Showing posts with label Social Commentary.. Show all posts

Tuesday 2 May 2023

File under "well said." XCVI

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect)."

Mark Twain.

Saturday 29 April 2023

Politics poisons everything the board game?

Monday 24 April 2023

Florida's state government's white bear problem?

NYT Pushes Suicide for the Mentally Ill

Wesley Smith

The phony argument that legalized assisted suicide will permanently be limited to the terminally ill took a big hit with a New York Times op-ed in which an oft-suicidal Canadian philosophy professor, Clancy Martin, argues that mentally ill people who are suicidal should receive help from doctors to die.

Martin’s first paragraph makes clear why his thesis should be rejected out of hand:

My first attempt to kill myself was when I was a child. I tried again as a teenager; as an adult, I’ve attempted suicide repeatedly and in a variety of ways. And yet, as a 55-year-old white man (a member of one of the groups at the highest risk for suicide in America) and the happily married father of five children, I am thankful that I am incompetent at killing myself.

If a doctor had helped Martin, he wouldn’t be alive today to be happily married, a father of five, and published in the “newspaper of record.” When a doctor helps a patient die, either by prescription or lethal injection, the job gets done.

The Gift of Life

Rather than appreciate the gift of life he received as a result of doctors’ being prohibited from helping him die, Martin wants mentally ill patients to qualify for lethal overdoses — an act that doctors foreswear in the Hippocratic Oath:

One might expect that as someone who has repeatedly attempted suicide and yet is happy to be alive, I am opposed to euthanasia on psychiatric grounds. But it is because of my intimacy with suicide that I believe people must have this right.

It’s true that policymakers, psychiatrists and medical ethicists must treat requests for euthanasia on psychiatric grounds with particular care, because we don’t understand mental illness as well as we do physical illness. However, the difficulty of understanding extreme psychological suffering is in fact a reason to endorse a prudent policy of assisted suicide for at least some psychiatric cases. When people are desperate for relief from torment that we do not understand well enough to effectively treat, giving them the right and the expert medical assistance to end that misery is caring for them.

Between the Patient and the Grave

But that’s precisely when a compassionate psychiatrist may be able to stand between the despairing patient and the grave. And, as he apparently did, these despairing people often rally and find the strength to go on.

Martin does the “strict-guidelines-can-prevent-abuse” soft-shoe, but as we have seen over and over — in Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, and even the U.S. — guidelines offer a veneer of assurance and are liberalized and expanded as soon as the political paradigm allows. Indeed, in recent weeks, that is precisely what happened in Vermont, Oregon, Canada, and the Netherlands.

He concludes:

Suicidal people suffering from psychological torture should have the right to consult a medical expert about medical assistance in taking their own lives and be given that assistance if their need is justified. Having terrified or anguished people in acute mental suffering ending their pain by the many means available to them, often resulting not in death but terrible physical injury, is much worse, and it’s happening every day.

Who will be the “expert” to judge whether someone else has suffered enough? The patient’s doctor? If the doctor refuses, a suicidal person can go doctor-shopping with the help of euthanasia-advocacy organizations to find one who will say yes. Indeed, wherever euthanasia is legal, doctors participate in the assisted-suicide deaths of patients outside their own medical specialties.

Anything Else Is Abandonment

We should never make suicide easy — the West is experiencing a suicide crisis, after all — and we should always strive to engage in interventions, whether the patient is suicidal because of cancer, a mental illness, or a calamity such as the death of a child. To do anything else is abandonment.

The question is whether we still care enough about each other for that to matter. At least Martin’s advocacy has the virtue of being an honest recitation of what euthanasia advocacy is really about.

Ps. The difference between JEHOVAH'S approach to addressing these types of issues and the approaches preferred by the thought leaders of the present age, is that JEHOVAH is addressing the disease and thought leaders on both sides of this issue are dealing with the symptoms.

Saturday 22 April 2023

A maximum wage?

Friday 21 April 2023

The Mediterranean's demographic time bomb?

Wednesday 19 April 2023

Ideology vs. reality?

Atheism is not a thing.

Sworn in on a Copy of…a Carl Sagan Book?

Rob Sheldon

From The__Byte:

If you look closely at the photo that accompanies NASA’s press release about the new director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, you’ll see something both curious and delightful — that she’s taking her oath not on the Bible, or any other conventional holy book, but on a copy of Carl Sagan’s 1994 “Pale Blue Dot.”

Indeed, as NASA Watch‘s Keith Cowing spotted following Dr. Makenzie Lystrup’s swearing in last Friday, the first woman ever to lead the Maryland space center marked the occasion with a nod to that other star enthusiast, the late Sagan.

“Normally I just pass on these staged pics,” Cowing wrote. “But people have noticed something unusual about this photo.”

In the good old days when I was young, people viewed oaths as particularly dangerous. If you violated an oath, you didn’t just come under the wrath of the State, you came under the wrath of God. Therefore taking an oath of office involved a Bible to give it extra binding power. It reassured the public that even if you violated your oath, God would even the score. Apparently, even atheists fear the wrath of God, and do not want to use a Bible, which they say they don’t believe in. Of course no one “believes in Carl Sagan,” but that is exactly the point — the oath has no teeth. I don’t know Makenzie Lystrup’s personal beliefs, but it’s astonishing how many atheists reveal they believe in God by the things they avoid

Ps. I beg to differ with Mr. Sheldon Scientism has become a religion for many "atheists" and adherents of this faith regard the likes of Mr. Sagan as Prophets/saints/avatars, so I would actually like to commend ms.Lystrup at least(unlike many "theists") she is open about her Scientism.

Tuesday 18 April 2023

Think you're a law abiding citizen? Time to think again

Monday 17 April 2023

Whither the Christian nation? II

File under "well said" XCV

"It takes considerable knowledge Just to realise the extent of your own ignorance."

Thomas Sowell

Friday 14 April 2023

Saving civil discourse?

2+2=5?

Monday 10 April 2023

False messiahs ?

Red team vs. Blue team post game?

Sunday 9 April 2023

When your only tool is an eraser?

The religiopolitical right makes another bid for the lead in the race to the bottom with the religiopolitical left .

Wednesday 5 April 2023

Playing God(again)

Pleistocene Park: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Rob Sheldon

Popular Mechanics reports, “Bringing Back the Wooly Mammoth Is One Big Genetic Gamble, Scientists Say.” Pleistocene Park, as it’s called, is the brainchild of Sergey Zimov in 1997, 50 square miles of Siberia are to be returned to the Pleistocene — 25,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. (See sources here, here, here, and here.)

But how, and why? Strangely, as glaciers slowly ground over North America, producing the Great Lakes, Siberia sported vast grasslands in which the apex herbivore was the wooly mammoth. Like the bison of the American plains, the mammoth modified its environment to remove the trees and keep it a productive grassland, the “mammoth steppe.” The last mammoth died on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, some 4,000 years ago. But not before leaving frozen carcasses in the permafrost of Siberia, which were so well preserved that we have stories of stranded explorers subsisting on mammoth steaks. It is to these ancient TV dinners that we owe the rediscovery of the genome of an extinct species of cold-adapted elephant.

Well, in recreating an extinct species, what else would researchers choose — the passenger pigeon that crowded the Appalachian forests, the thylacine wolf that preyed on Australian marsupials, or the half-zebra quagga that had roamed the South African plains? For all these animals, their habitat had been taken over by humans, and it is doubtful that they would ever survive in the wild again. But the mammoth lived in Siberia, in one of the least inhabited places on earth, and likely to stay uninhabited. If ever there was a place to regain prehistoric paradise, this was it.

Getting Started

How is one to restart an extinct species? Isn’t this the chicken-and-egg problem in spades?

The idea is to recreate some of the DNA from the sequencing of frozen mammoths, and inject it into an Asian elephant egg to produce a half-elephant half-mammoth hybrid. Once a viable embryo is made, further CRISPR-Cas9 splicing can increase the percentage of mammoth DNA to produce 3/4 and 7/8 “mammophants.” Then by degrees one approaches true mammoths. Many challenges present themselves, not least is finding which hybrids are viable and which are stillborn. The gestation of an Asian elephant is 22 months and many trials are needed. This will be an expensive and lengthy process.

Wouldn’t one of the other extinct species be a whole lot easier to recreate? Why choose a mammoth?

A Mission to Save the Planet

Zimov doesn’t want to just recreate the Pleistocene, but in an echo of the commercial possibilities outlined in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, he wants to save the planet. In a world devoid of religion, global climate change (GCC) has risen to fill the need. The earth has a fever, and billions of dollars are being spent on antipyretics such as lithium batteries, giant windmills, carbon dioxide sequestration, and hydrogen fuels. If Zimov can link up to this powerful liturgy, his funding, if not his park, will be secure. And so he proposed that mammoths did not just spread poop across the steppe, distributing micronutrients, but they also cooled the planet, hence, the Ice Age.

How could a mammoth cool the planet, by flapping its ears?

That’s a peculiar feature of permafrost. It’s cold 365 days of the year. Cold enough that the methane gas, produced by methanogen bacteria slowly decomposing plant material, can form a special water ice mixture called a “clathrate.” Think of this as God’s bottled gas supply, existing in the bottom of oceans near gas seeps and in the polar permafrost. The GCC liturgy views methane as a powerful greenhouse gas, despite the fact that more abundant water vapor has already blocked all the infrared radiation that methane might potentially block, and despite the fact that methane is destroyed by ultraviolet light in less than a year. So GCC computer divinations warn the devout that should global warming begin to melt the permafrost, it would release all the methane and cause the runaway heat death of the planet.

Zimov Saw His Chance

Yet clones have no mothers, and surrogate wombs are either tanks or female African elephants. Like the elephant Horton in Dr. Seuss’ children’s book, this work will not hatch mammoths, but at best, elephants.

More to the genetics point, the same technologies would make even more profit for the breeding of humans. The success of Pleistocene Park would be rapidly transformed into Brave New World.

Yet another slippery slope?

In Belgium, Subjectivity Triumphs Over Biology

Wesley J Smith

We live in an irrational age. Germany allows people to change their gender once a year simply by filing out an official form. And now, Belgium is about to allow people to change gender — apparently, whenever they want.

The Belgian supreme court previously ruled that requiring people to identify as male or female violated the equality of people who don’t see themselves as exclusively either. So, a new law will be passed allowing ongoing fluidity of gender identity which will be officially recognized by submitting a simple form. From the Sudinfo story (Google translation):

The principle of irrevocability as well as the procedure before the family court are abolished, announced the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne in a press release. . . . This means that people will be allowed to change their gender and first name several times.

Similarly, the procedure before the family court will also be abolished. It will therefore always be possible to change the sex registration or first name with the registrar, following the same simple procedure as for the first change . . .

“It is important that the rights of transgender people are respected and that they can change their sex registration based on their gender identity, without unnecessary or nit-picking procedures. The Constitutional Court has rightly pointed out that the original law is insufficient in this area. We now want to remedy this situation with this bill, so that transgender people are recognized for who they are,” the minister said.

Apparently, even if “who they are” continually shifts.

Civilization-Destroying Stuff

This is civilization-destroying stuff. Not because of the transgender issue per se, but because it represents the triumph of the subjective.

A society based primarily on feelings over thought will be, by definition, profoundly unstable. Our emotions are ephemeral. If I “feel” I am male today, and female tomorrow, and neither the next day — and the law and culture must accommodate my current emotional state — rationality as the basis of society will shatter.

Why is this, Wesley? Transgendered people are a tiny minority of the population.

Because rule by irrationality won’t be limited to gender dysphoria. The attitude will metastasize throughout the depth and breadth of society and culture, eventually corroding our most fundamental institutions and societal structures. As the ancient wisdom has it, a house built on sand cannot stand.

Pages

Search This Blog