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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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but had truly abysmal response rates for reasons I can't quite fathom

As someone with chronic health issues that knows the inside of the hospital fairly well, any communication from a health care provider that isn't explicitly from someone in scheduling or providing test results is assumed to be a new mystery bill you were never informed of verbally or in writing at any point, and 95% of the time that assumption is accurate. Sending the survey as a text message or email will have better hit rates. Also, this seems like it shouldn't need to be said but really, really does, make sure the survey actually works. I actually try to complete these when I get them (probably 8-12 a year) and fully half of them are dead links or malfunction in some other way. The institutional work ethic of an organization free from market forces and able to obfuscate its billing practices without consequence, imo, spills over into absolutely everything they do and encourages mediocrity at best.

Did you take that seriously? I would hope not, because the joke was that it's hard to get responses from participants in euthanasia because they're dead. If it's meant to be an educational aside, I appreciate it.

You might assume they only try to interview patients who survived the procedure. Though that also would imply the procedure was botched extremely badly.

You've given me the idea for a very good medical comedy about a critical care doctor who either disagrees with the concept of euthanasia, or bumbles around never quite being told which patients are involved.

He, or she, holds the record for most lives saved or resuscitations performed. In a very British manner, the actual doctors responsible for euthanasia are very vexed by his tendency to immediately save their patients, and they're in a cat and mouse game of taking turns murdering and unmurdering any given patient.

The hospital brass are desperate to figure out a way to not award him excellence awards, because it's just plain old embarrassing at this point.

I can foresee potential to change the plot to get more demographic appeal. The life saving male doctor versus the ice queen no-nonsense German euthanasia dom. Or getting Rowan Atkinson to play the male lead.

It might be delightfully British. We can fabricate end of season drama by having them come to blows, and then have them either start to fuck over a corpse that comes alive (because their thrusting counts as CPR), or when they realize that they can game both metrics if they cooperate to keep the bodies clinically dead for long enough to fool the coroner.