Who Are These Clowns?

I have no idea how these clowns have gotten onto my blog roll but you’ve got to read this, folks. This is priceless:

So how can Republicans attack the birth-control mandate without being declared at war with women? How about just looking at the economics of it, which are very simple? Birth control isn’t expensive, I’m told, (about $25 a month). So why should it be covered by insurance at all? Insurance is meant to protect people from unpredictable and catastrophic expenses that they can’t budget for. That’s why automobile insurance covers collision and liability, not oil changes and tire rotations.

We’ve been weeping with laughter here for the past ten minutes. It’s incredible that there is a loser who is equally ignorant about birth control, economics, insurance, and even cars. I’ve only been driving for about two minutes but even I know that the idea of monthly oil changes and tire rotations is kind of bizarre. And how about the “health insurance exists only to protect people from the catastrophic” part?

It’s not good to laugh at the developmentally challenged, so I should stop.

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29 responses to “Who Are These Clowns?”

Evelina Anville

January 26, 2014

It never ceases to amaze me that birth control is such a debated issue in the 21st century. The very mention of birth control is enough to make some people erupt in to hysterics and make all sorts of insane comparisons–like in the article you linked to. It’s bonkers.

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Clarissa

January 26, 2014

Apparently, there is now this whole movement “Democrats are the ones who are really waging the are on women by adding birth control plans to health insurance.”

That is SO likely to work. Not. 🙂

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 26, 2014
  
  Also: this “journalist” thinks it’s a good idea to compare women’s health and car maintenance. Can anybody be any more clueless?
  
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Shakti

January 26, 2014

At this point, I’m just assume that Republican talking heads are just trolling us, regardless of their level of knowledge.

They hope to cause a non-trivial portion of women to either die from rage induced aneurysms or die laughing while politicians implement ridiculous policy based on the psychosexual neuroses of scary fanatics.

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Clarissa

January 26, 2014

Well-put! It is weirdly entertaining to see them try to become less toxic to female voters and making things worse.

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musteryou

January 26, 2014

Women think about things emotionally, but men can bring solidity — maybe even some stolidity — to the equation. It’s all for the best! If you think of yourself as a car, you start to gain more reality and everything gains a sense of being in good working order.

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Clarissa

January 26, 2014

In this car metaphor, I still hear the echoes of this old conservative fantasy that the frequency of sex somehow impacts the amount of birth control women need. Car oil change directly depends on the mileage you have driven.

And in terms of cost, a yearly car oil change costs about $45 in the US. While Mirena costs $1,300 at a minimum, usually more. So the guy I quoted is deluded on every single account. I have no idea how he manages to remain this stupid.

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1. musteryou
  
  January 26, 2014
  
  I used to wonder how people could be so stupid, but the truth is their ideology, which is Christian metaphysics, holds that women are ethereal and insubstantial. That is what they mean, in their code, when they pronounce that something a woman has said is “just emotional”. It also explains how criticisms of the system from women can be routinely ignored. I can make all sorts of points — and pretty clearly, too — but it will be as if I had not said anything. I’m just waiting for a male to come on the scene to tell me what is real and what isn’t. But the male doesn’t engage with anything I’ve said — he merely takes it as a springing off point. Women (predominantly from America) too will reflexively reduce abstract theorizing and obervation to the level of personal opinion, which enables them to advise me not to take things too seriously.
  
  Naturally, money or healthcare or attention to psychological health are not important for ethereal beings as, in some sense they do not exist at all. They seem to, but actually they don’t. A true Christian with real insight will be able to see through their vain protests about existing. He (or she) can dismiss almost any form of communication with a wave of the hand: “Why can’t you just adapt and get along?”
  
  In fact you are not a woman if you do not sacrifice your sense of self for the greater good. You are pretending to be a man — that is, aiming to be substantive. This is bound to fail.
  
  If God wanted you to have a Mirena device would would appear in the realm of insubstantive reality, and you would have it. But it’s not appearing because reality is real, and we have cars and garages and other real things. Learn to live with it!
  
  And as I said before, a Mirena device at the moment costs $28 in Australia, and insertion is free. That is because Australian women, for the time being, are a bit more real than American women.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    January 26, 2014
    
    My sister was recently training an acquaintance not to start a conversation with her boss where she was going to ask for a raise with the words, “I feel.”
    
    This habit of hiding in the realm of the subjective and the insubstantial, as you say, is a very big problem.
    
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    1. musteryou
      
      January 26, 2014
      
      I don’t think it has anything to do with hiding in the realm of the subjective and insubstantial. If you think so, you haven’t had full-on psychological warfare directed at you, but I assure you this is not the case. In fact, you can be very, very direct, but this will not be read as directness but as anger. Anger is also disallowed, because you are crossing the set boundaries from female to male. You must have an identity disorder.
      
      I will say that my experiences have been extreme because I come from an extreme right-wing background, which I have needed to extricate myself from. Also, take note that my background and that of my family was totally immersed in an ongoing psy. war and propaganda war, similar to the cold war, but much more intense and personal. So even my parents have willingly used the psy. war tactics developed, I presume, during the war, against me. To the degree that I have gone to the left they have done this reflexively and thoughtlessly.
      
      In any case, you can put me through more and more training. I am no thoroughly trained to fight this kind of psy, war, even from a position of extreme weakness, and still come out on top. I think Bataille and his notion of ‘informe” or formlessness ulimately saved the day, but that was only after a couple of decades of trying different things and being worn down.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        January 26, 2014
        
        “In fact, you can be very, very direct, but this will not be read as directness but as anger. Anger is also disallowed, because you are crossing the set boundaries from female to male. You must have an identity disorder.”
        
        – As a very angry woman, I can attest that the lives of angry women are a lot better than the lives of meek and passive women. There is no penalty for anger or directness, none.
        
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        musteryou
        
        January 26, 2014
        
        Well it is good that you can attest to that. Certainly you may have trouble reading what I wrote above, because my own experiences attest to the opposite, but of course the historical and cultural contexts were different.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        January 26, 2014
        
        I do know some stuff about the life experiences of the “I feel I deserve a raise” acquaintance, and believe me, a more sheltered life is hard to imagine. It isn’t about coming from a war zone in her case but, rather, about coming from a typical North American socialization pattern.
        
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        musteryou
        
        January 26, 2014
        
        My family successfully painted me as a hysteric to the degree I got angry. There was much to get angry about, above all not being allowed to grow up and become a person. I believe that my situation strongly paralleled that of the colonial blacks who were kept under “civilised” control despite their war of rebellion and were constantly undermined by being represented as children or savages. My parents represented me to myself and others as both. It’s hard to break out of that psychological and cultural dynamic when it is all that one has known. To assert that one is other than what one is taken to be invites rage on the part of those who want to maintain political control.
        
        As for me, I could not be further from the American socialization pattern, and I am sick and tired of being mistaken for an American. I have nothing to learn from Americans or their self-improvent programs. I just don’t have anything in common with that culture or its assumptions about social conditioning. I know that what I had to escape from was the internalisation of the logic perpetuated by psychological warfare. I used Bataille’s notion of formlessness to claim my sovereignty, by renouncing the need for others to recognise my rights and simply taking them for myself in the most natural way. But before that, I tried all sorts of other methods to try to escape, including being ver direct and aggressive and appealing to others — all to no avail.
        
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2. Stille (@aperfectbalance)
  
  January 27, 2014
  
  I still think a more interesting question than the whole insurance business is why the hell is BC so insanely expensive in the US. I could buy the exact same implant for 120 dollars uncompensated, and I highly doubt that the insertion procedure costs more than a thousand dollars, even in the US.
  
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Homple

January 26, 2014

The guy was pointing out the difference between insurance, i.e. a means of pooling risk for unexpected expensive events that individuals can’t plan for (e.g. running over bicyclist), and routine ongoing expenses, for which they can plan.
You confuse “insurance” with a “prepaid health care”, and you seem to want someone else to do the paying.

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Clarissa

January 26, 2014

“You confuse “insurance” with a “prepaid health care”, and you seem to want someone else to do the paying.”

– In the United States – which is the society we happen to be discussing – “prepaid health care” is referred to with the word “insurance.” Please pay attention.

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1. Homple
  
  January 26, 2014
  
  It is that semantic confusion which causes quite a bit of debate about health care.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    January 26, 2014
    
    You can call it a green giraffe in pink dots instead of insurance and that will in no way diminish the number of officious fools who thing birth control can somehow be compared to car oil change.
    
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Benoni

January 26, 2014

Pregnancies are very frequently unexpected and expensive, so I don’t really get your point.

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1. Homple
  
  January 26, 2014
  
  …which is why maternity care is covered.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    January 26, 2014
    
    “…which is why maternity care is covered.”
    
    – Where? By whom? In which insurance plan? Which part of “maternity care”?
    
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2. Evelina Anville
  
  January 27, 2014
  
  @Homple: To extend on Benoni and Clarissas points, I don’t think “maternity care” is always the answer to an unexpected pregnancy. Some women want to abort with an unexpected pregnanacy and abortion services are expensive and not covered by most insurances.
  
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valter07

January 26, 2014

Technically, there is nothing inherently wrong with “prepaid health care” or something else doing the paying. The American society decided that some things are worthy to be paid for by everyone’s taxes, even if one is not personally using the services. National defense, public safety (why don’t true libertarians lobby for privatizing public safety, so more fortunate could buy public safety insurance and pay for police, CSI, etc once they are victims of the crime?), highways, some social programs, k-12 education (the last example is already murky since public schools are in part funded by property taxes, which results in inequalities between neighborhoods)… Some other societies decided that universal health care is also worthy of public funding. What this or that society decided simply reflects society’s value system… there is nothing inherently non-Christian in publicly funded universal health care.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 26, 2014
  
  Yes, you want “prepaid crime protection”, and you seem to want someone else to do the paying. Tsk tsk tsk. Can’t you do your own firefighting and crime prevention without having to involve Uncle Sugar?
  
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Homple

January 26, 2014

I’m surprised that you’ve not seen any insurance policies that offer maternity care. But anything is possible.

The analogy of oil changes and birth control illustrates the regular and predictable nature of birth control expenses. It is a poor choice for rhetorical purposes since it leaves one open to the “stupid Christer unfeeling patriarchal oppressor’s denigration of women” response. But one gets that anyway at some point in such a discussion as this one.

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Clarissa

January 26, 2014

“I’m surprised that you’ve not seen any insurance policies that offer maternity care. ”

– Can you quote a sentence written by me where I said anything of the kind?

“The analogy of oil changes and birth control illustrates the regular and predictable nature of birth control expenses.”

– Supplies for diabetics are just as regular and predictable. And medication for absolutely everybody with any chronic condition. Do you suggest that all these people should be denied health insurance? Predictability and regularity of expenses are in no way related to medical insurance coverage.

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