Text 12203, 145 rader
Skriven 2007-02-13 21:57:40 av Josh Hill (15644.babylon5)
     Kommentar till en text av rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated
Ärende: Re: Cath0licism and Creati=nism
=======================================
On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 20:27:10 -0800, Rob Perkins <rperkins@usa.net>
wrote:

>> Katrina was grotesque, the most spectacular demonstration of
>> incompetence I've ever seen from the Federal Government.
>
>Oh, I quite agree. Systemic indifferent incompetence.
>
>Spanning 30-40 years across 15-20 Congresses and four or five Presidents of
>both parties, of course.

The Clinton Administration left FEMA in tip-top shape. And after the
risk became apparent in the 90's, Congress embarked on a very
reasonable program to shore up the levees, but the Bush Administration
cut its funding. So while there have been failures all around (along
with the construction of one of the most ambitious civil engineering
complexes in history), I don't think they can or should be used to
justify the much worse failures of the current Administration.
 
>> The failed attempt of some spinmeisters to deflect attention from the
>> Administration's failure by pointing to the failures, real or
>> imagined, of state and local official is grotesque, a sad indication
>> of the depths to which our public discourse has descended.
>
>Well, they failed, too. Miserably and completely, with competing local
>governances actually getting in the way of amateur attempts to coalesce and
>civilize. Utility corporations neglecting their implicit duty to restore
>things like cell phone service to the trapped citizens.
>
>The whole story impugns government at every level, and leaves no authority
>there blameless. From Bush's foreign adventurism reducing NatGuard troop
>levels, to the underestimation for *decades* of the impact of a cat 3
>hurricane on the levy system, to the woefully ineffective State government,
>more interested within the bureaucracy in CYA and blame-casting than almost
>anything else, to the inattention all those Congresses and Presidents gave
>to warnings by the Army Corps of Engineers, combined with lack of
>improvement funding and the miles of red tape required to do anything really
>meaningful, to Ray Nagin's weird vacillating and grandstanding. Not to
>mention the behavior of police in the non-flooded areas, preventing people
>from walking out of the disaster area...

Thing is, I don't expect local officials to do anything but fail in a
case like this. The best public servants tend to go to Washington.
And, in any case, this was way too big a problem for any state.

New Orleans seems to me a perfect example of what's wrong with the
conservative love affair with decentralization: expecting the mayor of
a dirt-poor medium-sized city to deal with a disaster of this
magnitude is like expecting the dogcatcher to stand in for the SWAT
squad.

That isn't to say that I want to centralize everything, or that I
don't think the Feds sometimes stick their nose where they shouldn't.
I just don't think that /any/ policy works when it becomes a matter of
ideology, of religious belief, rather than of practicality, of
empiricism.

>...all of that together contributed to the NOLA coma.
>
>Did I miss anything?
>
>> The entire situation in Washington is grotesque.
>
>Yeah. Even so, compared to Darfur, or Somalia, the Russian Duma, and maybe
>even the Japanese Diet, the situation in Washington is so far from grotesque
>as to be a patent joke to call it grotesque. It's got its massive troubles
>but the plain truth is that it's also got much, much farther to fall before
>it's really bad.

Sure. Still, I was thinking today about how low our expectations have
fallen since Reagan took office. The conservatives hate government so
much that they squeezed it to death, and now that they've done that,
they can say, "Hey, look at how ineffectual government is!" But I'm
old enough to remember that the gummint landed a man on the moon in
less than ten years, and passed civil rights legislation, and medical
care for the elderly, and slashed poverty permanently. And I'm
educated enough to "remember" the Manhattan Project and 140,000 planes
in one year, and the abolition of slavery and child labor, and the
creation of the minimum wage and Social Security. But today, you
mention something like defeating global warming, and people say, "Oh,
it's government, government can't do that." But of course it could.

>> And everyone -- the
>> the 34,000 civilians who died last year in Iraq, the 40,000 uninsured
>> who died last year in the United States, the country, the planet -- is
>> paying the price.
>
>Raw number claims like this, without
>supporting material, can't tell the entire story. For example, how many
>civilians died in 2001 in Iraq? (Or, pick a year. Or average out five). Was
>the cost of that allegedly (much?) lower number worth it? And of the
>uninsured in the U.S., how many of those would have died regardless of their
>status under insurance?

I don't know how to put a value on a life, but I do know that with the
violence increasing, we are fast approaching and may have reached the
point at which the war is taking more lives than Saddam did. And I
think that speaks for itself.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care, "the number of
excess deaths among uninsured adults age 25-64 is in the range of
18,000 a year." I don't know why the figures don't include those under
25 years of age.

http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml
 
>> I just don't see how I can put a smiling face on that.
>
>Well, you can't, but I'd not consider it at all the worst of all possible
>worlds.

I'd just like it to be better! To have a sense of forward movement
again, to see us dealing with some of our problems. And to avoid some
terrible things that are happening a bit out of sight -- the deaths,
of those uninsured people, say, or the population disaster in the
third world, or the loss of so many species -- so much richness,
beauty, wonder, gone in most cases forever.

It may not seem like it from my posts, which tend to be rants about
this or that, but I'm always becoming excited by possibilities, by
potential. I'm an idealist and an optimist. And I become frustrated
when those possibilities are thwarted by greed or ignorance or
ideology, or when I see things coming and people don't want to know
because they can't be troubled.

>Rob, still hoping for peace in Iraq, somehow

Partition. I've always suspected that, but the Turks were in the way.
Well, it's time to tell them to take a hike -- or, more realistically,
come up with a Federal arrangement that wouldn't encourage Turkish
Kurds to rebel.

Even without that, things will work themselves out once we make it
clear that we're getting out of the way. But I think it will be more
brutal.

-- 
Josh

[Truly] I say to you, [...] angel [...] power will be able to see that [...]
these to whom [...] holy generations [...]. After Jesus said this, he departed.

- The Gospel of Judas
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