Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Deep Thought
If there was a way to present surgery as a competitive sport, I'd never need to write a post on American health care ever again.
Kraken's Dance: Part Two (Of Three)
Four seconds into the duel, and Tolofsson knew he was in trouble.
Tegatchi’s blade moved almost too fast to follow. Each glittering blur cut closer to Tolofsson’s flesh than the one before.
There was no time to find an opening, almost no time to even realise that that was what he was meant to be doing. Tegatchi was simply too young, and too quick.
Except.
Tolofsson trusted to instinct. Deflecting another brutal slash at his ribs, he leant to his right, continuing the course of his knife towards his enemy’s shoulder. Tegatchi’s own weapon was already waiting. A heartbeat before the impact, Tolofsson yanked his arm upward, smashing his elbow into Tegatchi’s jaw. There was a satisfying crunch of bone, followed by an even more satisfying cry of pain as Tolofsson straightened his arm, flicking his knife point along his opponent’s chest from hip to sternum.
Tegatchi staggered backwards, one step, then two. The third step saw him firmly planted again. Tolofsson noted a new wariness in his eyes.
“First blood is mine,” he said, trying to keep the relief from his voice. “And why, boy? Because speed is nothing without experience.”
Tegatchi shrugged.
.
“Simply a scratch, old man. Your knife will rust away before you kill me with such wounds.”
.
Tolofsson cursed under his breath. His foe might be a fool and a traitor, but he was also right; the cut was long but thin, essentially superficial. Tegatchi didn’t even bother to glance at his wound before he brought his blade up again, and lunged.
Wrenching his head to the right, Tolofsson felt as much as heard the knife-tip that whistled past his ear. Almost instantly he aimed a brutal punch at where his opponent’s neck had been an instant before.
His fist hit only air.
Spinning around, Tolofsson brought his knife around in a long, desperate arc. With Tegatchi behind him-
.
His blade sighed as it passed over his foe’s head, as though disappointed. There wasn’t even time to slow his swing before his enemy sprang from his crouch, slamming his body into Tolofsson’s torso and lifting him from his feet.
Scorched skeletons shattered beneath him as Tolofsson hit the ground hard. He grunted with pain as bone splinters lacerated his back, heard the tortured screech as more shards forced themselves inside his vertebrae sockets in miniature fountains of blood and machine oil.
His knife was gone, lost in the fall. No time to find it. Reaching out, he crushed more bones, powdering them in his hands as he pulled himself upwards.
He almost made it before Tegatchi was upon him. The younger marine barrelled into him with enough force to knock the air from his chest. Once again, he fell into the pile of blackened bones. New wounds opened upon new shards; he had to bite his lip to avoid crying out in pain. Closing his fingers around a broken skull, Tolofsson slammed it into his opponent’s temple. Tegatchi’s head whipped sideways, blood flying out in a crimson curve, but he kept hold. Pinning Tolofsson’s’ right arm with his left, Tegatchi brought his knife down towards his foe’s ribcage.
Dropping what remained of his impromptu weapon, Tolofsson made a desperate grab for Tegatchi’s arm. The rest of the cathedral seemed to telescope outward into infinity as his entire world became about the fractional changes in the height of that blade.
That height kept slowly decreasing. Tegatchi wasn’t just young and quick, he was strong. He was smart, too, Tolofsson realised, it was clear the knife-point was aimed at the centre of the star of shatter-marks that were all that remained from an Ork Mek’s attempt to disembowel him a century earlier.
The knife slipped downward another half-inch. Stopping that blade was a battle Tolofsson could not hope to win, any more than he could have hoped to win this duel. He was quite simply outmatched on every level. Speed, strength, agility. All he had was experience, and at that moment it seemed even that counted against him. All experience really meant was that he had taken more damage, and borne more pain.
Except.
Something was scratching at the back of his mind.
What had he told himself?
Nothing without experience.
He had borne pain.
Suddenly, without warning, Tolofsson let go.
Tegatchi’s knife plunged downward, into his chest. The blade penetrated a little over an inch into the thick wall of his ossified ribs before he grabbed hold of his foe’s arm once more.
The younger chaplain’s surprise was splashed all over his face. For a sliver of time he slackened his hold on his knife hilt.
It was enough. Rather than continue his doomed attempt to keep the knife aloft, Tolofsson twisted his entire body sideways. The knife followed his roll, or tried to, and broke in half against his stone-hard rib bones as a result. Aiming a savage kick at Tegatchi’s left knee, and feeling the kneecap give way with a sickening crack, Tolofsson rolled off his bed of broken bones and scrambled to his feet.
Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the knife blade still buried in his chest, and pulled it out in a shower of blood.
“Not far enough in, whelp,” he announced coldly. “My heart is buried deeper than that.”
Tegatchi was back on his feet as well. He was still quick, even though his stance made it clear he was favouring his right leg with as much weight as possible.
In his hand glinted Svengirsson’s knife.
“Never mind. I can always just drive this through the other one.”Tolofsson let his strategy drown in his hate, and charged forwards, screaming out everything left within him.
A half dozen blows after Tolofsson reached him, and Tegatchi knew he was in trouble.
Perhaps he had made a mistake in enraging his foe. There was no doubt it had been a mistake to allow him to all but break his leg in two. Apparently he’d be taking something from today after all.
If he lived that long. Being a knife up and a leg down wasn’t really as fair an exchange as it might have sounded. It meant he was forced to hold the weapon in his left hand, the better to protect his shattered knee.
He knew how to fight with both hands, of course, but against a sparring partner as experienced and determined as Tolofsson, he couldn’t afford even a modest reduction in his fighting prowess. Nor did guarding his leg make it easy to shield his already badly damaged jaw.
Tolofsson clearly intended to take full advantage. For every lunge at Tegatchi’s face, there was another short, stabbing kick at his crumpled knee. For every low sweep of a leg, there was another savage elbow jab. Most of them were deflected, and none truly connected, but each glancing blow sent another pulse of agony along Tegatchi’s strained and protesting nerves. It wasn’t as though they needed any encouragement. The pain in his leg was already unbearable, and it grew still worse every time he gave ground across the cracked and bloodstained flagstones, which seemed to be happening with almost every blow.
Any thought of fighting back had evaporated. The best he could do was try to angle the knife into his Tolofsson’s attacks, in the hope the older man might actually drive himself onto the blade in his fury. It was a vain hope, but hope nonetheless. Certainly, it was only Tolofsson’s rage that prevented him realising he could now easily outdistance his opponent and search for a new weapon. He might even have pulled the shattered knife tip from his chest and attacked with that; even that feeble approximation to a weapon would-
Wait.
Go back.
Something was scratching at the base of his mind.
A new weapon.
Still falling back by inches, teeth clenched almost to the point of fighting each other against the agony, Tegatchi allowed himself to turn himself on his wounded leg. His eyes darted from side to side between each of Tolofsson’s increasingly vicious strikes. He risked glances at his fellow marines, each one just as still as when this battle had begun an eternity ago. He took in both Tolofsson’s Kringrimmi and his own supporters, all but indistinguishable from each other, mirror images across a broken hall.
The search grew harder as his pain grew worse. Spots of light began to swim behind his eyes, obscuring his vision, draining his hope. Tolofsson dodged inside his guard, fingers entwined, and pushed forward into a sledgehammer uppercut to Tegatchi’s neck.
The blow itself blinded Tegatchi as the spots of light burst first into stars and then into supernovae. The force of the blow almost lifted him from his feet. Instinctively he took a step backwards to steady himself, only realising his mistake a split second before his full weight pressed itself upon his left leg, which immediately conceded defeat with a hideous snap.
His eyesight began to swim back into focus as he fell, only to be snatched away once more as his skull made contact with the cold stone of the cathedral floor.
“Here we are again,” he heard Tolofsson say contemptuously. “I must confess, the appeal is more obvious from this perspective.”
Run, the voice in his head pleaded . Get away!
Running was out of the question, but the point was well taken. Blinking furiously in the hopes of regaining his sight, Tegatchi tried desperately to crawl away from the sound of his opponent’s voice. The blackness began to break apart as flickering yellow and green lights began pushing their way through the cracks.
When Tolofsson brought his foot down upon Tegatchi’s broken leg, the agony was so overwhelming that it took him a second or two before he could gather himself enough to scream.
Sadism brought more than simple pain, however. It brought clarity. In the eye of the storm of screaming neurones and crumbling bone, Tegatchi realised not every light dancing before his eyes was a trick of his damaged, violated body.
Something was shining in the wreckage ahead.
Move.
Punching his teeth together as though sheer force was the only thing ew require to neutralise all the pain our flesh has capacity to process, Tegatchi began to drag himself forwards.
Tolofsson responded by digging his heel in still further. The spots of light infecting Tegatchi’s vision began to grow, pulsing in time with the avalanches of agony running through his body, but he refused to give his opponent the satisfaction of a second scream.
“Hah!” Tolofsson barked. “I like determination in my enemies. But nothing about hopeless defiance is more important than the fact that it is hopeless.”
Move.
It appeared to Tegatchi as though the world was retreating from him. With each new handful of splintered bone and crumbled masonry, and each long scrape of his torso against the stone, it seemed the gleam of metal he sought was further from him, as though the universe had concluded that he would die here, and soon, and wanted to flee from the act of witnessing his final breath.
He's right, he old himself. This is hopeless. Better to roll over and face death.
No, some other part of his mind responded urgently. Move. Move!
Tolofsson twisted his foot again, inciting fresh paroxysms. Dimly, Tegatchi wondered whether he was screaming again. His senses didn’t seem to be working in concert anymore. Someone was screaming, he thought. Or whispering. It was hard to tell.
Above him, Tolofsson grunted with his own pain.
“Svengirsson’s blade would not have snapped like this,” he said, apparently to himself. He must have been pulling the remains of Tegachi’s knife from between his ribs. As he did so, he released his foot long enough for him to kick Svengirsson’s knife from Tegatchi's hand.
Tegatchi seized on the brief release his disarmament gave him ,and brought his agonising blood-stained crawl to an end.
The glinting object he had given everything to reach proved to be an ornate hilt, apparently of burnished gold, with its pommel carved into a leering skull. Whatever blade was attached lay hidden under an oozing pile of massacred cultists whose bodies had been tossed there after the Krakens had taken the cathedral.
It was a weapon, and Tegatchi grabbed for it. Though it was all but impossible not to lunge desperately forwards and start slashing for his foe’s innards then and there, Tegatchi fought to remain composure, reaching for the hilt as though he were simply attempting to crawl away by a few more inches, using his hand to shield the weapon from Tolofsson’s sight. As his filthy, bleeding fingers closed around the hilt (which surprised him with how warm it was), he turned his head upwards, attempting to see his foe’s face.
Tolofsson had indeed pulled the knife shard from his chest. Thick dark blood was running towards his legs, hardening even as Tegatchi watched as the genetic modifications in Tolofsson’s circulation system burst into hyperactivity.
As Tegatchi watched, Tolofsson stepped away from his wounded leg, allowing Tegatchi a full view of his would-be executioner. Tolofsson held the broken blade between his fingers, like the claws of a predator, it too was covered in blood already solid, but there was little doubt the edge could still cut Tegatchi’s throat without any appreciable effort.
“This is unfortunate,” Tolofsson said, indicating his improvised weapon. “I know you’ll be just as dead this way. But one does get attached to one‘s own weapons.”
There was the slightest hint of a shrug, and then Tolofsson was diving forwards and down, his arm outstretched, the fragment of knife screaming as it tore the air.
Kill him.
Tegatchi span himself onto his back, bellowing at the pain it caused, and pulled the hilt of his stolen weapon outwards and upwards in a long arc to meet his incoming foe. Striking at the only hope he had left.
It hadn’t occurred to him until he swung the hilt that he had no idea whether there was a blade attached.
There was. With a crackle of unfathomable energy and a burst of cold blue light, a savagely serrated glowing blade cut through the air like it was vacuum, and Tolofsson’s left forearm like it was wet paper.
In the end, Tolofsson was too surprised to even scream. All that could be heard was the muffled thud of his severed arm hitting the ground, and the hideous wet pulsing of his life blood as it cascaded from the stump. For a moment or two he stood there, swaying slightly, staring at the fountain of crimson liquid as it gushed from what remained of his limb. He might have been willing the coagulants to do their job, or perhaps he was simply waiting for the signals from his eyes to correlate with what his brain was prepared to believe.
Whatever was passing through his mind, it didn’t make any difference. After a few seconds shock kicked in full force, and Tolofssson toppled in a cloud of grey masonry dust and darkly glinting gobbets of blood.
Gradually, by inches, gritting his teeth so hard he became certain he would shatter them, Tegatchi drew himself to his feet. The effort once more set motes of light dancing across his vision. In fact, the entire world was fading out at the corners again, but this time it didn’t concern him in the slightest. Quite the contrary. This wasn’t death, it was purpose. The universe now consisted of exactly three things: Tolofsson, and the sword, and himself.
As he hobbled over to his fallen enemy, Tegatchi could just about register shouts of outages. He ignored them. The shadows that flitted through the world outside his foe and his weapon were moving again. He ignored that too.
Kill him.
Tegachi dragged the twisted remnants of his leg over to the prone form of his foe, and watched the arterial flow as it continued to weakly pump blood onto the floor to thicken the dust into dark, viscous streams.
Kill him.
Eagerly, Tegatchi raised his sword. This time he could swear it sounded less like the blade screamed as the air flowed around it, and more as though it sang.
The shouting was getting ever louder. The sharp bark of bolter fire suddenly added itself to the din. Still Tegatchi ignored it. Tolofsson, the sword, and himself.
Kill him. KILL HIM!
For a moment, Tegatchi paused. Had he not already won? Tolofsson could no longer threaten him. He could kill the old man any time he chose. It was no longer a battle, it was a formality. How did the Krakens, both his Caudan fellows and what remained of the sullen Kringrimmi, gain from the death of their seniormost chaplain?
NO! KILL HIM NOW! You cannot set aside your task! It must be complete!
Tegatchi took one final look at Tolofsson, laid as though sleeping peacefully in the spreading pool of his blood. He took one final look at the sword, viciously jagged and glowing coldly. And he took one final look at himself, at who he was, and what he was, and what he might be tomorrow.
This time there was no doubt. When he brought the blade down to strike Tolofsson’s face, the blade was unquestionably singing.
Tegatchi’s blade moved almost too fast to follow. Each glittering blur cut closer to Tolofsson’s flesh than the one before.
There was no time to find an opening, almost no time to even realise that that was what he was meant to be doing. Tegatchi was simply too young, and too quick.
Except.
Tolofsson trusted to instinct. Deflecting another brutal slash at his ribs, he leant to his right, continuing the course of his knife towards his enemy’s shoulder. Tegatchi’s own weapon was already waiting. A heartbeat before the impact, Tolofsson yanked his arm upward, smashing his elbow into Tegatchi’s jaw. There was a satisfying crunch of bone, followed by an even more satisfying cry of pain as Tolofsson straightened his arm, flicking his knife point along his opponent’s chest from hip to sternum.
Tegatchi staggered backwards, one step, then two. The third step saw him firmly planted again. Tolofsson noted a new wariness in his eyes.
“First blood is mine,” he said, trying to keep the relief from his voice. “And why, boy? Because speed is nothing without experience.”
Tegatchi shrugged.
.
“Simply a scratch, old man. Your knife will rust away before you kill me with such wounds.”
.
Tolofsson cursed under his breath. His foe might be a fool and a traitor, but he was also right; the cut was long but thin, essentially superficial. Tegatchi didn’t even bother to glance at his wound before he brought his blade up again, and lunged.
Wrenching his head to the right, Tolofsson felt as much as heard the knife-tip that whistled past his ear. Almost instantly he aimed a brutal punch at where his opponent’s neck had been an instant before.
His fist hit only air.
Spinning around, Tolofsson brought his knife around in a long, desperate arc. With Tegatchi behind him-
.
His blade sighed as it passed over his foe’s head, as though disappointed. There wasn’t even time to slow his swing before his enemy sprang from his crouch, slamming his body into Tolofsson’s torso and lifting him from his feet.
Scorched skeletons shattered beneath him as Tolofsson hit the ground hard. He grunted with pain as bone splinters lacerated his back, heard the tortured screech as more shards forced themselves inside his vertebrae sockets in miniature fountains of blood and machine oil.
His knife was gone, lost in the fall. No time to find it. Reaching out, he crushed more bones, powdering them in his hands as he pulled himself upwards.
He almost made it before Tegatchi was upon him. The younger marine barrelled into him with enough force to knock the air from his chest. Once again, he fell into the pile of blackened bones. New wounds opened upon new shards; he had to bite his lip to avoid crying out in pain. Closing his fingers around a broken skull, Tolofsson slammed it into his opponent’s temple. Tegatchi’s head whipped sideways, blood flying out in a crimson curve, but he kept hold. Pinning Tolofsson’s’ right arm with his left, Tegatchi brought his knife down towards his foe’s ribcage.
Dropping what remained of his impromptu weapon, Tolofsson made a desperate grab for Tegatchi’s arm. The rest of the cathedral seemed to telescope outward into infinity as his entire world became about the fractional changes in the height of that blade.
That height kept slowly decreasing. Tegatchi wasn’t just young and quick, he was strong. He was smart, too, Tolofsson realised, it was clear the knife-point was aimed at the centre of the star of shatter-marks that were all that remained from an Ork Mek’s attempt to disembowel him a century earlier.
The knife slipped downward another half-inch. Stopping that blade was a battle Tolofsson could not hope to win, any more than he could have hoped to win this duel. He was quite simply outmatched on every level. Speed, strength, agility. All he had was experience, and at that moment it seemed even that counted against him. All experience really meant was that he had taken more damage, and borne more pain.
Except.
Something was scratching at the back of his mind.
What had he told himself?
Nothing without experience.
He had borne pain.
Suddenly, without warning, Tolofsson let go.
Tegatchi’s knife plunged downward, into his chest. The blade penetrated a little over an inch into the thick wall of his ossified ribs before he grabbed hold of his foe’s arm once more.
The younger chaplain’s surprise was splashed all over his face. For a sliver of time he slackened his hold on his knife hilt.
It was enough. Rather than continue his doomed attempt to keep the knife aloft, Tolofsson twisted his entire body sideways. The knife followed his roll, or tried to, and broke in half against his stone-hard rib bones as a result. Aiming a savage kick at Tegatchi’s left knee, and feeling the kneecap give way with a sickening crack, Tolofsson rolled off his bed of broken bones and scrambled to his feet.
Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the knife blade still buried in his chest, and pulled it out in a shower of blood.
“Not far enough in, whelp,” he announced coldly. “My heart is buried deeper than that.”
Tegatchi was back on his feet as well. He was still quick, even though his stance made it clear he was favouring his right leg with as much weight as possible.
In his hand glinted Svengirsson’s knife.
“Never mind. I can always just drive this through the other one.”Tolofsson let his strategy drown in his hate, and charged forwards, screaming out everything left within him.
A half dozen blows after Tolofsson reached him, and Tegatchi knew he was in trouble.
Perhaps he had made a mistake in enraging his foe. There was no doubt it had been a mistake to allow him to all but break his leg in two. Apparently he’d be taking something from today after all.
If he lived that long. Being a knife up and a leg down wasn’t really as fair an exchange as it might have sounded. It meant he was forced to hold the weapon in his left hand, the better to protect his shattered knee.
He knew how to fight with both hands, of course, but against a sparring partner as experienced and determined as Tolofsson, he couldn’t afford even a modest reduction in his fighting prowess. Nor did guarding his leg make it easy to shield his already badly damaged jaw.
Tolofsson clearly intended to take full advantage. For every lunge at Tegatchi’s face, there was another short, stabbing kick at his crumpled knee. For every low sweep of a leg, there was another savage elbow jab. Most of them were deflected, and none truly connected, but each glancing blow sent another pulse of agony along Tegatchi’s strained and protesting nerves. It wasn’t as though they needed any encouragement. The pain in his leg was already unbearable, and it grew still worse every time he gave ground across the cracked and bloodstained flagstones, which seemed to be happening with almost every blow.
Any thought of fighting back had evaporated. The best he could do was try to angle the knife into his Tolofsson’s attacks, in the hope the older man might actually drive himself onto the blade in his fury. It was a vain hope, but hope nonetheless. Certainly, it was only Tolofsson’s rage that prevented him realising he could now easily outdistance his opponent and search for a new weapon. He might even have pulled the shattered knife tip from his chest and attacked with that; even that feeble approximation to a weapon would-
Wait.
Go back.
Something was scratching at the base of his mind.
A new weapon.
Still falling back by inches, teeth clenched almost to the point of fighting each other against the agony, Tegatchi allowed himself to turn himself on his wounded leg. His eyes darted from side to side between each of Tolofsson’s increasingly vicious strikes. He risked glances at his fellow marines, each one just as still as when this battle had begun an eternity ago. He took in both Tolofsson’s Kringrimmi and his own supporters, all but indistinguishable from each other, mirror images across a broken hall.
The search grew harder as his pain grew worse. Spots of light began to swim behind his eyes, obscuring his vision, draining his hope. Tolofsson dodged inside his guard, fingers entwined, and pushed forward into a sledgehammer uppercut to Tegatchi’s neck.
The blow itself blinded Tegatchi as the spots of light burst first into stars and then into supernovae. The force of the blow almost lifted him from his feet. Instinctively he took a step backwards to steady himself, only realising his mistake a split second before his full weight pressed itself upon his left leg, which immediately conceded defeat with a hideous snap.
His eyesight began to swim back into focus as he fell, only to be snatched away once more as his skull made contact with the cold stone of the cathedral floor.
“Here we are again,” he heard Tolofsson say contemptuously. “I must confess, the appeal is more obvious from this perspective.”
Run, the voice in his head pleaded . Get away!
Running was out of the question, but the point was well taken. Blinking furiously in the hopes of regaining his sight, Tegatchi tried desperately to crawl away from the sound of his opponent’s voice. The blackness began to break apart as flickering yellow and green lights began pushing their way through the cracks.
When Tolofsson brought his foot down upon Tegatchi’s broken leg, the agony was so overwhelming that it took him a second or two before he could gather himself enough to scream.
Sadism brought more than simple pain, however. It brought clarity. In the eye of the storm of screaming neurones and crumbling bone, Tegatchi realised not every light dancing before his eyes was a trick of his damaged, violated body.
Something was shining in the wreckage ahead.
Move.
Punching his teeth together as though sheer force was the only thing ew require to neutralise all the pain our flesh has capacity to process, Tegatchi began to drag himself forwards.
Tolofsson responded by digging his heel in still further. The spots of light infecting Tegatchi’s vision began to grow, pulsing in time with the avalanches of agony running through his body, but he refused to give his opponent the satisfaction of a second scream.
“Hah!” Tolofsson barked. “I like determination in my enemies. But nothing about hopeless defiance is more important than the fact that it is hopeless.”
Move.
It appeared to Tegatchi as though the world was retreating from him. With each new handful of splintered bone and crumbled masonry, and each long scrape of his torso against the stone, it seemed the gleam of metal he sought was further from him, as though the universe had concluded that he would die here, and soon, and wanted to flee from the act of witnessing his final breath.
He's right, he old himself. This is hopeless. Better to roll over and face death.
No, some other part of his mind responded urgently. Move. Move!
Tolofsson twisted his foot again, inciting fresh paroxysms. Dimly, Tegatchi wondered whether he was screaming again. His senses didn’t seem to be working in concert anymore. Someone was screaming, he thought. Or whispering. It was hard to tell.
Above him, Tolofsson grunted with his own pain.
“Svengirsson’s blade would not have snapped like this,” he said, apparently to himself. He must have been pulling the remains of Tegachi’s knife from between his ribs. As he did so, he released his foot long enough for him to kick Svengirsson’s knife from Tegatchi's hand.
Tegatchi seized on the brief release his disarmament gave him ,and brought his agonising blood-stained crawl to an end.
The glinting object he had given everything to reach proved to be an ornate hilt, apparently of burnished gold, with its pommel carved into a leering skull. Whatever blade was attached lay hidden under an oozing pile of massacred cultists whose bodies had been tossed there after the Krakens had taken the cathedral.
It was a weapon, and Tegatchi grabbed for it. Though it was all but impossible not to lunge desperately forwards and start slashing for his foe’s innards then and there, Tegatchi fought to remain composure, reaching for the hilt as though he were simply attempting to crawl away by a few more inches, using his hand to shield the weapon from Tolofsson’s sight. As his filthy, bleeding fingers closed around the hilt (which surprised him with how warm it was), he turned his head upwards, attempting to see his foe’s face.
Tolofsson had indeed pulled the knife shard from his chest. Thick dark blood was running towards his legs, hardening even as Tegatchi watched as the genetic modifications in Tolofsson’s circulation system burst into hyperactivity.
As Tegatchi watched, Tolofsson stepped away from his wounded leg, allowing Tegatchi a full view of his would-be executioner. Tolofsson held the broken blade between his fingers, like the claws of a predator, it too was covered in blood already solid, but there was little doubt the edge could still cut Tegatchi’s throat without any appreciable effort.
“This is unfortunate,” Tolofsson said, indicating his improvised weapon. “I know you’ll be just as dead this way. But one does get attached to one‘s own weapons.”
There was the slightest hint of a shrug, and then Tolofsson was diving forwards and down, his arm outstretched, the fragment of knife screaming as it tore the air.
Kill him.
Tegatchi span himself onto his back, bellowing at the pain it caused, and pulled the hilt of his stolen weapon outwards and upwards in a long arc to meet his incoming foe. Striking at the only hope he had left.
It hadn’t occurred to him until he swung the hilt that he had no idea whether there was a blade attached.
There was. With a crackle of unfathomable energy and a burst of cold blue light, a savagely serrated glowing blade cut through the air like it was vacuum, and Tolofsson’s left forearm like it was wet paper.
In the end, Tolofsson was too surprised to even scream. All that could be heard was the muffled thud of his severed arm hitting the ground, and the hideous wet pulsing of his life blood as it cascaded from the stump. For a moment or two he stood there, swaying slightly, staring at the fountain of crimson liquid as it gushed from what remained of his limb. He might have been willing the coagulants to do their job, or perhaps he was simply waiting for the signals from his eyes to correlate with what his brain was prepared to believe.
Whatever was passing through his mind, it didn’t make any difference. After a few seconds shock kicked in full force, and Tolofssson toppled in a cloud of grey masonry dust and darkly glinting gobbets of blood.
Gradually, by inches, gritting his teeth so hard he became certain he would shatter them, Tegatchi drew himself to his feet. The effort once more set motes of light dancing across his vision. In fact, the entire world was fading out at the corners again, but this time it didn’t concern him in the slightest. Quite the contrary. This wasn’t death, it was purpose. The universe now consisted of exactly three things: Tolofsson, and the sword, and himself.
As he hobbled over to his fallen enemy, Tegatchi could just about register shouts of outages. He ignored them. The shadows that flitted through the world outside his foe and his weapon were moving again. He ignored that too.
Kill him.
Tegachi dragged the twisted remnants of his leg over to the prone form of his foe, and watched the arterial flow as it continued to weakly pump blood onto the floor to thicken the dust into dark, viscous streams.
Kill him.
Eagerly, Tegatchi raised his sword. This time he could swear it sounded less like the blade screamed as the air flowed around it, and more as though it sang.
The shouting was getting ever louder. The sharp bark of bolter fire suddenly added itself to the din. Still Tegatchi ignored it. Tolofsson, the sword, and himself.
Kill him. KILL HIM!
For a moment, Tegatchi paused. Had he not already won? Tolofsson could no longer threaten him. He could kill the old man any time he chose. It was no longer a battle, it was a formality. How did the Krakens, both his Caudan fellows and what remained of the sullen Kringrimmi, gain from the death of their seniormost chaplain?
NO! KILL HIM NOW! You cannot set aside your task! It must be complete!
Tegatchi took one final look at Tolofsson, laid as though sleeping peacefully in the spreading pool of his blood. He took one final look at the sword, viciously jagged and glowing coldly. And he took one final look at himself, at who he was, and what he was, and what he might be tomorrow.
This time there was no doubt. When he brought the blade down to strike Tolofsson’s face, the blade was unquestionably singing.
Monday, 1 March 2010
Having Been Human
Again, with the spoilers. Oh so many spoilers.
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Well, that was grim. And bleak. And bloody. Grim and bleak and bloody. Body counts are way up, and recurring characters still in possession of all necessary body parts or spiritual essences are way down.
It certainly deserves having a "The Horror tag" added to this post.
But was it any good. Well... Yes. Mainly. Sort of. In a sense.
There's a lot I could say about the two episodes that concluded this season, but for the sake of my fingers I'm just going to focus on one aspect to it; the one thing that bothered my thoughts the most after watching it: MaCMaFE.
When you get right down to it, I think that there are simply certain aspects of television that I am unable to entirely accept. Doubtless many of these have surfaced over the two years I've been writing this blog (almost to the day: time to order myself a cake) , but the one I'm mulling over right now is the Main Character Magnetic Field Effect (MaCMaFE).
I was lucky enough to be in my early to mid-teens when it first seemed to truly dawn on people that television shows did not have to be explicit serials in order to allow a story to run over multiple episodes, or even years. In a sense, I was growing up as television was. I remember very clearly finding an article in the Radio Times discussing those few TV series that had managed or bothered to break free of the "reset button" format (though this was back, I suspect, before that term was coined).
Even at that early age, I was entirely aware of how limiting a concept the repeated enforced return of the status quo was, and it irritated me a great deal. Either an event had to be entirely undone and implausibly resolved, or it did have lasting consequences, but they were simply (and conveniently) never mentioned again. Voyager was arguably the nadir of this concept, at least in sci-fi, partly because DS9 had demonstrated the value of allowing organic changes to the narrative and partially because of all the Trek shows (including the later Enterprise), it had the very least justification for trying to return to equilibrium each time.
Nowadays it's actually much harder to find a show that does reset each week (though that might well be selection bias on my part). This is, generally speaking, good news. True, it often makes things harder for shows by demanding more attention from their viewers (never an easy sell), and the trouble with constant movement is that you risk drifting too far from the original premise that made it all work in the first place (Gooder has argued several times, and I think rightly, that the point at which Scrubs dropped precipitously in quality was the exact moment each of the conflicts set up early in Season 1 had been resolved). On the whole, though, I'm glad for the change.
MaCMaFE is an inevitable side-effect of that shift, however. One of the advantages of at least partially serialising your show is that the conflict between the characters can become much more real and serious. The disadvantage is that real and serious conflicts often lead to people drifting apart.
It is one of life's little ironies (or my own little hypocrisies) that whilst I push for emotional and dramatic realism in the shows I watch, I tremble with dread at the thought of losing major characters. This is why I'm desperate for Annie to return in Season 3, even if she was totally wasted this year and Lenora Critchlow might well be advised to look elsewhere for her wage packet. The problem is, of course, losing "major characters" is exactly what happens in real life. It's entirely possible to have a major row with a friend and then not see them for weeks, or months, or ever again, and often, even when peace is declared, things are an awfully long way from being what they were. In TV land, where the shouting matches tend to be about whether or not someone blew up their mate's father's spaceship because he was possessed by a murderous killer parasite hellbent on galactic dominion, one would expect the rifts to be deeper than those we experience.
Instead, the opposite happens. Sooner or later, main characters forgive each other, or at least declare piece in a manner indistinguishable from forgiveness. They move back in together, or at least close enough to not need two sets anymore. Horrible, heartrending betrayals are smoothed over on the flimsiest of pretexts (I don't want to spoilerise anything here, but the first episode of True Blood Season 2 contained a particularly eye-popping example of this, which might be why it was on my mind as I watched Being Human a few minutes later). People change jobs and come right back. Relationships break up and both sides bicker endlessly without apparently considering the benefits of just not hanging out any more. Whatever it takes to keep the same people in the same situation, so the same viewers can watch without feeling alienated. It keeps me happy in the sense that we're still enjoying the adventures of the characters we love, but there's always the voice at the base of my skull, slowly growing in strength, telling me that this doesn't make sense. That these things aren't, and possibly shouldn't, be forgiven.
Having watched Being Human last night, it's impossible to ignore the strange low hum of a MaCMaFE generator once more being switched on (MaCMaFE generators are available at Currys, PC World, online at Amazon, and for those in a hurry, one can purchase the McDonald's McMaCMaFE and medium fries for £5 at your nearest drive-through). Surely, on the list of Bad Things main characters have done that will be tough to forgive, massacring an entire train carriage has to be fairly near the top. It's all the worse because Mitchell did it, at least in part, as revenge against humanity. As horrible, vicious, petty, directionless revenge. The show is called Being Human, for God's sake; it's whole existence resolves around the questions of redemption and what it means to be human. By declaring war on humanity, by destroying it utterly in the first box he found it in, Mitchell has done more than kill twenty people. He's killed his own humanity. It was already battered and bruised, perhaps even on life-support, but for two years the question has always been whether Mitchell can keep the embers alive through a squall of temptation (I can hear this metaphor starting to creak already).
But now? Now, it's simply dead. Mitchell can force the vampire within him to sleep for a while longer, but it won't be to allow his human side to surface anymore. He is now a vampire, or he's an empty box.
It's possible anyone reading this might argue I've gone too far. Well, maybe, but I'd note in my defence that I think showrunner Toby Whithouse agrees with me, at least in part. How else do we explain the last minute journey into perversion and mass murder embarked upon by the previously unflappable Kemp? Whithouse knows that you can't make your hero more sympathetic, you have to make your villain more villainous. And it worked, too, just about. I guess from a certain perspective you can understand how a man so devoted to the Bible might care little for psychics, even those he employs, and killing his clairvoyant henchman to banish Annie makes some sense in terms of a petulant swipe at Mitchell. But still, this is pantomime villainy. Once you reduce a character to killing because it's the easiest available option at that exact moment in time, you're not trafficking in shades of grey anymore. You're just in a race to the bottom. More than anything, its dramatic cheating, compensating for the darkness erupting from one of your heroes by painting everything he dislikes black, so we can still feel essentially comfortable. It's like how each episode of Hustle requires that the gang's mark be resolutely unpleasant, so we can feel good about watching criminals steal their money. Only this is worse, because it's more like someone having their money stolen by our heroes and then retroactively made into a bastard so we can claim that karma has done it's job, just whilst working along a different time dimension to the one we like to jog along.
So you find yourself watching a man of God licking the lipstick from co-workers stolen mug, and you grit your teeth through the sight of his head technician (whose name I've forgotten and will henceforth be known as Techie del Wankfest) proves to engage in acts of pointless peeping-Tom onanism (seriously; the guy can't work out how to get the internet in there?). Now they're bad, you see? They're all sexually weird and stuff. Being the latest in a long string of dead bodies is to good for 'em.
Is that true, though? Really? In the course of that facility being open, so far as we know, four werewolves have died. In each case, it was in the process of attempting to cure them. That in no way justifies either Kemp's callousness or the need to pre-order body bags (as Mitchell points out), but their deaths can plausibly be called second order; known as a likely result rather than specifically aimed for (and with an actual honest-to-God potential upside to those in question if the treatment worked). In addition, Kemp ordered the extermination of thirty mass murderers who the police have demonstrated they have no interest in actually, y'know, policing. Mitchell argued he had them under control, but we already know that this was, at best, temporarily true. He was already determined to leave. He was handing control of the group of addicts to a lapsed haemoholic, for fuck's sake, because he'd only just killed someone and now he wanted to run away. How long was the peace going to last? It's clear vampires almost if not actually invariably relapse; the very most noble one we know has killed twice in the last year.
So, thirty mass-murderers running around being ignored by the law are now dead. Again. And in return, twenty innocent human beings, none of which (so much as Mitchell knew) have so much as kicked a dog get ripped to shreds. Four failed cures and thirty stone-cold (literally) killers vs twenty innocents. Even I don't like reducing this sort of thing to cold numbers and functions, but if I did, it is to put it mildy massively uncertain that Mitchell would come out ahead when the final score is tallied.
But hey, MaCMaFE. So now Mitchell is skulking in another house, in another town,waiting for the next time he can't help but kill again. George may say he hasn't forgiven him, can't forgive him, maybe, but it doesn't matter. Time will pass and whether or not George has forgiven him won't matter at all. Eventually silence starts to sound like forgiveness anyway. Or it doesn't, and the guilt leads to a relapse, because guilt is smarter than you are and tends to hide exactly in the opposite direction to the one you assume it's heading.
Whether or not George can forgive him is irrelevant, of course. The question is whether we can. As black-hearted as Kemp proved to be, we never needed to believe anything different. What we believe about Mitchell is crucial, and I'm far from sure we can get back to where we were, or get to wherever else we need to.
Sunday, 28 February 2010
The Shake Experiment: Here Are The Final Facts
At long last, the shake experiment has concluded. But what conclusions can be concluded from that conclusion?
it seems rather like there's no real difference between the seven groupings. "Goo" looks a little slender in comparison to its colleagues, but that's about all. If we consider the mean value of each shake category:
Is that variation true, however, or just what the graph suggests. Let's check using the standard deviation of each category:
We argue then that within each set, category X dominates category Y if the mean of X is greater than Y and the standard deviation of X is less than Y.
Well... maybe not all that much. Taking into account the pie chart below:
it seems rather like there's no real difference between the seven groupings. "Goo" looks a little slender in comparison to its colleagues, but that's about all. If we consider the mean value of each shake category:Fruit 5.10
Sweets 5.75
Chocolate 6.70
Breakfast Cereal 6.05
Cakes 6.65
Biscuit 5.30
Goo 4.4
it's a bit easier to gauge the differences. Broadly speaking, the seven categories can be divided into four sets, {Chocolate, Cakes}, {Breakfast Cereal, Sweets}, {Biscuit, Fruit} and {Goo}, where the difference between the mean values of elements between sets is greater than the difference between mean values of elements within the set. From this, we might conclude that that first set is the optimal choice.
But is that the whole story? What about the variance of each category. Once again, we can illustrate this (rather crudely) with a bar chart:
This time the graph is a bit more helpful. Clearly chocolate is not only a good bet, but a reasonably consistent one as well. Cakes are even more consistent, which will make it difficult to choose between them. At the other end of the scale, goo is neither particularly enjoyable but desperately variable in addition. About the only further statement one might be willing to make is that the higher mean of biscuit over fruit combined with a slightly reduced variability might make us want to split up their category above.
Is that variation true, however, or just what the graph suggests. Let's check using the standard deviation of each category:
Fruit 1.834
Sweets 1.953
Sweets 1.953
Chocolate 1.237
Breakfast Cereal 1.690
Cakes 0.487
Biscuit 1.634
Cakes 0.487
Biscuit 1.634
Goo 2.155
We argue then that within each set, category X dominates category Y if the mean of X is greater than Y and the standard deviation of X is less than Y.
This process creates the following ordering: {Chocolate, Cakes}>{Breakfast Cereal}>{Sweets}>{Biscuit}>{Fruit}>{Goo}.
Obviously, this is only one method. But I have to say it tracks with my experience as a shake expert (I guess this makes this a Bayesian experiment, though BigHead will argue that's been true for some time). I am thus content to recommend those that visit Shake'a'Holic (though for Durham dwellers at least you might want to do it quickly, before the shop's seemingly inevitable lingering death) partake either of a chocolate or cake-based shape.
Right. That's that. Time to start planning the experimentation process by which I can compare cheese and beer...
Saturday, 27 February 2010
Taking Care
I still lack the heart to get into the nitty-gritty of the healthcare summit; other than to say it went pretty much exactly how I thought it would: the Republicans' last experience of live TV discussions with the President persuading them to come far better prepared this time.
However, since S. Spielbergo has spent some time discussing the overall situation over at his own blog, I thought I'd take a big risk and actually start tearing up online articles by people who are actually liable to respond.
And make no mistake, my deletion of Spielbergo's scare quotes is deliberate. The Republicans as a party are evil, or at least their actions are evil, if you'd rather think of it that way. There is simply no other way to describe people who ask their countrymen to elect them so as to serve their interests and then turn round and argue that it isn't worth trying to save the lives of 18 000 to 45 000 citizens every year.
I have no doubt that if the Republicans had brought a bill to the summit on Thursday, I would have despised it. There would already be thousands of posts up across the blogosphere about how terrible it was, and one would probably be mine. But at least at that point the Republicans could argue they were aware of the problem, and had an idea how to solve it, even if I thought that idea was ridiculous.
Instead, they said they had no intention of even considering the problem, and just tried to dodge the issue each time it was raised.
You can't do that, and it not be evil. These people volunteered to take responsibility for the general public, and then flat out refuse to even admit the existence of the problems that are quite literally killing many of those same people. Not only that, but they've actively argued the methods for saving lives the other side have suggested will lead to the government killing people. It takes a certain sort of moral vacuum to try and protect a status quo that kills people by stating that the changes will kill people and knowing damn well that you're lying. It's attempting to justify your willingness to let people die by pretending you care too much about them for you to risk them dying.
This goes back to my long-term problem with many conservatives; it's impossible to conclude that these people have an ounce of empathy for those failed by the system when all they do is insist those people don't exist. It's one thing to listen to a story about a woman forced to wear her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford to visit a dentist and then argue that hard choices have to be made in a society and we can't protect everyone; it's quite another to start mocking the idea that this mightn't be something we should put up with in one of the most affluent nations in the world. For sure, many people who do that sort of thing aren't evil, just appallingly callous (and bollocks to their complaints that they were "only joking"; you only get to claim you were joking when the rest of your behaviour makes it clear you didn't believe what you're saying). It only becomes evil when one has the direct ability to do something about it, and instead mocks the very idea that one should feel obliged to try.
Anyway. With that point aside, think there’s some conflation going on here in Spielbergo's argument. I do, as Spielbergo says, love the NHS. Crucially, this is not because I am European, it is because I am British. I’m sure plenty of French people love the French system and plenty of Swiss people the Swiss system. This is an important point because all three systems are very different. It does no-one any good to compare America's system to "Europe's".
Spielbergo is entirely right that the Democratic proposals are too timid to fix the current system. This is not because the system is fundamentally flawed, however. It’s only fundamentally flawed if you assume the US needs a specifically NHS-style system; a system to which the States is indeed probably institutionally (to say nothing of ideologically) incapable of applying. Choose something like, say, the Swiss system instead, however, and the degree of large-scale changes needed becomes far, far less. Those who know far more about these things than I do have been suggesting the Swiss model be adopted precisely for that reason; it works far better than the US model and is sufficiently structurally similar to make implementing it theoretically feasible with a minimum of fuss. I’m not sure I'd even would recommend anyone else following the NHS model at all, actually, since as far as I can determine it's chiefly noteworthy for the fact it manages to operate pretty well despite us putting so little money into it.
The second problem is that this argument only tracks following the most superficial consideration of the statistics. Yes, the vast majority of Americans list themselves as very or somewhat satisfied with their healthcare. Of course, it would be tempting here to argue that there was probably a time when the vast majority of Americans were OK with slavery too. I'm not going to, because the comparison would be unfair, but it does highlight the important truth that it is meaningless to cite the percentage of people happy with a situation without considering the damage being done to those not happy.
In any case, a closer look at the data suggests a different story. Fully two thirds of those who have had recourse to their insurance claims describe their bills as having a major adverse effect on their lives. Almost a quarter state they put off seeking medical help for lack of funds. More than half are concerned that losing their job will cost them their insurance (which raises another important point: being happy with what an system has allowed you is not the same as being happy with the system itself ). A fifth state they have had difficulty persuading their insurers to pay up.
Given this, the question is not "Why change a system so many people are happy with" so much as "How can a system with such drawbacks still lead to people being satisfied". My own personal take on this would be Occam's Razor; these people are satisfied because have no experience of alternative medical systems under which they'd be better, and because the nature of the current system is such that you can be rejected or bankrupted by insurers at the drop of a hat, which means many people are probably satisfied at least in part because they've escaped the worst case scenario.
Regardless of how close to the mark that speculation is, I'd argue it would be far more sensible to look at the stats regarding how insurance claims have affected people, rather than how much those people feel they're hard done by in comparison to others.
Lastly, and related to the above, the problem with this kind of appeal to the will of the masses is that never actually seems to account for that will properly. Sure, majority of American’s prefer their own healthcare, but a majority of them also believe the system should be changed. A wide margin more people (9%) support rather than oppose the Democratic HCR proposal once they know what is in it. This after over a year of being told the bill would explode the deficit and kill your Grandmother.
So it seems strange to argue that if most people like their current insurance it shouldn’t be changed, even if most people think it should. I know cherry picking polls and stats is hardly a practice limited to Republicans, but it doesn't make them right to do it.
Of course, the Republicans have spent a good deal of the last year pretending that is what’s been proposed, which should be the latest in a long line of clues that trying to fairly determine where they stand on this issue is liable to be a waste of one's time.
Second, when this particular argument fails, it isn’t proof the argument itself is bad, it’s proof that the Republicans are so far away from any position that can be squared with concern for their constituents, interest in carrying out their responsibilities, or a desire to negotiate in good faith, that every single word put down in a paragraph that starts with “Looking at it from their perspective...” is tragic waste of vowels and consonants that might otherwise have been used to describe a good movie or craft a dick joke.
What Spielbergo means, as far as I can discern, is that the only way a political argument can be good is if the other side is either forced to agree with it in public, or pretends not to agree with it but changes their stance anyway. As a general rule, I would agree that those are the arguments that could certainly be considered the most successful within political circles (outside of the court of public opinion, though of course that's still relevant because it's only when they're paying attention that it matters that a party has been forced into admitting the other side have a point). In this case, though, it doesn’t matter, because Obama is coming at the Republicans with their own arguments, and they’re still pretending they don’t agree. There are any number of provisions within this bill that Republicans still in Congress are on the record for having supported. Last year, the general feeling amongst the GOP was that 80% of the HCR bill was in line with their philosophy, it was just that that wasn’t enough. Fast forward to now, though, and all of those Republican ideas included in the hopes of getting them to sign on are now repeatedly decried as offences against democracy.
So even if we did make the mistake of believing an argument is only good if the other side will confess to agreeing with it, there quite simply isn’t such a creature left in the rhetorical world. Because using the HCR bill (or anything else) to sink Obama’s presidency is the only thing, literally the only thing, the GOP cares about right now.
Now, you can argue that such is their role as the opposition. I would disagree, I think the role of opposition is to keep the party in power honest rather than to thwart its ability to govern – the will of the people, and so forth - but you could make the case, though you'd have to explain to me how it's OK to, say, block appointees to high-level military positions in the middle of two wars whilst confessing no having no idea whether or not they're qualified.
Regardless of your position on what the minority party should consider itself entitled to do, what the current behaviour of the Republicans clearly demonstrates is that Spielbergo is looking for a method of persuasion that quite simply does not exist. The thought process by which one assumes that method must exist - and I see no other way to read Spielbergo's argument other than that he believes this, unless he's prepared to argue there exist literally no "good" arguments for reform - and so any that fail must have been flawed in some way, is the same one that leads to people like David Broder arguing that any time the Republicans filibuster a bill it must be the Democrat’s fault for not giving them enough of the things they want, and that the only way “bipartisanship” can fail is if the side more willing to compromise isn’t prepared to compromise enough.
Not that I think Spielbergo is the next David Broder, of course. I mean, I may be telling everyone I think his arguments are wrong, but I don’t want to insult the guy.
None of this matters, though, since it's not remotely the case that the Republicans would want it at all. What exactly is being proposed here? Forcing the drugs companies to reduce their prices? How will that help? Research costs what it costs. Reducing what the Americans pay to what we pay isn't going to do any good for those who make the pills, and I simply don't see anything the Americans can do to force us to pay more. Certainly I don't see any way they can do that by enacting entirely internal changes.
So what would the Republicans suggest? Replacing the money individuals pay for the drugs with government money for research? The GOP is already screaming (incorrectly) about the bill costing too much. Forcing a cap on the amount a pill can cost? That's fundamentally at odds with the way Republicans do things that it could never happen even if so many of them weren't receiving healthy amounts of cash from those same companies.
Certainly it seems clear to me that the search for this entirely mythological “good argument” is going to have to go a good deal further than “If you let us reduce costs in every other way, we’ll allow you to reduce the amount of subsidisation powerful pharmaceutical businesses will receive.” In truth, that might actually theoretically work if the Republicans were suggesting that to the Democrats (though realistically I very, very much doubt it would), but the suggestion that the best way to get the GOP to sign on with the Democrat’s agenda is to include provisions that will hobble major donors to Republican campaigns strikes me as pretty unpersuasive, however much the Republicans might agree that letting the rest of the world pay less for US drugs is a bad idea.
In fact, Spielbergo may not have seen this particular topic come up during the HCR discussion, but I have, or at least a couple of things that were very close. There were several abortive discussions generated on whether to introduce amendments to the bill that would allow the US government to either directly force pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices for American consumers, or start buying American drugs back off the Canadians, since that would still be cheaper than buying them first hand.
Anyone want to guess which party was interested in reducing American drugs costs? And which party immediately labelled the idea as socialism in action?
However, since S. Spielbergo has spent some time discussing the overall situation over at his own blog, I thought I'd take a big risk and actually start tearing up online articles by people who are actually liable to respond.
For us Europeans the American system just boggles the mind – we just can’t begin to fathom why they don’t have a similar system to us. I mean as much as we complain about it, we basically love our NHS (well your NHS and my small island equivalent). We like that we never need to be concerned about having the right cover, or that our insurance premiums will go up, or getting a long term condition or any of that rubbish the Yanks have to deal with on our daily basis.Actually, it's not at all hard to understand why those evil Republicans don’t want the idea, any more than it’s hard to understand why they don’t want people’s inheritance taxed, corporate money into their coffers limited, illegal immigrants given medical care, and so on: it’s predominantly a combination of dogmatically insisting freedom is exclusively determined by what the law doesn’t prevent combined with a pathological fear of people getting money the GOP thinks they don’t deserve.
We’re basically used to what we have, and we like it so it’s hard to understand why those “evil” Republicans are so hell bent against the idea…
At this point it is worth pointing out that in my view the Democrats aren’t a lot better and most of their suggestions are just improvements on a broken system rather than the complete rebuild it actually needs.
And make no mistake, my deletion of Spielbergo's scare quotes is deliberate. The Republicans as a party are evil, or at least their actions are evil, if you'd rather think of it that way. There is simply no other way to describe people who ask their countrymen to elect them so as to serve their interests and then turn round and argue that it isn't worth trying to save the lives of 18 000 to 45 000 citizens every year.
I have no doubt that if the Republicans had brought a bill to the summit on Thursday, I would have despised it. There would already be thousands of posts up across the blogosphere about how terrible it was, and one would probably be mine. But at least at that point the Republicans could argue they were aware of the problem, and had an idea how to solve it, even if I thought that idea was ridiculous.
Instead, they said they had no intention of even considering the problem, and just tried to dodge the issue each time it was raised.
You can't do that, and it not be evil. These people volunteered to take responsibility for the general public, and then flat out refuse to even admit the existence of the problems that are quite literally killing many of those same people. Not only that, but they've actively argued the methods for saving lives the other side have suggested will lead to the government killing people. It takes a certain sort of moral vacuum to try and protect a status quo that kills people by stating that the changes will kill people and knowing damn well that you're lying. It's attempting to justify your willingness to let people die by pretending you care too much about them for you to risk them dying.
This goes back to my long-term problem with many conservatives; it's impossible to conclude that these people have an ounce of empathy for those failed by the system when all they do is insist those people don't exist. It's one thing to listen to a story about a woman forced to wear her dead sister's dentures because she couldn't afford to visit a dentist and then argue that hard choices have to be made in a society and we can't protect everyone; it's quite another to start mocking the idea that this mightn't be something we should put up with in one of the most affluent nations in the world. For sure, many people who do that sort of thing aren't evil, just appallingly callous (and bollocks to their complaints that they were "only joking"; you only get to claim you were joking when the rest of your behaviour makes it clear you didn't believe what you're saying). It only becomes evil when one has the direct ability to do something about it, and instead mocks the very idea that one should feel obliged to try.
Anyway. With that point aside, think there’s some conflation going on here in Spielbergo's argument. I do, as Spielbergo says, love the NHS. Crucially, this is not because I am European, it is because I am British. I’m sure plenty of French people love the French system and plenty of Swiss people the Swiss system. This is an important point because all three systems are very different. It does no-one any good to compare America's system to "Europe's".
Spielbergo is entirely right that the Democratic proposals are too timid to fix the current system. This is not because the system is fundamentally flawed, however. It’s only fundamentally flawed if you assume the US needs a specifically NHS-style system; a system to which the States is indeed probably institutionally (to say nothing of ideologically) incapable of applying. Choose something like, say, the Swiss system instead, however, and the degree of large-scale changes needed becomes far, far less. Those who know far more about these things than I do have been suggesting the Swiss model be adopted precisely for that reason; it works far better than the US model and is sufficiently structurally similar to make implementing it theoretically feasible with a minimum of fuss. I’m not sure I'd even would recommend anyone else following the NHS model at all, actually, since as far as I can determine it's chiefly noteworthy for the fact it manages to operate pretty well despite us putting so little money into it.
Anyway when you stop and think about it from the Republicans perspective you can kind of (well kind of) get what their problem is with the idea. They have a system already in place that the majority of Americans are happy with – yes there are some holes (and some pretty big ones at that), but the system by and large seems fairly popular. First point for a conservative is therefore why rock the boat? If it isn’t broke don’t fix it and all that jazz.There are three problems with arguing that the system is fairly popular. The first is the most obvious: the fact that people are happy now does not mean they'll be happy in a few years following the massive increases in insurance premiums heading down the pipe (and which have already been announced in some states, like Maine and California). Arguing that a system isn't broken yet is embarrassingly short-sighted, and doesn't deserve to be considered as a sensible objection unless those people arguing it can suggest how to fix it at a later date. Certainly, anyone who argues we need to do something about global warming must immediately recognise the foolishness of this argument, since right now, the planet isn't exactly in dire straits. So why worry, huh?
The second problem is that this argument only tracks following the most superficial consideration of the statistics. Yes, the vast majority of Americans list themselves as very or somewhat satisfied with their healthcare. Of course, it would be tempting here to argue that there was probably a time when the vast majority of Americans were OK with slavery too. I'm not going to, because the comparison would be unfair, but it does highlight the important truth that it is meaningless to cite the percentage of people happy with a situation without considering the damage being done to those not happy.
In any case, a closer look at the data suggests a different story. Fully two thirds of those who have had recourse to their insurance claims describe their bills as having a major adverse effect on their lives. Almost a quarter state they put off seeking medical help for lack of funds. More than half are concerned that losing their job will cost them their insurance (which raises another important point: being happy with what an system has allowed you is not the same as being happy with the system itself ). A fifth state they have had difficulty persuading their insurers to pay up.
Given this, the question is not "Why change a system so many people are happy with" so much as "How can a system with such drawbacks still lead to people being satisfied". My own personal take on this would be Occam's Razor; these people are satisfied because have no experience of alternative medical systems under which they'd be better, and because the nature of the current system is such that you can be rejected or bankrupted by insurers at the drop of a hat, which means many people are probably satisfied at least in part because they've escaped the worst case scenario.
Regardless of how close to the mark that speculation is, I'd argue it would be far more sensible to look at the stats regarding how insurance claims have affected people, rather than how much those people feel they're hard done by in comparison to others.
Lastly, and related to the above, the problem with this kind of appeal to the will of the masses is that never actually seems to account for that will properly. Sure, majority of American’s prefer their own healthcare, but a majority of them also believe the system should be changed. A wide margin more people (9%) support rather than oppose the Democratic HCR proposal once they know what is in it. This after over a year of being told the bill would explode the deficit and kill your Grandmother.
So it seems strange to argue that if most people like their current insurance it shouldn’t be changed, even if most people think it should. I know cherry picking polls and stats is hardly a practice limited to Republicans, but it doesn't make them right to do it.
The second issue is they are quite firmly behind the idea of small government – Now the NHS in the UK comprises £119bn in costs – which means to add it on (if we didn’t already have it) would increase spending by about 30%. You ask any proponent of smaller government if they want to take a system out of the private sector and increase government spending by 30%, I’m pretty sure they are going to turn around with a very large NO!The problem with this argument is that the current cost of American healthcare to the taxpayer is already higher than ours. Nor is anyone suggesting taking a system out of the private sector, this is about regulating that part of the private sector more stringently. Now, a "small government" conservative can certainly still object to the increased regulation, but make no mistake; said conservative would be making that argument despite a reduction in the tax burden, not in addition to it. Moreover, as I've said, comparing the proposed changes in the US system to the NHS is pointless, because no-one has proposed aping the NHS in any case.
Of course, the Republicans have spent a good deal of the last year pretending that is what’s been proposed, which should be the latest in a long line of clues that trying to fairly determine where they stand on this issue is liable to be a waste of one's time.
And yes Squid I know all those 50 million uninsured and 18,000 dying each year should be a good argument – But well it hasn’t worked so clearly it isn’t.This is, needless to say, entirely backwards, if not out-and-out insane. First of all, this implies that an argument is only good if it works, and that it works only if the other side immediately capitulates based on its quality, which is so far away from the way politics works I’m amazed anyone could possibly suggest it. Whether or not an argument works depends not on the opposition agreeing with it (and just how often do you see that happen?), but on how well it drives public opinion, shoring up the poll numbers that might just persuade someone (in this case the Democrats) to stop cowering and get something done. Getting the Republicans to admit they're wrong has never been the objective. Persuading the public the Republicans are wrong is the name of the game.
Second, when this particular argument fails, it isn’t proof the argument itself is bad, it’s proof that the Republicans are so far away from any position that can be squared with concern for their constituents, interest in carrying out their responsibilities, or a desire to negotiate in good faith, that every single word put down in a paragraph that starts with “Looking at it from their perspective...” is tragic waste of vowels and consonants that might otherwise have been used to describe a good movie or craft a dick joke.
What Spielbergo means, as far as I can discern, is that the only way a political argument can be good is if the other side is either forced to agree with it in public, or pretends not to agree with it but changes their stance anyway. As a general rule, I would agree that those are the arguments that could certainly be considered the most successful within political circles (outside of the court of public opinion, though of course that's still relevant because it's only when they're paying attention that it matters that a party has been forced into admitting the other side have a point). In this case, though, it doesn’t matter, because Obama is coming at the Republicans with their own arguments, and they’re still pretending they don’t agree. There are any number of provisions within this bill that Republicans still in Congress are on the record for having supported. Last year, the general feeling amongst the GOP was that 80% of the HCR bill was in line with their philosophy, it was just that that wasn’t enough. Fast forward to now, though, and all of those Republican ideas included in the hopes of getting them to sign on are now repeatedly decried as offences against democracy.
So even if we did make the mistake of believing an argument is only good if the other side will confess to agreeing with it, there quite simply isn’t such a creature left in the rhetorical world. Because using the HCR bill (or anything else) to sink Obama’s presidency is the only thing, literally the only thing, the GOP cares about right now.
Now, you can argue that such is their role as the opposition. I would disagree, I think the role of opposition is to keep the party in power honest rather than to thwart its ability to govern – the will of the people, and so forth - but you could make the case, though you'd have to explain to me how it's OK to, say, block appointees to high-level military positions in the middle of two wars whilst confessing no having no idea whether or not they're qualified.
Regardless of your position on what the minority party should consider itself entitled to do, what the current behaviour of the Republicans clearly demonstrates is that Spielbergo is looking for a method of persuasion that quite simply does not exist. The thought process by which one assumes that method must exist - and I see no other way to read Spielbergo's argument other than that he believes this, unless he's prepared to argue there exist literally no "good" arguments for reform - and so any that fail must have been flawed in some way, is the same one that leads to people like David Broder arguing that any time the Republicans filibuster a bill it must be the Democrat’s fault for not giving them enough of the things they want, and that the only way “bipartisanship” can fail is if the side more willing to compromise isn’t prepared to compromise enough.
Not that I think Spielbergo is the next David Broder, of course. I mean, I may be telling everyone I think his arguments are wrong, but I don’t want to insult the guy.
Now onto the main point I wanted to make – and the one that surprises me the Republicans don’t seem to have cottoned onto – We Europeans get to buy all these drugs and things, but we don’t spend anywhere near the amount the Americans spend.This, at least, I agree with entirely, in so much as I’m sure the Republicans probably do hate this (Democrats, too), though I suspect many of them can console themselves with endless whiskey sours at the next banquet a drugs company throws for it’s – ahem - “friends” in Congress. Having said that, though, it’s far from clear to me how reforming the US health care system would in any way help, at least in the way it's currently considered. Firstly, the drugs price issue is currently essentially separate to that of HCR. I get why it shouldn't be: if drugs were cheaper so would insurance tariffs, but at present the Democrats have shied away from confronting the pharmaceutical industry as much as possible. Crucially, though, whilst you can lower drug prices and thus improve the insurance issue, I don't see how reforming insurance will make one iota of difference to the cost of drugs, which makes it hard to see how Spielbergo expects there to be a reduction in costs.
...
US dollars subsidise our Healthcare.
And more specifically every American Citizen paying for health insurance is helping us over in Europe and Canada get better drugs cheaper than we should otherwise have it.
None of this matters, though, since it's not remotely the case that the Republicans would want it at all. What exactly is being proposed here? Forcing the drugs companies to reduce their prices? How will that help? Research costs what it costs. Reducing what the Americans pay to what we pay isn't going to do any good for those who make the pills, and I simply don't see anything the Americans can do to force us to pay more. Certainly I don't see any way they can do that by enacting entirely internal changes.
So what would the Republicans suggest? Replacing the money individuals pay for the drugs with government money for research? The GOP is already screaming (incorrectly) about the bill costing too much. Forcing a cap on the amount a pill can cost? That's fundamentally at odds with the way Republicans do things that it could never happen even if so many of them weren't receiving healthy amounts of cash from those same companies.
Certainly it seems clear to me that the search for this entirely mythological “good argument” is going to have to go a good deal further than “If you let us reduce costs in every other way, we’ll allow you to reduce the amount of subsidisation powerful pharmaceutical businesses will receive.” In truth, that might actually theoretically work if the Republicans were suggesting that to the Democrats (though realistically I very, very much doubt it would), but the suggestion that the best way to get the GOP to sign on with the Democrat’s agenda is to include provisions that will hobble major donors to Republican campaigns strikes me as pretty unpersuasive, however much the Republicans might agree that letting the rest of the world pay less for US drugs is a bad idea.
In fact, Spielbergo may not have seen this particular topic come up during the HCR discussion, but I have, or at least a couple of things that were very close. There were several abortive discussions generated on whether to introduce amendments to the bill that would allow the US government to either directly force pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices for American consumers, or start buying American drugs back off the Canadians, since that would still be cheaper than buying them first hand.
Anyone want to guess which party was interested in reducing American drugs costs? And which party immediately labelled the idea as socialism in action?
Thursday, 25 February 2010
State Of The Union
Whilst we wait to see what effect the Health Care Summit will have on the landscape (pretty much everyone seems to be saying "Not much", which I'd say was likely but far from certain), there are a couple of other interesting recent articles to consider. If nothing else, the three links below sum up an awful lot of what is so disgracefully wrong with the American system.
First of all, anyone still having trouble understanding why I spend so much time beating on the American media might want to take a look at this article, in which the New York Times concludes that there exists no conflict between calling themselves the "paper of record" and refusing to retract articles, irrespective of the amassed evidence that they are false, unless the guy that gave them the story - who was since arrested in an attempt to bug a Senator's office - admits he was lying.
Compare this with something like the Dan Rather incident, where three people were fired and Rather allegedly forced into retirement by CBC because they ran a story based on documents later found to have been forged by someone else. I guess accusing the President of doing something based on evidence which you later discover is false is far worse than accusing a non-profit organisation that helps racial minorities receive their constitutional rights of something which you later discover has been fabricated by an apparent criminal. Or maybe "paper of record" means you get to have a more relaxed standard of truth-telling. Maybe they'll just "record" anything their Public Editor unilaterally decides cannot be categorically proved as false.
And whilst we're on the subject of ACORN, the constant bleating by almost everyone from ombudsmen to Jon Stewart over how the media hadn't blindly piled on nearly enough, and the quite simply insane decision by Congress to strip said organisation of all federal funds - further proof, were it needed, that the constant noise machine of FOX, Drudge, talk radio and Republican officials invariably leads to everyone else in the government and media scrabbling around in a desperate effort to concur with as much stone-cold wingnut bullshit as is humanly possible - let's take a moment to consider the an organisation Congress believes should keep being sent taxpayer dollars.
Got that, people? Giving legal advice to pimps: unacceptable. Giving money to pimps, so as to procure a prostitute? No worries.
Of course, whilst this latest example of breathtaking hypocrisy might be particularly easy to spot, given they both involve pimps what are given shit, Blackwater would still have some way to go to reach the sickening level of Halliburton. Nothing says worthy of access to the public purse like gang-raping employees and blocking their access to legal recourse, huh? I mean, if she even was raped; maybe she was just delusional after being locked in a fucking box for 24 hours. It's a tough call. [1]
Presumably this exceptionally harrowing and upsetting story is why as many as 10 Republican Senators were persuaded to support an amendment that would withdraw funding from any company that prevented its employees from seeking legsal support.
Just think about that for a second. 75% of Republican Senators voted against a law designed to prevent rape victims being cut off from the justice system (number of Republican Congresspeople who voted against defunding ACORN: zero). A law written to tell those companies the taxpayers subsidise that as a bare minimum, they couldn't tell their employees that their only response to a sexual assault was to either quit or to keep their fucking mouths shut.
Of course, not only did 30 or so Republican Senators decide that rape victims were less of a concern than the merest fractional strengthening of employment laws, they actually had the nerve to start complaining that Senator Franken, by introducing the amendment, had forced them to vote against the interssts of sexually assaulted women. The nerve of the man!
This is the American problem in a nutshell. Hiring pimps is a non-issue, but helping them get what they are legally entitled to is a disgrace. Falsely accusing the powerful without effect leads to dismissal, but falsely accusing the average Joe leading to government punishmens is just worthy of tinkering with future semantic language. Abandoning rape victims is unfortunate, but limiting employer's actions is disasterous. And, on top of it all, the real villains in American politics are not those who ignore their responsibilities to their citizens, it is those who force their colleagues to confront those responsibilities.
Which brings me back to healthcare. It took me two hours on and off to write this post. Over that time, eight US citizens died due to a lack of health care. The current scuttlebutt in DC is that Congressman Stupak is once again threatening to sink HCR over his objections that poor women can get abortions as well as rich ones. He thinks "it's not the end of the world" if the bill fails to pass.
If we can be sure of nothing else in this ridiculous and heartbreaking situation, it's that it's going to be the end of a lot of people's worlds.
Pass the damn bill.
[1] Vitriol aside, I do realise that a story does not become more plausible simply because it is more hideous. It's taken more than four years to get to the point where an Appeals Court has ruled she has the right to be heard in open court, so we're still waiting to hear the full story (if indeed we ever will). What is most certainly clear however is that Jones' story might be true, and that Halliburton's attempts to block her access to the legal process are disgraceful and unjustifiable even if she is later found to be lying.
First of all, anyone still having trouble understanding why I spend so much time beating on the American media might want to take a look at this article, in which the New York Times concludes that there exists no conflict between calling themselves the "paper of record" and refusing to retract articles, irrespective of the amassed evidence that they are false, unless the guy that gave them the story - who was since arrested in an attempt to bug a Senator's office - admits he was lying.
Compare this with something like the Dan Rather incident, where three people were fired and Rather allegedly forced into retirement by CBC because they ran a story based on documents later found to have been forged by someone else. I guess accusing the President of doing something based on evidence which you later discover is false is far worse than accusing a non-profit organisation that helps racial minorities receive their constitutional rights of something which you later discover has been fabricated by an apparent criminal. Or maybe "paper of record" means you get to have a more relaxed standard of truth-telling. Maybe they'll just "record" anything their Public Editor unilaterally decides cannot be categorically proved as false.
And whilst we're on the subject of ACORN, the constant bleating by almost everyone from ombudsmen to Jon Stewart over how the media hadn't blindly piled on nearly enough, and the quite simply insane decision by Congress to strip said organisation of all federal funds - further proof, were it needed, that the constant noise machine of FOX, Drudge, talk radio and Republican officials invariably leads to everyone else in the government and media scrabbling around in a desperate effort to concur with as much stone-cold wingnut bullshit as is humanly possible - let's take a moment to consider the an organisation Congress believes should keep being sent taxpayer dollars.
Got that, people? Giving legal advice to pimps: unacceptable. Giving money to pimps, so as to procure a prostitute? No worries.
Of course, whilst this latest example of breathtaking hypocrisy might be particularly easy to spot, given they both involve pimps what are given shit, Blackwater would still have some way to go to reach the sickening level of Halliburton. Nothing says worthy of access to the public purse like gang-raping employees and blocking their access to legal recourse, huh? I mean, if she even was raped; maybe she was just delusional after being locked in a fucking box for 24 hours. It's a tough call. [1]
Presumably this exceptionally harrowing and upsetting story is why as many as 10 Republican Senators were persuaded to support an amendment that would withdraw funding from any company that prevented its employees from seeking legsal support.
Just think about that for a second. 75% of Republican Senators voted against a law designed to prevent rape victims being cut off from the justice system (number of Republican Congresspeople who voted against defunding ACORN: zero). A law written to tell those companies the taxpayers subsidise that as a bare minimum, they couldn't tell their employees that their only response to a sexual assault was to either quit or to keep their fucking mouths shut.
Of course, not only did 30 or so Republican Senators decide that rape victims were less of a concern than the merest fractional strengthening of employment laws, they actually had the nerve to start complaining that Senator Franken, by introducing the amendment, had forced them to vote against the interssts of sexually assaulted women. The nerve of the man!
This is the American problem in a nutshell. Hiring pimps is a non-issue, but helping them get what they are legally entitled to is a disgrace. Falsely accusing the powerful without effect leads to dismissal, but falsely accusing the average Joe leading to government punishmens is just worthy of tinkering with future semantic language. Abandoning rape victims is unfortunate, but limiting employer's actions is disasterous. And, on top of it all, the real villains in American politics are not those who ignore their responsibilities to their citizens, it is those who force their colleagues to confront those responsibilities.
Which brings me back to healthcare. It took me two hours on and off to write this post. Over that time, eight US citizens died due to a lack of health care. The current scuttlebutt in DC is that Congressman Stupak is once again threatening to sink HCR over his objections that poor women can get abortions as well as rich ones. He thinks "it's not the end of the world" if the bill fails to pass.
If we can be sure of nothing else in this ridiculous and heartbreaking situation, it's that it's going to be the end of a lot of people's worlds.
Pass the damn bill.
[1] Vitriol aside, I do realise that a story does not become more plausible simply because it is more hideous. It's taken more than four years to get to the point where an Appeals Court has ruled she has the right to be heard in open court, so we're still waiting to hear the full story (if indeed we ever will). What is most certainly clear however is that Jones' story might be true, and that Halliburton's attempts to block her access to the legal process are disgraceful and unjustifiable even if she is later found to be lying.
Wednesday, 24 February 2010
Breaking Naan Bread With The Enemy
I'm all for universal peace and harmony and the peaceful and profitable interaction between all colours and creeds, but Vindaloo Against Violence?
I have no idea how common anti-Indian violence is in Australia; clearly any amount is too much, but is the consumption of ludicrously hot curry really likely to decrease tensions? Kormas Against Klansmen might work, once you get past the concern of whether one is simply swapping racial hostility for racial stereotyping, but vindaloo?
That's like Torture for Tolerance. Burns for Brotherhood. You may as well try to promote African-American culture in the States by lining up every white person in the country and getting Mike Tyson to punch them all in the face.
On the other hand, this is probably very good news for Australian dentists. I wonder how many of them are Indian?
h/t to Chuck.
I have no idea how common anti-Indian violence is in Australia; clearly any amount is too much, but is the consumption of ludicrously hot curry really likely to decrease tensions? Kormas Against Klansmen might work, once you get past the concern of whether one is simply swapping racial hostility for racial stereotyping, but vindaloo?
That's like Torture for Tolerance. Burns for Brotherhood. You may as well try to promote African-American culture in the States by lining up every white person in the country and getting Mike Tyson to punch them all in the face.
On the other hand, this is probably very good news for Australian dentists. I wonder how many of them are Indian?
h/t to Chuck.
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