South Asia’s cricket obsession

Firstly, I found that to be a poorly-written article. Secondly, I found the below quote to be wrong and insulting:

Today, it is the culture of Bollywood cinema and cricket that serve as the very distinctive and exotic essence which draws people who would otherwise be uninterested in 21st Century India, which has little to set itself apart from a host of other southern countries.

Third, read the second response after the article. It seems that there are opposing points of view, points that may be more comprehensive in scope.

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 Bong Hits 4 Jesus

This case amuses me.  Alaska has some of the most lax drug laws in the country, and this case has little if anything to do with drugs.  Rather, an overzealous principal wishes to enact a ridiculous overenforcement to make a point.  Let me rephrase that – some conservative principal in Alaska who HATE HATES HATES most of his neighbors has decided to get even by taking his anger out on one of their children.
I’m fairly confident that the case will swing in favor of free speech.  If you feel like digging and want to be entertained, read up on the comments by Justices Souder and Roberts.

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I figured out how to defeat the conservative movement, one partisan at a time. Next time you are talking to someone who you know to be conservative, steer them toward politics. *Then,* whoever they talk about, say you like him (and they’re pretty much all hims on that side). More importantly, say you like them, and them reference liberal things they have done (or might have done). I’ve discovered that most of them pay NO ATTENTION WHATSOEVER to the news, so you can pretty easily turn them against their plutocrats by just suggesting their “lib’rels.”

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Viacom Sues GooTube

I think Google will roll the dice on this one. They are counting on a judge to say they are in a “safe harbor” because they delete everything promptly when notified that content is illegal. As the law currently stands, they will win any suit. The only reason to worry is that a judge might decide that youtube itself, as an entity, is a RICO organization similar to the mob – and that seems unlikely. But you never know – Viacom does have plenty enough money to buy off a few judges.

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After Mr. Daley voted, a reporter asked what grade he would give himself as mayor so far.

“You don’t give grades,” he said. “Grades are only given on Election Day.”

Good article…

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Angad sent us this.

Kristin responded as such:

I saw a dentist for the first time in 11 years in 2005, after I finally got dental insurance when I acquired my current job. My mother hadn’t been able to afford medical/dental for us since I was very young and in elementary school. In the years between I was fortunate enough to only have a non-infectious cavity or two, nothing like the child in the story.
So what do you do? You brush your teeth an extra long period of time (a habit I still practice, which has been pointed out to me by various roommates) and pray you don’t get seriously ill.

Lack of medical care is a very real problem, while having it seems such a privilege. Having been there, it genuinely hurts me to know families are allowed to suffer through disease and displacement while the wealth disparity looms ever present.

I hope one day, once I get my shit together, I can contribute to assisting the impoverished in some way, too.

So I responded with the following:

I disagree with you all. The boy deserved to die. Was he not
a) a minority,
b) poor,
c) uninsured, and
d) all of the above?

This is not a lesson to bureaucrats working hard to bring pork into their state at the behest of large corporations. This is an issue of PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY. As we can tell from Kristin’s story, the boy is at fault because he didn’t spend enough time brushing. I hope other low-income minorities learn from Deamonte’s (maybe he’d still be alive if his name was
Matthew or John?) example, and take ownership of their dental hygiene. They shouldn’t expect millionaires to break off 0.01% of their hard-earned wealth to pay for an $80 dental examination.

And on that note, I think the 23.9% of dental offices currently accepting Medicare should reconsider. Obviously Medicare patients aren’t paying for their own services, and if filling out the necessary paperwork were to be counted as a business expense, they are making less money than they could if they opted only to serve affluent white families. As Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, informs us, every decision should be based on what best serves the individual, because from that the collective fares best. So, as we can see, we all will do better when dental offices serve only white people, and allow low-income minorities to die.

Time to brush,
Jonthon

P.S. Obviously, the entire message is a satirical poke at what response the people who make such decisions would employ, IF they were forced to respond. They won’t ever actually acknowledge the case of Deamonte, and it’s a near-miracle that a newspaper even picked it up. [Indeed, the link Angad sent us no longer worked by the time I got around to blogging this.] Kristin’s case is actually illustrative of nothing less than that people of lesser means must work harder to get their fair share than the rich – systematically guaranteeing that the lower class will never be able to catch up. It’s sad, it’s wrong, and, in cases like Deamonte’s (a beautiful name full of character and originality, truth be told), it’s maddening. That no one will be found responsible, that even if they were they would deny the existence of practical problems based on theoretical solutions, that they would be given nothing more than a slap on the wrist in the relative scheme of things, suggests that the only answer is to bring back the pillories and guillotine.

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