Lively

I'm a sucker for moderate dissonance and early-to-mid 20th century classical, case in point:

@brodehouse: Eh, there's always been a bit of a self-congratulatory streak in TED talks. The Onion made a pretty biting parody:

I think your perspective on this is a little bit skewed, just putting that out there. "Your side" is not so devoid of irrationality, and the other side is not so devoid of factual support.

Ditto, I can't really think of games I've played where mental health is seriously brought up at all. Sure, you have your mopey emo depressed reluctant heroes, and you have your Two-Face wanna-be schizophrenics, but all of the above are so silly and comic book like that they really don't bear being taken seriously.

Now if you want to go into the realm of movies, I think you might look at low-brow Adam Sandler type movies for examples where developmentally disabled people are played for laughs, and most of the time that shit isn't even funny, because laughing at the powerless usually doesn't constitute effective humor. On the flip side, you have movies like "Radio" or "I Am Sam" which end up being saccharine Oscar-bait that kind of feels exploitative.

I'm drawing a blank right now on movies that strike a good balance of empathy and realism when it comes to mental illness, but I'm sure there are some out there. Maybe "Rain Man" and "Of Mice and Men"? (Also are we making a distinction between mental health and being developmentally disabled?).

As far as games go, it's pretty uncharted territory.

Well that's exactly what I'm saying, actually (or was trying to say), so I guess we're in agreement here.

What I'm getting at is that, given that companies tend to behave this way, we need a good government run healthcare option, because goodness knows a lot of workers aren't getting it from their employers.

The whole "healthcare mandate" compromise that was reached that enforces the use of privately provided health insurance was kind of a horrible half-measure, when they should have had the guts to actually create a viable public option.

I guess the problem here is that what is "fair" and "ethical" can be quite different depending on your point of view. In my view, it's neither fair nor ethical to ask women to pay more for being who they are, and I think we as a society have a moral obligation to try to keep the level of access fair across the board.

In your first poll choice, you imply the leap that agreeing with the statistics (saying that women take more out of the system) kind of automatically means you support making them pay more, when I think you'll see that MOST of the people in this thread don't agree with you. Hell, isn't it also part of "how insurance works" that the risk is spread out? I'll repeat my assertion here that the way you phrased the original poll was very skewed to one side, and I think you know that.

Lastly, you make a reference to "trickle down economics" at the end there. In general, if rich people and wealthy corporations do well, they nearly always try to keep the profits to themselves and don't all of the sudden pass it down out of the generosity of their hearts. More jobs may open up due to new projects and expansion, but actual worker wages have been stagnant for decades. Across the nation right now companies that are pulling pretty healthy profits are still reducing employees hours so they can avoid being required to pay for new healthcare plans.

If profitable companies refuse to even provide basic living wages and bare-bones healthcare plans to their workers, then it's the moral obligation of society to provide it, and fund it by taxing those who can afford it.

I know some people disagree with that point of view, and that's fine, but I guess in that case I'll see you at the voting booth, where (if we're lucky) some measure of change can be affected in one direction or another.

@cretaceous_bob: Surely there's some reasonable middle ground where you don't get charged more for being a woman, or being of a certain race, but you do get charged more for being morbidly obese / a smoker / reckless alcoholic with no regard for your own health.

Last time I checked conservatives were all about personal responsibility, and I don't see how this goes against that.

Yes, because you're clearly the reasonable party here who posted a non-sensationalized question in a poll that wasn't heavily editorialized to make one side look reasonable, and anyone who disagreed look like some sort of irrational ideologue.

It's not against the rules to be a shit-stirrer, but at least be honest about what you're doing, and if you don't have the self-awareness to recognize that then maybe I gave you too much credit earlier.

You should have at least offered up one more poll option: "No, because it's part of our social contract to not discriminate against life circumstances that weren't chosen", or something to that effect.

Edit: Just to be clear, here is how I interpreted your poll choices, as they were phrased (because that matters a lot in how they're perceived):

A. (The right answer).

B. "Sure, have your objections, but know that you are denying 'facts'! " (never mind that even if you accept that women cost more to cover, it still might be a net bennefit to keep cost of access equal).

C. "No, and also old people should be covered equally too", (This one comes closer to understanding the opposing side, but being the only option out of four that doesn't portray one side as crazy is pretty weak).

D. "Again, feel free to trot out your irrational feminist victimization paranoia, but I have 'facts', so chew on that."

I guess I have a really big pet peeve about people self-righteously trumpeting their "facts", as if one metric or statistic in their pocket can make them immune to other bad assumptions, bad logic, just bad thinking in general.

The current healthcare insurance system has proven itself untrustworthy, and unreliable, so I'm not sure why having a government run plan alongside the private ones would be such a bad idea (that would be the "public option" plan you might have heard proposed).

If something in government is broken, one option is to try to fix it, instead of throwing out the baby with the bathwater and abandoning it over to private control. Christ, look at the problems with the privatized prison systems in the U.S. for an example of how bad that can go. Profit motive and competition has the ability to improve some systems, but it has also been shown to make some things a lot worse (especially when you pair profit motive with the lack of competition).