An Open Letter To My American Friends About The NHS
I did want today to write something about comics, and I’ve also got a playlist I want to post, but I felt compelled to write this after various news reports over the last couple of days. Unlike most of my writing (to which I retain the rights for various reasons, I’ve decided to license this piece as Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License because I want people to share this by whatever means. I’ve emailed the following to as many of my USian friends as I can think of and have valid email addresses for (and at least a dozen who it turns out I *don’t* have valid email addresses for, if the bounce messages are anything to go by…):
I am writing to you because you are a friend of mine, because of various statements that have been made by American politicians and journalists about Britain’s National Health Service.
I do not like to try to interfere in American politics, because how you run your country is your own business, but your politicians have been lying, and they have been lying about me and my wife and many of our friends and relatives, so I feel an obligation to set the record straight.
Many of your politicians and journalists have been saying things like “Ted Kennedy wouldn’t get treatment for his brain tumour in the UK because of his age” (a Republican senator called Chuck Grassley said that). Sarah Palin said that in the UK babies with Down’s Syndrome would have to go before a ‘death panel’. And so on. I’m sure you’ve all heard many claims like this yourself.
These claims are lies, pure and simple. They’re not ‘opinions’ that people can disagree about, they’re not things that can be debated, they’re not honest mistakes, they’re out-and-out lies.
Many of you will know that I worked for the NHS for about three years. Some of you will also know that Holly, my wife, still does. Do we strike you as people who would work for an organisation that killed people? Your politicians and journalists are accusing us of being knowing accomplices to murder.
According to the CIA World Factbook, British people live on average seven months longer than Americans. Now, that doesn’t say much about either country’s health-care system, especially when you take lifestyle differences into account, but what you *can* tell from that is that we’re not killing our old people – you don’t get a high life expectancy by killing people!
The tiny grain of truth in all of these lies is that in the NHS, an organisation called the National Institute for Clinical Excellence decides what treatments the NHS will and will not pay for. It does this by measuring how much extra healthy life a given treatment will give a patient, and how much it costs – just like your insurance company does. All healthcare systems have a budget – no system can spend an infinite amount of money, after all – so choices have to be made. The difference is, in your system, the choice is made based on whether you can afford to pay for it. Here, the choice is made based on how much you need it. If you’re 77 years old, like Ted Kennedy, and you have a brain tumour, you’ll get treatment so long as there’s a good chance of it working and giving you a few more years of good life. If there isn’t much chance of that, the government won’t pay it, that’s all. Just like your insurance company won’t pay for expensive treatments that won’t help you, neither will the British government.
And no-one is stopped from paying for treatment if it’s not funded by the NHS. People in Britain can still get private health insurance if they want to and can afford it, and can ask for treatments that the NHS don’t provide. Mostly they don’t, because it works for most people.
I know at least one homeless person who has been given treatment for cancer – and he was homeless before the treatments, not because of them – in Britain, if you’re sick you will get treated, no matter how much money you have. And no matter how old you are, or how disabled.
One American news source recently said that Professor Stephen Hawking would be allowed to die over here, because of his illness. In fact Prof. Hawking has lived in the UK all his life and has nothing but praise for his treatment by the NHS. Sarah Palin says people with Down’s Syndrome would be refused treatment – that would be news to the people with Down’s Syndrome I used to work with, many of whom had had heart operations on the NHS.
On average, people in the USA spend twice as much on healthcare as people in Britain – and more than any country in the world. Despite that, according to the World Health Organisation, the USA’s health system is 37th in the world, while the British one is 18th.
There are plenty of faults with the British health care system – and I hope that your legislators learn from them and get you a better system than we have – but it works. We do not kill old people. We do not kill disabled people. If we did, then Holly and I , instead of working for the NHS, would be fighting against it with every ounce of strength we have.
There are arguments that can be made against our system, just as there are arguments for it, and if you agree with those arguments then that’s fine – I have no intention to change your mind here. I am just trying to let you know that I am not an accessory to murder, and that anyone who says I am is a liar.
Linkblogging for 10/08/09
I’m going to link to a few things here, but the only one I really care about is this – Andrew Rilstone’s new pdf ‘zine, with which he’s broken his five-month blog silence. I’ve only read the first quarter, but I can already say it’s one of the best things (if not *the* best) I’ve read on comics this year – a series of discursive essays on Watchmen – film and book, childhood, Stan Lee , silver age Supergirl comics and 1940s Superman radio shows sponsored by Kellog’s Pep (but mostly Watchmen). I think Pillock will especially like this, but everyone should have a look.
ETA After reading the whole thing, I can safely say it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever read about Watchmen, and one of the best things Rilstone’s ever done.
In other news – Charlotte Gore isn’t a witch, she’s a nutter.
A good post on women in free software, asking among other things what can be learned from the experiences of Dreamwidth.
I don’t know why I haven’t linked it before, but I hope you’ve all been reading RIck Veitch’s Subtleman strip…
And Bruce Schneier has a good post on risk intuition.
Some actual content tomorrow – probably comics-based – as well as my return to Twitter (I hope). Been a very busy week at work…
Linkblogging for 09/08/09
Just a quick one today as I have an infection that’s swelled my tongue up to the size of my head and given me a migraine…
Big Finish have reduced the prices of a load of their Doctor Who spin-off series to a fiver – when you buy them you get a DRM-free MP3 download immediately and a CD through the post (post is free). The series involved are Bernice Summerfield (a companion from the books, the first story of which is written by Paul Cornell, who I know some of you like), Gallifrey (a series that starts out as an interesting SF political drama but gets all mystical-story-arc by the end, featuring both Romanas, Leela and both K9s), I, Davros (the life of Davros in the style of I, Claudius, sort of), Dalek Empire (you can guess what that one’s about) and Doctor Who Unbound (a ‘What If…’ series, featuring different actors playing the Doctor in different continuities).
If you’re going to buy one, I’d recommend either Masters Of War (an Unbound story featuring David Warner as the Doctor, with the Brigadier and Davros and an unusual take on the Daleks) or, one of my favourites, Deadline (in which a writer played by Derek Jacobi muses about how much better his life would have been had that TV series Doctor Who he’d worked on in the early 60s ever been made).
Eddie Campbell talks about why comics created as film pitches are so poor, and the difference between the meaning of a story and a recounting of its plot.
Alex reviews the Peter Davison Doctor Who story Kinda and Doctor Who And The Silurians.
Jim Jay talks about the Greek woman who supposedly set light to an English tourist’s genitals. After having just spent a week in a tourist-trap in Greece I can see exactly why she did it…
Sara at Orcinus is worried that the Republicans in the US are turning towards actual fascism.
And Costigan looks at the Home Office response to claims that ID cards can be cloned.
A Guide To My Blogroll Part 2 – L – M
Again, as I said before, but for those just coming in, who I link in my blogroll on the right is very much an arbitrary thing – everything linked there is something I think is good, but not everything I think is good is linked there. With that in mind, on we go…
Leonard Pierce is one of the funniest writers I know. An online acquaintance of mine, he’s a freelance writer and humourist who writes for, amongst others, The Onion AV Club, and is also one of the vanishingly small number of people who’s ever commissioned me to write a piece for publication somewhere other than this blog. He writes about comics and general pop-culture things, from an anarchist perspective, but seems astonishingly knowledgeable about everything from postmodern critical theory to hip-hop and death metal (his most recent post, a potted biography of Niccolo Macchiavelli in the style of the theme from The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air, gives a pretty good idea of what he’s like).
Liberal Democrat Voice is an unofficial Liberal Democrat party groupblog, with a handful of regular contributors and a few irregular ones. Always worth reading if you want a brief idea of what the general feeling among the party is about UK current events.
Love And Liberty is the blog of Alex Wilcock, who writes extremely well about both Liberalism and Doctor Who – his How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal is justly famous both among Who fans and Lib Dems, and was an essay I admired before I really got involved in either group.
Lucid Frenzy, Jr is Gavin Burrows, a frequent commenter here who I first got to know in the comments to Andrew Rilstone’s blog. He writes about cultural stuff – recent posts include a review of a June Tabor gig, an extended appreciation of the Fleischer Superman cartoons, a discussion of ‘the slag-off song’ in punk, a discussion of the character of Captain Mainwaring from Dad’s Army, and several Spotify playlists. His stuff is generally longer, thoughtful review pieces that wouldn’t be out of place in the Observer or Saturday Guardian arts sections, except that he doesn’t exude the insufferable Burchillian smugness of most contributors to those periodicals, so you can read a full piece by him without wanting to kill him and/or yourself.
Marc Singer unfortunately hasn’t blogged for six months or so, but when he did he was one of the very best comics bloggers out there, and also wrote well about The Wire. Part of the reason he’s on a long-term hiatus from blogging is that he’s writing a book on Grant Morrison, and I suspect, given the quality of his writing on the subject, that it will be the definitive critical word on the subject.
Mark Evanier is a writer who’s done a huge amount of work in TV animation (he created Scrappy Doo and the Dungeons & Dragons TV show, and wrote a big chunk of the Garfield TV series, among other works) and comics (he writes the dialogue for Groo, and worked with Jack Kirby as an assistant on the Fourth World comics). He’s an expert on old comics and old comedy – especially people in both fields from about the 1940s to the 1970s. He writes a lot about the Marx Brothers and Laurel & Hardy, maintains a Jack Kirby FAQ, and generally seems to have at least a few anecdotes about everyone we think of as ancient legendary figures.
Mark Steel and Mark Thomas are both hard-left-wing (Steel is a Trotskyist, Thomas non-aligned but tending towards anarchism) political comedians and activists. Both sites are excellent (and in fact run by the same people), but Steel’s ‘blog’ is updated far more than Thomas’, as it always includes the text of his weekly Independent column. Both men also actually manage to be very funny even when dealing with extremely serious or complex political matters.
Mat Bowles should write more. The fiance of Jennie Rigg, mentioned in the last of these blogroll posts, he’s someone who doesn’t just shoot his mouth off like I do but who actually has some idea what he’s talking about, especially when it comes to political theory.
Matt Rossi hasn’t really blogged in several years (he’s been suffering writers’ block) but I leave the link to his blog here because the stuff he did write was so astoundingly good, be it his alternative-history stuff, where he’d just let his imagination create conspiratorial or magical links between obscure historical events, or his writing on comics (which is what got me back into the medium) or his autobiographical stuff. He’s an absolutely astonishing writer, both in terms of ideas and in terms of prose style. He’s also one of a very few people who was there to help me at a time when I needed it, and helped me more than he can know. He’s probably forgotten that, but I haven’t, and I hope he starts writing more again soon.
Millennium Dome, Elephant is a fluffy, grey, little stuffed elephant who lives with his two daddies Alex (of Love & Liberty, linked above) and Richard, and who, like them, is a Liberal Democrat who likes Doctor Who a lot. For the comics fans among you, imagine a Lib Dem/Whofan equivalent of Bully The Little Stuffed Bull, but funnier – I’ve literally cried with laughter at some of the politics posts.
And The Mindless Ones are my favourite comics group blog, one of a vanishingly small group among the comics blogosphere who know the difference between irreverence and ‘snark’, and who can actually write (and draw in the case of their two fantastic weekly single-panel comics). As a group their taste and approach to comics intersects with mine so much that I’ve more than once scrapped an already-written post on a comic because they’ve written something almost fingerprint-identical and posted it first. Where someone like Jog is undoubtedly the leading thinker in terms of online comics criticism, the Mindless Ones site is where the action is, where you’ll find the most *exciting* comics criticism (as well as lots of pictures of superhero pants).
Why Liberals Should Use GNU/Linux
This is another of the posts that several people said they’d be interested in. Those of you who aren’t, blame those people. This is pitched at the most non-technical of people, so my apologies if this feels patronising to some of you…
Before I start, I’d better explain what GNU/Linux is, since many people won’t know what it is. About 25 years ago, a computer programmer and political activist called Richard Stallman decided that he didn’t agree with copyright restrictions, End User License Agreements and other things that stopped him sharing computer programs that he liked with his friends – he’d been brought up to think of sharing as a good thing, and also came from a scientific background and valued the free sharing of information. He also liked to play around with computers and disliked being unable to improve programs due to lack of source code (the human-readable form of computer programs which is how they’re written and modified).
Rather than break the law by sharing these programs without the permission of the copyright holders, Stallman, who seems to be rigorously principled to a fault, decided to make it unnecessary for anyone else to ever have to face this choice, by creating an entire operating system (an operating system is the set of programs that allows you to run your computer, like Microsoft Windows) and all the programs you might want to run on it, and make it all free (as in freedom) – anyone who wanted could share it with anyone else, and could make any changes to the source code they wanted. Stallman used something he called ‘copyleft’ (a term that originally came from Discordianism) to ensure that the programs would always be available freely – he copyrighted the programs, then released them under a license which says that you can redistribute modified versions, but only if you distribute the source code for your changes and let anyone else do the same. Stallman founded a charity, the Free Software Foundation, which was used to promote the creation of an operating system called GNU (which stands for GNU’s Not UNIX – UNIX being a popular operating system for business and academic use – GNU was designed to be as much like UNIX as possible, so people who knew one system could use the other, and so bits of GNU could replace the equivalent bits of UNIX and be used before the complete system was created).
Over the years the GNU project has managed to create pretty much everything one could need to run on a computer, ranging from compilers (the programs that you use to turn source code into programs you run) right through to web browsers or programs for typesetting music scores. However, one part of the GNU operating system remained unfinished. This part was the kernel – the part that communicates between the software and hardware. Ten years after Stallman announced the GNU project, a Finnish student called Linus Torvalds produced one. His kernel was called ‘Linux’ , and soon many people started referring to the whole system as that, as I do in speech, but the GNU project, who after all wrote the majority of the system, prefer the term GNU/Linux.
Anyway, what we have is a whole system of free software (which some people also call Open Source Software) – everything from web browsers to office suites to graphics software to games. All these are free to download, and you’re free to share them and, if you’re a programmer, to modify them and share your changes.
But why should Liberals, specifically, use Free Software and the GNU/Linux system?
Most people who argue for GNU/Linux do so on the basis of technical superiority, and as far as that goes it is a far better system, technically, than Microsoft Windows (I don’t know enough about Mac OSX to judge it, but that *seems* to be about equal to GNU/Linux technically – I could be very wrong though) , in terms of security (you don’t get viruses on GNU/Linux), speed, reliability and so on. But most people don’t really care about that – they care about playing their music, browsing the web, IMing with friends, playing solitaire, and you can do all those things equally well using any modern operating system.
Other people argue that all proprietary software is evil. I’m hardly likely to do that – I work for a proprietary software company myself, and I use a *very* small number of proprietary programs (the proprietary version of unrar for reading cbr files, a proprietary piece of firmware needed for my laptop to function, and Spotify until Jotify gets better playlist support) at home. If someone wants to use proprietary software and is willing to accept restrictions in order to get something they want, that’s fine by me.
But what I *do* think matters is the issue of freedom – and the issue of trust, When you are running proprietary programs you are essentially trusting the vendor that the program does what they say it does and only what they say it does. You are also giving up a lot of control over your own machine.
Apple, for example, will only allow programs sold through its own store to be run on the iPhone, and have absurd restrictions on what they sell there – such as cutting all the swear words out of a dictionary, and still only allowing it to be sold to adults. Now, you *could* always jailbreak the iPhone and install what you want on it – except that Apple are currently fighting in court to have that ruled illegal. Apple are actually one of the worst companies for this kind of thing, trying to make it illegal to run software you want to run on your own machine. They’ve tried the same thing to try to stop people being able to use an iPod without their iTunes software.
More disturbing, and more widely reported, is Amazon’s deletion of copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from their Kindle ebook reader – along with any notes the users had made.
Now, in all these cases you can argue that the people who bought those items entered into an agreement, and they know the risks – and that’s true to an extent. Certainly I wouldn’t suggest that what Amazon, for example, did was illegal. But almost *every* proprietary software license contains clauses that allow this sort of thing, and many programs have the technical ability to do these things too. Whenever you run a proprietary program, you’re ceding control of your machine and your data to another individual or corporation.
Which, I repeat, is fine if you trust them. But it does raise the all-too-real possibility of digital book-burning. Imagine that you buy a book to read on the Kindle, and the government, as is its occasional wont, decides that that book is naughty and should be banned. They can take out a court order to force Amazon to delete every single copy of that book in existence, knowing they have the technical means to do it. If a book is published only as an ebook – as increasing numbers are – then removing every single copy of that work in existence becomes a real possibility, realer than it ever has been before.
Or the government could get, say, Microsoft, to agree that any time anyone uses encryption software on its operating system, a decrypted copy of the encrypted data is stored on a government database – just to fight terrorism, you understand…
These things are real threats when you cede control of your machine to anyone else. By running free software, you have absolute control of your machine and your data – even if you don’t choose to take that control (as most of us won’t) in most ways, you know you have it and therefore others don’t.
In other words, GNU/Linux is based on the principles of free speech, is developed as a mutual, co-operative international project, adding value to the commons (and it is valuable – companies like IBM, Novell and Red Hat make billions from GNU/Linux while still giving back code which others can use freely) and protects the individual (to an extent) both against an overbearing state *and* against monopolistic corporations – could you really get anything more Liberal than that?
Now, even five years ago I wouldn’t have recommended any casual users use GNU/Linux. Back then it was very difficult to install software and get it working – it could take several hours’ struggle to be able to, for example, listen to a RealAudio stream. These days it couldn’t be simpler to install software – it’s certainly *much* simpler on GNU/Linux than on Windows. Say you want to install a program to calculate your menstrual cycle. You open ‘Synaptic Package Manager’ from the menu, click ‘search’, type ‘menstruation’ and you’ll be given a list of programs to choose from. Click one of them, click ‘mark for installation’, click ‘apply’ and voila, your menstruation calendar is now on your computer. Same goes for adventure games, databases, MP3 playing software, word processors, screensavers, video software, ham radio programs, Atari emulators, statistics packages, or anything else you could want for a home computer.
It’s so easy that my (completely non-technical) mum has been using GNU/Linux exclusively for a year now with no problems, as have my six-year old nephew and eleven-year-old niece when they visit my parents (my nephew loves playing Pingus). None of them have had the slightest difficulty doing anything they want on it (well, that’s a lie – I had to give my mum a little telephone tech support to get Yahoo! Chess working for my dad a week or two after she started using it).
There isn’t one standard version of GNU/Linux – rather it comes in ‘distributions’, which are collections of software put together either by companies or by groups of volunteers. Each distribution exists for a different purpose, because anyone can change the software to fit what they want. My personal favourite distribution is Debian , but some people seem for some reason to find that a little difficult. On the other hand a Debian-based distribution called Ubuntu is generally regarded as the best for beginners (this is the one my parents use) but is still perfectly good for more experienced users (my wife uses it, and she used to use Slackware, which is generally regarded as only for the most seriously technical people out there).
There’s also an Ubuntu-based distribution called gNewSense which contains only absolutely free software (Debian and Ubuntu both let you install non-free bits if there’s no free option and they’re needed to run your hardware). That might not work on some hardware , especially laptops, but if it’ll work on your system then you can be sure you’re running an *absolutely* free system (rather than just a 99.7% free version like mine).
Download an Ubuntu CD and give it a go – you can install it on your computer and leave Windows on there as well. It’s the Liberal thing to do…
A Guide To My Blogroll – Part 1 – A – J
So I’ve been away for a week, and confirmed every opinion I already held about going on beach holidays (they’re really not for me). Before I went, I listed a load of possible posts I might make, and asked which ones people were interested in. One that more people seemed to want to see than I had thought is a guide to my blogroll, so here it is… I’ve split it into several posts, as it got huge.
My blog is rather unusual in that I have several different groups of readers, who’ve come from different sources – most of you are comics people, I think, but there are also a chunk of you who are Doctor Who fans, a few I know from music discussions, quite a few Lib Dems, and a few personal friends (as well as some who fit into multiple categories), with relatively little overlap between these groups. As such, many of you will know exactly who (for example) the Mindless Ones are but have no idea who (say) Millennium Elephant is. So I’m going to give a very brief description of every blog in my sidebar, so you can know if they’re your kind of thing.
A word on how I put together my sidebar, incidentally – it’s completely random. Everything there is a blog I read regularly, but there are some I read *as* regularly that I don’t list there, including some by very close friends. It’s just a sampling of things I think people who read this might like. Anyway, the list…
A Trout In The Milk is Pillock/Plok, who often comments here. I started reading this for his posts about Steve Gerber’s 1970s Marvel comics, but he also posts on many other subjects, in an idiosyncratic writing style, and with more insight than most. More importantly, he also seems to be a truly decent person.
Andrew Rilstone is probably my very favourite blogger, but he’s not updated since March. He writes intelligently and articulately on a whole range of subjects, from Doctor Who to the works of C.S. Lewis, via Richard Dawkins, Dave SIm, Wagner and the Daily Express. I hope he comes back soon.
Brad Hicks is one of the best political commentators on the net, for US politics. He’s a mainstream Democrat, so several thousand miles to the right of me, but one of the sharpest minds out there. His occasional writing on science fiction is also worth reading.
Cerebus, A Diablog is a project by two people to go through my all-time favourite comic, Cerebus, issue by issue, though they seem to have stalled a month or so ago…
Charlotte Gore is a Libertarian member of the Liberal Democrats, my own party. I often disagree profoundly with her, but she always argues her case well.
Chicken Yoghurt is Justin, an extremely good liberal blogger (and one who uses 2000AD panels at the top of his blog, always a good sign), who hasn’t been posting much recently but who’s always good when he does.
Chris ‘Mightygodking’ Bird is a Canadian humourist who mostly writes about superhero comics, but also about Canadian politics, TV shows and the usual pop-culture stuff, but more intelligently and with a lighter hand than most.
Debi ‘Innerbrat’ Linton is a paleontologist who writes about identity politics, DC Comics (especially Black Canary), and other stuff she’s interested in. She’s one of my very favourite people, and when she’s on form she’s a sharp, intelligent writer who’s also not afraid of subjecting her own views to scrutiny.
Doctor K is a comics blog by a professor from South Carolina. including features such as “Gil Kane Punch Of The Week”.
Emily Short writes interactive fiction (text adventures) and also writes about interactive fiction. Her work is absolutely fascinating for anyone who’s interested in narrative and the possibilities of computer narrative.
Final Crisis Annotations is what it sounds like – Douglas Wolk’s annotations for Grant Morrison’s comic Final Crisis.
Gad, Sir! Comics! is an absolutely wonderful comic blog that has unfortunately not updated in eighteen months.
Grant Morrison‘s blog is great, as you would expect, but requires you to sign up to read it, which is irritating.
Helium Flash is my wife, Holly, who doesn’t post as much as she should. (She does post more on her personal blog, but I’m not linking that as quite a bit of it is discussion of our private lives for her friends, and I’m not as comfortable as she is with my private life being in the public domain). She should post more, as she’s one of the best writers I know (I fell in love with her online, and it was her writing I knew first).
Investigations of a Dog is my friend Gavin Robinson, who as well as being one of the best bass players around (and a friend of mine for a decade now – shocking how time flies) is also a military historian. He doesn’t post all that much – maybe one post of substance a month – as he has RSI, but what he does post is fascinating. Recent posts include a review of an old Ladybird book about Oliver Cromwell, a discussion based on something I linked to of the syntax of the verb ‘to cuckold’, and an explanation of why Achewood got it wrong about 17th-century pornography.
Jennie Rigg is great. She’s a Liberal Democrat and a fan of Doctor Who, especially the Sixth Doctor. The quote I gave her for her sidebar sums it up pretty well – “I find myself agreeing with Jennie more than almost any other blogger, especially when she says I’m always right. She is in possession of uncommon sense (much rarer than the common kind) and gets annoyed at all the right things.”
And Jog is pretty much universally regarded as the best writer on comics as a medium (as opposed to just a superhero content-delivery mechanism) out there. He doesn’t post as much to his blog as he used to now – many of his posts go instead onto group blogs like the Savage Critics – but everything he posts is worth reading.
Part 2 tomorrow.
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