By an objective assessment of the political spectrum of the world, there's no doubt that America is center-right. But Bill Kristol isn't looking to make an objective assessment, he's looking to retcon the Obama victory as an overwhelmingly Republican country voting against McCain and Bush, not for Obama.

There's no other Western country where using tax income to address social inequality is even a debating point.

The UK is pretty center-right, too ... and it has paid *paternity* leave, gay civil partnerships and a minimum wage of $21K a year (it's $12K here, to save anyone from looking it up).

Obama's platform, every part of it, would place him comfortably in the right wing of every mainstream right wing party in Europe. So would Hillary's.

Bill Kristol doesn't mean this. He believes that the Republicans are the natural party of government in the US, and that Obama is a blip in that. When he says 'center-right' he means 'Reaganite Republican'.

Elections are won in the center, which is precisely why Kristol and the like keep saying 'center' and accusing anyone against them as being 'extremist'. The Republicans have swung too far to the right.

'Isn't nature splendid?'

Yes, no argument here.

'So let's call that splendor "god"!'

Um ... OK. I won't, but whatever floats your boat.

'Dawkins wrote a whole book called Unweaving the Rainbow about

how splendid nature was, but didn't call it "God". That's

because he's a fundamentalist.'

Er ...

The thing about reductionism isn't that it thinks everything

is small and essentially pointless ... it's that it thinks that all the big and splendid things came about by a series

of quite simple physical stages. The universe of science is

literally billions of times bigger and more complicated and

richer than the bronze age religious view of the universe,

but it seems to be governed by only a handful of physical rules, replaying and combining.

If there are people who can't find meaning or morality

without imagining a god imposing those things on them ...

well, that's a serious limitation on their part. 'God did it all' as the answer to every question is the biggest act of reductionism of the lot.

This is true. Comparing the US to any other similar country, it's center right, socially conservative. And that still holds true even though most Western countries have gravitated towards a monetarist policy platform. Even though most countries have drifted right, Obama is comfortably to the right of most Western politicians. Anyone who doesn't see that isn't looking - and if there's one group of people more insular and self-congratulatory than the American right, it's the American left, who are 'beacons' fighting battles for women's rights won in *Pakistan* twenty years ago.

There are various nuances, though. For a start ... just because the political parties are all center right doesn't mean all the people are.

But most important in this context, though: when the Kristolistas say America is a center right country, all they're actually saying is that Obama should only do exactly what Bush would have done. He should govern as a Republican would govern. That there's no appetite for changing things.

And *that's* nonsense. There's a reason Obama was greeted as a liberator, and it's not because everything was going just swell.

That's all that's being debated here - the current Fox News talking point. They lost, but they want to portray it as a win. And that's all. For sake of *that* argument, America is not a center right nation.

Yeah ... having a system where sick people don't go to be treated isn't a particularly good system. They might not have gone to the doctor, but they might have ended up skipping a day at work. Or going to work and making other people sick. Total cost of that course of action = more than $15. Result: it would have been better if they'd been to the doctor.

Having a population that's healthy and a healthcare system that emphasises prevention and early detection makes for a better society, and is more efficient than the alternative.

Yeah, it probably is. I lived in the UK for ten years, so I've 'lived it', though.

It's simple - the American healthcare system deliberately and systematically excludes the people who are most likely to get sick: poor people, minorities, those with chronic or congenital problems, old people. But even ignoring that, making people worry about the cost, even those with coverage, dissuades people who *are* sick from going to the doctor. It means that conditions that could have been treated early and cheaply (or prevented altogether) become expensive medical emergencies.

The 'free' model probably does have people going to the doctor more often - just as, in the US, 'people who have health insurance' go to the doctor more often. If the system changed, there would be a surge in uptake that would need to be managed - when the NHS was introduced in the UK, millions of people tried to get dental and eye care straight away. There are ways of managing this that every practice already uses.

It is better to have a system where a few people who aren't all that sick go to see the doctor than one where people who are sick don't.

No system is perfect. But any sane healthcare system, surely, has to start by looking out how sick the patient is, not how much cash they've brought along.

Another way universal healthcare would help is that it would reduce the cost of motoring - at the moment, a vast chunk of insurance premiums goes to paying injury claims. In the UK, where healthcare is free at the point of delivery, it doesn't.

Free universal healthcare in the US would massively cut insurance premiums, more people would be able to afford to pick up a car or a second car or whatever.