Another take: Life is absurd and the absurdness of life manifests in various ways, this being how in a third world country. I'd hate to think of what the hospital would be like if everyone skipped out on their bill. Detaining people at hospital seems absurd, but also very pragmatic from an existential concern for the hospital itself. I think the absurdness has something to do with an inherent value of freedom a la agency. One wants to maintain one's agency so one goes to hospital to get fixed up; but the trade off is potentially giving up one's agency, at least for a time.

Another take: calling these situations "absurd" from the perch, presumably, of a wealthy country dismisses the absurdity that we humans don't even aspire (at a policy level) to fix this. We don't want to share resources equitably, so we compete and some people lose. One has no idea how cheap human life is until you've been to a hospital in a poor country and see people die because they can't afford a bag of saline. To make that bag of saline, you access to petroleum, processes for plastic and water security. We all want that stuff for ourselves.

If we each pick a number between one and twenty, and shout that number, it will be a better conversation than what's happening here.

5 stars for somehow making this even more evil. Holy shit

Are you guys saying this os somehow excusable?

M-DEEM dude of course that's our position! Fuck the poor! Fuck the Kenyans! Lock em up for ever!

Come on dude get real.

The conversation is going off the rails because people aren't clear on what the other person is trying to communicate by their use of 'absurd.'

1. causalcollapse is using 'absurd' to presumably express an attitudinal valance like 'bad' or 'not good'. For causalcollapse the situation of confining people to pay their bills, to his/her sensibilities a bad. Full stop.

2. gmol understood casualcollapse's use of 'absurd' to presumably mean 'surprising', to which gmol clearly disagrees, seeing that the context of a third world country certainly leaves open the real possibility of such a policy at a hospital; the insinuation is that inadequate infrastructure of various kinds in third world countries makes such a situation quite plausible.

3. I was riffing off gmol's understanding of 'absurd', suggesting a more Camus styling interpretation of 'absurd' along the lines of 'not logically consistent'. I did this by suggesting that the option to preserve one's agency (by going to the hospital to get better) 'absurdly' aka 'illogically' entails potentially giving up one's agency by way of forced confinement. I couched this position within gmol's assumption that the states of affairs of a third world countries make such a situation plausible. I did this by suggesting that such hospitals probably have a hard time having enough money to operate, such that confinement was a pragmatic strategy for staying open. I didn't say the pragmatic strategy of staying open was morally right or justified. I take the moral nature of the situation to be self-evident.

So now that you (we) have a diagnosis of what's going on in the conversation, you want to try to rephrase your comments in way that isn't unnecessarily insulting? Same to you, Two Jar Slave.

I'd rather drink a raw liter of liposuctionings than continue this thread further

let's play crematory or depository

how about a round of civil forfeiture or civilian forfeiture

mel gibson on the phone, "give me back my son"

*enters credit card info*

*roll credits*