I agree that people with the wrong political opinions should not be allowed to work, and that it's up to corporations to be the ultimate arbitrator of what is acceptable political discourse.
>We had racial policy in the form of slavery, then segregation and Jim Crow, to discriminatory housing policies, to inequitable application of drug laws
All of those examples are the opposite of
>"treat people as individuals, not as just another member of their group"
I trust the government even less. Charlie Gard is a good example - the UK government has not only decided that he should die, but that his parents are barred from bringing him to another country for treatment.
On top that, the UK is saying that he has to die at the hospital and that his parents can't bring him home on hospice.
It's amazing that the hospital has the authority to deny the parents the ability to bring the child home.
They may be tending to a vegetable, but unless they endanger anyone they are entitled to this.
More importantly - hospitals can make mistakes, and any entity with power might eventually abuse it. It is frightening that the hospital has this much power over this family.
The hospital is being backed up by the British and European court systems, and it seems pretty reasonable that those groups together all have this power. If the court had disagreed with the hospital then the hospital would not have had this ability.
> unless they endanger anyone they are entitled to this
In Britain, the rights of the child are considered to pre-empt the rights of their parent to control them. In this case, the doctors argue (and the courts have agreed) that the parents are asking to do something that will cause pain to the child for no benefit to it.
> It's amazing that the hospital has the authority to deny the parents the ability to bring the child home.
It doesn't. The courts do, and the parents got good quality legal advice (pro bono, which is a problem, there's an argument for these kinds of cases to have some legal aid).
No. The Charlie Gard case is an horrific example of how easily grief and desperation are exploited with false hope.
Your corruption of the facts - the UK's government has not "decided he should die" - is an echo of that exploitation.
It is the same construct that leads the unwell to adopt dangerous or ineffective remedies from quacks and snake oil merchants, only in this case it is being leveraged by political and religious groups to further their own agenda.
No. Real hospitals in the US and in Italy have offered to treat him, but the UK has indeed decided he should die and preventing the parents from bringing him to those hospitals.
No. You have moved beyond emotive mis-statement into lying. You are repeating propaganda. The Italian proposal is a bad joke. It is a Vatican hospital with no experience in this field, with no hope of offering any treatment, and is simply grandstanding on behalf of the Pope. As things stand, the UK has not "decided he should die". The UK High Court and Supreme Courts - not government - accepted that he is dying, and that any attempt to prolong life would be cruel. The US hospital proposal may be serious and is under consideration by UK courts, but it too has nevertheless been hijacked by uncomprehending US politicians.
In all this I feel mostly for the parents. Their pain and desperation has been used by cynical opportunists for column inches, and that is just revolting.
One thing - can someone explain to me at what point the hospital becomes a prison?
It feels like I'm missing some utter, basic detail because I keep thinking "so why not just pick up your child, even with the hospital complaining, walk out the front door, and go to <wherever you want to go>"?
Same reason you can't do that when the court says your child needs treatment and you don't want them to have it - the state intervenes on behalf of the child and overrides your parental rights.
I would gladly subscribe to an NPR-caliber newspaper that doesn't have pushing liberal narratives as a #1 priority.
Just like Fox is #1 because it's the only not-liberal media outlet, a real not-liberal newspaper would have a huge following because of the lack of alternatives.
This comment really does point to a couple of fundamental issues that would have to be overcome with any proposed solution. The first is that people often say they are willing to pay for a certain thing, but are generally not willing to do so in fact. The second is that people are not willing to pay for just any content. (TheGirondin, as an example, is willing to pay only for content that he/she construes to be NON-liberal.)
The first problem is that people say they are willing to pay for certain things, but are not willing to do so in fact. So even if you spend money producing NON-liberal content, you may, in a content marketplace with Facebook and Google, find few buyers who were ACTUALLY willing to give you money for it. This issue in particular, bedevils many industries. It's not at all unique to content industries, and even so, few people have found consistently workable solutions to address it.
The second issue is the fact that you would have to begin to produce content for sub-cultures. TheGirondin will only pay for content he/she construes to be NON-liberal. Others will be willing to pay only for content that they construe to be NON-conservative. Still others will want content they construe to be NON-Christian. And then some will want content they construe to be NON-Islamic. For some the content will need to be NON-Mexican. And some will want the content to be NON-Black. Etc etc etc.
We shouldn't underestimate the costs required to produce such content, nor the limited size of the audience of people who would ACTUALLY pay for such content. It is at once extraordinarily expensive for you to produce such content, and at the same time, extraordinarily cheap for Google and Facebook to distribute that expensive content for free anyway. In some of the worst cases, it's almost Quixotic to even try.
(Consider... what sports content could you produce without black people? You could certainly create sports leagues that disallow blacks. That would not be the issue. However, assuming you did spend all the money to do so...
you run into the second problem...
Who would pay you for that content with the regular sports leagues around competing with you?)
This is somewhat of a non sequitur, if you mean to imply that this can be aggregated up into a market for such a publication. People often interject with an "I would pay for xyz" in discussions like this. But in practice, people pay for the kinds of magazines you see on bookshelves. Journalists would love to (in principle) make higher quality stuff, but they get drawn into the click-baity, partisan flamewars because that's what actually sells papers (or eyeballs or whatever).
