Conflict-tainment

Blogdom,
We all remember the television industry giving us infotainment, the marriage for purposes of fattening a visa account between the innocent maiden unexhumed Alice Information and the swaggering self-made businessman L. Otis Entertainment. Alice Information was mysteriously out there to be found, somewhat like Cain's wife in Genesis, who appears to arise outside the creation of Adam and Eve, the mother of all living things. Come along L. Otis Entertainment, who grabs her by the head and dances her round the fire 24/7. But this is not the place to discuss the nature of truth. Whatever she be and wherever she go, she sh0uld have stayed unmarried, if not necessarily virginal.
The television industry may as well cash out now and put the money in China, because infotainment has gone homespun. No one needs an evil media empire to conflate information about the world with entertainment to satisfy various layers of the soul anymore. However, Alice aint in a Kansas movie palace sleeping a night-table away from the silk-pajamaed Otis anymore. We're doing this now with the we-wide-web, on which there is no room for them, whoever they may be. No room for them means conflict now. Thus, inevitably, is born conflict-tainment, in which our own dilemmas are projected on the computer screen as embodied in very real conflicts we have little to do with, and instead of living out our own lives, we hope our side wins the war somewhere else, while we watch, spectators to the soul.
I hear the retort to the previous paragraph already; there is no other, it's a smear fiction. I have two firm defenses against this argument, which I consider ridiculous in this context. First, Alain Badiou, in his controversy with Emanuel Levinas the most eloquent and erudite defendant of the idea that the other doesn't exist, in his less read but more significant tome Being and Event states that "Every multiple contains some other" as a simple truth of set theory. Frankly, in the tome he was concerned with establishing the true philosophy, in the anti-Levinas essay, winning at all costs. (The same duality is seen in Socrates via Plato, I am informed by an expert and good friend). Second, as long as there is human conflict, there is an other whose desires are radically opposed to one's own. While the other is not a permanent installation of the over there like the Egyptology wing of the British Museum, there were multiple others yesterday, are many others today, and will be more tomorrow, till the last syllable of you know what. In philosophais one would say something like "l'alterite est un fait structurel permanent, mais l'autre particulier est passager." Bible-wise, Goy-el-goy (nation against nation) till the end of time. That's that; I am I am, he is he is.
When a conflict is somebody else's it is very difficult to tell what sort of conflict it actually is, and our social science universal categoricals like economic, political, ethnic, and religious, to present a partial list in descending order of sensefulness, can tell us nothing. They are deliberately and happily terms empty of particular nature, or eidetic terms (terms of kind) under which to classify unlike things by their surface manifestations. These I maintain to be choices of representation from an available body of idioms in the outside world radically separate from the actual mental world of man.
Concerning conflict, I find no eiditic analysis particularly more useful and convincing than that I learned in 4th grade reading class: there were there three types of conflict. The conflict of man against man, the conflict of man against himself, and the conflict of man against nature. In a conflict into which foreigners inject their passions, all possible variety of commentary can be found online, and I pick the random example of, oh, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict to demonstrate how effective this particular classificatory scheme actually is. In physical fact, as best I can ascertain it, there are as many conflicts as there are Israelis and Palestinians, but they are brought together under their flags to fight a war in the timeless fashion of physical reality from the ancient Pelloneus to contemporary Iraq. In cyberspace, though, a couple of motifs repeat, of which the eidetic analysis of my onetime teacher can help us see some varieties. The conflict of man against man, or regular Joe, regular Yussef, shows us regular dudes, or at least dudes regular by the standards of that veiled and mysterious middle east, who all want a good life and happen to be on opposite sides of fence. Then there is the conflict of man against himself, in which the two particular traditions and cultures involved must be similar because they all believe in only one god and chant a variant of the ancient name "Avram" and therefore, the conflict must be between a high and a base impulse played in one arbitrary "culture" among others real or possible (dem non-Abrahamitics), which I will call the Isradam or "struggle against man" conflict. Then there is the most peculiar conflict of all, which falls perfectly under the remaining category of my early teacher, the conflict of man against nature, or Israel/Philistine conflict. It does not concern the Palestinians, but some idea of a natural people pitted against an explicitly demarcated people celebrating all in human nature that may or may not be rotten but needs to sublimated and not speak its own name. Hilariously enough, the nature's people regrettably chosen nom de guerre happens to come from the ancient root just mentioned. The word "Palestine" comes from "Philistine", as surely and irrelevantly as the Swahili Barack and the Hebrew Baruch are closely related forms of "blessed" or "benedict." Spinoza is spinning in his Netherlandish grave.

Not only do I find the conflict-tainment an aesthetically repugnant form of life, but
it has the already manifest potential to dull or sensibilities for action wherever we happen to actually be, as we hope our aspirations will be won with blood--of somebody else and by somebody else. This here is not the "society of the spectacle." It's the society of spectator.

May it shock and outrage the world that this blog does not take a piously
pure stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The blogger has no particular stake in the real situation thousands of miles eastward and thus finds it unethical to take a pious position other than the following: may your conflict-tainment at the expense of others be put to bed relatively painlessly.

Does Public Disease Call for Nationalized Remedies?

Internautes,
The health records of the world leave little doubt of two facts; first basic sanitation and access to lifestyle improvements have done more for the health (including the longevity) of world citizens than all applicable knowledge of biology thus far, and it is arguable that neither further medicine nor human engineering can ever replace the essentials. Second, the United States is dead last in the industrialized world in providing opportunities for lifestyle improvements. While the record can never budge us from the correlation of poor lifestyle-improvement opportunities with the poor public health/preventative medicine outcome for America if we wish to blame lazy Americans who have had everything too good for their own bad health, but the correlations are there to suggest heavily not only the obvious importance of lifestyle, but the contribution of relative prices of healthy and unhealthy food, availability of healthy food altogether, urban design, transportation policy, etc. to the relative health of nations.
This is public health or health economics 101.
What is more frequently missed is what all this means to health-care policy. When one method is more important than another in achieving results, it makes correlatory statistics, from everyday mental comparison tests to the fanciest of regressions, looking at the effect of the second and less important variable on the outcome while ignoring the first all but bunk. In the case of regressions, the omitted variables are in this case exceedingly unlikely to be uncorrelated to the included ones. The regions of the United States or Europe with better preventative care, for instance, are almost certainly the ones with more effective medicine; there are legal and political reasons why this should be so within the blocs but not between them. All of which means that to say that the proposition that European nationalized healthcare systems have proven themselves by the health outcomes they achieve against the American system is bunk simply beacuse that they're not the achievers here at all. The European lifestyle and incentives to lead it are what we ought to be imitating. Starting by explicit health-care is all but insane: the United States has the best curative medicine in the world, if also the most expensive. While some are excluded from the system, the majority of people get what the nation pays for. It is a question of value whether one gives more importance to the total quality-weighed amount of curative medicine in the country, or gives more importance to the basics being broadly provided. Especially given the diminishing marginal returns of care to any one individual, there is much to be said for the second position. But it is a matter of fact that the best available care in the United States is the best available care anywhere, that the United States is the leader in medical research and actually subsidizes the rest of the world in the arena of prescription medicine (a highly atypical but real situation). It is also a highly likely conjecture that the continued incentives to produce medical goods in the United States could give this country the advantage in next-generation biological technologies; an advantage we seem to now lack in just about everything else, and consequently need desperately.
The state of the nation's health is an outrage that calls for public health solutions, not nationalized medicine whose results are not what they appear to be if one ignores this crucial causative factor. A serious healthy urban planning, healthy food incentive-creating program together with more innovative approaches to improving lifestyle would of course drastically reduce insanely rising health-care costs far more effectively than Hillary Clinton's proposal to create a monospomy (buyer-side monopoly, which reduces costs) of health-care or Barack Obama's unthought compromise plan, which includes elements from so many sources the likely economic result is presently undecipherable. Why is no one telling the public any of this? We live in a republic, not a democracy, not so we may elect pop-stars to embody our ideal selves but so that those who thought most about a question are in a position to present it to those who have thought less and have them ratify the leaders who listen to the best advisers. The hope of republican forms of government is that the people's reasoning about candidates' debate correspond or map unto the actual complicated policy questions, of which no one has a grasp of all. Each person trying to decide the issues all for themselves adds up to a highly repetitive crystal matrix of dunces projecting a largely grey image on the screen of governmental decision. The citizens of a republic each contribute a different facet to the image on the screen; the members of a mob, each in his own isolated world, all do more or less the same thing, creating an additive, rather than a transformative, aggregate.
Obama and company have perverted a common-sense but already flawed logical imperative to judge things by their results into a nonsensical injunction to compare systems by their late surfaces; which is precisely what the Madisonian republican form of government is supposed to prevent.

So why does Europe have nationalized health-care whereas we do not? It is a complicated question involving historical accident, selection of citizens by mentality in the era of mass migration, two world wars, and many other factors of which I am but hazily aware. None of them however means that Europe's medical system works better than ours. Europe's public health system is what's doing that work. Perhaps American medicine is still what it is because it is the only remedy to our lifestyle, or perhaps it is a flawed system that could use improvement. But no such ammendations will have the massive consequences that the candidates believe they will have.

I am all for public works projects. But the candidates have agreed upon the wrong starting point by which to orient the rest of the picture through a presumed future policy process.