I mean, this is a sad story. You didn't want to marry her for reasons, this guy doesn't want to marry her for reasons. (I do think there's an element of pride there about not wanting to be perceived as the male version of a gold-digger, but whatever).
She's not sleeping around because she's riding the cock carousel, as the crude phrase has it. According to you, she only had a handful of boyfriends and slept with them in the context of 'this is a serious long-term relationship'.
She wants to get married, but can't. This is not the temptress of redpill lore, she has all the perceived advantages in the dating marketplace but can't find a guy who wants to marry her, and it's not because she's looking for unattainable perfection.
An arranged marriage would be the best chance for her: her parents find a decent guy who will be happy enough with a ditzy (but loyal) wife who looks good, has enough knowledge of wealthy social circles to fill the role of running the household and hosting and supporting his career, and he is capable enough to take over the family business and not run it into the ground.
I hope she finds someone soon, this is wasting her life and chances for what sounds like a nice (if dumb) girl. Remind me to say a prayer for her, the traditional one I know is "St Anne, St Anne, find me a man" but looking it up online the other matchmaker saints (for women) are St. Andrew, St. Anthony of Padua, and the Archangel Raphael. I guess St. Nicolas of Myra fits there too with the dowries he arranged.
HereAndGone
5d ago
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. "It works but we don't know why or how and our last theory is gone up in smoke" does not read well for a position of "well my fart-huffing is more scientifically based at least!"
HereAndGone
8d ago
Because it's the adult kids end up with "hi, here's your mother's ashes in a parcel, oh you say nobody notified you? not our problem anymore!"
HereAndGone
8d ago
Most humanities programs are, to put it bluntly, huffing their own farts.
...Psychiatry is hardly perfect in that regard, but we care more about RCTs than debating Freudian vs Lacanian nonsense. Does the intervention improve outcomes in a measurable way? If not, it is of limited use, no matter how elegant the theory behind it.
In other words, "our farts are different"? 😀
There would be the view out there that "okay, so you are trying to distinguish yourself, as a psychiatrist, from those squishy psychotherapists, but dude, the main difference is that you guys are legal drug pushers and now there's some doubt that the drugs even work".
Depression caused by lack of serotonin? Yeah, we don't think that anymore, but we still prescribe drugs to bump up serotonin levels.
Many such instances!
HereAndGone
11d ago
they need them to save other people's lives
Mmmm. That's a bit too much like the thought experiment about the surgeon kidnapping people and killing them for their organs - is he wrong or is he in the right? And there does seem to be some financial inducements involved, or at least alleged.
I think people are uncomfortable with revising definitions of death to be "this person isn't dying fast enough so we can break them down for parts, let's say that if they're not up and about dancing flamenco, they're toast and we can start cutting".
HereAndGone
11d ago
Thank you for the explanation. It still seems a longer way round than just remembering the times tables, but if it works for people to understand the principles, I suppose that's the main point.
HereAndGone
11d ago
Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:
Two families whose loved ones ended their lives at a Swiss clinic in secret have said they are heartbroken that another family has been put through a similar ordeal.
Anne Canning (51), from Wales, travelled to the Pegasos clinic, near Basel, to end her life in January following the tragic death of her only son. She told her family she was going on holidays.
Under similar circumstances, Alastair Hamilton (47) travelled from the UK to the clinic in 2023.
Following Mr Hamilton’s death, the clinic reportedly promised last year that it would always contact a person’s family before carrying out an assisted death.
However, Ms Canning’s family claim they were never informed.
Last week, the daughter of a Co Cavan-based woman who ended her life alone at the same clinic told the Irish Independent that the first she knew that her mother had died was when a volunteer for the group sent her a WhatsApp message.
Maureen Slough (58), who had a history of mental illness, travelled to the Pegasos clinic on July 8, having told her family she was going to Lithuania with a friend.
Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.
There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:
The Pegasos group said it received a letter from Ms Slough’s daughter, Megan Royal, saying she was aware of her mother’s wishes and accepted them.
It also said it verified the letter through an email response to her using an email address allegedly supplied by Ms Royal.
Ms Royal said she never wrote such a letter or verified any contact from Pegasos, and her family think Ms Slough may have forged the letter and verified it using an email address she created herself.
Her family have questioned why Pegasos staff did not ring Ms Royal on a number that Ms Slough had supplied to them for her.
The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.
Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.
HereAndGone
12d ago
that still requires you to know that 4 x 7 = 28 and to me it's just as fast to learn all the times tables in that case.
HereAndGone
12d ago
They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward.
That was the ending of the James Cagney movie Angels with Dirty Faces: the childhood friend, now a priest, of the gangster Rocky asks him to beg for mercy on the way to the electric chair so the gang of juvenile delinquents who idolise him will turn away from the criminal path:
In Rocky's last few hours before execution, Jerry visits. He sees the negative impact Rocky could have on the Dead End Kids and asks him to beg for mercy on his way to the death house, citing the impact it would have on the gang, ruining their romantic image of the gangster lifestyle. Rocky refuses, telling Jerry that his reputation is all that he has left.
As they enter the execution room, Rocky shakes Jerry's hand and wishes him well before walking to the electric chair. Then out of nowhere Rocky breaks down, begging and screaming for mercy, and seemingly dies a coward's death. Later, Soapy and the gang read in the newspapers of how Rocky "turned yellow" in the face of his execution. The gang no longer knows what to think about Rocky or the criminal lifestyle, and Jerry asks them to accompany him to say a prayer for "a boy who couldn't run as fast as I could".
HereAndGone
12d ago
Had a look at the Substack link, tried reading what he believes as a pagan, and my impression is "cut-rate Gibbon". Too occupied with "and here is why it's the fault of Christianity that our empire is declining!" and not enough "as a pagan this is why I do things the way I do". I doubt he makes any offering to his picture of Athena, or to Wotan, or any of the rituals pagans would engage in. When he was going "and a real pagan of the past would never do this thing", I was going "Dude, that was exactly the thing they were doing".
HereAndGone
12d ago
As you say, you came along long after all this row. So any improvements that occurred before you started working in the UK are invisible to you. I don't know if the lurid accusations were true but they were certainly made:
Of the hundreds of families who submitted testimony of their loved ones’ experiences on the pathway to the independent review chaired by Baroness Neuberger in 2013, many referenced hydration and nutrition. Some patients’ families had been shouted at by nurses when trying to give them water. The panel also heard how opiates and tranquillisers were sometimes used inappropriately and in too strong a dose as soon as the LCP was initiated, which made the patient drowsy and incapable of asking for food or drink. The Neuberger report quotes a particularly shocking example of someone who suffered a painfully “slow death, attributable in part to dehydration and starvation”.
...One case study in the 2023 report refers to a 21-year-old woman named Laura Jane Booth, who was admitted for a routine eye operation in 2016. Three weeks later, she was dead. Booth, who had the genetic disorder Patau’s syndrome, was initially deemed to have died of natural causes on her death certificate; a 2021 inquest, however, found that there had been a “gross failure of her care” and that “malnutrition contributed to her death”. Her parents said that she’d been denied food for weeks while in hospital, and that they’d had no idea she was put on an end-of-life pathway. The report for LCFCPG said this is one of seven cases in which doctors failed to take a patient’s mental capacity into account, in clear breach of the Mental Capacity Act 2005.
...We spoke with Julie James, whose dad David was a respected Liverpool musician and cancer survivor. James drove himself into Aintree Hospital in May 2012 with constipation. After originally being told a simple procedure would remove the blockage, he contracted pneumonia and sepsis and became more seriously ill, eventually requiring a tracheostomy and ending up on a critical care unit. At first, he did not recognise his family.
“He was crying out for a drink,” Julie says. “He was very, very thirsty.” Julie says David’s wife, May, asked if she could give him some water, and was told by a nurse that David was not allowed food or drink. When David was finally given fluids by drip, he began to recognise Julie and May again, and even asked for music books to pass the time.
Julie and her family accused the hospital of putting her father on the LCP without his or his family’s consent, so he could pass away “peacefully” and “with dignity”, as she remembers hospital staff saying at the time. The trust took the unusual step of seeking declarations from the Court of Protection to withdraw what they said were “aggressive” treatments, including CPR; they argued that James had little chance of recovering and that trying to resuscitate him would cause him pain. The judge denied the trust’s application, but this began a long legal journey for the James family that led to a Supreme Court battle via the Court of Appeal after James’s death from cardiac arrest.
That is part of the problem: something is done to excess, it gets fixed, the people who come along later have no idea of the history and go "well everything is fine as it stands today, what is the problem?"
The problem is, we've seen the days when it wasn't okay, and there's little reason to think that there will not be new and improved ways of going off the rails in future.
HereAndGone
12d ago
You shall not commit adultery.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
Well of course, they first have to figure out their gender identity and sexual orientation and position on polyamory before they can even begin to contemplate ethical non-monogamy. How repressive to tell eight year olds that adultery is sinful!
HereAndGone
12d ago
I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.
The Tom Lehrer (God rest the man) song is funny but acute if you're old enough to have gone through the process when schools were switching from the old way to the new way, and teachers weren't adequately trained yet in the new way.
HereAndGone
12d ago
See, that's the kind of 'innate understanding from first principles' that my brain just does not have for numbers. I learned my times tables and I'd be lost without them.
I look at that and go "but why pick 2? Why not multiply the 7 by 3 and divide the 8 by 4 if you're doing it that way?" Not getting the underlying patterns means I'm blind as to why "this number rather than that number, this of course is the quadrant of the circle for cos" etc. It's like trying to explain to someone tone-deaf that of course this note from hitting this key on the piano is not the same as this note hitting that key. (I'm bad at that as well, I love music but in music classes at school when we had to identify 'what note was that?' I bombed).
HereAndGone
13d ago
Yeah, I think a lot of this is top-down, not grassroots. Unfortunately, the people going through the universities and the training get this imposed on them. So even if they're not progressive themselves, they are being taught "this is how you do it" and not given alternative tools.
HereAndGone
13d ago
Oh, I agree, but the ones most online are the most vociferous, and they that shout the loudest get heard most. So the extreme positions get pushed because the majority are silent or don't know the shenanigans going on until it's too late.
HereAndGone
13d ago
My extreme scepticism around these kinds of bills comes from abortion legislation (elsewhere and here in Ireland). The activists pushing for it run the most extreme cases, swear up down and sideways only a very teeny-tiny few will ever need to avail of this if made legal, and then work their socks off behind the scenes to have the language in the legislation as vague as possible (so it can be challenged in court if necessary) and that a way of gaming the system (e.g. having two doctors sign off on abortion in the UK became 'this is only rote rubber stamping') can be introduced to get what they want.
"Intolerable suffering from incurable condition" means what, exactly? If I'm thirty years old and claim that my depression means I have no boyfriend or no career (instead of a dull job) and I see no change on the horizon, am I not intolerably suffering?
There's a lot of wiggle room between "let everyone assume we mean people dying in horrible pain from mortal cancer" and "in practice, just tell the doctor this script with this exact wording to get it".
HereAndGone
13d ago
As I've noted elsewhere, Switzerland has had assisted dying since 1941. All but nonagerians don't remember a time before some form of legal euthanasia. That is multiple generations, and they are a functional and wealthy society where the elderly seem quite content.
On the other hand, Swiss clinics do have a reputation for dodginess around "if you can pay for it, we'll do it" plus the famous Swiss discretion regarding "it's none of our business where the money comes from: Nazi gold, drug money, African dictators robbing the treasury, we'll give you a bank account".
See the claim here about a Swiss clinic, Pegasos, that provides assisted dying. I don't know what the truth is here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is "one law for the Swiss citizen, another for the foreign national coming over here to our discreet and legal clinic where what they do is none of our business (so long as they're not doing it to any Swiss)".
There's also concern around organ donation. I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.
There's a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I'm too cynical to accept "but that would never happen! slippery slope is a fallacy!" arguments since the slopes have been greased with butter in every other instance of big social changes. Right now the fears around euthanasia may not have manifested, but I think that is largely due to the brakes from social lack of acceptance being put on. Remove the brakes, and what will happen?
EDIT: To clarify that last, I don't mean simply making it legal. Where it's legal, but there is high social opposition to it, that keeps the brakes on. But push for mainstreaming it, run publicity campaigns with the hardest cases (the way activists fighting abortion bans always pick the "pregnant by incestuous rape ten year old" victim when the vast majority of abortions are for economic reasons), and weaken that opposition, and then what happens?
Canadian style MAID where disabled veterans are told "we can't afford to pay for the supports for you to live in your own home, but if you want to kill yourself we can sign you right up"? If a twelve year old wants assisted suicide, then providing a psychiatrist rubber-stamps that they are mature enough to make the decision, it can go ahead? Once again like the bad old days before antibiotics, the danger is not from the illness but from going into hospital, because you're less likely to come out alive?
When you take the brakes off, there's only so long the inertia holds. Then the new normal sets in, and then all the edge cases and "that will never happen" start happening.
HereAndGone
13d ago
Regarding the UK, do you remember the furore over the Liverpool Care Pathway? Allegations that elderly patients were being ushered out instead of patched up and sent home, on the rationale that they would only get sick and end right back up in hospital again, putting more strain on the over-stretched NHS, and thus it was better all round (and more compassionate) to just let them die - or if they annoyingly didn't show signs of dying just yet, to help them along the way.
Some lurid stories of people visiting sick relatives and noticing another patient begging for water, claiming to be thirsty, and being ignored by nurses, and when the visitors asked about it, they were told this person was 'nil by mouth', they were unresponsive, they were DNR, and it was none of the strangers' business, and so (it was claimed) they were being let die of dehydration by stealth.
Things like that are why euthanasia in hospitals has a very tough opposition to overcome: people are legitimately afraid they, or their loved ones, will be checked off a list by some faceless bureaucrat on the grounds of 'too expensive to keep them alive', and not because of expensive experimental end-of-life treatment, but literally "well they got pneumonia, they may come back in next winter with it again, just let them die this year and save the bother".
There were also some allegations about euthanasia in the Netherlands, one I remember from years back was a doctor deciding on behalf of a sick nun that he'd give her euthanasia because he knew her religion would prevent her asking. That's the kind of fear of "god-complex" doctors that people have. It may be unfounded, but one rotten apple ruins the whole barrel.
There is currently a case where a family here in Ireland claim a Swiss clinic provided "assisted dying" to their mother without their knowledge or consent (but the clinic counter-claim they got permission from the family) and only learned she was dead via a Whatsapp message.
I suppose that my view is "it depends". Sometimes letting someone go without resorting to extreme measures is the right thing to do. Actively intervening to cause death? Yeah, that's difficult for me.
My own experience of this is with my late father. He suddenly, in his mid-70s, collapsed one day with what turned out to be total kidney failure. While in hospital, he had to be resuscitated three times. The hospital asked us (after the first resuscitation) would we want them to try again, should it happen (with the very strong hint that we should say "no"). My mother and siblings insisted that no, we wanted him given every chance.
When they did let him out, it was clearly evident from their behaviour that they considered they were just sending him home to die. He was very weak and very ill, but my mother and I nursed him through it and he got another ten years of life, and good years too - not miserable, confined to bed years. In fact, he bounced back so well that the consultant used to call him his "miracle man" (and we smiled wryly and muttered under our breaths 'no thanks to you bastards, if we left it up to you, he'd be dead').
Come forward to when he's in his early 80s and my mother died of lung cancer the year before. This time, he was gradually failing. Nothing big, but you could tell he was fading. I said to my sister that this would probably be his last year, or if not, then next year. He got a stroke due to DVT clot, and this time when the hospital said that efforts to prolong life would just be futile, we agreed. He was ready to die, and it was his time. Any extreme measures would just have meant waiting for the next stroke, and the next. So, letting him go while keeping him comfortable was a peaceful, and even natural, death.
My point? The first time would have been wrong to let him die. The second time would have been wrong to try and keep him alive. And both times, the hospital was trying to nudge us towards the death side of the equation. That's the lack of trust in medical experts that is at the heart of the debate.
HereAndGone
13d ago
"Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame" was pretty good, though, and I say this as someone who has no sympathy at all for Parker and Stone's politics (whatever they may be).
HereAndGone
13d ago
But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.
That's true, but raising the waterline for the less able and less talented is going to be good for the nation as a whole. Better to have literate, functional (as in "learned how to pay attention and behave, not wreck the classroom"), blue collar or working class kids than criminals-in-training. Sure, they'll never get jobs at Bear Stearns, but they won't be clogging up the jails either.
HereAndGone
13d ago
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
HereAndGone
13d ago
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle.
Unhappily, the most vocal and most online ones are the Mx. Smiths in a polycule who were highly indignant over not being able to tell their eight year old pupils all about their sex life as a queer non-binary folx because some repressive, probably MAGA, parent snitched on them to the administration about what was really being taught instead of readin'/ritin'/'rithmetic.
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
(In case you think I'm inventing the polycule teacher, nope, that's a real example from a few years back).
Enlighten my ignorance. I'm going by headlines I see online, so is it that the court decided the damages awarded against Trump were too high so they were struck down, but the charges can stand?
And what does this mean for the NY AG Letitia James? Is she okay on the grounds that the charges were legit to bring against him, or is this going to damage her?
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