And Speaking of the Welfare State
Since I've taken a great deal of flac for "stating" (ouch) that state insured medicine was (some) improvement over nothing at all here is a little friendly "bone" for people who genuinely fear the power of all bureaucracy whether in the "public" or private sector. In this case a private company in this city has recently given half a million dollars to the local health "authority" under Canada's (sort-of) socialist health system to fund a so-called 'bereavement centre' for the terminally ill. Well, it escapes me why we need a bunch of nosy social workers pretending to feel sorry for seriously distressed people. Two years ago in its August 14/2006 issue the Globe and Mail ran an interesting item on the deleterious effects that those mindworms known as "grief counsellors" have on personal suffering.><
Counsellors who provide immediate help to victims at disaster scenes increase the likelihood of their patients going on to suffer from post traumatic stress disorder, reports the (London) Sunday Telegraph. Dutch scientists who studied 236 survivors of traumatic events discovered that those given one-to-one counselling or " emotional debriefing" - straight away were more likely to demonstrate signs of post-traumatic stress disorder six weeks later. The team, whose study is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, was led by Dr. Berthold Gersons of the University of Amsterdam medical school. He said, ' By immediately talking through what happened to you with someone else, it could be that you're reinforcing what's happened in your memory '.><
If Greystone Managed Investments wanted to really demonstrate a desire to help those in the most urgent need and at the same time prove themselves morally superior to their counterparts in the state bureaucracy why don't they provide a shitload of money for Station 20 West in Saskatoon? Here is, or maybe was, a plan for a kind of community "mall" for poor people which was to house a cooperative grocery store, free dental and medical clinics, a library and other services for the indigent. That's a little more reasonable I would think. The news quotation below is from today's Leader Post. Use of the word "programming" sounds scary to say the least.Regina Palliative Care Inc. announced the establishment and official naming of the Greystone Bereavement Centre. The centre recently opened on the Western Christian College campus and will provide expanded bereavement programs and services to Saskatchewan residents.
Some counselling and group events are already being offered at the centre, said Elaine Bourassa, president of RPCI
" Thanks to the generous $500,000 contribution from Greystone Managed Investments, we are able to take a bereavement program that is based in the Regina Qu'Appelle Health Region and expand it by providing a new home for the specialized care grieving individuals and their families need,"
Programming offered at the Greystone Bereavement Centre will be unique in Canada and will include an aboriginal component and outreach programs to communities, groups and individuals who do not currently have access.
Oh goody ...
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Shag note: I got some good comment on this one ... for a change. Here's a summary. Since the end of the Vietnam war, more or less, social democrats and other old "new leftists" have embarked on a search for a new "historical agent". During the last twenty years this became increasingly weird. The blue collar worker was eased out by the anti-imperialist (with marxist-leninist exegesis in turn replaced by religious totalitarianism) for whom "critical support" was to be given ... uncritically of course. Later the onset of modern "political correctness" meant only those of a non-white (and generally female) persuasion were admissible to the temple. That business also partially morphed into the child-police racket which is ongoing. In that one all lower and middle class parents regardless of sex or origin become suspects of "abuse". How the worm turns ... Of course all these evils have existed at some level throughout most of the last century ie. residential schools, only the misery seems to have become more generalized and perhaps not as "deep" for some groups as in the past. The portions of our ruling classes which profit from "mind games" are not constrained by the usual considerations of real economics. Despite the efforts of advertisers there are only so many cars (or television sets) you can sell especially when other head honchos want to put impossible requirements on that market. "Mind Control" is an essentially unlimited market ... at least until the public recovers some sense and shuts down this entire industry. The current situation is analogous to a puddle of dirty water creeping outward, wider but thinner. This might also explain wide spread acceptance of managerial ideology even by people who strongly object to parts of same. This is, in my view, central to the brutality of everyday life and the rebirth of fascism in the western world. Italy and England are examples.
Labels: fascism, medicare, mindworms, totalitarianism, welfare state
posted by Werner @ 12:34 PM
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2 Comments:
Economists of both the left and right usually opine that "growth" in an economy is both an inevitability (business cycles aside) and a necessity if an
economy wishes to avoid contraction. In other words a "stable state" is both unlikely and perhaps even trying for such produces unpleasant consequuences. There are disagreements about whether such growth is a good or bad thing, but only very heterodox economists question whether the empirical observation of long term growth is desirable.
The tendency of that part of our ruling class whose "product" is social control is actually very similar. Like that part of the economy that produces real goods and services, there is a natural tendency for 'expansion" in the mind control industry, most(but not all) of it mediated through the state and public finance. Like the real economy there is no obvious limit to this expansion. In the case of the real economy the availability(or finiteness) of actual resources puts something of a check on some expansions, and the market does the rest by pricing goods higher and higher as the marginal value increases.
In the mind control industry there is NO direct mechanism as such in making expansion of a given "service" provision more and more expensive. There is also no immediate feedback by a market-like mechanism, and expansion into new fields of social control is subsidized by the state until the necessary market can be created by propoganda or so-called "education". The only feedback is political- how much are so-called "clients" willing to tolerate and how much is the general public willing to throw into the great soup pot where it is spun off by internal power struggles over its distribution. The taxpayer has NO control about how this mass of money is allocated.
All this is relevant to the "grief ghouls"(remember that in the horror genre "ghouls" are eaters of dead bodies) because I am old enough to remember a time just a few decades ago when the whole idea of what they now do would have been considered BOTH bizarre and repulsive. There is NO limit set by common sense or any political process that we have available that cannot be circumvented by the mind control industry in their pursuit of a new market. Sometimes they are stopped by lawsuits, as the VAST illusion of "Satanic abuse" and "recovered memory" that was a social worker fad about 15 to 20 years ago was. (A lot of the idiots involved still believe the crude propaganda put forth then) But that is "stopping", not preventing.
In the future look for even more strange and creepy new markets to open up. The only PREVENTION that I can see is to attack the industry "as a whole", not on one of its specific atrocities but rather in the spirit that the whole enterprise is illegitimate. I await the day when our present do-gooders are raked over the same coals as previous do-gooders involved in residential schools are now.
Mollymew
Well put. Since the end of the Vietnam war, more or less, the search for a new "historical agent" has become increasingly weird. The blue collar worker was replaced by the anti-imperialist (whether a marxist or religious totalitarian). Later the onset of modern "political correctness" meant only those of a non-white (and generally female)persuasion were admissible to the temple. That business also partially morphed into the child-police racket which is still ongoing. Of course all these evils have existed at some level throughout most of the last century ie. residential schools, only the misery seems to have become more generalized and perhaps not as "deep" for most groups of people. Perhaps for this reason acceptance of managerial ideology even by many people who seem to strongly object to parts of it is fairly widespread. That would tend to explain both the brutality of everyday life and the rebirth of fascism ie. in the western world ... Italy, England as examples.
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