SSCReader
6d ago
Derry Girls is very up and down, but the thing I think it does well is juxtapose mundane concerns with the things we get used to (soldiers searching school buses, having to cross armed checkpoints just to go to the other side of town, paramilitaries stealing cars etc, with the sometimes shocking, large bombs, shootings of someone you know etc.
I have a very vivid memory of going about my day as a kid, maybe 11 or 12 and coming home to my uncle and parents having very hushed conversations while watching the news, where a large bombing had taken place in Belfast. Then 10 minutes later i was out playing kerby with my friends. Just the things you can get used to.
Now I live in the US I am not particularly worried their Culture War will go hot. Up until recently i lived in a rural very Red town. Yet I work in academia, so almost all my colleagues are Blue. When I had bbqs or parties and those worlds collided, there was no boom. As different as they are, they are (from the pov of this outsider at least) no where near as opposed as back home. Indeed even very blue progressives are often more patriotic and God fearing than Conservatives in the UK.
I think social media and the like makes it look much worse than it is.
SSCReader
6d ago
Thatcher et al either lacked the appetite for a political purge or didn’t think they could pull it off, and chose to destroy or sell them instead.
Thatcher didn't want to save them, selling them off wasn't an act of desperation it was an act of political ideology.
"Margaret Thatcher strongly supported the initiative, as did the majority of her government, and considered it as a fundamental to improve the economic performance. “As she explained in her memoirs, [she] saw privatisation as ‘fundamental to improving Britain’s economic performance’. But it also chimed with her political ideology.”"
She believed that private industry with decreased regulation was the best way forward. She also wanted council houses and social housing in general out of public ownership and into private hands.
Indeed her famous "The lady's not for turning" speech was given because she was under significant pressure to stop her neoliberal policies. This wasn't desperation, this was exactly the culmination of her principles. Even if they had been performing well and the UK economy was doing well, she would have tried to do the same.
As for unions, she didn't kill them but she crippled them (or they crippled themselves depending on your opinion of Scargill et al). Trade union membership dropped nearly 10 percent during her tenure and days lost to strikes dropped 10 fold by the end of her final year. British Steel had returned to profitability by halving the workforce among other changes, but was still privatized/ This wasn't a fire sale, it was a strategy. And largely she was proven correct, most of the privatized companies showed improvements in performance and labor productivity, even those that were already running reasonably well.
SSCReader
7d ago
Sure, I think that most doctors probably do what they can within the system as it is. But a lot of patients are unhappy with the system as it is. And by the sound of it many doctors are unhappy with the way it is as well.
And while extrapolating from a single act is not a good idea, the number of people who were somewhat or actually supportive of the out and out murder of an Insurance CEO may indicate that something needs to change.
So I suppose the question is, from someone within the system if you were told: "The people are about to rebel and start executing insurance CEOs, hospital CEOs, doctors and more, and we must change to make the system more transparent and cheaper and to not make Drs work insane hours, we don't have a choice" what would you recommend? You have been endowed with decision making power and insurance CEOs are so scared they will follow your decisions. What would you do?
SSCReader
7d ago
I don't really blame a doctor for not being willing to commit fraud for me. I also don't really blame him for the musical chairs of billing. He is just a cog in the system (an important one, but a cog nonetheless), but the system is just pretty terrible for people who don't have great insurance plans (which is a lot of people) and it is also pretty terrible at being really clear about what things are likely to cost for those people, and to decide about trade offs.
As an example my dentist has a hook up straight to my dental insurer, so once he does my check up and decides I need a filling or a crown or a root canal or whatever (or all my old NHS fillings replaced as he thinks they are causing my teeth to crack). He can put in various treatments and get an exact OOP price for each option, right on his tablet. "I recommend a root canal and a crown but we can make do with a filling if you cannot afford it." He still has to tell me that if something goes wrong, it might cost more, and he can't for emergency treatments, but he can tell me the exact expected cost of routine treatments that he does every single day.
Because like it or not cost should be part of the treatment discussion. You want to put me on X but it will cost me 500 dollars a month I don't have or Y which is less effective but I can afford. I will have to make a choice, and I cannot do that without someone going through both the benefits of each medication or surgery and the costs, whether that is risks, side effects but also actual dollar amounts are likely to be.
To be clear Doctor's cannot fix that alone. These are systemic problems caused by interactions of insurance companies, hospitals, laws, regulations and yes doctors. But I do think doctors SHOULD be trained to look at costs as one part of the treatment model. If you want your patient to get a scan, preferably an MRI but a CAT scan would be 50% cheaper (in cost to the patient) and 14% less useful, then patients should be having input into those choices. Even if you can't tell me the exact difference , proactively giving advice on better vs cheaper options is helpful.
Now of course, the patient will probably need to sign off on something to protect you as the doctor ,so they don't come back and sue you for using a cheaper less effective option. But that is solvable.
As for me, well my insurance company refused to cover the first two drugs my GE prescribed anyway because they are new and not on their coverage list, and they will only consider covering them once the older (and cheaper) drugs that are on the list have shown to be ineffective first. Which objectively is an entirely understandable choice on their part. But then it takes another 2 weeks of back and forth to establish what drug they could put me on.
But again an interface with the insurance company where it will immediately tell you what is automatically covered and what is not, is not rocket science. My dentist can tell me what material I am or am not covered for in a crown in 30 seconds. Some of these problems are systemically solvable, even if more complex and emergent costs could not be. My doctor says there are 6 drugs he commonly prescribes for UC and Crohn's and the majority of his patients (who have private insurance) are on one of three insurance providers. Even if all you cover is those 3 providers and those 6 drugs X will cover 1, 2, and 4, Y will cover 2, 3, 5, 6 and so on, you're not only going to save your patients time, you will save yourself time, because now I don't have to keep coming back until we find a drug you want to use that is covered. You'll know for United Healthcare to not bother with 1 and 2 until you have tried 3 and 4.
Doctor's can't do it on their own, but maybe a bit more awareness that pressuring for more transparent costs and the systems that would allow common treatments and insurers to be checked to be Doctor facing (rather than handled entirely separately) would be helpful to both patient and doctor would be useful. Cost is an integral part of treatment decisions, for many, many people, and the current system is simply not set up to facilitate informed choices on that.
That isn't your fault or any doctor's fault. But as a patient advocate, I don't think it is something they perhaps consider enough.
SSCReader
8d ago
The problem is for example, me going for a colonoscopy, I contacted my insurance company to ask how much would be covered. They said if my doctor coded it as preventative (i.e. I was just being screened due to my age) it would be essentially entirely covered, however if it was because the doctor was trying to find a diagnosis it would be 50% co-pay. So I asked well how much would that be, and they said depends on your doctor and their facility but somewhere between 3 and 10,000 dollars, perhaps more.
Now the problem is I was having symptoms, which is why my GP referred me to a GE (the only GE I can get into see inside 3 months in the area as it happens) in the first place. So I ask the GE how they are going to code it and he says, no idea, you'll have to ask the front desk staff who do my billing. So I ask them and they say, depends on what the doctor puts in his notes. If he mentions pre-existing symptoms we'll code it as exploratory. So I ask how much that will cost and they say, we have no idea, so I ask how much does it usually cost OOP on average and they mumble around a lot and eventually say 2-4000 dollars.
So I get the colonoscopy because I am feeling pretty bad, and I get diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, they code it as exploratory and I end up having to pay about 4 and half grand out of pocket (most of which as it happened went to the facility and the anesthetist and the lab that analyzed the removed polyps and tissue, it appears). Now luckily I can afford that, because I am a responsible person with a decent paying job. But I asked my doctor what would have been different if it was just a routine screening and he said nothing at all. He would still have checked polyps in the lab, he would still have done everything he did, except I wouldn't have had to pay more than 50 bucks. And of course he is recommending I get a colonoscopy every 6 months because I am at elevated risk of bowel cancer. Now my GE doctor says he does 5 or 6 colonoscopies a day. It is essentially the main thing he does, and my insurance company is the biggest in the state. There has to be a better way than telling me, well it can be somewhere between zero and unknown but probably between zero and 10K, for a procedure which is pretty well defined.
SSCReader
9d ago
his is a concept in formal logic that it took me awhile to get my head around. A modus ponens argument takes the form “if A, then B; A; therefore B”, while a modus tollens argument takes the form “If A, then B; not B; therefore not A”. In other words, if someone is saying you should believe B because A is true,
I think you're missing a more direct link to something like this. For many people the (subconscious) thought process goes like this as far as I can tell: Only bad people support rapists. I support Conor/immigration. I am not a bad person.
So if Conor is a rapist (A), I am a bad person for supporting him (B). I don't want to see myself as a bad person (Not B) therefore Conor is not a rapist (Not A)
Substitute as desired. It happens most frequently among family members in my experience (I love my brother there is no way he could be a rapist). And can break down under significant levels of evidence, but is very psychologically stressful the stronger your feelings were. So in a world of para-social relationships with celebrities, or where people are projecting onto famous people (OJ Simpson for the black community for example), or feel very strongly about a position it can be common.
See even various attempts to reconcile the existence of evil with an all loving God and sometimes very visceral reactions from Christians that their God may be wrong about something. If God is wrong about homosexuality being a sin, then I am a bad person for disowning my gay son, therefore God has to be perfectly right. My uncle who disowned my gay cousin turned even more fanatically to the Church after he came out, and can't tolerate any criticism about it. Because if it is flawed in any way, then it might be wrong about the very difficult thing he had to do. And if it is wrong he destroyed his relationship with his only son over it, which would make him a bad father. He is very invested in that being right.
It also explains the: That is not happening and if it is happening it would be good anyway pipeline. If A is bad, and I supported it, then I am bad. I don't want to be bad so A is not happening. If confronted with proof that A is happening then I have to rationalize it as being good, so that I can maintain my self-image.
SSCReader
9d ago
Non-fiction I'd say. Is Troubles Fiction even a thing?
Oh yes, ranging from fictionalizations of real events (Walking to School is an example here, basically a fictionalization of the various issues kids crossing sectarian lines to get to school had, of which the Holy Cross incident in 2001 is probably the most prominent), to Across the Barricades (Romeo and Juliet but with more kneecappings) and the like. I think there is even the Iliad but with the Troubles instead of the Greek/Trojan war. Garth Ennis (writer of the Boys and Preacher etc.) has Troubled Souls and For A Few Troubles More graphic novels. For movies and TV you have Derry Girls, '71, Belfast, Omagh, etc.
Non-fiction, I'd recommend From a Clear Blue Sky, which was written by the grandson of Lord Mountbatten. As a child he survived the bombing of his grandfathers fishing boat by the Provos, but his twin did not, so it gives a perspective on traumatic events and loss. Armed Struggle by Richard English, looks more at the evolution of the IRA since the Easter Rising in 1916. Lost Lives by David McKittrick, goes over the stories of those killed, some of which are pretty mundane. Bandit Country The IRA and South Armagh is a staple for a reason.
Voice from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland is excellent all round, Families at War: Voice from the Troubles may fit your bill, though I have not read it, but it is on my list. Supposedly it looks more at the family experiences during the Troubles.
I probably could go on and on, as there is a huge amount of literature generated about the Troubles in general.
As another anecdote, my grandfather told me that he once dug up a box of rifles that had been buried in his fields by one of the Loyalist paramilitaries (probably UDA or UVF given his location), but that he was more mad about how stupid they were in burying it in the middle of a field that was obviously going to ploughed at some point, rather than burying them along the hedgeline where they would likely have been undisturbed for decades. So he marched down to the local Orange Lodge (of which he was a member) and gave off about it over a pint. Mysteriously the guns vanished overnight, with some bottles of potcheen left in their stead. That's where I got the potcheen I would give you behind your mothers back when you were sick, he said. So you can thank those lazy eejits for the hair on your chest.
SSCReader
12d ago
Are you looking for fiction or non fiction?
I have my own stories of growing up and raising kids during the Troubles but I don't know if those are too small scale.
As an example: I have been glassed by the son of a prominent Loyalist paramilitary leader when I was younger (mistaken identity), then his Da, came to my parents house and very politely threatened that should the RUC be involved he would come back with friends. However after he learned my name, He instead promised his son would come and apologize, as my uncles were friendly with another big shot in the paras, and he wanted to smooth things over (my mothers belief of why at least).
His son did come and apologize profusely, and clearly had a black eye and split lip, so punishment of a sort had been meted out.
Certainly in small towns like the one I grew up in the paras acted as arbiters of a sort. Drug dealers back then would often be kneecapped if caught. Though nowadays what remains of the paras are more likely to be dealing themselves, than keeping their neighborhoods clean.
For smaller issues, you could look at our various flag and parade protests/riots, the Holy Cross walking to school incidents, and the demise and re-organization of the RUC into the PSNI and the contentious nature of integrated schooling, which have more day to day impacts, though are probably not as dramatic as all our bombings and shootings!
SSCReader
15d ago
If they are adults now, they weren't raised in the environment we now fear.
No they were raised in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and the Culture war I was trying to stop infecting them was a rather more deadly one. Hatred of Catholics was very common (given I grew up in about the most Loyalist areas there are) and many kids ended up in the paramilitaries, which was the thing I was striving to stop, that particular pernicious influence.
But I think you are wrong, you can start from a very young age to explain the things you want them to understand, kids absorb things from their surroundings and you have to get ahead of that whether it is explaining what a Taig or Fenian is, to what the word trans means (obviously very simplified) You are not going to be able to control everything they learn, so you have to make sure you are ahead of whatever they are going to get exposed to, and that means you have to start young, whatever it is you fear they are going to pick up. By 3 kids can certainly understand the concept of private areas and bad touches, by 5 to 6 they can understand much more. They can't reason through the socio-political implications of the IRA, and the UDR, but they can tell you if someone was calling the lone Catholic boy in the school a Fenian, or talking about how their Daddy has a baseball bat with nails in for Catholics, or if someone tries to talk to them about their body not feeling like their own or what have you.
Community is valuable, but if part of the point of a community is to raise your kids better, one that drove your own family away with (in your own words) bonkers behaviours may not be the one to pick. We must learn from the histories of our forebears after all. I could have gone back to the Plymouth Brethren sect my Dad left, and certainly it would have avoided the paras..because they would have had no tv, no radio, and virtually no contact with the outside world. It is a tight knit community. But it is also a very restrictive one, and I think attempting to raise my kids in a belief system I do not personally believe in is also likely to be fairly corrosive.
I sympathize, and I hope you find a good solution for you and your family.
SSCReader
15d ago
Wouldn't the best option be to not do what your parents did but in reverse? They flee the bonkers traditionalism that pushed so many people away and create the woke movement, you flee the woke movement back into the arms your parents fled from.
Doesn't seem as if it is likely to go any better next time round does it? Then your daughter flees the hell and damnation you thrust upon her and becomes whatever replaces wokeness in 20 years time or whatever. Turbo-wokeness or Satanfarianism or something.
That doesn't seem as if it will actually be any better for her. Do you think your only options are risking she "mutilates" herself or "mutilating" her mentally by enforcing a fear of hell and damnation that you yourself don't even really believe? Just..don't do either. You can expose her to both points of view and educate her about the risks and rewards of each. Give her the tools to be her own person, however that turns out.
Without bragging, that was how I did with my three kids (adults now) and they all turned out to be well adjusted, either with families of their own or heading that way. You don't have to run from one extreme to the other.
And my parents story is very similar to yours for what it is worth, fleeing a restrictive religious sect (though in my parents case because this was Northern Ireland decades back they still had to take us to a Protestant church, for appearances sake), and becoming much more permissive and hating that upbringing.
SSCReader
17d ago
For me truth are just things I know (or think I know, more correctly I suppose) to be true. So if someone asks me Is there a God, if I say No, I am telling the truth, and if I say yes I am lying. It's certainly possible I am wrong, and God does exist, but my statement isn't a lie, just incorrect in that case.
I don't myself hold to a specific ethical structure, because I think they all have some useful things to say and some wrong things to say. All of them are groping at part of the unseen elephant as it were. My joke is I am not a consequentialist, I just played one in politics. As in, if you are deciding whether to allocate funding for a new hospital, a new school or an adult social care facility, you kind of have to try and quantify which brings the most "good" to your nation and citizens given you are spending their tax money. So you'll try to quantify emergency department waiting times vs crowded classrooms vs how many care home places you currently have in the region. And because you may be subject to judicial review, you will have to justify your decision beyond I felt that a hospital does the most good. But outside of that I find utilitarianism particularly goes some places I think are incorrect. Virtue ethics is a little wishy washy and deontology can also break down at scale.
Try to be a good person, consider the outcomes, treat people as you would like to be treated, think hard about difficult problems, allow people to make their own choices, are all useful, but I think they all have to be taken as a kind of gestalt where each is shining a light on one particular part of moral thought. I think two genuinely good people can come to very different decisions on the same moral conundrum, even ones they each find in the other to be monstrous and still be good people.
SSCReader
17d ago
Truth > Freedom > Nation and so on.
But you do have to apply that on the fly? As in presumably not all truths are weighted over all freedoms. If you had to tell a white lie, to save all of humanity from being murdered/enslaved, is truth still over freedom?
SSCReader
17d ago
So.. a Delaware judge has once again unilaterally decided to void Elon Musk's $50 billion pay package.
The one thing I will mention is that companies historically preferred Delaware's Chancery court because there was no chance of a jury trial (most states allow either side to demand and get a jury). The fact it would be a unilateral decision was the selling point, as that is thought to be much lower variance than a jury. I.e. you can predict what each judge is likely to decide based upon case law and their previous decisions. Even if their decisions are not what you want, the fact they are more predictable than a jury trial is valuable.
So this really should only be a problem if this is not consistently followed. But given expert lawyers in Delaware were predicting the outcome prior to the original trial probably indicates that Tesla should have been able to predict this and take steps accordingly (structure the deal differently, have more independence between the people putting together the deal and Musk etc.).
Texas I think does allow jury trials for their Business court, so whether that is going to be better may be a gamble.
SSCReader
17d ago
I haven't changed my views, if anything I think the election results supported me. The gap between men and women did not change much at all, (11 points in 2016, 12 points in 2020, 10 points in 2024) The 4B thing is just signaling and will pass, I haven't heard a single woman I know in person mention it. Commentators can claim whatever they want, it doesn't mean they were right. Race, education and urban/rural are still much more important factors than gender. A white rural woman is much more similar to a white rural man than to a black urban woman in this regard.
Even among ages 18-29 the gap between men and women was smaller than in 2020. I don't think there is any evidence here that it is becoming more of a problem in other words.
SSCReader
17d ago
Reason and intellect. I prefer people to tell the truth, I also prefer people to be alive. The murderer at the door scenario covers this perfectly. Sometimes one of those is more important than the other. Entirely depends on the scenario in question. I prefer people to be able to act freely, I also prefer people not to murder other people. Therefore some level of balance needs to be there given that some people do want to and will murder others if they are not prevented. They cannot have full freedom, otherwise they undermine others rights to life. So we try to cobble together some kind of set of rules that acknowledges that.
It is not a perfect process by any means, and of course it is open to bias just like anything else. But rigid adherence to principles is simply not how we are built. There are vanishingly few Kantians in the world as far as I can tell, and I think that is simply because it does not work. In some circumstances lying is the more moral thing, in some circumstances it is not. Applying your principles to the circumstances and working through what that means is part of being human. Perhaps you might decide that telling the truth to the murderer at the door is best and I decide to lie. That doesn't mean I necessarily think lying is good, just like doing the opposite doesn't mean you think murder is good.
That's why we have multiple competing schools of moral and ethical thought, because the world is complicated and deciding what is the right thing to do is not necessarily straight forward. Principles can clash, and you have to have some way of deciding which is most important, in scenarios where it is impossible to fulfill them all.
Now of course we are also very good at rationalizing our choices to ourselves and to other people, so it is very difficult to know if people are legitimately trading off their principles and beliefs to try and get the best possible outcome that meets as many of their principles as possible, but that is part of the deal, until we invent mind reading, we are alienated from each others thoughts. We cannot truly know each other, only the outward faces we wear.
But it would only be a whim, if I had no principles at all, and wasn't trying to at least reason through how to satisfy them as best I can in any given situation.
I suppose the question is, if you were in a position where your principles clash, how do you deal with that? If fulfilling one of your deeply held principles means breaking another and vice versa, how do you decide?
SSCReader
18d ago
But then why pretend to value freedom most of all when you are ultimately a pragmatist?
When did I say I valued freedom most of all? And saying no means I don't value freedom of association at all, I value it, just not exclusively. So my answer would be Yes, but.
Kant is wrong about many many things and this is one of them. It may be the devil's position but if it is, he inherited it from God. The bible explicitly supports justifiable lies. God rewards the midwives who lie to save male children for example. Because they were not lying for themselves but to save lives, and this showed they "feared God" i.e. correctly valued some of His laws over others. God is is not a Kantian.
There is a difference between something not providing ALL the moral content of your decision making and not providing ANY moral content to your decision making that you seem to be struggling to grasp.
SSCReader
18d ago
What you are missing is that there is a spectrum which runs from principles should never be compromised (the one that never works in the real world) to principles have no value. Indeed my experience is that Chinese lradership are less likely to compromise principles than me, they just have very different principles. In that regard they are closer to you than me.
As to how the US was founded, thats kind of my point. In the real world their Libertarian principles lasted all of about 5 seconds or their fledgling nation would have fallen apart. They suddenly were the ones crushing rebellions and imposing taxes. It turns out just like communism, Libertarianism is utopian but actually unworkable. I think Libertarians are fine principled people, and i have some close friends who are, but it is about as naive about human behavior as the communists. And the history of the US shows that perfectly. All men are created equal, except those its profitable for us to enslave, men should be free to rebel against governments they disagree with..until its our government. Those principles are corrupted immediately by self-interest.
SSCReader
18d ago
To be fair, I am 1) Not American, 2) Not a Democrat and 3) A Mottezin so how much you can extrapolate from me to the people you are talking about is an entirely different ballgame.
If you want to say SSCReader is an inveterate liar, then certainly yes for much of my career I was. But of course, I also worked for both Right and Left wing parties. So as much as I am an exemplar for Democrats it is also going to implicate Republicans.
SSCReader
18d ago
Come now, the idea that principles may need to be traded off against each other in the real world is nothing new, even for Libertarians. Thinking that means people who do that don't actually have principles is just No True Scotsmanning. You see the same thing where people say Christians don't really believe abortion is murder otherwise they would be working harder to stop it. You don't get to decide how other people choose to instantiate their principles.
I love freedom. That doesn't mean I love freedom at any cost. Libertarians who believe a Libertarian nation should have a defensive military funded by taxes certainly understand that. Taxes may be theft but that is cold comfort if your neighbor who does fund their military rolls over your borders.
As for you comment about China if that is some kind of vague swipe about preferring communism, do better. As it happens I have spent significant time in China and it is definitely not a reasonable government by my metrics.
SSCReader
19d ago
Eh, as an atheist veteran of the great online flame wars of the past, I have been called a servant of Satan before. Just a demonstration that the more things change the more they stay the same I suppose.
SSCReader
20d ago
No, which is why some lies are anti-social. We call that fraud, or perjury and the like. Just like some killings are murder, and some are not. Notably we don't criminalize things like lying about how much you can afford, or white lies about whether your wife looks good in her new jeans, and so on. We recognize that not all lies are a problem.
Killing is conducive to a functioning society, whether that is killing in self-defence, execution, war, and so on. So too is lying. Depends on the types of lie and the reasons, just like with killing.
SSCReader
20d ago
Those are not conductive to a functioning society.
History begs to differ. Every society has dishonesty and distrust. Whether individuals like or dislike it is besides the point. They do it. All the time. They lie about how much they drink, how much they eat, they lie about why they can't make it to work, why they have no money. Not everyone and not all the time of course, but enough that you simply cannot operate without taking into account if the other person is lying to you. And that is what our societies have evolved to function with.
SSCReader
20d ago
You want the vegans not to be able to write up a simple contract that says "anybody renting this land must forego meat on penalty of being kicked out".
Yup, in a tension between rights there has to be some level of reasonableness. To be fair I also think a meat eater commune couldn't do the reverse. I think if a Native American on a reservation wants to sell his house to a white man he should be able to. You can contract that they can't damage your land, you can contract they don't unreasonably annoy the neighbours with noise et al. But you can't contract restrictions on eating meat or that they can't make any sounds at all for example. Some things are simply not reasonably contractual. What those things are will vary culture to culture, and in the US situation given their history of as you pointed out enslaving a race against their will, the ensuing Civil War, and then further decades of various discriminatory laws they are very sensitive to racial issues like that. In a different place or a different location it might be different. In Northern Ireland Catholic and Protestant balanced rights have to be considered more than Jews or whatever, in Germany they are sensitive to antisemitism instead.
In some hypothetical nation where vegans were hunted nearly to extinction, there might be carve outs like Native American reservations or peace walls or what have you, as a practical matter, for vegans, to protect them from attack and harassment, but it wouldn't be because they have a fundamental right to bar others, just that nations are complicated and sometimes it is necessary to compromise for the greater good.
The US does have high life expectancy and low infant mortality though. And most of the issues are caused by obesity not healthcare here in any case. Its not the highest certainly, but that isn't your criteria. Likewise the US does have a fairly robust social safety net, and low crime rates. It also has very little actual poverty. It certainly also has a lot of opportunities for leisure and recreation.
I'm by no means in the top 1% but the US is an excellent place to live.
Just comparing to places I have spent plenty of time in, it's better than the UK, better than France, better than China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Russia. Maybe the Nordics might beat it, maybe, but I didn't spend enough time in Sweden to assess.
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