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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.
It's amazing the way this blew past all the worst dystopian fantasies of the alarmists in only a few years.
Nobody thought it would be this bad, and now nobody cares. Talk about a summary of this whole century so far.
I mean some people were predicting it, most of them religious. This decade has humbled the atheist in me. They clearly knew something that I did not.
It is uncanny how right even the strawmen were.
How right were the strawmen? Taking the linked graphic way too seriously, I think it's clear that the strawman is supposed to be an assertion of a causal relationship, right? Not just the bare "if X then Y", which is vacuously true if Y is something guaranteed to happen eventually, like a plague, or teachers being dumb.
My scoring would be:
Various plagues. Partial credit here: it's possible that modern acceptance of gay (relationships/marriage/whatever) exacerbated Monkeypox. (The counterargument is that removing stigma allows Public Health Inc to intervene more effectively. And also that the continent on which Monkeypox is most prevalent is... not famously accepting of gay anything.) There's nothing resembling a causal relationship with COVID though, and since that one's the main reason "plagues" are on our minds these days, only partial credit. Also I'm being generous by interpreting "plague" literally and ignoring the "locusts and frogs" thing.
The terrorists will win. Trying to be charitable, our (U.S.) horrid withdrawal from Kabul was a "win" for the terrorists. I'm not clever enough to construct a causal path from gay marriage to that, though. No points.
Third world war. Again being charitable, we have an elevated risk of a third world war today. I can think of possible causal paths, but none that I can unironically believe, so no points here either.
Schools will begin to teach... First, I have to be extremely charitable in ignoring the obvious ways in which the statement "schools are teaching..." is at best grotesquely misleading. I think the sensible reading of this strawman is not "married gay people will force schools to..." but rather a sort of slippery slope. I think it's true that there's a slope there, and it was slippery, but it's also true that once we hit the "parents don't have the right to a say in what their kids are taught" level, it became an excellent electoral strategy to run against this stuff. We're not falling into a trough of unbounded stupidity. Nevertheless it is the case that legalizing gay marriage probably made this broad category of thing common, so yes, partial credit here too.
In summary: not very right. With this amount of stretching, I can give any terrible theory partial credit. Par for the course for strawmen, but let's not give credit where it ain't due.
Agree. Plagues: happen every hundred years at least for all of human history, covid was a very minor plague in comparison, monkeypox too, both were much better than AIDS or smallpox. Terrorists: terrorist have been winning for much of the past hundred years, again, no change. Third world war: ... these have also been constantly happening for the past hundred years, not causal. Schools teach: I don't think explicit homosexual sex is taught in any significant number of american schools.
Healthcare-assisted euthanasia is a poor example of right- ideas being correct, anyway. For starters, it's very uncommon, and even moreso for people who don't have terminal diseases / are old. And - innocent, weak people die all the time because of the state, says leftists. "people should have to work to make food" is reactionary tinged. Is it bad when a homeless person starves because the state didn't give them housing and welfare? What about when someone dies of some rare cancer "because" the state didn't give them the $500k experimental treatment? And those happen way, way more! It's not a very close comparison, but the much higher frequency of the latter, and the fact that in both cases, the end is 'innocent exploited person dies'...
Whereas something like low TFR, casual sex above having children, pointless simulacra consumer media culture, slave morality and last man, those are large-scale claims about society that every person is claimed to personally experience, and are thus much more important.
"He who does not work, neither shall he eat." -- Stalin. Also Lenin (Vladimir, not John). Incorporated into the Soviet Constitution, for what that was worth. Real reactionary, that bunch.
(it's from 2 Thessalonians; maybe that makes it reactionary regardless of its later uses?)
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As an actual disease, sure. In terms of economic, lifestyle and cultural consequences I'd argue it got inflated into one of the biggest ever
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Largely agreed. I could still be swayed on euthanasia worries; I'm not sure why, but somehow it seems particularly bad to kill somebody and call it kindness. I haven't thought about it carefully enough to have proper thoughts though.
What does "last man" refer to? Not familiar with the phrase.
Nietzche's last man.
Seeking comfort, simple pleasure, comfort, and above all avoiding suffering.
"The last man's first appearance is in "Zarathustra's Prologue". According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves. After having unsuccessfully attempted to get the populace to accept the Übermensch as the goal of society, Zarathustra confronts them with a goal so disgusting that he assumes that it will revolt them – a culture which seeks only passive comfort and routine, avoiding everything that could potentially bring risk, pain, or disappointment.[1] Zarathustra fails in this attempt, and instead of repelling and manipulating the populace into pursuing the goal of the Übermensch, the populace take Zarathustra literally and choose the "disgusting" goal of becoming the last men. This decision leaves Zarathustra disheartened and disappointed."
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