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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

How so?

Do they have a public healthcare system? Nope. What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?

Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?

I could carry on but it's a bit pointless since those are two massive things. You need to remember, how fucked up the US is, is well documented. It's documented by your own media. And confirmed and defended by people like you.

No kind of society doesn't look after it's own. That's what a society is.

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I don't mean to apologize for some of the awful things that go on in the United States, but your comment seems to come from the point of view of someone whose understanding of the country is built on popular media and clickbait headlines, rather than first-hand experience, if I may be so bold.

Keep in mind that what gets reported on and popularized is what sells clicks/views/etc, and is not very representative of "normal life."

It's true that services and norms vary widely across the different states, and in that sense perhaps there is not a "society" so much as "a patchwork of societies, not always working together." But I don't think it's quite the black-and-white either/or question that seems to be argued in this thread.

You don't get to declare by fiat what constitutes a society, or what counts as "taking care of its own". Nor do you get to just help yourself to the assumption that other countries, which claim to have things like "a public healthcare system" and "police who have a duty to save you", actually have those things.

As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.

As for "confirmed and defended", since it's impossible to have a government that actually does the things you claim, of course I can "confirm" that the US doesn't. And of course I'll defend freedom, particularly when that means explaining what freedom actually means to people who don't understand it.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

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>As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.

They show video footage... Jesus christ, you've bought into the Trump propaganda of fake news so much you're just saying believing the media is foolish. This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.

> They show video footage

Video footage can tell you that some small group of people did some particular things at some particular time and place.

Video footage cannot tell you what isn't on the video. Which is the vast majority of what the vast majority of actual Americans do with their time every day. Which does not look at all like your media-inspired, uniformed caricature.

> This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.

Excuse me? The media has always lied. The evidence for that is overwhelming for anyone who actually cares to look.

Decades ago, we had no way of knowing about the extent of lies being told to us by the media (and by our politicians, for that matter) at the time they were told to us, because we had no other sources of information. Now we do. We can spot the lies told to us by all of our so-called "trusted" sources, just as they can spot lies told to us by Trump. There are no genuinely trustworthy sources of information. I agree that sucks, but it's the fact, and trying to ignore it or sugar coat it just makes it worse.

The US is built on a fundamental distrust of mainstream authority. Our founders were religious radicals who thrived as long as they were exiled someplace where they couldn't affect anybody who mattered. Our folk heroes are dimwitted-but-clever rebels who defeat all the experts with old-fashioned know-how. The Russians sent men to space essentially as cargo for the mathematicians back on Earth to work out; we sent seat-of-your-pants pilots, and arguably our most memorable space mission was the one that got screwed up until our team improvised their way to victory. We proudly pay cash to lawn-mowers and restaurant servers we like so they can hide it from the taxman. So given all that, why would we ever meekly hand our humanity, our free will, to the bureaucrats in the police department or hospitals, just so that they can abuse it more efficiently?

German here. We do have a public healthcare system. That we can opt out of and go private. The trade-off is it being increasingly hard to get back into the public one, especially as people get older and thus more "expensive".

Insurances (including fire service or roadside assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had incentive to do the same.

This is interesting, when you say "increasingly hard to get back into", what are you referring to?

What is the rising cost of going back to being on the public system?

Being older than 55 is the big one. Those making very little money can join a family insurance of their significant other. Or find a loophole, like getting into the public system of another country, then moving back.

For those younger, it seems to be mostly about not earning a lot. Here the limits are even smaller for those already private in 2002.

Ah ok, so premiums to rejoin the public service are higher as you're over 55? Vs say continuing to pay?

> Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?

What country puts that kind of positive obligation on the police? I'm not aware of any that do.

By your definition, no "society" existed in the entire world until the 20th century.

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