Eliza
2mo ago
I skim-read that as 'Call of the Wild' (the Jack London novel where a sled dog goes to live in the woods with wolves) and was very confused. But happy that 'girl stories' were finally moving in my direction. Alas.
Eliza
3mo ago
Most of these claims arise in the rare periods of lucidity that bless/curse the severely demented. You get a few good minutes or hours to realize how your brain is rotting, often before your body has, and you realize how awful things have become. Then you slide back into the vague half-life of semi-consciousness, and I hope your mind is choosing to devote its last dregs of cognition to happier memories, instead of the living hell you currently dwell in.
I sometimes think that our approach to euthanasia is stymied by fundamental incompatibilities and contradictions with post-enlightenment principles. We highly prize autonomy and regard as foundational the need for consent. But the ones most in need of euthanasia are those who have declined to the point they no longer meaningfully can consent. And I find it somewhat cruel to imagine a person struggling with a terminal illness or other severe mental or physical suffering, being additionally burdened with having to take the sole decision of if and when to end their life. What a huge question to have to grapple with at the lowest point in your life.
I think there is a serious and tragic problem here; but we lack a suitable cultural programming to adequately solve it. Our focus on preservation of life to the exclusion of all else creates outcomes where people spend months or years existing, suffering, without hope of recovery. An insistence on the inviolable importance of consent means many of those who arguably need it most cannot access euthanasia under any system we could invent. And a belief that any such avenue must be systematized and accountable will create a system overloaded with bureaucracy, hoops to jump through and people covering their asses at every turn in case they go to jail. None of it will be the best interests of the patient.
Eliza
3mo ago
There are not too many years separating the Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Both are deemed illegal under international law. Both restrict the rights of the former occupant population. But one has been an on-and-off war zone ever since, and one has not. Why? No single reason. But a big one is that Turkey accompanied their annexation with near-complete ethnic cleansing.
Eliza
3mo ago
In vitro fertilization involves creating more embryos than you intend to implant and then destroying the rest.
I share some of your ethical concerns around IVF. But the wilful misrepresentation of how IVF works does not help pro-life arguments. IVF superstimulates the ovary in order to collect many eggs in one go. Of these, only a proportion fertilize, and only a proportion of those start developing, and only a portion of those become embryos, and only a proportion of those are genetically viable. The 'many embryos used up to make one child!' faux-statistic is because of natural attrition, because human reproduction is dicey and inefficient. Not because someone arbitrarily decided to discard them. If there are any surplus embryos at the end of this gauntlet they would normally be frozen for later use.
It's disorienting to realise that our media diet is selected and proportioned far more by the availability/prominence/outrageousness of those particular news stories, than any objective importance of the events they describe. News media, like everywhere else, is scrambling to keep broadcasting with squeezed budgets. It's much simpler (and cheaper) to repeat verbatim a report from some NGO than pay an investigative reporter.
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