 shouldn’t count, when considering the severity of the disease, because they are overweight. Because it is “common knowledge” that being overweight shortens your life expectancy.

By a couple years.

“Extreme” obesity might shorten one’s life by as much as 14 years. Taking myself as an example – my BMI is over 40 – that would mean that at 37 years old, I should still have at least another 23 years or so in me, assuming I don’t do anything to improve my health, like exercising more.  I should also point out that it’s only in the last few years that I’ve actually gotten to the point where I consider myself pretty good at my craft, and the amount of writing I’ve been doing has been increasing in recent years, and is likely to keep increasing.

If I were to catch COVID tomorrow and die a month later, that would wipe out a majority what would have been my career as a writer, and according to Jimmy Dore and those like him, that doesn’t count.

The reality is that all diseases have a wide array of comorbidities, and they always have. There has never been a world in which a majority of the population was in “perfect health” with no conditions that might make them more vulnerable to one disease or another, and setting policies based on such a world is guaranteed to result in mass death. We haven’t even touched on things like asthma or heart problems, which can be caused or exacerbated simply by breathing the polluted air of urban and industrial environments, but the reality is that we shouldn’t have to. Even if my obesity was due to a conscious, calculated decision to sacrifice a decade of life in exchange for more General Tso’s chicken, that doesn’t amount to a conscious choice to lose three decades of life because a pandemic was badly managed.

Or because it was decided that a certain portion of the population is simply disposable:

But as a disabled, immunocompromised person, I’m haunted by how Dr. Walensky added, after explaining that over 75% of the deaths of vaccinated people from Covid have been people with four or more comorbidities, that this is “encouraging news.” This messaging–meant to encourage a return to normal and apparently meant to comfort nondisabled people–is the real sting of this constant refrain of “people with comorbidities” rhetoric. I have been told, almost daily since the earliest stages of this pandemic, that it’s only people like me that are dying, that people like me are somehow a completely acceptable sacrifice for “the economy” and a “return to normal.” What should be read as a profound failure of national policy to protect the most vulnerable among us is being repackaged as “encouraging news.”

I’m troubled by how deeply this messaging has permeated our culture. In talks with nondisabled people about how I’m still being careful, isolating and using a mask when I absolutely have to leave my home, I am gaslight by nondisabled people, who robotically repeat to me this “it’s only people with comorbidities dying” talking point. When I remind them that when they talk about people with comorbidities that they are talking about people like me, the response is predictably the same: “I wasn’t talking about you.”

But the fact that they’re not talking about me–and about us as immunocompromised and disabled people–is the problem. “People with comorbidities” is deployed to make us faceless non-people, to erase us from the conversation even when we are–in the most literal sense–the people being talked about. The rhetorical function of that word, of “comorbidities” is to erase our identities, to talk about us without talking about us. With the rhetoric of “comorbidities,” we’re not your siblings or your grandparents or your neighbors or your friends anymore. We’re statistics.

The reality of the situation is my government doesn’t care if I or other disabled, marginalized people die as long as nondisabled people can eat inside at an Applebees. We’re disposable as long as most people can continue to offer their labor (coerced by capitalism) and consumption to make the richest people a bit richer. In the push for a return to normal–a normal which already disregarded disabled people, and especially multiply marginalized disabled people–the eugenic belief that lives like mine are less worthy continues to solidify as policy, as schools and businesses reopen, as my state government here in Texas continues to stand in the way of local mandates and protections.

A versatile concept, “comorbidities,” is rhetorically deployed like the other eugenic weapons of capitalism and white supremacy, making faceless abstractions of the very people most at risk from this widely unmitigated pandemic. But framing the deaths of those with comorbidities as “encouraging news” sidesteps conversations around other prevailing injustices, including how BIPOC communities are more likely to have comorbidities because of systemic inequalities, how this pandemic has disproportionately harmed indigenous communities, and how the medical industrial complex already maligns disabled people, BIPOC folks, fat people, and LGBTQA+ kin.

Epidemics and pandemics are, pretty much by definition, a Bad Time. They bring death and fear, and have a long history of bringing societies of every kind to a grinding, painful halt. Those of us in wealthy nations are often told that we’re at or near the peak of civilization, and that all those bad things in the past don’t count because we didn’t know better, and that was so long ago. And it’s bullshit. We’ve learned enough about the world to know that things like eugenics aren’t just morally repugnant, but are also entirely without even the “practical merits” their advocates claim. What we haven’t done is change the ways in which our society incentivizes scapegoating, bigotry, and the devaluation of human life.

We are in the beginning of an era that is likely to be defined by “natural” disasters of every kind, and conditions like heat, cold, and disease outbreaks have always been used as tools of eugenics and genocide. This pandemic should open our eyes to a great many problems with the way we run things, and that definitely includes the fact that support for eugenics has never really gone away. We can’t avoid repeating the horrors of the past if we don’t change the social infrastructure that was in many cases designed to lead people towards “solutions” that involve deliberately letting people die for no good reason.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Yanis Varoufakis on the fall of capitalism and social democracy, and the rise of techno-feudalism

I’m working on a long-ish piece about eugenics and the pandemic, but it’s a topic I want to get as right as I can, so I want to allow another day to work on it. In the meantime, I heartily recommend this interview with Yanis Varoufakis on the state of the world:

I think his perspective is an important one to take seriously. If we are going to deal with climate change, injustice, and authoritarianism, it’s important to understand how power is currently distributed. Without that, I don’t see how we have a shot at making changes that would take wealth and power away from those who currently rule the world. This isn’t fun stuff to think about, bit it is important.

Cody’s Showdy takes a look at Biden’s first year in office

I don’t know about you, but for me, it’s felt like time has been moving strangely over the last couple years. Part of my problem is that I was just getting used to life in Scotland when the pandemic hit. We had a year in some form of lockdown, and then another international move, getting used to another new country, and trying to make this blog work as a source of income (because my visa doesn’t allow me to do normal work – help out on Patreon if you can!), and then I realize that it’s been a whole year since Biden took office back in the States.

I voted for Biden, mostly because I felt that a conservative neoliberal whose primary defining features are “not Trump” and “not Bernie” would be better than the naked fascism of a second Trump term. I stand by that, but I have to admit that as low as my expectations were, Biden has disappointed me. I thought that his ego would have him actually fight for the agenda he ran on, or at least see how much he could do directly through the executive branch, but apparently even that was too much to hope for. At this point, it seems like he’s committed to handing Congress to the GOP in 2022, so that he can do nothing for the rest of his time in office, and blame them for it, and blame the left for somehow causing the Democrats to lose their elections.

As usual, Some More News has done a pretty good summary of the situation:

I’m starting to feel like the only real change we can expect from Biden’s victory is for his administration’s seemingly deliberate incompetence to convince more people that the Democratic Party is not actually on our side, and it’s not interested in the progressive policies on which it runs. The electoral process – as it currently exists in the U.S. – is something that has clearly demonstrated its inability to actually serve the people, or meet the need of our time. By all means vote, but if that’s the end of what we do, the we will never see the world we say we want. We have to build collective power so we can take control away from those who would drive us to extinction.

A brief agricultural report

I’m putting together a larger post on this, and I wanted to take a little time with it, so here’s a sort of preview. It’s a report from a regular caller to The Majority Report on his perspective as a farmer about the state of things:

Basically, there are a number of factors converging to create what looks to be an ongoing food shortage that will cause more empty shelves in some places, and higher prices in others. It’s important to remember that a lot of problems like this are things that could be solved, but not if access to food is controlled by the markets, with rationing based on wealth rather than need.

As with so many other problems today, we have the resources and understanding to solve this. What we lack is an economic and political system that values life.

Good news, everyone! The U.S. healthcare system is a little bit less cruel and devious than it was a month ago!

The healthcare “system” of the United States is so deeply, unforgivably fucked up that it’s hard to put into words.

Literally.

There is so much wrong with the system that even a layman like me could probably write several books on it, and barely scratch the surface. This is the result of running healthcare – or any other necessity for survival – for profit. There’s always going to be a fairly constant demand relative to the population, and people will do or pay everything they can to keep living. I’ll add that it’s even more fucked up when you consider that the corporate interests responsible for the massive amounts of pollution to which we’re exposed on a daily basis are also spending lots of money to keep people in power who will fight tooth and nail against the efforts to bring universal healthcare to the United States.

Until healthcare is treated as a right that can’t be used to extort money from people, the U.S. is going to keep having a system that profits off of death and misery.

That said, I’m a firm believer in the notion that the best way to get the people to empower themselves and bring about real democracy, is to do what we can to ensure their basic needs are met to the greatest degree possible, and to give them as much control over their limited time as possible. As the pandemic showed us, when people get a taste of what life could be like, they’re reluctant to go back to something worse. That means that while I think we absolutely should have universal healthcare that’s free at the point of service, I was glad to hear about the “No Surprises Act”, which goes a long way (though not all the way, as we’ll see) towards fixing one small part of what’s wrong with healthcare in the U.S.

For those unfamiliar with the complex array of bureaucracy and blood sacrifice that makes up what’s called a “healthcare system” in the United States, let me explain the need for this bill. Basically, if you’re not old enough to have Medicare (the kinda-universal healthcare that’s available to old people), you need some form of private insurance to make healthcare affordable. Most of the time, this insurance will not cover all the doctors or hospitals near where you live. It might not even cover most of them. Part of choosing a health insurance plan is looking through their lists of “in-network” healthcare providers to make sure that they’ll actually cover the costs of healthcare at a place near to you. Incidentally, it’s on you to actively look for the ways in which health insurance companies will try to force you to pay for your healthcare, despite sending them hundreds or thousands of dollars per month precisely to avoid those bills.

The problem is, even if you do get health insurance that covers your favorite hospital, that’s not a guarantee that everything in that hospital will be covered. Some of the individual doctors might be “out of network”, which means you are stuck with the bill. Again, it’s your responsibility, as the patient, to look out for that trap. The example scenario I hear a lot is one of surgery – you need an operation, and you know that your surgeon is covered by your insurance, but…

Is your anesthesiologist? Or are they out of network? Do you have a chance to check?

Or what if the entire operating room team is covered, but someone calls out sick, and their replacement isn’t covered?

So, it’s pretty common for Americans to get unexpected medical bills that can range from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, even for things they didn’t even know they had a say in.

This law, which went into effect on the first of January, fixes most of that (From the New York Times via Commondreams because paywall):

If you are having a medical emergency and go to an urgent care center or emergency room, you can’t be charged more than the cost-sharing you are accustomed to for in-network services. This is where the law’s protections are the simplest and the most clear for people with health insurance.

You will still be responsible for things like a deductible or a co-payment. But once patients make that normal payment, they should expect no more bills.

[…]

For scheduled services, like knee operations, C-sections, or colonoscopies, it’s important you choose a facility and a main doctor that is in your insurance plan’s network. If you do that, the law bars anyone else who treats you from sending you a surprise bill. This also addresses a large problem. Surprise bills from anesthesiologists, radiologists, pathologists, assistant surgeons, and laboratories were common before.

If, for some reason, you are having such a service and you really want an out-of-network doctor to be part of your care, that doctor typically needs to notify you at least three days before your procedure, and offer a “good faith estimate” of how much you will be charged. If you sign a form agreeing to pay extra, you could get additional bills. But the hospital or clinic can’t force you to sign such a form as a condition of your care, and the form should include other choices of doctors who will accept your insurance.

This is not the end. The entirety of the United States is set up to encourage people to find ways to make money, with no real concern for the harm done in the process. Even so, this is a legitimate win for the American people, against their corporate overlords. That said, as MSN reports, this bill does nothing to change the problem of Americans risking their safety to avoid ambulance bills:

The No Surprises Act, health care legislation targeted at preventing surprise medical bills, officially went into effect on Jan. 1, albeit with one major exclusion: ambulance bills.

A 2021 survey found that ambulance bills account for 8% of all medical debt. A big reason why is because 51% of emergency and 39% of non-emergency ground ambulance rides include an “out of network” charge from insurers, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker.

“I think part of the issue is that a lot of ambulances are run by the states, which makes it more complicated for them,” Matthew Rae, associate director at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told Yahoo Finance.

Furthermore, Rae added, you can “absolutely not” request a specific ambulance provider to ensure it’s in-network. Just 10 states have laws in place protecting consumers from being balance-billed by a ground ambulance provider.

“Most places you may not have a choice over who’s the ambulance that shows up,” Rae said. “This is absolutely a place where someone who is having an emergency has to make a call and they don’t have control picking their provider and then they are potentially subjected to a surprise bill.”

According to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, citing data from seven states, “more than two-thirds of emergency ground ambulance rides had an out-of-network charge for ambulance-related services.”

Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, told Yahoo Finance that there is “only one [provider] who has a monopoly contract for the region you live in. There’s literally no choice. Not that you really have a choice of emergency physicians, barely have any choice over an anesthesiologist, but it’s even more extreme. We think of ground ambulance services as if it should be like a municipal fire department type of service.”

Adler noted that “something like 80%” of ground ambulances are out-of-network.

“It’s fundamentally broken … it’s not like the ambulance has as much power because they don’t get to choose who they pick up,” he said. “Neither side has a lot to stand on here. And then you’re getting a lot of one-off fights between the insurers and the ground ambulances which is not great for the patients stuck in the middle.”

And those who are without any health insurance and in need of an ambulance are responsible for footing the entire bill, though Rae noted that they do have the ability to negotiate.

“This is a place where people can incur big expenses,” he said.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two times when I should have taken an ambulance ride to get checked out, and opted not to because of the cost. The first was a simple bike accident. I hit a curb too hard, and went over sideways. I hit my head hard enough on the pavement to crack my helmet, and my neck hurt. The abysmal insurance I had at the time (this was before the Affordable Care Act, when it was even worse) didn’t cover any of the nearby urgent care clinics, and I didn’t want the cost of an ambulance ride, so I put an ice pack on my neck and tried not to move much for a couple days. I was fortunate that I could afford to do that, rather than having to go to work. I was also fortunate in that there seemed to be no serious damage done.

The other time, I was biking back from work, had the right of way, and a woman turning left hit me. We were both going fairly slowly, but her car destroyed my bike, and I skinned a knee and badly jarred my wrists. It was outside a CVS pharmacy, so I hobbled in and bought myself some medical supplies rather than availing myself of the ambulance that showed up.

In hindsight, I probably should have taken the ambulance ride and gotten checked out, but I would have had trouble affording it. My wrists never fully recovered from that.

It was, as I’ve said before, damned near miraculous how much our quality of life improved when we got to Scotland, and just simply… knew that our costs would be covered. If we felt sick, we could just call the doctor. If we needed medicine, we just got the medicine. When Tegan got shingles in the United States, we thought it was poison ivy at first, and didn’t even consider going to the doctor, because of the cost. The result of that was she went untreated for the first week or two, and suffered a lot for it.

When I got shingles in Scotland, I called the doctor as soon as I noticed the rash, because why wouldn’t I? It was a short walk away, and no matter what it was covered by the money we had already sent to the NHS (it was £600 for each of us for a full year of coverage). I got an appointment the same day, stopped by the pharmacy on my way back, and started taking antiviral medication immediately. I had a much easier time with it than Tegan did.

Here in Ireland, the healthcare situation is worse than Scotland, but better than the United States, at least from our perspective. Irish citizens have universal coverage, as I understand it, but immigrants like Tegan and I do not. That said, our private insurance covers most hospital costs, with the highest single charge for something that’s not covered being €80. For example, it’s possible that a set of x-rays, multiple blood tests, and specialist visits, the bill could climb to hundreds of Euros, but it’s capped at €970 per year. That costs us €80 per month, compared to $300 per month with MUCH worse coverage, back in Massachusetts.  We pay out of pocket for GP visits and prescriptions, but that is also far cheaper than the deal we had in the US. I should also mention that this is literally the cheapest plan we could get and still be allowed to live in this country – if you want frills like a private hospital room, pregnancy coverage (which seems like it shouldn’t be extra), and so on, you can get a more expensive plan for better service.

I will probably never stop being angry about the cruelty and injustice of the U.S. health insurance system, for as long as it exists in anything close to its current form. Even so, I am overjoyed that my friends and family will now be a bit better protected from the greed that ravages that country. It’s a real step in the right direction that will materially improve a lot of people’s lives.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Heroic Leader Braves the Gates of Hell to Defend the Environment (not really)

Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, president of Turkmenistan, is doing us all a favor and closing the gates to hell!

Well, not really.

For those who are unfamiliar, the “Gates of Hell” (also known as the Darvazagas crater) is a huge sinkhole in Turkmenistan that is thought to be the result of Soviet oil exploration, which collapsed a natural gas cavity, creating a sinkhole. The gases coming out of it were lit on fire to keep them from spreading at ground level and poisoning people.

In a lot of ways, that was probably a good call. While the smoke from the crater isn’t great for either local life or for the climate, it’s almost certainly better for both than the unburnt gas would have been. That said, they expected the fire to last for a couple weeks, not half a century, and the fumes from the fire have been causing problems. So, when I first heard that there are new plans to extinguish the fire and seal it off, I had one brief, happy moment where I forgot what world I live in, and thought that it was because of the harm being done to the environment (a category in which I include humanity). There are actually a number of underground fires (many of them in coal seams) that are emitting CO2 and other dangerous chemicals, and are obviously are dangerous to any structures or infrastructure above them. To be sure, Berdimuhamedow does seem to be trying to gain whatever “green” points he can, but…

Berdimuhamedow said that the burning crater “negatively affects both the environment and the health of the people living nearby” and that Turkmenistan is “losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits.”

Turkmenistan possesses the world’s fourth largest reserves of natural gas in its underground, intending to significantly increase its export of gas to many countries such as Pakistan, China, India, Iran, Russia and also Western Europe by 2030.

Yeah…

Turkmenistan isn’t exactly the worst offender when it comes to the climate or other environmental issues, but this is very much part of an ongoing trend – world leaders pay lip service to the climate crisis, while continuing to expand fossil fuel extraction.  The story very much brings to mind the oh-so subtle satire of Doom Eternal, with capitalists reacting to the discovery of Hell by looking for ways to directly profit off of it.

Unfortunately, this goes beyond increasing the already monumental task of ending fossil fuel use, because while the industry has developed ingenious high-tech methods for accessing and extracting fossil fuel deposits, the wealth that has come from that has been used to shield them from ever having to figure out how to clean up after themselves. One part of this is the criminal laziness was probably best highlighted by the pathetic industry response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, and the demonstration that there had been no advances in oil cleanup in the decades since the Exxon-Valdez disaster, and BP’s oil spill response plan for the Gulf of Mexico included species like walruses and sea otters. The other part tends to be less dramatic, but could end up being as destructive as the more attention-grabbing spills and leaks – abandoned extraction sites:

How many of them are there, and where are they located?

A recent investigation by Reuters estimates that the United States could have more than 3.2 million orphaned and abandoned wells. Some states have a few hundred; others have a few thousand. And some have a staggering number of them: Pennsylvania reportedly has more than 330,000 of these wells within its borders.

“Orphaned and abandoned oil and gas wells are located everywhere,” says NRDC senior advocate Joshua Axelrod. “They can be in the middle of a forest, in backyards, in farm fields, even under sidewalks and houses.” Basically, they are anywhere that oil and gas development has taken place—at sites of large-scale operation spread out over many acres as well as single-well outfits on tiny parcels of land.

Why are they so dangerous?

Simple: Because they leak. Among the chemicals that can seep out and contaminate air, soil, or groundwater are hydrogen sulfide, benzene, and arsenic. Even the smallest leaks can adversely affect the local environment if they go unaddressed or undetected for many years.

Most alarmingly, though, these wells emit a lot of methane, an odorless gas that can seep into nearby buildings (a home, school, or office, for example) and pose major health hazards. When concentrated in enclosed spaces—such as a basement or a bedroom, for instance—methane will take the place of oxygen in the lungs and can cause weakness, nausea, vomiting, and convulsions. Long-term methane poisoning can even be fatal. And methane, of course, doesn’t just make people sick: It’s also highly explosive. In 2017, two men were killed while installing a hot water heater in the basement of a home in Firestone, Colorado, that had been built adjacent to an oil and gas field. When the neighboring petroleum corporation restarted a well that had been dormant for a year, a damaged flowline filled the basement with gas, which ignited into a fireball that destroyed the house in an instant.

I suppose it’s a good thing that we’re aware of this problem, and know where all of these abandoned wells are. It’s also helpful that many of them are on dry land, which reduces the resources required to actually seal them off. There’s another problem that, while probably less severe, is also less well-mapped, and is pretty much all under water – sunken ships.

The image is an infographic titled

I’ve long believed that the climate will continue warming for generations to come. If we’re going to survive, we’re going to have to find a way to exist as a part of global ecosystem that is, at least to some degree, actively managed. It’s not that I think nature needs us to “fix” it, but rather than we desperately need a healthy and diverse ecosystem for us to survive and thrive. That means that we can’t just stop doing the bad things – we also have to clean up after ourselves and our predecessors. This is work that is vital to our future, and it’s work that will take at least as long to do as it took to make the mess.

I also don’t think it will be profitable. The closest we could get to dealing with this problem in a capitalist society would be to provide government incentives. There will be some forms of cleanup that could be directly profitable, like “mining” raw materials from various kinds of trash, but that won’t be the case for everything that needs cleaning up, and the history of that economic model makes clear that the people forced to engage in that dangerous work will be treated horrifically.

We have a very long way to go before we can consider ourselves responsible residents of the planet. The cleanup will take generations. It will take far longer if it’s still limited by obsession with profit and disdain for human life, but no matter how we go about it, it will be the work of multiple lifetimes. In my lifetime, I’ll be content if I see us change to the point where those doing this necessary work are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve – it’ll be a good sign that we’re on the right track.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Youth climate activists in Wales have the right response to an attempt at placation.

On top of the pandemic, 2021 continued the escalation of climate chaos, and our leaders continue to fail us at a breathtaking scale.

It’s been clear to me for a while that political institutions in a lot of the world have gotten very good at ignoring the kinds of activism we’re most used to seeing in liberal democracies. I think that dismissal is particularly bad, and particularly galling when it’s directed at children. Kids who’re socially or politically active tend to both be lauded for it, and rewarded with speeches about how we should listen to the clear-sighted wisdom of the youth, and ignored beyond that.

It feels like it’s all about teaching people to be satisfied with the feeling of doing the right thing, rather than demanding the change that’s actually needed. That’s why I’m pretty happy to see this story out of Wales:

Young members of an environmental group have turned down an award from a council, accusing it of not doing enough to tackle climate change.

Pontypridd’s Young Friends of the Earth has been campaigning for changes to address the climate emergency.

It said Rhondda Cynon Taf council has not done enough since the devastating floods in 2020 after Storm Dennis.

Group member Alice, 13, said: “It would be hypocritical for us to take the award.”

“We feel Rhondda Cynon Taf council – and the world – isn’t taking action against climate change,” she added.

“The major changes we could do as a county would be big decisions and not small day-to-day ones.

“Because if you sit in a house which is on fire you wouldn’t just sit there as the flames surrounded you and start making a plan how you’re going to deal with the fire.

“You’re going to act immediately and get water and you’re going to put the fire out. You wouldn’t sit there doing nothing. The world isn’t in the best shape and they’re not doing enough about it.”

Alice added that there was “action immediately” when the pandemic hit, and the same needed to be done for the climate change emergency.

“We need that with climate change because if we don’t get it sorted out we might not be here.”

When Storm Dennis caused widespread flooding across south Wales in February 2020, Pontypridd was one of the worst affected towns.

Homes and businesses were hit, with the middle of the town centre flooded after the River Taff burst its banks.

“When we saw the town flood last year we knew climate change was getting worse and despite what people were saying about it getting better because it’s not,” said Alice.

“I felt terrified when I saw water running down the main street because if water can reach that high because of a storm, imagine what it will be like in 10 years.”

Dan, 12, another member of Young Friends of the Earth, said: “I would have expected Rhondda Cynon Taf council to declare a climate emergency after the Welsh government did.

“They are one of the few councils in Wales not to declare it and after Storm Dennis I’d have thought it would have been the first thing they would have done.

I very much agree with the sentiment that we need actions, not awards. I’m not actually certain of this, but I feel like there is a lot more that even local governments could be doing, not just in terms of prioritizing the move away from fossil fuels and preparing for extreme weather events, but also in terms of pushing regional and national governments to do more, and helping both their constituents and fellow governmental bodies participate in the pressure campaigns. Ideally, we want the kind of action that can build momentum for greater action in the future.

I’m also encouraged to see the level of strategic thinking involved here:

The group, which has a core of about eight members, was also savvy enough to know that it might get more publicity for its cause if it turned down the award.

They viewed a YouTube clip of the moment in the film Brassed Off when band leader Danny turns down a prize to draw attention to the plight of ravaged mining communities and explains: “Us winning this trophy won’t mean bugger all to most people. But us refusing it … then it becomes news.”

Dan Wright, 12, said: “If we had accepted the award, we might have got in the local paper. More people now will know what we’ve done. Perhaps they’ll join us on a march or do their own research on the climate. When I first heard about the award I felt excited but then thought they were trying to greenwash themselves.”

I don’t think I started thinking about that kind of strategy until I was in my 20s, and it’s encouraging to see it in today’s kids. On the one hand, it continues to be infuriating that children need to spend their time on this, but on the other hand, I think that if we’re ever going to have a truly just and democratic society, we will need to spend less time working to generate profit, and more time involved in our own governance in a far more direct manner than we see in representative democracies. I believe that simply electing representatives and trusting them to do well by us has more or less proven itself to be a failure. It concentrates power in the hands of people who are then able to use that power to further empower themselves, rather like we see in capitalism. As far as I can tell, the only solution is a populace that participates in the running of society at least as actively we we currently participate in wage labor and consumerism.

We should not look to children for hope. That’s an unfair burden to place on them, and an abdication of our responsibility. It’s just another form of selling out their future for our own comfort. What we should be doing, in addition to taking real action on climate change, is educating ourselves and our children about what it means to govern ourselves, and to build and live in a society that values life.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.

Abolition requires more than just swapping out people. It requires reshaping the world.

If you’re at all aware of the history of U.S. foreign policy over the last century, any time a left-wing movement achieves some kind of success, you’re faced with the joy of a step in the right direction, mixed with the feeling that it’s only a matter of time before there’s another corporate-backed effort to put a far-right regime in power. It’s annoying, because that reaction feels sort of fatalistic – like no matter how much we do, there’s always a handful of obscenely wealthy extremists who prefer mass murder to anything that even looks like a threat to their power.

That’s the case right now, with the recent victory of Gabriel Boric in Chile’s presidential election. It’s impossible for me to see this welcome move to the left without remembering the events that made it such a big deal. With a nation as powerful, and as committed to capitalism as the U.S., it’s hard not to worry that we’re never going to actually have a shot at a better future without the U.S. itself undergoing revolutionary change. That change itself is constantly being fought by the U.S. government, more or less as part of standard operating procedure. A couple recent examples are the assassination of Michael Reinoehl by U.S. Marshalls (possibly on the orders of then-President Trump), and the imprisonment of Florida anti-fascist Daniel Baker in association with the events of January 6th. What’s interesting about that case is that Baker’s 44 month sentence is for merely suggesting that people on the left should do what Kyle Rittenhouse did in Kenosha, and organize an armed opposition to the fascist mob that was planning to attack the capitol and possibly murder lawmakers.

“Dan’s case speaks volumes about how the state represses the left much differently than it treats the far right,” Brad Thomson, civil rights attorney at the People’s Law Office, who did not represent Baker, told me. “Here, Dan was sentenced to three and a half years for online posts opposing another January 6 incident. But for actual participants from January 6, we’re seeing charges and sentences far below that.” Thomson added that “every case is unique, but the overall message people will get from this is that online speech calling for militant antifascist action will send you to prison for much longer than actually taking militant action with fascists.”

Any effort at ending capitalism on this planet will have to account for U.S. intelligence agencies, even if the U.S. armed forces never get involved. This has led to a lot of people calling – rightly in my opinion, for the abolition of the CIA. The problem is that as with policing, merely replacing the people currently involved in the organization won’t actually solve the problem. Beau of the Fifth Column does a good job of breaking down why:

We’re surrounded by a sort of global mental infrastructure, built over countless generations and maintained far better than any material infrastructure, by those whose power and privilege come from that very infrastructure. Trains and power lines help everybody, but those at the top can get power and transit for themselves, even if the rest of us are stuck without. The infrastructure of hierarchy and competition, on the other hand, only serves those at the top, and they will spend unimaginable sums to maintain and improve that infrastructure, by setting laws, and by spreading propaganda to the masses.

That’s why I no longer buy the idea that gradual or incremental reforms will save us. As things stand, we have to fight almost as hard for little changes as we do for big ones, and the little changes are both inadequate, and easily reversed. As with police abolition, success requires that we remove the justification for groups like the CIA, and for their actions.

There was a saying going around a while back, in some of the climate activist groups I was part of – if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together with others. Unfortunately, we need to go far and fast. We need a planet-wide overhaul of our political and economic infrastructure, and of the thought patterns and assumptions that support and perpetuate that infrastructure. Doing all of that at the speed I want to do it isn’t safe. I don’t see how it could be. The closer we get to real change, the more those at the top are going to rely on their oldest and most reliable tool: violence.

They will imprison people for the mere act of advocating armed opposition to militant fascism. They will summarily execute people who actually carry out such opposition. Many of the people who walk the halls of power today were themselves involved in ordering, aiding, or hiding numerous atrocities around the world, and it’s hard to see why they would stop now – it’s worked well for them so far.

The problem is that we’ve run out of safe options. Allowing things to continue as they are today means courting extinction, and at minimum guarantees hundreds of millions of needless deaths. As always, my preferred path forward relies on increasing our resilience and our capacity to take coordinated action, separate from any government systems or political parties. I think that gives us the best shot we’ll ever have at large-scale change with as little violence as possible. I also think it gives us our best shot at withstanding efforts to crush that change long enough to see it through. The biggest ray of hope I can see is that it’s getting harder for the government to hide what it’s doing around the world, and it feels like the U.S. empire is beginning to lose its grip a bit. It’s encouraging to see things like Boric’s win in Chile, and the return to power of the MAS party in Bolivia. Our job, in places like the U.S. and western Europe, is to do our part to keep an eye on what our governments are doing around the world, and to organize so that we can create ever-increasing political costs for the politicians and oligarchs behind this sort of foreign interference.

Thank you for reading. If you find my work interesting, useful, or entertaining, please share it with others, and please consider joining the group of lovely people who support me at patreon.com/oceanoxia. Life costs money, alas, and owing to my immigration status in Ireland, this is likely to be my only form of income for the foreseeable future, so if you are able to help out, I’d greatly appreciate it. The beauty of crowdfunding is that even as little as $1 per month ends up helping a great deal if enough people do it. You’d be supporting both my nonfiction and my science fiction writing, and you’d get early access to the fiction.