Hillary Clinton Declares War on Single-Payer Health Care

Clinton has received more money from the pharmaceutical industry than any other candidate from either party in the 2016 election cycle.

Clinton's statements on single-payer include some myths that have long been perpetuated by the right.

Other "developed" nations spend about half as much on health care as the US and cover everyone.

 

By Michael Corcoran, Truthout | News Analysis

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34499-hillary-clinton-declares-war-on-single-payer-health-care

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In 2003, Barack Obama said he was a "proponent of a single-payer, universal health-care plan," but as president he refused to even engage in a discussion on the issue when he was working to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2009-10.

But at least Obama took the same approach as most establishment Democrats and merely ignored an idea that would save the country billions, while covering every single American, regardless of employment or ability to pay. Hillary Clinton, however, hasn't ignored the policy in recent months on the campaign trail. Instead, despite broad popular support for Medicare for All, Clinton has declared war on single-payer health care.

Bernie Sanders, who just released his Medicare for All plan on January 17, has made single-payer a "central axis point in the campaign," as MSNBC's Chris Hayes described it, and helped to push the subject into the national debate. So, when new polls revealed Sanders to be in a dead heat with Clinton in early primary states, Clinton took the offensive. She began a campaign to attack single-payer, painting it as something that would burden middle-class families, empower right-wing governors and put Americans' health insurance at risk by dismantling every major health-care institution in the country.

Clinton's claims are either patently false or incredibly misleading. By presenting them to a national television audience during interviews and the debates, she may be doing more damage to the single-payer movement than the pharmaceutical and insurance companies could ever hope to achieve. 

She is making these claims largely to Democratic primary voters, who support Medicare for All at a rate of 81 percent, but could be misled by a politician whom many of them trust and admire.

"It is conceivable that the continued negative critiques - especially of the fearmongering variety - could have a deleterious impact on popular opinion," Dr. Adam Gaffney, a physician and health-care writer, told Truthout.

Worse yet, Clinton almost certainly knows she is wrong. Her experience with health-care reform has made her familiar with the economics of single-payer, according to documents that were belatedly made public by the Clinton Library in 2014. It is hard to ignore the fact that she has received more money from the pharmaceutical industry than any other candidate from either party in the 2016 election cycle, or that the health industry paid her $2.8 million in speaking fees between 2013 and 2015.

History will no doubt remember that the United States was, for a time, the only "developed" nation on the planet that didn't guarantee health care to its people as a right. And Clinton's name will now forever be associated with this shameful fact.

A Window of Opportunity

There is good news in this story. The reason Clinton - and several of her liberal allies in politics and media - have engaged in this misinformation campaign is because she knows Sanders' proposal for Medicare for All is one of several reasons why many voters are choosing him over her. Plus, the challenges single-payer supporters now face also provide an opportunity to educate the public about this type of reform.

"Single-payer is at the center of the political discourse in a manner it hasn't been for years," Gaffney said. "We should view the renewed single-payer debate as a window of opportunity to advance our vision of a more egalitarian health-care system." And this, Gaffney maintains, requires hard work in educating the public, "because the naysayers have such larger microphones."

Indeed, Clinton's falsehoods will reach a massive audience. Sanders has refuted many of these in interviews and in debates, but it is an uphill battle. 

Clinton is a status quo politician with great power. And her campaign is being covered by corporate media that have long been deferential to power and the status quo.

But, while Clinton has the larger microphone and a compliant media at her elbow, those who support a single-payer plan have the facts on their side. 

Virtually all of the credible data about the economics of public health care demonstrate, incontrovertibly, that single-payer would improve health outcomes, cover everyone and lower costs.

 

And many dedicated activists are trying to help spread the word. National Nurses United, for instance, has come out strongly in favor of this plan and is organizing around the country to explain its merits to voters.

"Finally, a real plan from a leading presidential candidate that will guarantee health care for every American, just as every other major nation has done," National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro said in a statement. "Instead of being held hostage to a corporate system based on profits and price gouging, with Sanders' Medicare for All plan we can finally have a system based on patient need, with a single standard of quality care for all, regardless of ability to pay, race, gender, age, or where you live. That's a beautiful thing."

Countering the Distortions

Clinton's statements on single-payer include some myths that have long been perpetuated by the right: for example, the idea that it is unaffordable. Other allegations are strange and new, seemingly aimed at confusing voters. Let's address a few of the myths:

 

Myth 1: Single-payer is unaffordable and would burden the middle class.

This is a classic example of how a politician can take a fact out of context to manipulate the truth. Hillary Clinton has continually attacked Sanders for planning to raise new taxes on middle-class families, in part, to fund his Medicare plan. This is true and Sanders has never denied it.

Of course, when Clinton makes this critique, she fails to add important context. Any increase in taxes would be offset by a reduction in out-of-pocket health-care expenses (on premiums, co-pays and deductibles) that would dwarf any added taxes. For Clinton to argue that Medicare for All would burden middle- and working-class families requires her to advance the nonsensical argument that giving $2 to an insurance company is a better deal than paying $1 in taxes.

Of course, the savings are actually much greater than that. Gerald Friedman, an economist from the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has been examining the economic impact of single-payer for many years, shared his calculation with Truthout, showing that there would be a total savings of $277 billion in the first year of Sanders' Medicare for All plan.

"For a middle-class family of four with an income from wages of $50,000 and an employer-provided family plan of an average price, the Sanders program would save $5,807, or 12 percent of income," Friedman concluded, factoring in both taxes and out-of-pocket expenses.

If Clinton thinks a family of four would suffer by saving the equivalent of 12 percent of their income because it would involve paying a little more to the government and a whole lot less to some private insurance company, she should explain why that is.

It is also worth noting that the savings estimated by Friedman are totally consistent with the disparities shown when US health-care costs are compared with countries that have universal public health care. For instance, in Canada, which has a system very much like the Medicare for All plan proposed by Sanders, per capita health-care spending is $4,445, while the country spends 11.4 percent of its GDP on health care and insures everyone. Meanwhile, the United States spends $8,223 per person on health care annually, spends 17.6 percent of its GDP on health care and leaves about 13 percent of its population without any insurance at all.

Similar disparities exist between the United States and every one of the other nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - all 35 of which have some kind of universal public health-care system. As of 2012, the average OECD country spends $3,268 per capita on health care and 9.5 percent of its GDP on health expenses. In other words, other nations classified as "developed" by the United Nations spend about half as much on health care as the United States and cover everyone. 

Moreover, in studies done by the World Health Organization and the Commonwealth Fund, the United States has been ranked poorly in terms of health outcomes when compared to other nations in the OECD.

Myth 2: Sanders' policy would roll back the progress won from the Affordable Care Act and dismantle institutions such as Medicare.

In a video attacking Sanders, Chelsea Clinton made the following statement: "Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program [Children's Health Insurance Plan], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance."

It is ironic that a few months earlier at the CBS debate on November 14, 2015, Clinton accused Sanders of "impugning my integrity," when he correctly pointed out that she has received millions of dollars from Wall Street donations and speaking fees. Yet, in this video by her daughter, Sanders is basically portrayed as a right-wing villain who wants to deprive everyone of health care.

How to respond to a critique that claims Sanders wants to dismantle Medicare? His plan - and just about every other single-payer bill (HR 676) he co-sponsored in the House of Representatives for years - does the exact opposite. Sanders' plan expands Medicare to cover everyone. Medicare is effectively a single-payer system for people over 65. Because it doesn't have to deal with countless private insurers, it has only 3.6 percent in administrative waste, compared to private insurance, which has about 31 percent in administrative waste. Canadian health care, incidentally, has less than 2 percent administrative waste.

And while many of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act would become needless if single-payer were passed, Medicare for All would serve to achieve the two major goals that the ACA failed to accomplish: It would make insurance universal and dramatically reduce costs, which under the ACA are rising at an unsustainable rate. Some customers on the ACA's exchanges have faced 20 percent increases, according to The New York Times.

To accuse Sanders of dismantling CHIP is an especially dirty trick since it implies that he wants to deprive children of health insurance. But, of course, children - and all other Americans - would have insurance in a Medicare for All system. "Yes, Chelsea, President Sanders would dismantle Obamacare, the CHIP program - and, indeed, the entire system of private health insurance. 

And good riddance to it," said Friedman in an essay on Dollars and Sense. "Instead of relying on a patchwork of programs and a leaky safety net, under the Sanders plan, everyone would have health insurance, guaranteed regardless of employment, without copayments or deductibles, and with free choice of provider."

Myth 3: Sanders' plan would give all the power to the states, empowering right-wing governors to control health policy.

This argument was made by Clinton at the debate in Iowa in November 2015 and gave her the chance to link Sanders to the right-wing governor of that state, Terry Branstad, who is not a popular figure among Iowa Democrats. But the claim is baldly untrue. As Sanders' plan states - and in keeping with the very principle of single-payer health care - the system is "federally administered."

"Governors have nothing to do with Medicare," said John McClaughry, vice president of the Vermont-based free-market think tank the Ethan Allen Institute, in an interview with Truthout. "They can't touch it. This is a pretty galling argument, if you ask me."

It is ironic, in light of this attack, that one of Clinton's primary arguments against Medicare for All is that it would roll back the gains of the ACA. Yet, one indisputable shortcoming of the ACA is that, due to a Supreme Court ruling, right-wing governors have been able to opt out of the provision for Medicaid expansion, which has been a major source of frustration for Obama, and the millions of Americans who are deprived of insurance.

With Friends Like These ... Clinton's Liberal Enablers

Clinton has been a major force in Washington for a long time and as a result she has a number of loyalists who are willing to add credibility to the misinformation she is spreading about universal health care.

For instance, former presidential candidate and staunch Clinton supporter Howard Dean, who now serves as a corporate lobbyist for Dentons, has taken to engaging in his own fearmongering on single-payer. On January 13, Dean appeared on MSNBC to argue that Sanders' health plan could result in "chaos" and that "trying to implement it would in fact undo people's health care." Oddly, Dean did not make note of his stated support for single-payer as recently as 2009.

Dean is hardly alone in offering Clinton cover. Paul Krugman, the popular progressive economist and New York Times columnist, seems to always defend Clinton's policies - something of which Clinton often reminds voters. After the YouTube debate, Krugman penned an essay where he flatly stated that "Bernie Sanders is wrong about [health care] and Hillary Clinton is right." The reason? Because the ACA "is the signature achievement of the Obama presidency" and "spending political capital" trying for single-payer would be a poor use of time, he writes.

Krugman's attempt to argue that the ACA is transformational legislation falls flat. He writes, "It more or less achieves a goal - access to health insurance for all Americans - that progressives have been trying to reach for three generations." Try putting that on a bumper sticker.

Even if Krugman feels Medicare for All is not a worthwhile pursuit for Democrats, does that really mean "Hillary Clinton is right," as he claims? Clinton didn't simply argue, as Krugman did, that pursuing Medicare for All was a waste of political capital. Instead, she argued the plan would jeopardize health insurance for the whole country.

Krugman knows this isn't true. He acknowledges, unlike Clinton, that the savings from single-payer would offset any tax increase. But when he says (emphasis added) "it would be difficult to make that case to the broad public, especially given the chorus of misinformation you know would dominate the airwaves," he is unwittingly describing Hillary Clinton herself.

The list of Clinton loyalists in the media goes on. Ezra Klein predictably took the side of the mainstream Democratic Party when he mocked Sanders for offering "a puppies-and-rainbows approach to single-payer." Jonathan Chait of New York magazine recently wrote "The Case Against Bernie Sanders," which describes Sanders' health-care policy as one that "uses the kind of magical-realism approach to fiscal policy usually found in Republican budgets." This is false. The economics of single-payer have been well studied. But Chait is the same guy who called the Affordable Care Act "the greatest social achievement of our time." It certainly makes for a better bumper sticker than Krugman's milquetoast description of the law, but both are guilty of hyperbole in regards to a law that is more noteworthy for what it fails to do, than for what it accomplishes.

"I find the critique from many liberal commentators highly unconvincing," Gaffney said. "For instance, both Krugman and Ezra Klein have charged that the plan doesn't specify what would be covered and what wouldn't. Of course choices on 'medical necessity' will need to be made, but this is already happening today under Medicare!"

"The same approach could be adopted to those under age 65," he added. "This isn't interstellar travel."

The Challenge Before Health-Care Activists

The path to single-payer is not interstellar travel, but it has been a long road for activists who have been fighting for this reform for decades. They have long been ignored and kept to the sidelines, while compromised politicians continue to maintain a private system that treats health care as a commodity to be sold for profit.

Yet, as Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton bang heads on the issue in the coming weeks, for the first time in a while, single-payer activists aren't standing on the sidelines. They are in the middle of a major national debate about why the United States should rid itself of the notorious distinction of being the only nation in the OECD that allows sick people to go bankrupt or die due to lack of insurance.

[…]

Educate the Underdogs

Slavoj Žižek: The Cologne attacks were an obscene version of carnival

http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2016/01/slavoj-zizek-cologne-attacks
  

 

Were the recent Cologne sex attacks a deliberate assault on western values and a middle-class sense of decency?

By Slavoj Zizek

Who are the “hateful eight” in Quentin Tarantino’s film of the same name? The ENTIRE group of participants - white racists and the black Union soldier, men and women, law officers and criminals – they are all equally mean, brutal and revengeful. The most embarrassing moment in the film occurs when the black officer (played by the superb Samuel L. Jackson) narrates in detail and with obvious pleasure to an old Confederate general how he killed his racist son, who was responsible for many black deaths. After forcing him to march naked in cold wind, Jackson promises the freezing white guy he will get a warm cover if he performs fellatio, but after the guy does so, Jackson reneges on his promise and lets him die. So there are no good guys in the struggle against racism – they are all engaged in it with the utmost brutality. And is the lesson of the recent Cologne sex attacks not uncannily similar to the lesson of the film? Even if (most of) the refugees are effectively victims fleeing from ruined countries, this does not prevent them from acting in a despicable way. We tend to forget that there is nothing redeeming in suffering: being a victim at the bottom of the social ladder does not make you some kind of privileged voice of morality and justice.

But this general insight is not enough – one has to take a close look at the situation which gave birth to Cologne incident. In his analysis of the global situation after the Paris bombings1, Alain Badiou discerns three predominant types of subjectivity in today’s global capitalism: the western “civilised” middle-class liberal-democratic subject; those outside the west possessed by the “desire for the west le desir d’Occident,” desperately endeavouring to imitate the “civilised” life-style of the western middle classes; and the fascist nihilists, those whose envy at the west turns into a mortal self-destructive hatred. Badiou makes it clear that what the media call the “radicalisation” of Muslims is Fascisation simple and pure:

“this fascism is the obverse of the frustrated desire for the west which is organized in a more or less military way following the flexible model of a mafia gang and with variable ideological colorisations where the place occupied by religion is purely formal.” 

The western middle class ideology has two opposed features: it displays arrogance and belief in the superiority of its values (universal human rights and freedoms threatened by the barbarian outsiders), but, simultaneously, it is obsessed by the fear that its limited domain will be invaded by the billions outside, who do not count in global capitalism since they are neither producing commodities nor consuming them. The fear of its members is that they will join those excluded.

The clearest expression of the “desire for the west” are immigrant refugees: their desire is not a revolutionary one, it is the desire to leave behind their devastated habitat and rejoin the promised land of the developed west. (Those who remain behind try to create there miserable copies of western prosperity, like the “modernised” parts in every third world metropolis, in Luanda, in Lagos, etc, with cafeterias selling cappuccinos, shopping malls, and so on).

But since, for the large majority of pretenders, this desire cannot be satisfied, one of the remaining options is the nihilist reversal: frustration and envy get radicalised into a murderous and self-destructive hatred of the west, and people get engaged in violent revenge. Badiou proclaims this violence a pure expression of death drive, a violence that can only culminate in acts of orgiastic (self)destruction, without any serious vision of an alternate society.

Badiou is right to emphasise that there is no emancipatory potential in fundamentalist violence, however anti-capitalist it claims to be: it is a phenomenon strictly inherent to the global capitalist universe, its “hidden phantom”. The basic fact of fundamentalist fascism is envy. Fundamentalism remains rooted in the desire for the west in its very hatred of the west. We are dealing here with the standard reversal of frustrated desire into aggressiveness described by psychoanalysis, and Islam just provides the form to ground this (self)destructive hatred. This destructive potential of envy is the base of Rousseau’s well-known distinction between egotism, amour-de-soi (that love of the self which is natural), and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself to others in which a person focuses not on achieving a goal, but on destroying the obstacle to it:

“The primitive passions, which all directly tend towards our happiness, make us deal only with objects which relate to them, and whose principle is only amour-de-soi, are all in their essence lovable and tender; however, when, diverted from their objects by obstacles, they are more occupied with the obstacle they try to get rid of, than with the object they try to reach, they change their nature and become irascible and hateful. This is how amour-de-soi, which is a noble and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, that is to say, a relative feeling by means of which one compares oneself, a feeling which demands preferences, whose enjoyment is purely negative and which does not strive to find satisfaction in our own well-being, but only in the misfortune of others.”2

An evil person is thus not an egotist, “thinking only about his own interests”. A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself. Rousseau is describing a precise libidinal mechanism: the inversion which generates the shift of the libidinal investment from the object to the obstacle itself. This could well be applied to fundamentalist violence – be it the Oklahoma bombings or the attack on the Twin Towers. In both cases, we were dealing with hatred pure and simple: destroying the obstacle, the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Twin Towers, was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society.3

Such a fascisation can exert a certain attraction to the frustrated immigrant youth which cannot find a proper place in western societies or a prospect to identify with – fascisation offers them an easy way out of their frustration: an eventful risky life dressed up in a sacrificial religious dedication, plus material satisfaction (sex, cars, weapons…). One should not forget that the Islamic State is also a big mafia trading company selling oil, ancient statues, cotton, arms and women-slaves, “a mixture of deadly heroic propositions and, simultaneously, of western corruption by products”.

It goes by itself that this fundamentalist-fascist violence is just one of the modes of violence that pertains to global capitalism, and that one should bear in mind not only the forms of fundamentalist violence in western countries themselves (anti-immigrant populism, etc), but above all the systematic violence of capitalism itself, from the catastrophic consequences of global economy to the long story of military interventions. Islamo-Fascism is a profoundly reactive phenomenon in Nietzschean sense of the term, an expression of impotence converted into self-destructive rage.

While agreeing with the overall thrust of Badiou’s analysis, I find three of its claims problematic. First, the reduction of religion, the religious form of fascist nihilism, to a secondary superficial feature: “Religion is only a clothing, it is in no way the heart of the matter, only a form of subjectivisation, not the real content of the thing.” Badiou is totally right in his claim that the search for the roots of today’s Muslim terrorism in ancient religious texts (the “it is all already in Quran” story) is misleading: one should instead focus on today’s global capitalism and conceive Islamo-fascism as one of the modes to react to its lure by way of inverting envy into hatred. But is, from a critical standpoint, religion not always a kind of clothing, rather than the heart of the matter? Is religion not in its very core a “form of subjectivisation” of people’s predicament? And does this not imply that a clothing IS in some sense the “heart of the matter”, the way individuals experience their situation – there is no way for them to step back and see somehow from outside how things “really are”… Then, the all too fast identification of refugees and migrants with a “nomadic proletariat”, a “virtual vanguard of the gigantic mass of the people whose existence is not counted prise en compte in the world the way it is”. 

Are migrants (mostly, at least) not those most strongly possessed by the “desire for the west”, most strongly in the thrall of hegemonic ideology? 

Finally, the naïve demand that we should:

“go and see who is this other about whom on talks, who are they really. We have to gather their thoughts, their ideas, their vision of things, and inscribe them, and ourselves simultaneously, into a strategic vision of the fate of humanity”.

Easy to say, difficult to do. This other is, as Badiou himself describes, utterly disoriented, possessed by the opposing attitudes of envy and hatred, a hatred which ultimately expresses its own repressed desire for the west (which is why hatred turns into a self-destruction). It is part of a naive humanist metaphysics to presuppose that beneath this vicious cycle of desire, envy and hatred, there is some “deeper” human core of global solidarity. Stories abound about how, among the refugees, many Syrians are an exception: in transition camps they clean the dirt they leave behind, they behave in a polite and respectful way, many of them are well-educated and speak English, they often even pay for what they consume... in short, we feel they are like ourselves, our educated and civilised middle classes. 

It is popular to claim that the violent refugees represent a minority, and that the large majority has a deep respect for women… while this is of course true, one should nonetheless cast a closer look into the structure of this respect: what kind of woman is “respected”, and what is expected from her? What if a woman is “respected” insofar (and only insofar) as she fits the ideal of a docile servant faithfully doing her home chores, so that her man has the right to explode in fury if she “goes viral” and acts in full autonomy?

Our media usually draw a distinction between “civilised” middle-class refugees and “barbarian” lower class refugees who steal, harass our citizens, behave violently towards women, defecate in public... Instead of dismissing all this as racist propaganda, one should gather the courage to discern a moment of truth in it: brutality, up to outright cruelty towards the weak, animals, women, etc, is a traditional feature of the “lower classes”; one of their strategies of resisting those in power always was a terrifying display of brutality aimed at disturbing the middle-class sense of decency. And one is tempted to read in this way also what happened on New Year’s Eve in Cologne – as an obscene lower-class carnival:

“German police are investigating reports that scores of women were sexually assaulted and mugged in Cologne city centre during New Year’s Eve celebrations, in what a minister called a ‘completely new dimension of crime’. According to the police, those allegedly responsible for the sex attacks and numerous robberies were of Arab and north African origin. Over 100 complaints were filed to police, a third of which were linked to sexual assault. The city centre turned into a ‘lawless zone’: between 500 and 1000 men described as drunk and aggressive are believed to have been behind the attacks on partygoers in the centre of the western German city. Whether they were working as a single group or in separate gangs remains unclear. Women reported being tightly surrounded by groups of men who harassed and mugged them. Some people threw fireworks into the crowds, adding to the chaos. One of the victims had been raped. A volunteer policewoman was among those said to have been sexually assaulted.”4

As expected, the incident is growing: now over 500 complaints have been filed from women, with similar incidents in other German cities (and in Sweden). There are indications that attacks were coordinated in advance, plus right-wing anti-immigrant barbarian “defenders of the civilised west” are striking back with attacks on immigrants, so that the spiral of violence threatens to be unleashed… And, as expected, the politically correct liberal Left mobilised its resources to downplay the incident in the same way it did in the case in Rotherham.

But there is more, much more, to it: the Cologne carnival should be located in the long line whose first recorded case reaches back to Paris of the 1730s, to the so-called “Great Cat Massacre” described by Robert Darnton5, when a group of printing apprentices tortured and ritually killed all the cats they could find, including the pet of their master’s wife. The apprentices were literally treated worse than cats adored by the master’s wife, especially la grise (the grey), her favorite. One night the boys resolved to right this inequitable state of affairs: they dumped sack-loads of half-dead cats in the courtyard and then strung them up on an improvised gallows, the men delirious with joy, disorder, and laughter... Why was the killing so funny?

During carnival the common people suspended the normal rules of behavior and ceremoniously reversed the social order or turned it upside down in riotous procession. Carnival was high season for hilarity, sexuality, and youth run riot, and the crowd often incorporated cat torture into its rough music. While mocking a cuckold or some other victim, the youths passed around a cat, tearing its fur to make it howl. Faire le chat, they called it. The Germans called it Katzenmusik, a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats. The torture of animals, especially cats, was a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. The power of cats was concentrated on the most intimate aspect of domestic life: sex. Le chat, la chatte, le minet mean the same thing in French slang as “pussy” does in English, and they have served as obscenities for centuries.

So what if we conceive of the Cologne incident as a contemporary version of faire le chat? As a carnivalesque rebellion of the underdogs? It wasn't the simple urge for satisfaction of sexually starved young men – this could be done in a more discreet, hidden way – it was foremost a public spectacle of installing fear and humiliation, of exposing the “pussies” of the privileged Germans to painful helplessness. There is, of course, nothing redemptive or emancipatory, nothing effectively liberating, in such a carnival – but this is how actual carnivals work.

This is why the naive attempts to enlighten immigrants (explaining to them that our sexual mores are different, that a woman who walks in public in a mini skirt and smiles does not thereby signal sexual invitation, etc.) are examples of breath-taking stupidity – they know this and that's why they are doing it. They are well aware that what they are doing is foreign to our predominant culture, but they are doing it precisely to wound our sensitivities. The task is to change this stance of envy and revengeful aggressiveness, not to teach them what they already know very well.

The difficult lesson of this entire affair is thus that it is not enough to simply give voice to the underdogs the way they are: in order to enact actual emancipation, they have to be educated (by others and by themselves) into their freedom.

Ontological Incompleteness

Koch, the Evil Thing