O'Reilly Explains Canada's Health System -Fucking Hilarious!

[Elfdart]

I think this has to be the most moronic comment ever from Falafel Boy:



And that says a lot!

LINK

Last night on the O'Reilly Factor, Bill turned to the audience letters. From Peter in Canada: "Has anyone noted that life expectancy in Canada under our health system is higher than the USA?" Bill wasn't phased, but he did use some creative math to answer. "Well Peter, that's to be expected," he said, "we have ten times as many people as you do!"

[Samuel]

That is the second stupidist thing I saw today. It doesn't violate quite as many parts of logic, but it is close.

[Darth Wong]

And ... Bill O'Reilly reaches a new low. Goddamn, he's an idiot.

I just hope the Daily Show/Colbert people saw that.

[Prannon]

So if we have 10 times as many people, and 10 times as many accidents and crimes, wouldn't that even out proportionally? He was making shit up because he didn't have any good answer to that email.

[Darth Wong]

So if we have 10 times as many people, and 10 times as many accidents and crimes, wouldn't that even out proportionally? He was making shit up because he didn't have any good answer to that email.

What's really sad is that it's an E-mail, not a live caller. This means he actually had a bit of time to compose his response to that, and this was the best he could come up with!

Seriously, Billo's just proven that he's so fucking stupid that he shouldn't be allowed to operate kitchen utensils without a lifeguard.

[Elfdart]

Either that or he's lying and he knows his fuckwit viewers will believe him anyway.

[FSTargetDrone]

Either that or he's lying and he knows his fuckwit viewers will believe him anyway.

Of course they will. There isn't a lot of critical thinking that goes on in the minds of the sort of people who find this clown appealing. Whatever He Says Is Right. He doesn't even have to believe it himself as long as he gets them to believe it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I wonder if he was trying to racist dog-whistle the idea that blacks, hispanics, etc, would live shorter lives than white people, and Canada was primarily white while the USA's life expectancy was brought down by having lots of non-whites in it?

[Darth Wong]

Either that or he's lying and he knows his fuckwit viewers will believe him anyway.

The man is nothing if not an egotist, and there are a number of canned talking points that right-wingers use to handwave away the superior life expectancy of Canadians. While flimsy and weasely, they are far better than the idiocy he went with.

I find it hard to believe he would deliberately make himself look stupid, especially when he had alternatives. It seems to me that he must have said it because he was genuinely stupid enough to think it was a reasonable argument.

[The Spartan]

Sadly, our culture values literacy and campaigns and rails against illiteracy. Yet, no one bats an eye at what Dr. John Allen Paulos calls "innumeracy." No, then the response is more along the lines of "well I'm just not good at math." People shrug and get on with their lives. To be fair, few people need even Algebra in their day to day lives, the problem, of course, is things like this. Members of this board, particularly those of us with math intensive backgrounds are having apoplectic fits that someone would say something so stupid, but the general population away from here are, by and large, going "OOOOO! Good point!"

It's enough to drive me to drink...

[open_sketchbook]

Yes, but it's as you say, most people don't need mathematics for the daily lives. You need to be able to read to gather information in the modern world. Period. While a lack of basic math skills can make you look like an idiot, it will not impede information gathering to a large degree. I'm terrible, utterly awful at math, possibly the worst, but I can read so I can find the calculations of others and still expand my knowledge anyway through memorization. Being unable to read in the modern world... I'd say that's worse nowadays than being unable to speak.

It's not being bad at math that's made O'Reilly an idiot here. It's the fact he's fucking stupid. And the fact there are enough people who are also fucking stupid that even with math backgrounds they'll believe him. It's how the right-wing works, a constant circlejerk of illogical "facts" that get passed off as true despite huge logical errors, then parroted by people whose minds have essentially become warped until they are incapable of seeing illogical information even in shit like this.

[The Spartan]

The problem that I have, and the point I was trying to make, is that people's innumeracy prevents them from catching this type of horseshit, regardless of whether they're looking for an echo chamber or not. It's also when people who know nothing of math (or science in general) open their mouths to tell me in particular or just science in general how something works because of their gut or whatever.

[Vendetta]

In a discussion on another forum I heard what I believe to be the best lolbertarian response to this:

America's low life expectency is a consequence of the freedom of Americans to choose unhealthy lifestyles (and murder each other), and that countries with longer life expectancies were so because they were socialist hellholes where healthy diet was imposed by The Government.

[Ziggy Stardust]

The problem that I have, and the point I was trying to make, is that people's innumeracy prevents them from catching this type of horseshit, regardless of whether they're looking for an echo chamber or not. It's also when people who know nothing of math (or science in general) open their mouths to tell me in particular or just science in general how something works because of their gut or whatever.

I really don't think this case has anything to do with math, I think it is a much more basic underlying failure of any sort of critical thiking.

[The Spartan]

Canada has a healthy diet? Poutin anyone?

[Vendetta]

Canada has a healthy diet? Poutin anyone?

Apparently, if you are not sufficiently healthy for the likings of the faceless bureaucrats who run all socialist health systems, denying care on a whim, the Vegetable Gestapo will kick in your door and force feed you lettuce until you are healthy dammit!

And this does not happen in America. Because America is Free.

[Serafina]

Canada has a healthy diet? Poutin anyone?

Apparently, if you are not sufficiently healthy for the likings of the faceless bureaucrats who run all socialist health systems, denying care on a whim, the Vegetable Gestapo will kick in your door and force feed you lettuce until you are healthy dammit!

And this does not happen in America. Because America is Free.

Well, thats actually true - sort of.

Socialised healthcare tends to fund educational programms about living healthy. And yes, this includes eating vegetables.
But i have never seen or heard of anyone being forced to eat them

Actually, you can see the difference between govermental and private healthcare very clearly in germany:
Nearly all govermental insurances fund educational programms, but private insurances do not do so.

[Lusankya]

In a discussion on another forum I heard what I believe to be the best lolbertarian response to this:

America's low life expectency is a consequence of the freedom of Americans to choose unhealthy lifestyles (and murder each other), and that countries with longer life expectancies were so because they were socialist hellholes where healthy diet was imposed by The Government.

That does not surprise me. I had one guy use a similar argument on me when he was arguing against random breath testing. Apparetly he didn't recognise the right of drunk driving victims to not get killed, because that was never written down in the constitution.

Plenty of these lolbertarians seem to view freedom as something that is inversely proportional to the number of laws that exist, even if the laws actually serve to increase individual choice.

[aerius]

Canada has a healthy diet? Poutin anyone?

Apparently, if you are not sufficiently healthy for the likings of the faceless bureaucrats who run all socialist health systems, denying care on a whim, the Vegetable Gestapo will kick in your door and force feed you lettuce until you are healthy dammit!

And this does not happen in America. Because America is Free.

I know you're kidding, but I should go down to the local WalMart and take pictures of all the land whales in the parking lot. It's like a Jerry Springer lard-ass special down there.

[Darth Wong]

That does not surprise me. I had one guy use a similar argument on me when he was arguing against random breath testing. Apparetly he didn't recognise the right of drunk driving victims to not get killed, because that was never written down in the constitution.

Plenty of these lolbertarians seem to view freedom as something that is inversely proportional to the number of laws that exist, even if the laws actually serve to increase individual choice.

Keep in mind that they use the word "rights" to defend slavery in the pre-Civil War US South. It's perverse; they have tortured the words "rights" and "freedoms" so that they invariably coincide with their personal prejudices, no matter what those prejudices may be. It means nothing when these people say "rights" and "freedoms" because they can make them mean whatever they want. In their minds, a tyrannical majority oppressing the rights of a minority is "freedom", whereas a government telling them to stop would be "tyranny".

[Lusankya]

True. The same person also told me that a shop having a sign at the front saying "it is a condition of entry to this store that your bags may be checked as you leave" violated your basic freedom of choice - namely, the freedom to make the choice to steal from that shop, because you might get caught.

They all seem to view the morality of a certain action in terms of the method in which it's obtained, rather than the end result. If 10,000 people are saved through government intervention, then that's bad because the government is limiting choice and personal responsibility. If 10,000 people die through government inaction, then that's the natural order of things because those people are taking personal responsibility for the choices that they made.

[Phillip Hone]

This doesn't surprise me very much; my mother, who is reallly conservative, uses reasoning like this all the time to dismiss statistics that make Canada look better than the US.

Me: "If Canada is a nightmarish dystopoia, than why does Canada have a lower infant mortality rate than the USA?"
Her: "Of course Canada has a lower infant mortaltity rate! They have only 1/10 as many people! I can't believe you're such an idiot!"

Sometimes when she's angry with me she threatens to make me live in Canada, and with a completely straight face. I mention this not to just get out a "rrrr teenage anger against parents" rant (generally we get a long pretty well, actually), but because I'm pretty sure through watching O'Riley and other conservative media people she has become a pretty good representative of the American right-wing.

[Darth Wong]

This doesn't surprise me very much; my mother, who is reallly conservative, uses reasoning like this all the time to dismiss statistics that make Canada look better than the US.

Me: "If Canada is a nightmarish dystopoia, than why does Canada have a lower infant mortality rate than the USA?"
Her: "Of course Canada has a lower infant mortaltity rate! They have only 1/10 as many people! I can't believe you're such an idiot!"

Sometimes when she's angry with me she threatens to make me live in Canada, and with a completely straight face. I mention this not to just get out a "rrrr teenage anger against parents" rant (generally we get a long pretty well, actually), but because I'm pretty sure through watching O'Riley and other conservative media people she has become a pretty good representative of the American right-wing.

But of course, if anyone tries to characterize party-line Republicans as stupid, then he's being unfair. Never mind the fact that they proudly oppose intellectualism and even centres of higher learning, often characterizing them as "indoctrination" by "left-wing liberals".

[Vympel]

This reminds me of Brit Hume's classic, idiotic attempt to say that California was more dangerous to live in than Iraq:-

"U.S. soldiers have less of a chance of dying from all causes in Iraq than citizens have of being murdered in California, which is roughly the same geographical size."

Anyone remember that classic, from August 2003? Wow, time flies, but Fox News personalities still don't have a fucking clue.

[LaCroix]

True. The same person also told me that a shop having a sign at the front saying "it is a condition of entry to this store that your bags may be checked as you leave" violated your basic freedom of choice - namely, the freedom to make the choice to steal from that shop, because you might get caught.

Well, that's the most fucked up definition of freedom I ever heard. If someone states theft as being a freedom, you should ask them to put their hands into their pockets, so they can't violate your basic right to slap them silly by blocking your fists.