The Republicans demand to be allowed to ktll those who
will die for lack of Obamacare in return for agreeing not to kill the children
whose lives that cancer research center might save.
Harry Reid has rejected that offer and continues to refuse
to let them kill anyone.
CNN thinks Harry better have a damned good explanation for
that.
OK, I'm not being quite accurate.
In truth, the Republicans don't actually want to kill all those people.
They want to let them die.
Exactly as the audience so notoriously demanded during the televised Republican primaries of 2008.
The fabulously rich who have vastly more than any sensible and honest person actually has any serious use for are that serious about not sharing.
Ordinary folk amuse themselves in pool halls.
The rich - the really rich - play billiards with Faberge eggs.
And in a thousand years they will play billiards with planets in uninhabited solar systems.
Or even inhabited ones.
It's not that I claim to be a whole lot more compassionate than these people.
It's that I am one of those they wish to allow to die.
I and, incidentally, the considerable majority of our fellow Americans.
So, unsurprisingly, I prefer otherwise.
And I wish more of the other Americans they propose to allow to die had the sense to prefer otherwise, as well.
Sometimes it's like trying to swim a river harnessed to a whole string of corpses, though, I must say.
On the other hand, property is active, not passive.
Ownership is an accomplishment of power, an affair of law, a matter of threats backed by force - threats that are not by any means, ever, mere bluffs.
The people the rich propose to allow to die are unable to simply take and use what they need - food, medicine, money, whatever - because a system of just such threats backed by force - laws - deprives them of it.
OK, I'm not being quite accurate.
In truth, the Republicans don't actually want to kill all those people.
They want to let them die.
Exactly as the audience so notoriously demanded during the televised Republican primaries of 2008.
The fabulously rich who have vastly more than any sensible and honest person actually has any serious use for are that serious about not sharing.
Ordinary folk amuse themselves in pool halls.
The rich - the really rich - play billiards with Faberge eggs.
And in a thousand years they will play billiards with planets in uninhabited solar systems.
Or even inhabited ones.
It's not that I claim to be a whole lot more compassionate than these people.
It's that I am one of those they wish to allow to die.
I and, incidentally, the considerable majority of our fellow Americans.
So, unsurprisingly, I prefer otherwise.
And I wish more of the other Americans they propose to allow to die had the sense to prefer otherwise, as well.
Sometimes it's like trying to swim a river harnessed to a whole string of corpses, though, I must say.
On the other hand, property is active, not passive.
Ownership is an accomplishment of power, an affair of law, a matter of threats backed by force - threats that are not by any means, ever, mere bluffs.
The people the rich propose to allow to die are unable to simply take and use what they need - food, medicine, money, whatever - because a system of just such threats backed by force - laws - deprives them of it.
Because the law, in conferring something on someone as his property, takes it from everyone else by force.
Hence it is by no means inaccurate, metaphoric, or hyperbolic to speak of the poor as "deprived," since they quite literally are, most of them, deprived of all they lack by that very same force behind those very same threats.
And letting people die only looks like a pure omission rather than being in any sense or degree an act, though it is literally a matter, at least as for those nearby, of keeping the hungry away from food, the sick away from medicine, the needy away from money at gunpoint until they die.
Hence it is by no means inaccurate, metaphoric, or hyperbolic to speak of the poor as "deprived," since they quite literally are, most of them, deprived of all they lack by that very same force behind those very same threats.
And letting people die only looks like a pure omission rather than being in any sense or degree an act, though it is literally a matter, at least as for those nearby, of keeping the hungry away from food, the sick away from medicine, the needy away from money at gunpoint until they die.
Something to think about, eh?
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