Freedom!

Andrew Sullivan discusses the different attitudes towards health care in Britain and America. First the British:

Brits simply believe suffering is an important part of life, especially through ill health. Going to the doctor is often viewed as a moral failure, a sign of weakness. This is a cultural function of decades of conditioning that success is morally problematic and that translating that success into better health is morally inexcusable.

Some might call this a healthy, CONSERVATIVE attitude towards life. You can't always get what you want, but you just might find you get what you need (I believe some rather famous English chaps said that somewhere).

Then the Americans:

But if most Americans with insurance had to live under the NHS for a day, there would be a revolution. It was one of my first epiphanies about most Americans: they believe in demanding and expecting the best from healthcare, not enduring and surviving the worst, because it is their collective obligation.

There's another word for people who think they should always get the best and that the world is obligated to give it to them: spoiled. Is this really Andrew's idea of a positive portrayal of America?

Apparently it is:

Ah, I thought. This is how free people think and act. Which, for much of the left, is, of course, the problem.

Freedom means getting as much as you can while paying the least for it? Seems like a rather limited vision of freedom.

500,000

I just had my 500,000 hit. It took a while to get here. Didn't help that I basically walked away from this blog for over a year and lost my audience. It's hard to get it back once it's gone.

I'm considering a reboot. Possibly a name change. Lots of change going on right now (both good and bad). Maybe it is time.

The Nice Guy

Speaking as a former Nice Guy(tm), this really hits home.

Local Organizing

northcountry posts on OpenLeft about the opposition Howard Dean has faced at the national level from people who would nominally be his allies (Democratic leaders).

It occurs at the local level as well.

My experience with dealing with the local party was that they were a lot of really smart and well meaning people, but they still tended to think in terms of power-bases. Anything that threatened those power-bases, even if they might be good for progressive causes, was treated with suspicion.

For example, I tried to organize a "Democrats club" in my local neighborhood that was designed to bring out Democrats who wanted to talk about the issues but didn't want to feel like they were just going to be a cog in the local party machine. I identified a gap and I wanted to fill it. I initially got support from the county party for this. But once it became clear that I DIDN'T want this club to be just the first step towards getting more people signed up to canvas and make telephone calls I almost immediately got the shut out. The hostility was palpable.

They wonder why ordinary citizens don't want to get involved in party activities and then they do things like this when it happens. It still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I probably made mistakes, so I don't entirely blame them (I generally think they are all great people). But I wonder if they honestly understand how much they turn people off?

That's why I like organizations like Drinking Liberally. It does essentially what I was trying to do without ever relying on party machinery. Democratic party people are more than welcome to come. But they are invited to be participants, not herders. And that's a role a lot of them have difficulty switching to.

Soft Power?

Spencer Ackerman hits on something that's been bugging me about coverage of Obama's increased emphasis on diplomacy:

There is, though, something at work behind Jenkins' comment. Without getting too academic-left-y, part of the reason why diplomacy gets coded as feminine -- arrgg I wish I knew how to write this without academic jargon -- is because we basically operate in an unfortunate lexicographic paradigm of "hard" military power and "soft" everything-else power. From there it's easy to see how unfortunate gender stereotypes can get mixed up in all this lazy thinking -- if difficult to excuse.

The truth is there's nothing "soft" about diplomacy, wherein you try to get the other fellow to do what you want. Madeleine Albright had the courage to go to Pakistan and denounce the Pakistani-allied Taliban in 1998 for "their despicable treatment of women and children and their general lack of respect for human dignity." Try telling Richard "Bulldozer" Holbrooke that there's something soft about forcing an end to ethnic cleansing a civil war. Was one of these activities more masculine or feminine than the other? It's absurd to think in these terms.

Democrats should be lashed any time they give weight to the "soft power" frame for precisely this reason: a good diplomat can make a foreign power feel pain without ever having to pull out "the guns".