I tuned in to MSNBC this afternoon wondering if this country of born-yesterday geniuses would bother to remember the end of the largest, deadliest war in human history, but what I got was a panel of simpletons trying to lend dignity to the idea that having Medicare pay a consultation fee to your doctor should you happen to seek counseling about what to do if you have a fatal disease will lead to summary executions.
say the smug voices. No it isn't actually, not even if you're currently hospitalized with paranoid delusions. It isn't because paying your doctor bill is not getting involved in the decision making. It isn't because there is no slippery slope argument, only a slippery slope fallacy unless you can establish that paying someone's bill gives you the right to kill him - and you can't.
"It's the slippery slope argument - it's easy to see how you can go from the government being involved in health care decisions to the government executing you."
Yesterday I replied to yet another viral e-mail purporting to show how Barak Obama is insisting that Our military personnel should "pay their own damned insurance since they're volunteers." It was followed by endless expressions of undying hate. Of course it's another fraud -- I've yet to get one that wasn't -- but in return for my polite reply showing how the words came not from Obama but from the comedy writers at the Daily Show, I got an e-mail so hideous and grotesque with hatred of "liberls like me" it was quite incomprehensible.
When it gets to the point where ordinary Americans with ordinary, respectable lives and credentials are less coherent, more hate filled and more willing to believe the utterly preposterous simply because our president had a black father, there is reason for the reasonable to worry. There is great temptation for many of us simply to wash our hands of this dirt and let the country go the way of the Third Reich.
"The Death Panel idea has legs because it's easy to understand"said the Republican apologist on MSNBC. Lies are designed that way, the truth just is what it is. Let's hope the country is more than it seems.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteIt has indeed occurred to me that we are witnessing a mass outbreak of paranoid delusions on the part of the right-wing remnant because their most extreme anxieties seem to bear no relation to the legitimate concerns a person might raise about wholesale changes to the health-care system.
The bizarre thing about delusions, as I understand the matter, is that they can persist alongside the saner stuff in a person's head. The following imaginary, dino-based conversation may illustrate:
Patient: There's a menacing purple polka-dotted velociraptor lurking in my closet, and it's going to break out and kill me come nightfall.
Shrink: Now you KNOW that isn't true. There's really no purple polka-dotted velociraptor. You know you're just imagining things. We talked about that last time, remember?
Patient: Yes, I know it isn't real, but I can't stop thinking that it is. The feeling is overwhelming and I'm terrified.
(Aside: I should mention that there IS, in fact, a purple polka-dotted velociraptor in my closet. But I don't care because if that clever little rascal gives me any trouble, I'll pick her up by the tail with my huge jagged teeth and toss her half a football field's length. That'll teach her! Danger and bloggingdino are two ungainly reptiles hatched on the self-same day, and I the elder and more terrible.)
Well, anyhow, that seems to be how delusions work -- they can take over and paralyze a person even though that person "sort of knows" what's real and what isn't.
Probably everyone has irrational thoughts -- the question is how much control we have over our demons, so to speak. And some of these healther-skelterering teabaggers at the town-hall raves evidently have almost no control at all, at least when in or near the presence of their elected representatives. To be fair, their elected representatives may well have a special relationship with Satan. But that's no excuse for such crazy, uncivil behavior....
An octopus never eats its own young. Because we conjoin only once in our lives (please, no sympathies), fan our clutch of eggs, then waste away as they hatch, we run out of time and opportunity. But a younger octopus … don’t ask!
ReplyDeleteI have considered the effect of learning and memory on behavior, and the subject continues to baffle. Consider the smoker who has read all the warning labels but continues smoking despite all evidence that it will shorten your life. Octopus ought to know … ahem.
There are neurons and synapses that act like computer bandwidth; these communicate via neurotransmitters. There are cells that function as SRAMS, SIMS and DIMwits. These are protein-based.
All learning, memory, and behavior are chemical in nature. Once chemical pathways are formed, they are imprinted as surely as newborn dinettes are imprinted at the first sight of mama dinosaur.
Once formed, chemical pathways tend to stay with us for a long time. They are supposed to function that way and are not easily revised. Eureka moments do not necessary signal an immediate or long-term change in behavior. Especially if you are Republican, everything you learned in the first days of life stay with you forever. Perhaps that explains why they spit up a lot and are always colicky.
I'm beginning to think that "paranoid delusion" is too mild an assessment. After listening to Madam Sarah announced that she has killed the Death Panel provision, I have to wonder that she doesn't really thing they was one, but I have to be astonished that she doesn't know -- or that she doesn't know that we know, Congress is in recess.
ReplyDeleteEven Grassly claims to have done it, which is odd since he's a senator and doesn't have much to say about House Bills.
So my money is on mendacity rather than dementia. They just think we're stupid and in large part they may be right.