Who idolizes pre-ghost visit Ebeneezer Scrooge?

Travis said:
You can judge a production of A Christmas Carol by whether they bothered to get a good actor for the Marley role or not.
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Which is why the George C Scott version from 1984 stands head and shoulders above the rest. He was the first one to play the role straight, and not as a cartoon character. The rest of the cast was terrific as well.
 
epepke said:
Travis said:
Why are people yelling out that an uninsured person should be left to die?
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It's not even that.

I'm in the hospital now (I get out tomorrow, yay!) I was dying. As it turned out, I had a pancreatic cyst of a liter in volume. Now I'll probably live for some time.

There is zero chance that I can ever pay for it. Somebody is paying for it, and probably a lot is coming out of public funds.

Paying for this, including diagnosis, treatment, and care, would probably have been much cheaper if done through a calmer mechanism rather than my showing up at an emergency room, but showing up at an ER is the only way I could ensure that I would, in fact, get treated.

Conservatives of the kind you speak of (which is now the majority of anybody having anything to do with the Republican party) do not want to save this money. The reason is because they are psychotic. I used to think they just had different values or thought in different ways, but now I see that they are actually delusional.
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Very good point. The "Obamacare" health insurance reform isn't really at all the progressive thing the Clintons were pushing for in the '90s. It really is a compromise package that addresses the problem from a relatively fiscally conservative point of view.

The point you make is one I've been arguing on several of these threads for a long time: that we really aren't considering horribly draconian laws (that not only remove the federal mandate for hospitals to provide treatment regardless of ability to pay in life-threatening situations, but it would even require the passage of laws that prohibited hospitals from giving treatment when they know the patient can't afford to pay it knowing full well they're going to pass those costs along to the rest of the system). In the absence of such horribly uncompassionate laws (that will never become reality), no one can truly opt out of the health care market. And everyone paying in something (and getting decent access to healthcare services) is better than the status quo.
 
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Foolmewunz said:
ETA: Serious(er). Note to GOP: When your planks all sound like Tragic Monkey wrote them after a double spicy burrito midnight snack, you've got problems.
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"Electrified acid moat on the border that may or may not contain exploding alligators" is TragicMonkey on a slow day. After a double spicy burrito midnight snack, he is FAR more creative.

Which does not invalidate your point about GOP going off the rails.
 
Ziggurat said:
I thought this thread was going to be about Charles Dickens' masterpiece. I was going to add some stuff about how under-appreciated Marley is.

I am disappointed. It's just another boring politics thread.
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When I reread "A Christmas Carol" I realized Scrooge had turned his back on compassion out of a deep hurt suffered in his youth. However now I can't remember what it was. This is a great asset, I can reread the same books every year ...
 
Minoosh said:
When I reread "A Christmas Carol" I realized Scrooge had turned his back on compassion out of a deep hurt suffered in his youth. However now I can't remember what it was. This is a great asset, I can reread the same books every year ...
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If the movie was faithful to the book, he had a distant relationship with his father and his girlfriend (fiancee?) dumped him.
 
Travis said:
:D

The Conservative Review of A Christmas Carol

This mildly comedic story serves as a cautionary tale about how even the most resolute of job creating entrepreneurs might be duped by socialist propaganda. Ebeneezer Scrooge, our story's protagonist, exhibits a dramatic fall from grace after he is subject to three hallucinations brought on by LSD bearing Hippies who cleverly disguise themselves as ghosts.

The first ghost, who initiates the "visions" by slipping the drugs to Mr Scrooge, gains his trust by imitating a now dead former business partner. The next three fake ghosts try to portray "spirits" representing Christmas Past, Present and Future. Notable is the lack of any spirit representing Jesus. Yet another salvo from the anti-religion left as they wage their war on Christmas.

The spirits guide Mr Scrooge through the visions by giving him suggestions on what he should be seeing during his drug trips. Thus they trick him into visions of family and former good times, how others might be enjoying the present while huddled in tiny hovels and how he might die alone and unloved just because he was so successful at maintaining his business.

After all this he wakes up thinking that he must now fight for Communistic wealth redistribution. This is brought home when he actually offers to give undeserved presents to a family of parasitic poor people and a raise to his top employee without even considering a cost/benefit analysis. He is then congratulated for his insanity by a crippled child. An obvious stand in for the wretched argument that those that can't work need to be cared for by productive people instead of being used as firewood as any sane society would.

I rather enjoyed this production as it helps to illustrate how anyone among us might succumb to Leftist social engineering via clever tricks. Ebeneezer Scrooge was a great man; a wealth creating capitalist who never overpaid anyone regardless of their productivity. Wisely he kept the money with the best and brightest (in this case that was himself) instead of it being squandered on the undeserving. But even this great of a man can be brought down by the leech supporters via their manipulation of emotions.
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Did you write that?
 
Robrob said:
They need scapegoats. Illegals can't vote so there's no down side.
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There's a huge downside. Many illegals have family members who can vote, and some otherwise conservative Latinos are sensitive to the deep currents of racism that run beneath sane-sounding calls to secure the border. Gay people have families too. Right-wing Christians are countered to an extent by left-of-center Christian positions.

And though the let-'em-die stance may stir applause in a fired-up forum, I suspect many of us are aware that health is largely a matter of luck.

If the GOP slate were offering anything like alternative solutions to this country's problems I believe it would have more credibility. But they're not. They think it will be enough to simply attack Obama and hold forth against gun control, socialized medicine, illegal immigration, Islam, etc. I don't think that will be a winning strategy. They are alienating too many people, huge swathes of society that might have sympathy for conservative values but who are too truly conservative to buy into the radical Republican agenda.

But, the progressive-leaning bloc will have to get out the vote.
 
Travis said:
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Those are all things a psychopath would do. Do the debates just attract the few psychopaths that also happen to be Republicans?
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Well, about 1% of the American population are psychopaths, so there clearly are enough of them to flood the debates. And I'd wager that those who vote do so as Republicans because that is "protective coloration."

But I think the real problem is faith; wanting to have something to believe in. People will pick a team and stick through it thick and thin. Hell, I understand that totally as I am a lifelong Cubs fan.

But when the thing you believe in changes, becoming evil, or when you become acquainted with pre-existing evils you were unaware of when you became an adherent, people make excuses, people start doubting themselves, and people become afraid to be seen as an apostate. They end up supporting things they never would have supported otherwise, and acting in ways that they never would have acted without the group.

We have seen this throughout history. I don't need to give you examples.

And that is what I see happening with the Republican Party.

And I don't think that "evil" is too strong a term for what I see today, except for the maxim that one should not ascribe to evil things adequately explained by stupidity or cupidity.
 
BenBurch said:
Well, about 1% of the American population are psychopaths, so there clearly are enough of them to flood the debates. And I'd wager that those who vote do so as Republicans because that is "protective coloration."

But I think the real problem is faith; wanting to have something to believe in. People will pick a team and stick through it thick and thin...
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I think it would be more accurate to say "wanting to have something to belong to." This is why trying to reason a person out of a belief system is so hard, and often ineffective: because the skeptic is only arguing the beliefs, and offering better ones, but not addressing the groups and relationships of which the believer is part, and from which they draw value, regardless of the beliefs that got them there in the first place.
 
Denver said:
I think it would be more accurate to say "wanting to have something to belong to." This is why trying to reason a person out of a belief system is so hard, and often ineffective: because the skeptic is only arguing the beliefs, and offering better ones, but not addressing the groups and relationships of which the believer is part, and from which they draw value, regardless of the beliefs that got them there in the first place.
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Yes, group identity is something we evolved to need.
 
"If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

I love that line
 
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