Everything Is Broken

Tablet ^ | January 14, 2021 | ALANA NEWHOUSE

[Bratch]

I believe they discovered his ailment and hopefully found the right treatment.

I got the impression she wanted to keep it close to the vest while still illustrating her point.

[marron]

An example of “brokenness” in the medical field can be shown by what we’ve gone through over the virus.

Doctors who use ivermectin, or hydroxychloroquine with zinc, have recovery rates of 100%. But despite an order from the president allowing their use —why should this require an order from the president?— they have been effectively banned through the back door, as hospitals and doctors are threatened, as pharmacies refuse to fill prescriptions, as the major information media shut down any mention of them.

[Frohickey]

1) Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more.
Nope. I don't pay for dozens of apps. I scrutinize my spending on apps to things I see a real enduring value in.

2) You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited.
Nope.

3) You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met.
No.

4) You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago.
No.

5) You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.
Ewww...


Its official. I'm a troglodyte. And a proud one!

[who_would_fardels_bear]

The world is being populated with spiteful mutants:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztZhxdGWSxI

[perfect_rovian_storm]

Agreed. Fantastic piece.

To see how far we’ve fallen, look at how many people here can’t even grasp the point of it.

Everything’s a mess. All of our institutions are broken beyond repair. Anything we were raised to trust has been corrupted and turned against us. Most people in any position of power almost anywhere are either corrupt or incompetent or a combination of both.

Climbing out of this hole won’t be easy and may well be impossible. I think she’s right that we have to create our way out of it.

[Kickaha]

Fail. Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them.

[RetiredTexasVet]

Couldn’t make sense out of this. Probably best to pull it and rewrite it before you re-submit it.

[Louis Foxwell]

And they all, the quiet ones, live their lies of invisible anxiety, shadows of the lives that might have been.
They die in silence, not screaming against their oppressors but acquiescing to the heel upon their head as their due.
There are some, a few, not many, who seek to be more, to struggle against the tyranny of complacency.
We need brave souls who will wake up to the horror that surrounds us and say in a loud and death defying voice, “no more.”

[Bodega]

I agree. The best medicine I ever practiced was as a Family Nurse Practitioner and contravened normal hospital and clinc protocols. No 10 minute visits period. No huge pharmacy bills for them either. Lots of time spent exploring what it meant “to be them”. Lots of time spent mutually figuring out what would work.
I often went to their homes because they needed that kind of care and concern. I did cervical exams on their beds with a set of stirrups I designed to be accommodated by their beds. In three years of happy hard work I had 3500 patients. Yes, my hours were long and I often went long distances, but the results made them happy. Me too.
The local MDs were generous with their supplies and no doc ever turned down one of my patients when I asked them to help him or her.
My clinic was philanthropic eleemosynary. It had to be as 90-something percent of the people were poor, very poor.

I thought I had died and gone to heaven until some doctor MD-types decided to buy the medicaid/medicare contract in the area and we NPs were booted out.

Now I go to the VA and I have had some excellent docs work with me. And I have had some I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel for. It seems like luck of the draw, sadly enough.
No one at the VA gives a damn what we the sick, weak and lame think. With some outstanding exceptions, it just plows blindly on with conventional medicine and out of date ideas. It is as broken as any institution I have had anything to do with in all my 80+ years.

[GoDuke]

Bookmark

[nuconvert]

“This disconnect between culturally mandated politics and the actual demonstrated preferences of most Americans has created an enormous reserve of unmet needs—and a generational opportunity. Build new things! Create great art! Understand and accept that sensory information is the brain’s food, and that Silicon Valley is systematically starving us of it. Avoid going entirely tree-blind. Make a friend and don’t talk politics with them. Do things that generate love and attention from three people you actually know instead of hundreds you don’t. Abandon the blighted Ivy League, please, I beg of you. Start a publishing house that puts out books that anger, surprise and delight people and which make them want to read. Be brave enough to make film and TV that appeals to actual audiences and not 14 people on Twitter. Establish a newspaper, one people can see themselves in and hold in their hands. Go back to a house of worship—every week. Give up on our current institutions; they already gave up on us.”

I hope people of her generation and younger read this.

[rollo tomasi]

Yet the life expectancy keeps going up.

Also, the medical profession responds to the wants of the consumers. Those wants takes a wholle heck of a lot of money and resources to manage.

Plus cherry picking dates is disengenous. For instance, in the 1970s who could afford to stay alive on dialysis which was a developing and very expensive treatment (Still is). Enter Medicare/Medicaid that the voters agreed to since they elect our representatives. Not as simple or cynical as you think.

[perfect_rovian_storm]

Wow, great post. Thank you.

[GILTN1stborn]

I agree with you. I had very personal reasons to want to hear what she had to say about the corrupt and messed up medical industrial complex.

[BiteYourSelf]

Yah what the heck was wrong with their son. I couldn’t find it in that mess.🙄

[kjam22]

Broken lines broken strings
Broken threads broken springs
Broken idols broken heads
People sleeping in broken beds
Ain’t no use jiving
Ain’t no use joking
Everything is broken.

Broken bottles broken plates
Broken switches broken gates
Broken dishes broken parts
Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken
Everything is broken.

Seem like every time you stop and turn around
Something else just hit the ground
Broken cutters broken saws
Broken buckles broken laws
Broken bodies broken bones
Broken voices on broken phones
Take a deep breath feel like you’re chokin’
Everything is broken.

Everytime you leave and go off someplace
Things fall to pieces in my face
Broken hands on broken ploughs
Broken treaties broken vows
Broken pipes broken tools
People bending broken rules
Hound dog howling bullfrog croaking
Everything is broken.

[.44 Special]

A broken man must fall all the way down before he can get up.

[trebb]

Too bad we have a lot of lazy Freepers who didn’t bother to read and digest the whole article - they help me understand why we’re doomed.

[wintertime]

I am irritated with the hook, too.

[Albion Wilde]

I believe they discovered his ailment and hopefully found the right treatment. I got the impression she wanted to keep it close to the vest while still illustrating her point.

Thank you. Our society has been so dumbed down by screen use instead of reading that many would rather snark than think.