Alex > Recent Status Updates

I'd rate the part about our medical system with three and a half stars. I wouldn't know how to begin to explain our system to an American, honestly.

Riddle me this: How can a rich person suffering from cancer be privileged because he belongs to a group with a higher life expectancy? That sounds like conflating the individual and the group he belongs to.

At least some of the info on our two-class-medical systemi is interesting.

Contrary to Lauterbach, I don't see the inheritance of wealth as unjust. This book has "envy" written all over it, but at the same time, he speaks of badly integrated foreigners and assorted "victims" of the system with thinly veiled disgust.

His lack of vision doesn't extend to making the availability of student loans dependant on the DISCRETIONARY income of the parents. When the parents are in debt, a high income isn't necessarily helping much.

In his vision, fourty percent of all children would get a university or equivalent degree. First, inflation of university degrees is a thing. Second, why? Do gardeners, taxi drivers and hairdressers need such a degree? No, and jobs like these probably make up more than sixty percent of the workforce, and the people who perform them aren't living a less fulfilled existence than many academicians.

Rawls' ideas are based on the "intuitive understanding of justice in modern society". Except they aren't. According to Rawls' ideas, if someone stumbled on a treasure (or his true love?) by a stroke of luck, it should be taken from him unless it can be redistributed so as to benefit the poorest of society.

He speaks of the state's children, not totalitarian at all, nothing to see here. And don't you dare quote him when you want to nap in a government building! It may be your parent but that doesn't mean it wants you sleeping on THEIR couch!

The state as Ersatzparent and more socialist drivel. This book is worse than I expected. Also, crap about Sweden being the best at everything. Then why have I never read a quality post from a Swede on any platform? (I'm aware that by this metric, Brazil is the best. That's a feature, not a glitch.)

Lauterbach proposed mandatory Kindergarten. That's the dumbest idea I ever heard. These places are just a warehouse for kids until their parents come home from work, and Lauterbach just said their personnel has a terrible performance.

This book has less than two-hundred footnotes, which also supply the sources. There is also no literature index. I keep stumbling on empirical statements that have no footnote and thus aren't sourced.

Two pages in and he's already bringing up John Rawls.

First statement that didn't age well: It's inconceivable that an uninsured person suffering from cancer wouldn't be treated.

Mad Bear is the man. Love the guy.

"What nonsense, old man! he chided himself. When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary. Oh there’s the devil, all right, but let’s not credit him with more than his damnable due. Are you that life-weary, old fossil?"

"Die zwölf Franken vertrank Herr Dingle in Le Havre, und außerdem fuhr er statt nach Irland nach Djibouti. Kurz, die Messe wurde nicht gelesen, weshalb in den natürlichen Verlauf der Dinge keine höhere Macht eingriff."