let's have a POLITIK DISCUSHIN

[rossmum]

hey ross are you going to tell more people irl how you owned people on the internet with posts longer than any assignment you ever submitted during your aborted stint at university?

this isn't a thing i do though. are you projecting again?

Well, with clarification, my post would have been significantly longer... I think you're trying to say that government is the one to define what's right and what's wrong.

i'm trying to say that government is the one to provide the necessary social support, which is less about 'right' and 'wrong' than you think - until it comes to business, at any rate

I understand your argument, and do have family that buys in to crap like alt. medicine, but I just don't see the problem with offering services (bs or not). People should be able to spend their money how they want and where they want, when they want. Without that right to be protected, we may as well be living in a communistic society. Our society has a lot of problems, yes, but I personally believe that as far as things go, this is the best we've had it in the entire history of the world. We are responsible for ourselves.

we live in a world where allegedly educated, affluent people with instant access to high technology and scientific research will still swear up and down that homeopathy works, acupuncture actually has any basis in reality, and that their lives matter to some nebulous all-powerful entity that has the power to create the universe and yet when they fail to intervene and stop cousin johnny's gambling problem it's because reasons.

we are the most exceptionally ignorant society that ever existed. we have access to resources that previous civilisations could literally not even have dreamed of, we have knowledge at hand which people elsewhere in the world still don't know of, and yet here we are defending some fucking fraud's "right" to sell magical magnetic rocks to retirees with back pain or some sick rip-off artist's "right" to exploit some grieving, desperate mother's vulnerability by telling them they can put them in touch with their dead child.

it's disgusting, and completely indefensible. it is also a complete brake on progress. we are pissing away our limited resources on useless junk and frivolity that we would not even miss if we hadn't been born into such a repulsively spoiled, shitty culture.

e: "we are responsible for ourselves" is an echo of the old model of social welfare, where people are expected to shut up and deal with their problems and if they can't then they can just go crawl into a corner and die. it's a selfish, shitty attitude and far removed from reality. not everyone has their shit together, and in fact remarkably few people genuinely do.