A Xangan apparently read my last post and my comment on Paul_Partisan’s recent entry and posted a response.  I received the response in my email however it disappeared from the post in question, suggesting that either Xanga had an error or the user deleted it.

Perhaps I should simply let it go, however, I thought what the person said was important and deserved as clear and honest an answer as I can give.

Here’s what the user wrote:

“It doesnt say abortion is illegal. My opinion is the same exact one that Paul presented.

My additional comment/question Is “Why in the world would I pay for someone who gets pregnant and wants an abortion for personal reasons, not medical.

Other than family, paying for someone else is not my responsibility  For the record before abortion was legal I went with a friend to TiJuana so she could go to a clinic there where it was legal. So I definitely believe in legalizing abortions. Your ideas angered me so that I can barely speak. You want everything for free with no responsibility. GROW UP! “

And here is my response to that.

Yes. You’re correct that the Stupak amendment does not make abortion illegal. However, it is a large step in the direction of making it effectively illegal.

Recall, before abortion was legal here, it was not the rich or the well to do who suffered most. They COULD get abortions. They could go to Tijuana like your friend did, or somewhere else. When they needed an abortion they shelled out the money to find safe and effective ways to get an abortion. It was a lot of trouble but they could do it.

However, the poor had no such luxury. To get an abortion they could not afford to go to Tijuana without charitable help. So they would have to get an abortion by going to some possibly dangerous, clearly illegal backwater shop and take their word for it that they have a safe method to perform an abortion. Either that or they’d have to find a way to do it on their own by doing something like hitting their stomach with a baseball bat in the hopes that it induces a miscarriage.  That or have a child they don’t want and probably can’t support. This is not safe. This is not fair. This is not humane.

The Stupak amendment puts us significantly closer to returning to that.

Every person in the individual and small group market will not have any insurance coverage for abortion. They can’t GET insurance coverage for abortion EVEN IF THEY SPEND THEIR OWN MONEY! That’s what the Stupak Amendment does. It makes it so insurance companies will not offer abortion coverage. Period.

Now it may be that insurance companies will include provisions in their plans to cover abortions if and only if they are in cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. The law will allow that. But it does not seem to require it. Insurance companies might not cover that. OK, they might be required to, depending on how you read the legislation, since this amendment contradicts other portions of the legislation.

But if they do, it’s still bad.  A woman who wants an abortion and can’t afford to pay the entire medical cost out of pocket (read most women) will now be subject to an interrogation. They will have to “prove” that their abortion is for a case of rape, incest, or to preserve the life of the mother. Whether or not it sufficiently meets that criteria will be determined not by Doctors, not by the woman, and not by lawyers, but by some insurance company bureaucrat sitting behind a telephone whose JOB is to DENY as many people as much coverage as possible to maximize insurance company profits.

Now the question you asked is why you should have to pay?  The basic answer to that is that as things stood  in many cases you WOULDN’T have had to pay. Women would have been paying for their insurance with THEIR money. Not yours. That insurance would cover abortions.  If this passes, they won’t be able to.

But perhaps there IS two senses in which you would have been paying for other people to have abortion coverage.  One is that your tax money would go toward subsidies to help poor people pay for healthcare. That could include buying if they chose coverage that offered abortion coverage.  The second is the general sense in which any insurance is a pooled risk. Every time you pay your premiums it’s going to the insurance companies pool where it pays not just for your medical procedures but everyone’s medical procedures.

Think about that last point though. EVERY dime of your insurance coverage is going to help people not you or your family get medical coverage. By your own logic you should hate ALL insurance. You should demand instead of insurance to have to pay for all medical treatments in cash for you and your family. Everyone else be damned. Not just for health insurance, but automobile insurance, flood insurance, home insurance, everything.

Similarly the question of tax money going toward subsidies. Right now your tax money is going to help lots and lots and lots of people who are NOT you and your family. It’s giving them access to public schools, to roads, to police, to firefighters, to electricity, to safe drinking water, to postal services, and a host of other things. If you really believe what you say, you should stop paying taxes right now. And at the same time you should opt out of all those systems. Refuse to use public highways, refuse all assistance from the police, not take part in any of the technological innovations resulting from government funded research, not get vacccines, not get social security. The list goes on and on.

And then if someone robs you, tough luck. If someone murders a family member, don’t expect Justice. The judicial system depends on your taxes. It exists to help everyone, including other people who are not you or your family.

But there’s something even more basic that is wrong with what you said.

“paying for someone else is not my responsibility”

“You want everything for free with no responsibility. “

Can’t you see the inherent contradiction here?  You’re the one asking for LESS responsibility. I’m asking for everyone to take on MORE responsibility. I want people to care. I want them to do things to help people who are NOT just them and their family or their friends.  I want people to take responsibility for the health and well being of everyone. Not NO Responsibility. TOTAL RESPONSIBILITY.

I want it to be your responsibility whenever anyone suffers in this country because they aren’t given the health care they need. I want it to be my responsibility. I want it to be ALL of our responsibility.

If you see a man about to be hit by a Bus and you have the power to pull them out of the way and save their life at no risk to yourself, wouldn’t you do that? Even if it’s a stranger. Even if you think the person is an idiot for being out in the middle of the street. Even if it could be a horrible person.  Wouldn’t you do it just because it’s the right thing to do?

Well there are millions of people in the country about to be hit by a Bus that is being uninsured. Many die every day from that Bus. That’s why I presume you support Health Care reform. Not just because it might help you and your family but because it will help save people  from medical bankruptcy and death because they did not have health insurance.

So now what makes the abortion case any different? This amendment clearly throws many women under the bus. Already hard decisions are made into impossible decisions. Women, mostly low income women, will simply have worse lives than they otherwise would have had. Either they will be forced to raise children they don’t want or they’ll be forced to pay for expensive unplanned procedures entirely out of pocket.

What I’m asking for is not complicated. I’m asking for you and everyone to extend the same compassion and courtesy you exhibited when you helped your friend who needed to go to Tijuana to everyone else who needs your help. I want that same spirit of compassion to be a part of all our lives.

And you know what? When ALL of us do it, it’s not that expensive. Sometimes you have hiccups along the way but overall it’s not hard. The power of the collective is immense. We can provide health care AND abortion services to every single person who needs it at very little cost to ourselves. All we need is the WILL to do it. We have to stop vilifying groups we don’t like, like women who get abortions, and start seeing them as human beings deserving as consideration as we are. We’re ALL in this together. They’re ALL part of our big human family. It’s our duty, our responsibility to help make them and us, better.

That’s what I believe in. Those are my “ideas” that angered you to speechlessness.  The idea that we’re all people. The idea that we all matter. The idea that we should all care.

Believe it or not, THAT’S what liberalism is about.

If you don’t know I’ve been strongly in favor of health care reform since the moment I first started caring about politics. And I’ve advocated strongly in favor of the current reform efforts. I thought and think these efforts are not just important but essential for our nation’s future economic security.

So why then do I meet the passing of this bill with almost no enthusiasm and only a sense of depressed melancholy? Why can I not bring myself to express more than lukewarm praise for this so called “success”?

Because at this point, this bill is starting to look as close to being pure suck as it could possibly be and still justify passing.

Worst and latest on this bill’s downward path to futility came in the form of an amendment passed in the House just before the bill was voted on. It’s called the Stupak amendment. It’s about abortion.

If you hear the hype about this amendment you’d think the original bill would have somehow opened some unseen floodgates allowing some mysterious enormous new funds to come in to the health care system and magically seize control of women’s minds forcing them to have abortions against their very will. Thank goodness the Stupak amendment stopped that from happening!

The problem is, this is all hype. The bill as stated before amended did not allow any federal funds to go toward abortions. That was already the status quo and even if the bill had said nothing about it, federal conscience guidelines would have remained in place requiring the government not to fund abortion.  The Hyde amendment was passed in 1977 and already restricts public funds from going toward abortion coverage. How many rules against this do you need!?!?

But since people complained, to provide clarification the bill even included a section that required that women who receive federal subsidies through the bill still pay for their actual abortions using their own money. That’s right abortion services would have been offered but you gotta use your own cash to get them. Simple and reasonable enough right? Not a single dime of federal money could have possibly gone toward paying for an abortion.

I, being an actual liberal, considered THAT status quo to be totally unacceptable. Federal conscience guidelines ought not exist. Abortions should be covered just like any other medical procedure. The Hyde amendment was a terrible thing that ought never have existed. When we extend health care coverage to the poor women who currently can’t afford it we should totally be also giving them abortion coverage. The ability to chose whether to have an abortion has real meaningful positive impact on the quality of life of women in this country. Denying them that right is cruel no matter how it is done.

But that’s a fight for another day. We all KNEW about these rules. We  knew that the bill in no way changed these things. And yet pro-choice people were willing to accept it so long as we all got better health care. Equally. Fairly. It wasn’t the best system but it would help.

However, the pro-life movement was not similarly impressed. For them, the status quo STILL wasn’t good enough.

The Stupak/Pitts amendment flips the whole thing around. Rather than a restriction on government funds it’s a new regulation on insurance companies. It says to them that they CAN’T offer abortion services on an insurance plan if even ONE of the members on that plan receives even a tiny amount of government subsidies to help pay for health insurance.  So get that, you pay 95% of your insurance premiums yourself and get a tiny government subsidy to help pay a little bit of the costs and the result… all plans you sign up for can’t offer abortion coverage. At all.

Do you see the effect?

Obviously this bars any public option health insurance plan from offering abortion coverage but that’s hardly surprising.

Much more significant is that it creates a strong incentive for insurance companies to normalize the plans they offer to the individual insurance market by taking OUT all abortion coverage. Roughly 80% of the customers on the exchange are likely to receive some form of government subsidies to help them pay for insurance. Why would any company risk losing all those lucrative customers? Remember the government is footing the bill for these people. And the people are MANDATED to buy the insurance. So in effect the insurance companies are getting paid for free. Of course they want those customers!  By far the easiest thing to do will be to simply take out abortion coverage for everyone. They have absolute zero incentive to try and come up with accommodations to ensure that abortion services are still offered in individual plans to those who pay without government subsidies.

Consider the long term impact of this. Ultimately the insurance exchange is supposed to fully replace private market insurance. That’s the point of it. Everyone is going to be a part of the exchange so that they can pool resources and pool risk making things cheaper for everyone. Whenever anyone wants private coverage they’ll go to the exchange. Indeed they’ll be MANDATED to do so or else face severe fines. And any company who wants to offer insurance to the uninsured will go to the exchange and put a plan up there to get all the new customers. But now all the plans the companies will put forth will not have abortion coverage. So that means basically it will be effectively impossible for a woman to get insurance coverage for abortion if they don’t have insurance through their employer.

That’s a radical shift from the status quo. Right now 85% of all private insurance plans DO offer abortion coverage. That will shrink to near zero.

I would not be surprised if insurance companies ended up simplify removing abortion coverage from their plans altogether, except for the gold plated cadillac plans. Really in a lot of companies the plans for individual insurance are very similar to some of their employer based plans. Why should they have to differentiate? Indeed, not providing abortion coverage except for the most expensive employer based plans may prove the safer route for them altogether. It would prevent the insurance companies from having to deal with criticism from the anti-choice crowd.

Keep in mind also that a lot of conservative think tanks regularly publish articles describing various plans to eliminate the employer based insurance market. And many economists do believe that ultimately employer based insurance should be phased out for reasons of efficiency and competition. If that ever happens then ALL insurance will be private. And by extension nearly everyone would not have access to insurance plans that cover abortion. An effective pseudo ban on abortion. Abortions only for the rich. Just like in the good old days.

The amendment is  supposed to have two conditions to make it more palatable. The one is that it excludes abortions in cases of rape, incest, and when there’s risk to the life of the mother. That’s at least good. But that just means women in those situations will be put in the uncomfortable position where they have to explain their abortion to some insurance company bureacrats and “prove” that their abortion was “necessary”. That’s sort of sick. It ought to be a decision made between the woman and her doctor with perhaps her family’s input. An insurance company should not stand in the middle of that.

The second mollifying provision is that supposedly women will be able to purchase a single separate Abortion Rider on top of their insurance using their own money.

The Abortion Rider is nothing but a lie.

It’s been tried before. There are states that have mandated this kind of an Abortion Rider to cover abortions. No insurance companies have ever found it profitable to sell actual abortion riders. That’s because nobody buys them. Pregnancies that require an abortion tend to be unplanned. People generally don’t plan in advance and buy insurance coverage to cover abortions “just in case”. No they assume they won’t need an abortion because they won’t get pregnant until they want to.

It would be as if you had to buy a diabetes rider to get coverage for diabetes. You tend to assume you WON’T get diabetes especially when you’re young and healthy. Heck try mandating heart attacks be put under an Cardiac Arrest Rider. See how many people under the age of fifty ever buy it.

This is precisely the problem that mandated insurance is SUPPOSED to solve. Most people wouldn’t even buy car insurance if it weren’t required for you to do so.  They tend to think the accidents won’t happen to them.

Riders are dumb ways to provide insurance. Comprehensive insurance has become the norm because it’s the system that makes sense. It’s the most cost effective. The Rider provision of the amendment will most likely never come into effect simply because knowing how illogical they are no company will bother to offer them.

And that means women who buy coverage on the private market will just be shit out of luck. Anyone who currently has insurance not through an employer and anyone who ever buys insurance not through an employer will most likely lose abortion coverage.

OK, so if that’s what the cost is, is there any gain? Will this actually reduce abortions?

No. We’ve seen that out and out bans of abortion don’t significantly reduce abortions. Why should we expect thsi to do so? No, it will just make more and more women suffer extreme financial hardship on top of everything else when they get the abortion they were going to get anyway. Abortions can be expensive. Obviously the way to mitigate that cost is to pay premiums into an insurance program. No such program will exist for many more women than in the past. So women will go into debt to pay for a lifestyle choice.

That’s the best case scenario. The worst is women again resorting to finding other much more dangerous means of getting an abortion.

NARAL and Planned Parenthood have both come out strongly in condemnation of this amendment. Planned Parenthood went so far as to say they can no longer support health care reform at all if this amendment is a part of the process. That’s quite an extreme statement from a group that has been in favor of health care reform from the very beginning.

It’s interesting to note that the people who voted for the Stupak amendment were almost all the very same people who voted AGAINST the health care reform bill when it went for passage. That includes almost every single republican in the House and a small and heavily influential group of conservative democrats. So these people aren’t really in favor of Health Care Reform. They didn’t pass the amendment because it would make the bill good enough for them to vote for it. No they passed the amendment just to make the bill worse. They knew it was likely going to pass anyway, but perhaps they hoped it would turn enough Democrats against the bill to cause it to fail. Judging from the outrage emanating from the progressives in Congress it very nearly did. The bill only passed 220-215. They only got two more votes than they needed to pass it and one of them was a Republican.

And so now we have yet another even worse variation on the Health Care Reform bill. 

I’ve seen this bill get weakened, watered down, gutted, piece by piece, step by step for months on end. With each new revelation I thought, well that’s still better than doing nothing. It’s a testament to how really bad our Health Care system is and how bad it’s projected to get that I could tolerate all this idiocy in the hopes of just getting something done. As logn as the good outweighed the bad it would be enough. As long as you could bend that cost curve it would be better than nothing. New bills could be passed in the future to make it even better, but we just needed to have something, anything, that worked. Even if only a little. So I supported it.

Now, I’m not so sure. There are a lot of things that are uncertain. Some things in this bill might make things better or might not. But now there’s one thing in the bill that will unquestionably make things worse. It’s going to turn women into effectively second class citizens when it comes to Health Care. They get to either choose no insurance and facing fines or insurance that doesn’t cover their basic needs.  That’s intolerably unfair.

And this isn’t over yet. The Senate is generally more conservative than the House. The bill still needs to pass there. What kind of disgusting watered down corruptions will we  get out of that? Then the bill will have to be reconciled. What will be lost in that process to appease both houses? 

I’m terrified that in the end Health Care reform will indeed prove to have been a great big giant waste of time. Not because Health Care reform isn’t important but because all the stupid infighting resulted in a bill that does as much harm as it does good.

I hope I’m wrong. Maybe this will be the worst that we will hear. Maybe people will be able to fight to get that Stupid Stupak amendment removed in reconciliation. Maybe the bill will still be worthwhile.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Recently I read the latest book in the Wheel of Time series titled The Gathering Storm.  This was the first in a three part finale of the already 11 book long series.

A while back Robert Jordan the author of the Wheel of Time passed away. He was in the process of writing book 12 called A Memory of Light.  Brandon Sanderson was chosen to be his successor and finish the series. However, A Memory of Light promised to be so long that the Sanderson together with the family and publishers decided it would be best to split it into three books.

Altogether, The Gathering Storm was a worth successor. It was exciting and intense and the events that transpired fulfilled the promise of the previous books in the series. I very much enjoyed returning to the world of WoT. It was so nostalgic re-experiencing the lives of these characters I’ve been reading about since I was 12 years old.

But something was… off…

Brandon Sanderson is a skilled storyteller. There’s no question about it. I’ve read his Mistborn series and was surprised by the creativity expressed in his world and simple clarity of the language he used. It was a lot of fun. His fight scenes were perhaps the best part of his stories. They were detailed, fast paced, intense, and immensely entertaining. There’s no real question as to whether Sanderson had the necessary skills to complete the series.

When Sanderson was asked he said that he had no intention of trying to imitate Jordan’s writing voice. He said that that would be a mockery. He was right. And it was good that he didn’t. If he had, I doubt I would have been able to stand reading it.

But Sanderson is not Jordan. And you can tell. I grew up with these books. I’m in love with these characters. And it’s… different.  It feels like there’s like this itch I can’t scratch. It’s off. It doesn’t fit.  It just feels wrong.

There were times when I was reading Jordan’s words and his descriptions would just strike something within me. The hair on the back of my neck would stand on end. A shiver would run up my spine. It just felt sooo real. So powerful. I was entranced as I read, unable to put it down.

And technically, I can see problems with Jordan’s writing. Sometimes his descriptions are just too long. Sometimes his plot dragged. Often I was annoyed with how slowly the story was unfolding. He was by no means perfect. In some ways Sanderson is a superior writer.
 
But in other ways, he doesn’t hold a candle to Jordan.

There was just a way the words flowed. A style to his language that made it unique. It was his voice. His masterful, brilliant, storytelling voice.

The Gathering Storm has some of that. You can see Jordan’s touch on the story. It’s pretty clearly unfolding according to his plan. At many parts it even feels like Jordan’s prose and it probably was since it’s well known he wrote as much as he could before he passed. In particular the prologue alone captured me in the same old spell. I was lost in the words same as always.

But at other parts the differences just annoyed me. Even the tiniest differences would remind me that this is not Jordan. And it just made me sad. It made me melancholy. I wondered at what might have been.

In a lot of ways it’s the same sort of feeling you get when a copy cat band plays a song from your favorite band. Or if in the old days if a bard’s apprentice were to play the epic songs or tell the tales of his master. It might be good. Indeed it might even be impressive, but it’s not the same. And that alone is enough is to make it not as good. You want the original. It was JORDAN’s vision. It was Jordan’s world.  Nothing else is the same.

This is why I can’t get into fanfiction. The author’s voice means a LOT to me. Sometimes, I’ll find fanfiction I enjoy. Some writers of fanfiction are VERY skilled. But it’s not the same. I just KNOW the author would never write that  or do that thing  or have the character say this or that, and it just irks me. It’s that itch. Always there. I can’t banish it from my mind.

I suppose it would have been worse if Sanderson had obviously surpassed Jordan or equaled him in every way.  Then it would have felt as if Jordan was replaced so easily and that would have been really sad.  But that was never a real possibility. Nobody can write exactly like Robert Jordan because nobody IS Robert Jordan. He’s a unique individual who had an amazing extraordinary vision that we are lucky he chose to share with the world.

I’m glad the story is being finished. I love that I’ll eventually find out exactly what Robert Jordan dreamed would happen to his characters.  I’ll read the books as soon as they come out just like I always do. I’ll get hours of enjoyment same as always.

But all the time ever mixed with the pleasure will be this perpetual sense of sadness that comes from the knowledge that there will never be another novel, another story, another chapter of writing with Robert Jordan’s remarkable unmatched storytelling voice. And I’ll remember then how much I miss him.

This video pretty much speaks for itself. 

I’ve been a member of Xanga for quite a while now. And all the time I’ve been here there’s always been this conflict over what Xanga is that drives the debate over how to reform it. 

People ask the question, is it a blogging site or is a Journaling site?  Is it a blogging site or a personal webpage generation site? Is it a blogging site or is a Social Networking site?  Is it a blogging site or is it a video and image posting site? Is it a blogging site or a wannabe microblogging site? Is it a blogging site or is a network of online collaborative magazines site? And most recently is it a blogging site or is it a forum site?

But I have a much simpler question I want to ask. A question I need an answer to before I can even begin to answer any of those other questions.

What exactly IS a blogging site?

What are the principles that make a blogging site a real blogging site? What are the features a blogging site can’t do without? What are the kinds of features that facilitate and enhance blogging as opposed to any or all of those other sites?

Because when I look out at all the online site from facebook to myspace to twiter to gaia online to blogger to orkut to wordpress to livejournal to youtube to linkedin to blogspot to tumblr to deviantart to xanga…  and they all tend to sort of blur together in my mind. Features are repeated across each service.  As time passes they all tend to copy off each other so much that they all start to feel the same. It’s hard to see what the design principles are that separate each of these services.

So I’m asking you. What are the first principles that define each type of internet service? What does it mean when we say we want Xanga to focus on blogging and not trying to be some other kind of site? What are we talking about when we say Xanga operates more like this or that kind of site then a blogging site?

I’m looking to determine a theory of blogging. Can you help?