[Ben to Platt] 1) Platt read the Independent article as being critical of the NHS/or socialized medicine. 2) Either the article was or was not critical of the NHS. 3a) If the article was critical of the NHS, then you can criticize socialized medicine. 3b) If the article was not critical of the NHS, then it's misleading, so you can criticize Jos Laycock.
I generally agree that all points are sound. [Arlo] No, Ben. All these points are not "sound". Platt read a headline and based on an ideological predisposition against "socialized" medicine, jumped to an assumption before gathering what he lacked, and that is an awareness and understanding of the NHS structure and history. When he makes this error, he blames the "headline" for his faulty reasoning. As Case pointed out, Platt should have been aware, reading a "foreign" publication, that he may require precontextual information the publication would generally assume among a native audience. In this case, an understanding of the historical attempts to privatize elements of the NHS. A sane response would've just been "oops, didn't know that, never mind", but in his blind zeal to discredit "socialized" medicine, his only recourse is to "damn something", whether it is the media or the medicine. To do otherwise would be to open the door to the possibility that his outrage at this example was, in fact, outrage AGAINST the very thing he argues FOR, privatized medicine. But he can't admit that. Can't see it. And so we get post after post condemning the "headline", but refusing to see what actually happened"... by pointing out that Primecare is evidence of "privatized" healthcare, and showing that Platt's outrage at this behavior was enough to warrant a complete discreditation of a system of healthcare, then the natural response is this... If the example, when thought to be of "socialized" medicine is enough to discredit to "socialized" medicine, then the same example when shown to be of "privatized" medicine should also be enough to discredit "privatized medicine". And that' why Platt when from using an example to discredit a system to suddenly agreeing with you that "anecdotal evidence" is meaningless. Had he been right, had the example of his outrage been actually against socialized medicine, you can be your life savings that he would STILL be tauting it in support for privatized healthcare. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
