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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27144 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023

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MSNBC reports:

Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say. Witnesses said Paul Kessler fell and struck his head during a confrontation with protesters Sunday in Ventura County, the sheriff's department said. He died Monday.

Authorities in Ventura County, California, are investigating the death of a Jewish man who was injured during a confrontation at dueling rallies over Israel and Gaza died Monday, the sheriff’s department said. Witnesses said Paul Kessler, 69, "was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)," the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. "During the altercation, Kessler fell backwards and struck his head on the ground,” it said.

What a horrible freak acci-

Paul Kessler, 69, died at a hospital on Monday, a day after he was struck during pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations at an intersection in Thousand Oaks, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles, authorities said.

Witnesses said Kessler was involved in a “physical altercation” with one or more counter-protesters, fell backward and struck his head on the ground, according to a statement from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. An autopsy Monday said Kessler died from a blunt force head injury and it was homicide, according to the Sheriff’s Department, which said investigators hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the act was a hate crime.

Well, it's unfortunate and tragic to have a real-world example of the eggshell skull rule, but (ed: cw, video of a man dying)-

A witness to the pro-Palestine protest that led to the death of Jewish man Paul Kessler today railed against local police for not arresting the man Kessler argued with - as new video shows the protest continued on even after police arrived at the scene... Witnesses say he and an as-yet unnamed Palestine supporter started arguing, and that it led to the man hitting Kessler in the face with his megaphone.

A police officer is seen on video asking an unidentified man, who is unconfirmed if this is the suspect, 'So you tried to hit his phone?' With law enforcement in the background, protesters are heard chanting, 'You will burn in hell; Israel will burn in hell.'

Another anti-Semitic chant can be heard, 'Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler should've smashed you.'

Oh.

Nor does the potential for things to get out of hand seem like it was a surprise (ed: cw, video of a man dying):

The man holding the flag in the photo above allegedly lifted up his shirt to show that he had a pistol in his waistband during the October 29 protest at the same corner (Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Westlake Boulevard, just north of the 101 Freeway). Police were called to the scene, but the man left before they arrived.

It's still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely. This is Ventura County rather than LA proper, so I think there's at least a chance that genuine prosecution could happen should the death be clear manslaughter or negligent homicide. The suspect has at least been stopped and questioned and is supposedly cooperating, though the amazing lack of any video of the 'confrontation' itself seems to be a complicating factor.

There's no outrage from the conventional sources, or the Biden or White House twitter accounts. There's nothing from the various ACLUs; quite a lot of people who I respected and had strong feelings on political radicalization must not have heard of it. The communities that spent a lot of time hunting down fascists and Nazis to punch and dox don't seem particularly interested by literal invocations of Hitler. And the lack of any arrest despite a clear suspect makes a bit of a mockery of all the people who in the Rittenhouse era proclaimed that any death required a prosecution and a trial. I guess to their credit (if damning with faint praise), the ADL has posted.

I've written at length about the extent and efforts pushing speech and speakers out of the public square have gone, and it's difficult to see this outside of that context. Worse, the lack of backlash seems a justification and legitimization of that behavior.

Which seems noteworthy in a few ways. There's no shortage of right-wing or Red Tribe examples, but Kessler, notably, was not. I'm not a fan of perspectives where only the cleanest hands make acceptable figures to bring forward -- to borrow from Mencken, defending freedom sometimes means defending scoundrels -- but I'll spell out when even that does not seem to be enough. It's not about X as a principle goes to this.

And at a deeper level... @FCfromSSC did a very good tactical analysis of the situation around violence at public protests in the context of the De Oñate Statue shooting. I don't want to extrapolate too hard from this case yet because it could end in a hard conviction next month. But it's looking, if anything, too rosy.

Put another one down for my claim that "most political violence is right-wing" is a lie generated by people that just elect to not classify violence as political when it's bad for that narrative.

I think- double check the numbers if you want to rely on believing this argument- that this is a lie generated by categorizing violence by white supremacist prison gangs as right wing political violence as opposed to ODC’s in an environment where gangs are separated by race.

That's a big part of how the ADL does it at least. Of course others might use other methods to get the results they want. Here's a Reddit comment I wrote some years ago about the ADL's report "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018". This methodology is then used to justify splashy graphics about how "Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists." (page 13), a claim echoed in many headlines citing the report.

Check out the actual list of murders on page 23. No actual ideological or racist motive is required and it seems any murder by someone involved with a white prison gang is counted, but murders by people involved with black or latino prison gangs are not. I started listing ones that seemed obviously dishonest to include but ended up with the majority of the list:

Robstown, Texas, July 27, 2018. Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.

Sumter, South Carolina, August 11, 2018. Demetrius Alexander Brown, a self-proclaimed Moorish sovereign citizen, was arrested for the fatal shooting of Sharmine Pack following a dispute about a vehicle sale at an auto repair shop.

Camden, Michigan, June 30, 2018. Anti-government extremist Joshua Daniel Miller was arrested for the shooting death of Eddie Coleman Heathcoe. Miller allegedly got into an argument with his ex-wife at the home she shared with Heathcoe. Miller was involved with militia and Three Percenter groups.

Dothan, Alabama, June 4, 2018. James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room. The couple fled to Florida where they were arrested following a carjacking attempt.

Renton, Washington, September 19, 2018. White supremacist Jeremy Shaw, who owned a small roofing business called Aryan Enterprises, was arrested along with his wife, Lorena, in connection with an alleged plot to murder Steven Morphis and steal his property through an adverse possession scheme. Morphis was beaten with a blunt instrument and his throat was slashed. Detectives who searched Jeremey Shaw’s home found a number of Nazi- and white supremacist-themed items. He was charged with homicide, burglary and arson; Lorena was charged with burglary, arson and rendering criminal assistance.

Athens, Georgia, May 11, 2018. Following a family argument, Malachi Qaadir Dorns, 19, stabbed his mother and older brother multiple times, wounding his mother and killing his brother. In an earlier arrest, Dornss told police that he was a sovereign citizen.

Abingdon, Virginia, May 4, 2018. Roger Melvin Tackett was charged with first degree murder and other crimes after fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute. According to police, Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.

Nashville, Tennessee, April 22, 2018. Travis Reinking opened fire inside a Waffle House, killing four people and wounding or injuring four more. Reports from co-workers and police officers who had previously known or encountered Reinking stated that he was a sovereign citizen. However, Reinking also has a serious history of mental illness and the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature; he has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.

Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018. Nikolas Cruz launched a deadly shooting spree at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people and wounding 17 more. According to CNN, Cruz, 19, belonged to a racist Instagram group and hated blacks and Jews, even claiming Jews wanted to destroy the world. Cruz also allegedly referred to women who engaged in interracial relationships as “traitors.” A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article reported that Cruz had racist and Nazi symbols on his backpack and that he had etched swastikas onto ammunition magazines left behind at the school after the shooting. However, little evidence has so far emerged to suggest that the MSDHS shooting spree itself was conducted as a white supremacist attack

I remember that last case, keep in mind Cruz also had Soviet and satanic symbols on his stuff and told authorities he was ordered to commit the shooting by demons, his interest was more towards anything edgy than towards any particular ideology. In any case, the list of cases seems drastically different from what most people would expect after seeing the graph or hearing the supposed percentages.

What shameless book-cooking.

What does ODC stand for?

Ordinary decent criminal.

I'm skeptical about this. I did some brief searching and most research seems to have pretty clear definitions for what constitutes political violence.

What he's talking about is how the ADL does it at least, see my comment above.

As a guy with most of a medical degree: falling and hitting your head on concrete can be a motherfucker. Results are a crapshoot and can be anything from a mild concussion to death. I saw a young, fit teenager that very nearly died and will be crippled for life with brain injury...because he fainted and fell off a step that was a foot and a half high. Plenty of manslaughter cases come from fistfights that take place in parking lots; one man knocks the other out and the loser falls, hits his head on the pavement, and dies. I think that this guy was KO'd by the thrown megaphone, hit his head on the concrete, and was mortally injured.

Everything I've heard from medical professionals and people with combat in their professional life tells me the same thing, to the extent that I sometimes find it baffling that enough of us survive to adulthood to keep the population going. Our skulls are fragile, and the Earth can be very hard and sharp. I also had a friend whose then-young-and-healthy coworker died 2 days after hitting her head on the ice. She seemed fine the next day and even came to work, but she was dead the day after. These have certainly shaped the way I treat potential head injuries and also how I consider altercations; I think anyone attacking anyone else while in any environment with hard surfaces gives the defender the justification to use lethal force in self defense, including firearms, because I don't consider firearms an escalation compared to hitting someone when there's concrete or even asphalt nearby. Either way, you're establishing that you consider the other person's life to be expendable, and the other person has a right to defend against that, even if that requires killing you.

I don't know. I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint, and from what I've heard of redneck territory, starting a fistfight if you aren't on reasonably friendly terms with the rest of the room gets you shot. I don't entirely agree with you: "getting punched in a parking lot brawl" is a hell of a lot less likely to kill or maim you than "getting shot by a guy". The results of the former are a crapshoot; most fistfights end without anyone being killed or maimed.

As a guy with most of a medical degree

As one with one and change, I certainly agree. Humans are both surprisingly resilient and also extremely squishy, and you don't fuck with blunt-force trauma to the cranium if you can help it.

I count myself lucky that I'm a peaceful person who hasn't thrown a punch in anger since middle-school, if I'm risking my noggin it better be for more than a drunken brawl.

I train in martial arts for self defense, specifically Muay Thai, and while I focus on all good fundamentals as you should, I add a lot of additional focus on shots to the body for more or less this reason.

While it goes without saying that you shouldn’t fight unless absolutely necessary and you are unable to successfully run away, I’m trying to stop the fight as fast as possible and also not catch a case.

So I’m talking shin kicks to the liver or floating ribs, knees to the solar plexus, punches to the liver, downward elbows to the collarbone, leg kicks, and stuff like that.

Most of these blows are extremely painful to the point of being debilitating if landed with power and expertise, will sap someone’s will & ability to fight, and with enough practice you can bruise or crack ribs, fold peoples legs, rupture livers, knock the wind out of someone in an instant. Since most street altercations are initiated by drunk and/or high morons with no training and little to no defense, a fight can be ended pretty quickly by working the body or cracking their legs with your shin.

And most importantly; compared to blows to the head you’re much less likely to kill or cripple someone, break your hand or foot against someone’s skull or jaw, and/or catch a murder or manslaughter rap.

Some states in Australia brought in 'One Punch Laws' to specifically address the grey area between common assault, manslaughter and murder to better align with the communities' sense of justice.

It was motivated by alcohol fueled violence in nightlife areas, but would be equally applicable here. A lot of effort went into educating the community that throwing a punch could lead to a homicide.

I think a one punch law in the US would not align with a lot of communities' senses of justice. Two guys get into a fight, there's a bunch of shoving, then one of them socks the other in the nose and they fall and hit their head and die... and the survivor gets the max penalty for any crime in Australia, life in prison?

There are differing versions of the law in different states. There seems to be certain requirements for the 'unlawful striking leading to death' laws to activate. In some cases it needs to be a single punch thrown under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. In other cases harsher sentencing is reserved for 'coward punch' strikes where the victim is unaware that the strike is taking place (punch from behind for instance, or attacking a random passerby).

Some example punishments:

10 years for a single punch thrown outside a birthday party leading to death while the assaulter was drunk

10 years after a thug punched a surgeon trying to enforce a no smoking sign out the front of a hospital leading to death

10 years for punching someone unprovoked from behind at the casino food court while drunk leading to death

8 years for punching someone after the victim supposedly stole the killer's food from a takeaway 'hole in the wall' after a night out leading to death

Minimum sentencing seems to be around 8-10 years and that seems to be the standard punishment given for these sorts of offenses after 10 minutes of googling. Some offenders are eligible for parole after serving half their sentence. Seems fairly reasonable to me, particularly with the ability to allow parole.

Maximum sentence of life imprisonment doesn't seem to have been given out yet and would presumably require aggravating factors.

All this being said, these laws seem to be for a 'one guy throws a single punch (starting the fight) and retreats' situation rather than 'two guys willingly start shoving each other, participating in escalation to a brawl' scenario. Details on the OP seem to be murky at the moment.

Yeah. You do have things more akin to a consensual fistfight duel than one asshole attacking another guy who might just have been a bit less of an asshole that day. In that case I think a much more minor sentence is appropriate...two guys deciding to take it outside and one of them dying from what's basically a shitty bare knuckle boxing match might mean a year or two in prison basically as punishment for fucking up a duel that wasn't supposed to kill anyone.

Life imprisonment is a bit excessive here, and 8 to 10 years sounds like what you'd expect for manslaughter.

I remember this case from the Floyd protests. Though I had forgotten that Gugino didn't die, it still seems that the effects were quite serious.

Wait, you're studying to be a doctor, and you still can't get laid? wth?

It's not terribly uncommon here in America; I know...let's see, three medical students or residents that have lots of trouble getting dates or have never had girlfriends. At my (decent, US) medical school, it's very interesting indeed how the short guys in my class and the short interns are focused on their careers while the average and tall ones have girlfriends.

Now, I don't think there is anything all that bad about this state of affairs. It may be that society needs a niche of celibate dudes for life paths that don't mesh well with marriage and children, and 'choose said guys by lot based on height' doesn't seem that bad. Consider things like the draft lottery. Also, the short guys that do get married or get into relationships with women that aren't morbidly obese or literally batshit crazy are a testament to the strength of the human spirit, etc...I've seen it done. Once. The man in question is going to be a literal brain surgeon and is the most charismatic person in our class; we think he could have a good career in politics. Your 5'4" family medicine resident or even a pint-size Navy SEAL ain't up to snuff. Such is life - there is nothing terribly wrong with the fact that short men must be remarkable, accept lifelong celibacy, or decide where they want the ambulances.

Uh, if becoming a doctor will attract women(and I have no doubt that this is true; I’d be more surprised if it wasn’t) then why are you bothering with ‘the hock’ to try to get a date instead of just waiting however many years?

The plot just keeps thickening on The Motte, from all quarters it seems.

This has been Motte Lore for a while. For what it’s worth, I agree with Mr Hock, I wouldn’t necessarily want to be the guy for whom an MD was the primary differentiator between whether a woman would date me or not. Not that I think Skookum’s celibacy is necessarily involuntary, I just don’t think his argument is complete bullshit. I’m curious to see what he considers his female equivalent, and if he’d date her.

Only recently have I begun to pay attention to what username goes with whom. I knew a few back on the Reddit days but I don't feel like I see many of them here. Or maybe I forgot or wasn't as attentive as I should've been. It's easy to forget Mottizens aren't just idiosyncratic chatbots but real people--but where, of what age, and sometimes even male or female I often have no idea.

Re: Skookum I am not always clear on what his argument is, other than he has a rather burning self-hatred, finds himself physically repulsive, and projects that self-image in such a way that he assumes women feel the exact same about him (visceral loathing). Also apparently he has seen, heard about in his own social circle, or somehow internalized the idea that women are homicidal and one of them might kill him at some point for something he inadvertently does. Or that he will be somehow attacked for showing interest in a woman. Or whatever. And finally, that an act of MegaChad adventure bravery (The Hock) will be the redemptive quest that will make him into...something better than what he feels that he currently is. (Instead of the suicidal misadventure of a man with an all-but-clearly stated deathwish, which is how I see it.) (Please correct any of this if you like, @SkookumTree, I don't want to misrepresent you.)

As far as whether or not having a med degree is social pheromone, I wouldn't doubt it. I guess there are physicians who agonize over whether women are into them "just for their MD" but I don't think I'd care so much--there's always something that flips a woman's switch (or nothing that does), and while sometimes it makes sense (tall, wealthy, deep blue eyes, muscular, clean fingernails, whatever), sometimes I think it's more random. I found this post recently by @raggedy_anthem insightful, even if it doesn't really provide any clear path for those seeking one.

I have just discovered "SkookumTree" apparently means "brave tree" in Chinook jargon, which was interesting--I'd thought it was just a weird-sounding word.

I am not always clear on what his argument is, other than he has a rather burning self-hatred, finds himself physically repulsive, and projects that self-image in such a way that he assumes women feel the exact same about him (visceral loathing).

Most of the repulsion's not physical, although my decidedly below average physical appearance doesn't do me any favors. I'm no Quasimodo, which I'll admit to here.

Also apparently he has seen, heard about in his own social circle, or somehow internalized the idea that women are homicidal and one of them might kill him at some point for something he inadvertently does. Or that he will be somehow attacked for showing interest in a woman. Or whatever. And finally, that an act of MegaChad adventure bravery (The Hock) will be the redemptive quest that will make him into...something better than what he feels that he currently is. (Instead of the suicidal misadventure of a man with an all-but-clearly stated deathwish, which is how I see it.

This guy put it better than I could have done myself.

More comments

This has been Motte Lore for a while.

I get the appeal of old forum culture now, even if by the time I had reliable internet access Reddit was already slaughtering them. There's a charm in having familiar faces and in-jokes within a community that isn't so large everyone becomes interchangeable and anonymous, even it they're using pseudonyms.

Because he's crazy. Not in a neat DSM-5 way with a legible diagnosis, just a surfeit of common sense and an excess of self-loathing. There's no pill for that I'm aware of.

Because I'd basically be a mark for a gold digger at that point; I don't necessarily know if I can improve on that by going on the Hock, but 'survived being chucked into the Alaskan wilderness in winter' definitely seems to on the surface fulfill the 'become remarkable' criterion. I'd like to make it very clear that this does not guarantee success any more than lining up at the starting line of a local 5K means you're going to win. It's a generally necessary but by no means sufficient condition.

So too, there would still be the 'hypocrisy' element; I believe that my subpar physical appearance and autism make me more or less disgusting for potential partners and I'd still be autistic and bald as a doctor. So I'd be asking my partner to do something I wasn't willing or able to do myself: endure pointless suffering. Making some autistic ugly-ish doctor happy through enduring pointless suffering day after day (from being with someone you consider gross) isn't a sacrifice that I'm currently worthy of. "Having a shit ton of determination and being willing to endure Hell on Earth for no goddamn reason" seems to be a building block of being worthy of that kind of sacrifice, if anyone truly is.

What’s so bad about a gold digger? You want female companionship, she wants a nice life, pick someone smart enough to have reasonable desires and know that divorce isn’t a massive payday(it rarely is and you’re not exactly a billionaire where even a chump change settlement is life changing money, I’d assume), you’ll both bond and make the most of the situation. As I understand it the median woman considers a husband who puts effort in and values her much more of a catch than one who is conventionally attractive and funny; it seems like that’s well within your power.

The issue with gold-diggers is the fact that they're likely to leave you when you're no longer gold. You might fall sick, or lose your job, and then she's off to the next one.

It's hardly a binary notion, women are in general attracted to wealth and status after all, which I don't find reprehensible in the least, but in my eyes, a wife should be willing to stick with you through thick and thin.

This isn't to say a woman who's with you for the money is a bad alternative to being single, but not only is Skook OD-ing on blackpills, I sincerely doubt he's so far gone that he can't land a woman we wouldn't call a gold digger.

While he might be short and (terminally) autistic, I think once he's a practising doctor he'll have plenty of above average looking nurses drawn to him, and while they might like the money or status, that doesn't necessarily mean them hoes ain't loyal. Besides, he says he works out, so it has to count for something doesn't it?

Worst case is a mail order bride, plus a solid pre-nup, though he should get one anyway.

Now, to put a mild spanner in the works, I wouldn't bet on him finishing his residency and them becoming a casual millionaire in less than a decade that is the norm for an American doctor, for the same reason I'm unlikely to be a consultant psychiatrist, AI is going to make us effectively obsolete in like 5 years max, maybe a few more years accounting for regulatory inertia.

But she won't know that! And by the time it's obvious, everyone else is fucked too ❤️

but not only is Skook OD-ing on blackpills

That is precisely what I’m trying to talk him out of before he gets himself killed wandering around in rural northern Alaska.

I know one bald, short and autistic doctor personally, and the only reason he's not dateable is because he's physically deformed and also schizophrenic (yet another case I personally diagnosed as a med student and had ratified later, you'd think someone would notice since both of them had doctor parents).

You're salvageable. There are almost certainly anatomically and mentally normal women who would happily date you if you keep working out and dress decently, especially since you'll be a doctor unless the Hock kills you.

There are almost certainly anatomically and mentally normal women who would happily date you if you keep working out and dress decently, especially since you'll be a doctor unless the Hock kills you.

Yes, I am well aware that there are desperately poor women in Cambodia or Thailand or hell, rural India who would date a man they are deeply and viscerally disgusted by in order to pull themselves and their families out of crushing Third World poverty. This is one hell of a sacrifice, I admire the hell out of that kind of resolve, and I don't think I'm worthy of it. I've met maybe a handful of people that are...maybe one percent of the population? Two? I'd sure as hell say that most of the people reading this ain't worthy of that, even though I think most people here are fine people and decent human beings.

I've seen several accounts of men in this position who didn't receive any interest until they got their MD at which point it was fish in a barrel.

That aligns with my personal experience in India, to an extent after adjusting for the nebbishness of the guys and the lower levels of sexual activity in general.

The majority of my male classmates made it through the course without touching poon outside a cadaver or a female volunteer in the ward, while I think at least half of them still haven't gotten laid, at the very least they know they're not going to remain unmarried if they want.

Goes to show most people can't think ahead, an American med student is the perfect blend of high potential value that's grossly underrated, once they're done with their residency they'll be millionaires in a few years. Catch them before the competition heats up and they know their worth I say.

@SkookumTree hey wanna marry me? I could use the naturalization, and if you're that terminally horny and alone, any hole's a goal right? At the very least I'll give you 1:1 rizz classes 🙏

For my MD-holding short friends that are still residents and not attending physicians: sure. Fish in a barrel...a very large barrel the size of an Olympic swimming pool, with a BB gun to shoot at them with. Water's murky, too.

How short are you

I think he's said he's 5'5 or 5'6, which while in extremely inconvenient territory, still isn't outright dwarfism.

At the very least there are plenty of tiny Asian women who wouldn't consider that a deal breaker when all the other practical considerations exist.

5'6"

The communities that spent a lot of time hunting down fascists and Nazis to punch and dox don't seem particularly interested by literal invocations of Hitler.

Well duh, their job is to push a narrative, because that’s what advocacy groups do. And that narrative is ‘republicans/white Christian’s/red tribers are mostly Nazis, like actual literal ones who will Carry out atrocities, so take our fringes seriously when they cry about being in the opening phases of a genocide’. Obviously they’re not interested in calling attention to actual literal invocations of Hitler, because those are mostly done by people who are none of those things- they’re criminals or brown Muslims or Ukrainian soldiers.

I'm hoping this is insufficiently charitable -- I'm not just talking dyed-in-the-wool groups like Unicorn Riot, Distributed Denial of Secrets, or the SLPC, but a lot broader a group of communities including some pretty close to the ratsphere -- but worse I think it's insufficiently cynical.

Even if all these groups are organizationally scheming political operations, what's really fascinating is that they normally don't manage to retain very strong message discipline outside of their core focuses, and sometimes not even there. It's actively difficult to not pick up a true believer or two eventually, if only by mistake. So is this the area where they're focusing message discipline, or are these the true believers?

The guy who hit him should get 2 years. It was improbable his actions would lead to death but he did commit assault and it resulted in death.

Looks like a simple case here.

It does in many ways remind me of Floyd who at most Chauvin should have gotten 2 years for doing his legally authorized job with bad technique resulting in a death.

Chauvin should get less time. Technique was current per MPD manual, also Floyd was resisting, at the beginning if not the end.

That’s how I would have voted on a jury but I think a reasonable argument can be made he was negligent and should have done better perhaps at a criminal level.

That seems to be the argument that carried the day, if you believe the verdict was based in reason.

I don't find the argument reasonable.

The argument that carried the day was a full lynch mob he’s a racists cracker who deserves life.

Not a reasonable argument.

Being negligent at work would have been 2 years. He got a lot more and I believe there were racial civil rights or hate crime add-ons.

Nonsense. Punching somebody in the head is attempted murder. Them actually dying makes it 2nd degree murder, minimum.

Attempted murder in CA requires the intent to kill. The vast majority of people who punch others in the face do not intend to kill.

Murder does not require the intent to kill, but even someone who forms the intent to kill during an altercation is often guilty only of voluntary manslaughter.

But most accidental deaths resulting from a simple assault are involuntary manslaughter.

Truish. But I’ve seen many fist fights. Not every day do people die. I would still call it a low probability.

I think people should be punished on what they do and not what occurs. Firing a bullet into someone has a much higher chance of death like 30% plus. Punching a guy probably sub 1%.

Seems like the 'killer' is a 50yo computer science professor of all things. Link includes a photo of him sitting around with an embarrassed smile on his face while Kessler is splayed out on the pavement waiting for an ambulance.

"Witnesses say the two sides began antagonizing each other and then it turned physical. 'They were both on an even ground, and they were yelling at each other, and then the man brought his megaphone up and hit Paul, and Paul went down,' one unidentified witness told ABC Los Angeles."

There's more conflicting statements, but nothing conclusive.

Edit: As an aside, his 'Rate My Professor' is being brigaded (archive):

"Absolutely slayed his class. Matter of back you could say I straight up murdered it."

Link includes a photo of him sitting around with an embarrassed smile on his face while Kessler is splayed out on the pavement waiting for an ambulance.

An ambulance which, according to the sheriff, he himself called. I don’t know exactly what happened nor what exactly this guy's level of moral culpability is (though he probably is guilty of at least involuntary manslaughter, but if his post-crime conduct is to be used to assess that culpability, then all of conduct should be included, not just some of it)

Yes, I agree. Even if he hadn't called the cops, he hung around to be interviewed at the scene, which is no small thing.

The big questions I would like to see answered is if he deliberately struck the victim in the head (as compared to maybe trying to knock the victim's phone out of his hand as possibly implied per the video of police questioning him in the link) and if he was the first one to strike out, or turn things physical.

I think the article from Forward is pretty good about a facts-only assessment:

[Ventura County Sheriff] said that the nature of the altercation — including “who the aggressor was” — remained unclear because of conflicting statements about what had occurred and a lack of definitive video evidence.

Some of the witnesses were pro-Palestine, while others were pro-Israel,” Fryhoff said. “During the investigation at the scene, deputies determined that Mr. Kessler fell backward and struck his head on the ground. What exactly transpired prior to Mr. Kessler falling backward isn’t crystal clear right now.”

And perhaps his head just did that.

As I said in the post, which describes those details along with videos that the Forward seems to have missed, "still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely". My point is a bit broader. I can remember a certain situation that was far more in favor of the homicide suspect and yet resulted in not just the suspect being arrested and jailed but having to post a multi-million-dollar bail.

Why would it be “extraordinarily unlikely” that there are mitigating factors or extenuating circumstances for a claimed manslaughter/homicide during a heated protest? IMO this should be the default opinion unless there’s very persuasive evidence. I’m thinking back to Rittenhouse, some of the Unite the Right charges, the Covington Catholic Kids… protests always get raucous for heated issues.

What we know is that: (1) the police lack evidence to charge him, despite the passioned pleas of local Jewish orgs, plus national spotlight on the police; (2) the altercation took place on the Palestinian side, which greatly increases the odds of the Jewish man having instigated the conflict (what was he doing “encroaching on their land”? There’s clear borders put in place by the authorities, the yellow tape*); (3) the Palestinians say one thing happened and the Jews another, yet the Palestinians were right next to the altercation, and thus their opinion outweighs the Jewish one; (4) the Muslim man said he tried to hit the phone, which tells us less than one might think, because placing a phone right in front of someone’s face aggressively is certainly grounds for swiping it away; (5) the Palestinian man immediately acted like a Good Samaritan and called the hospital plus cooperated with authorities.

edit on second look it’s unclear whether the tape was there before or after

Redefining a public space into "their land" where putting a phone at someone face is unacceptable is a good part of what I'm criticizing.

Your post is very clearly criticizing what you mistakenly believe to be a clear-cut case of a criminal act on the part of the Palestinian man. That’s why you include the testimony of someone from the Israeli side, omit the more authoritative testimony of the police chief which negates the former, and why you sarcastically write “what a freak acci-“ and an emphatic “oh”.

But it’s just not clear cut right now. That’s not my opinion, it’s the words of the Sheriff who possesses maximal information.

No one is “redefining a public space” here, we are using the limited information we have to make preliminary judgments on who is likely the instigator.

No one is “redefining a public space” here, we are using the limited information we have to make preliminary judgments on who is likely the instigator.

...

(2) the altercation took place on the Palestinian side, which greatly increases the odds of the Jewish man having instigated the conflict (what was he doing “encroaching on their land”? There’s clear borders put in place by the authorities, the yellow tape);

While I agree with the Rittenhouse verdict, the comparison doesn't work. Rittenhouse intentionally killed two people; when someone does that in circumstances other than those where self-defense is completely obvious (eg, defense of home), of course he is going to be arrested. In contrast, here there is no evidence that the killing was intentional. Moreover, the police had probable cause at the time to think that the Rittenhouse murders were premeditated.

Rittenhouse intentionally killed two people; when someone does that in circumstances other than those where self-defense is completely obvious (eg, defense of home), of course he is going to be arrested.

Except the prosecutor in his case literally said he would not have prosecuted the protesters if they were the ones that killed Rittenhouse instead.

Assuming that is true, we are talking about the arrest stage, not the prosecution stage. Police make arrests, not prosecutors.

Assuming that is true

I wish @ArjinFerman had provided a reference, but I have the itch to look up ridiculous claims ... and what the hell, that was another thing that actually happened. The interview is here, with the money quote at 37:50:

"In my mind, if someone in that crowd had a gun and had shot and killed Kyle Rittenhouse, our office would not have prosecuted; our office would not have found that person criminally liable."

He provides some context, but it's not "self-defense is completely obvious" context, it's "remember when a gun owner stopped a mass shooting and then the cops blundered in and killed the hero" context, and that was supposed to be in support of his thesis. He claims Rittenhouse running away with his gun after killing Rosenbaum is sufficient reason to kill him ... but what else was Rittenhouse supposed to do? Drop his weapon for the angry mob to pick up? Not retreat? The idea that you can identify and kill an active shooter because you see them running past a ton of people without shooting any of them is such obvious nonsense; you'd hope he would stop and rethink his life after that came out of his mouth.

I can't believe this interview didn't get more play! The only relevant Google hits for 'binger rittenhouse "would not have prosecuted"' right now are the author's blog I linked, a single episode of a video podcast with 50k subscribers, a meme, and a tweet from this April.

I wish @ArjinFerman had provided a reference, but I have the itch to look up ridiculous claims ... and what the hell, that was another thing that actually happened.

Sorry for wasting your time, usually when I make ridiculous claims, I have the source ready at my fingertips, so next time feel free to PM me.

I find it necessary, because if you provide sources from the start, people tend to build cases that the claim is, in fact, not ridiculous, and our glorious system is working as intended to provide justice for all. So I like to get people to contradict me first.

I can't believe this interview didn't get more play!

There's also a bunch of youtube lawyers that covered it. The funny thing is that I'm not sure if this is the worst thing he said there, the whole interview is insane.

I think you have excluded some of the context. What he says is, "From the crowd's perspective, that's how they viewed him [ie as an active shooter]. And that was a reasonable assumption on their part at that particular moment. ... After learning that he just shot someone, seeing him running through a crowded area with a gun that it would have been reasonable for ... the crowd to view him as an active shooter."

He claims Rittenhouse running away with his gun after killing Rosenbaum is sufficient reason to kill him ... but what else was Rittenhouse supposed to do

No, that is not what he says. He says it would have been reasonable for someone to believe that he could shoot him in self-defense or defense of others. It is important to bear in mind 1) if I reasonably believe someone is a threat, I can kill him in self-defense, even if I am mistaken;* and 2) it is perfectly possible for both parties to be acting in self-defense defense.

*"If the defendant kills an innocent person, but circumstances made it reasonably appear that the killing was necessary in self-defense, that is tragedy, not murder." People v. Minifie, 13 Cal. 4th 1055 (Cal: Supreme Court 1996).

it is perfectly possible for both parties to be acting in self-defense defense.

I might need to listen to the whole thing again, but from what I remember, he actually explicitly denies that, and argues one party must have a greater claim to self-defense, and that party was not Rittenhouse.

Anyway, none of this is relevant, the important claim is that he said his office would not prosecute if the mob ended up shooting him, rather than the other way around. If both parties have a claim to self-defense, than both parties should be prosecuted, or neither.

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we are talking about the arrest stage

This is false. We are also talking about the jailing and setting the bail stage.

Jailing is also done by the police, not the prosecutor. And we don't know what bail is going to be set for this new guy, so bail is irrelevant.

Sure it's relevant. Is it common for someone to be held in jail for longer than 48 hours when the prosecutors say there's no case? How many people who have their bail set to a million dollars or above end up being simply not prosecuted?

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Moreover, the police had probable cause at the time to think that the Rittenhouse murders were premeditated.

How so?

Because he came across state lines with a gun, and ended up shooting his political opponents. Again, based on facts that emerged, I do not think that he premeditated; in fact, I am sure that he did not, and I am sure that his acquittal was correct. But probable cause is quite a low bar, and of course is based on evidence known at the time of the arrest.

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Because he came across state lines with a gun

He didn't, the gun literally never left Wisconsin. Why do people keep repeating this one? And ehy do they keep making a big deal over him "crossing state lines" when his job was in Kenosha and it was 30 minutes away from his home. It's like if someone from NYC shot someone in Jersey City, no one would make a big deal out of it. He actually lived closer to Kenosha than the 3 people he shot.

I already talked about that; I meant what the police believed at the time, because that is all that is relevant to the issue of the arrest.

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You've given zero evidence for that though.

Because he came across state lines with a gun

Please, why are you still repeating this in the year of Our Lord 2023?

Again, the point is what the police believed at the time.

Have they? Or was that something thoughtlessly repeated by the media (or even just Twitter)? He turned himself in, you think they didn't ask him where he got the gun from? You think they didn't believe him?

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Hm.

I don't think 'he opposed their political position' is very strong evidence of murder, but maybe that's just me. He said he didn't mean to, and what the suspect claims is what really matters.

What element of murder is it that you think is satisfied by that video?

I don't. But I'm not the person who just said "ended up shooting his political opponents" was evidence of not just murder but premeditated murder!

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I think showing up to a protest armed merits some increased suspicion.

When someone is killed, the more effort it took to get into that situation, the less likely it was an accident.

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On the one hand, your logic is straightforward. On the other hand, you are saying that the lawful exercise of a constitutional right can establish probable cause that a person has broken the law. If I said that the content of a sign a protestor held or a slogan they shouted added up to probable cause, it seems to me that this would also be a straightforward logical argument. I don't expect you or @Gdanning to agree to that standard, though.

@netstack did not say that exercise of a constitutional right establishes probable cause. They said it increases suspicion. That is obviously true. I have the right to wear a Nazi outfit, and a right to bear arms, and a right to walk around near a synagogue. But that doesn't mean police have to ignore those things. Most facts which help establish probable cause are themselves perfectly legal.

Can you name a blue-coded constitutionally-protected activity that clearly "increases suspicion" in a way that predictably results in significantly worse outcomes in the justice system? You've cited a Nazi uniform; what's the blue-tribe equivalent that observably results in harsher charges and higher bails, which you accept as just?

...This, of course, ignores the numerous cases where the arms leftists carried did not "increase suspicion" in an equivalent way, even when they were shooting at or killing people.

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Yes, there’s a point at which lawful exercise establishes probable cause.*

What’s important is that the decision is made post facto. Given that two men died, Rittenhouse’s presence and equipment merited suspicion. In @Gdanning’s example, the Nazi larper is allowed to bear arms by a synagogue—but once police hear that there’s been a murder in the area, they have an obvious suspect.

This means yes, there is some protected speech which should constitute probable cause for arresting protestors once a crime has been committed. Or even before, judging by the “imminent lawless action” standard. If Mr. Alnaji had a “gas the Jews” sign, or was even reported joining some of the chants, I’d expect him to be taken in.

* If this is the wrong term, legally speaking, my apologies!

Good thing I linked to a New York Times article that made the self-defense arguments completely obvious!

Again, I believe that his acquittal was correct, but his guilt or innocence depends on a lot more than on just who fired first. Self-defense has quite a few complexities. For example, the guy in the car here was convicted of murder despite not firing first. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1655732/Video-Surveillance-footage-shows-shootout-killed-3-year-old-boy.html

And the New York Times article I've linked did not rest solely on who fired first.

Nevertheless, the idea that his self-defense claim was obviously correct is belied by the fact that the jury deliberated for several days.

Would you like to try again with a more serious argument about the facts of the case as available to the police at the time of Rittenhouse's arrest, or do you want me to rip through the various procedural problems and literal threats (and one high-profile attempt to identify the jurors by newscasters) aimed at that?

A political rally at which anti-semitic chants are heard and at which a counter-protestor is killed, could also describe Unite the Right gathering. Which reminds me, the latters famous chant ("Jews will not replace us.") could be repurposed by the pro-Palestian protestors by changing "Jews" to "Zionists". Then pro-Palestians could say it refers to Isreali settlers in West Bank, IDF in Gaza, or just any Jew in territories between River and the Sea, depending on radical they are.

They is currently an 8 month old baby in the UK with a mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal. The babies name is Indi: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/italy-grants-citizenship-terminally-ill-british-baby-after-104666139

A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.

The Catholics have said: give us the baby and we will put the baby in our pediatric Vatican hospital, and the Italian government has said they would cover the medical bills. The Italian government has also said that the family can have Italian citizenship.

The UK has said no, you can’t leave, you need to keep the baby here so we can kill it.

I know this sounds hyperbolic, but…I don’t think it is. Read the article. Absolutely deranged behavior.

I understand that in socialized medicine countries there is some calculation about how much life support will cost, and famously in Canada sometimes this means the government just tries to get you to kill yourself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby. The UK government won’t let them and insists that they should just kill her.

Insanity.

The UK is bad like this. I don't know why or how it got to be this way. But this is not an isolated example. The case of Charlie Gard got some attention a few years back, and the situation was basically the same.

Which is to say that if something in the laws or regulations is not changed, these awful situations will happen again and again.

Alfie Evans as well, nearly identical. That case shocked me. Absolutely brutal and senseless

Wasn't he brain dead basically?

Under British law, the primary issue in such cases is whether a proposed treatment is in the best interests of the child. Judges have repeatedly upheld doctors’ decisions to end life support even when that conflicts with the parents’ wishes.

So, for some reason, it is up to the doctors and judges whether the baby should receive life support, and not the parents, and furthermore, somehow that means they can prevent a child from leaving the country if they're going to get medical treatment they consider to not be in the best interests of the child, which in this case is undergoing painful treatment instead of letting her die? Do I have that right?

Why isn't it up to the parents why can't they take their child out of the country? What's the legal basis for this?

It makes a little more sense in custody disputes where the parents can't decide something so then a judge intervenes and picks a side, but in this case, both parents want the child treated. So why don't they get to make the decision?

Because it can amount to torture, and we don't generally allow parents to do that. Parental rights are not unlimited.

I lost a child myself, so I understand the pain and grief the parents are going through. But if the child is in significant pain and is not able to be treated ( which doctors seem to agree on), then its a choice of a long drawn out painful death or a quicker painful death. The parents in this state may not be able to make objective choices about what is best for their child.

Is the bureaucracy with all its political biases the best place to make that call?

In the average case, parents with consultation from doctors are the best persons to make that call, and that's why they do make that call (I'm guessing) ~99.999% of the time.

But sometimes that process doesn't work for whatever reason, and the government steps in.

This isn't weird, it's approximately how things are supposed to work with the legal system. 99.999999% of the time, men choose not to rape or murder or rob anyone; when one of them is an outlier who makes the wrong choice, the government has to step in to correct it.

I don't think it's inconsistent to say both 'Citizens make their own choices' and 'The government fordbids a small corner of decision-space with extremely bad outcomes for other people'. Lots of things constrain a person's choices, including brute physical reality, capitalism, social policing, etc; we're right to worry and fight over how much an individual's choices are restrained and guided, but I don't think it's right to say they're not making them.

You mean doctors? Then a judge? Yes probably.

Good thing that it's not just some nameless bureaucracy making the choice here but all the involved doctors also agree with it.

As someone with lots of personal & professional experience with doctors (working as a postdoc in medical science and helped the father of a close friend navigate his own cancer diagnosis), I have to take the opposite position. Doctors have a very strong tendency to groupthink, to defer to the leading doctor and to generally behave in such a way as to maximize ass-covering as opposed to the best interest of the patient. They can and will manipulate and keep secrets from you for the purpose of their own convenience. Don't misunderstand me, they do so since they're extremely overworked and just try their best to do good with limited time and resources, but they will frequently miss the mark especially in unusual cases.

Why is the pain necessary? Just put the baby on powerful enough painkillers to risk brain damage if necessary, then go for the long drawn out chance of life.

At 8 months, that will just kill them, which doctors are not allowed to do. They have to follow things like the Liverpool pathway which is withdrawal of support or feeding etc.

No, it will not kill them. We routinely sedate 8 month old children for various medical procedures. It can even be done for a long time as long as the risk of long term complications is acceptable.

Infants can't be sedated or given strong painkillers?

Yes, they can most definitely be sedated or be given very strong painkillers. They can cause permanent harm if done for extended periods of time, but it can be done. Speaking from a related expertise- I'm an anaesthetist.

Not if it will be harmful to them, in the UK at least. A compromise between a doctors moral and legal duty to do no harm and the cruel reality that some people can't be treated and death might be a kindness. They are allowed to withdraw life saving care but not give treatment that itself causes harm. The idea being that not saving someone is not the same as killing them.

Its been an ethical debate for a long time, Google Liverpool Care pathway for more (though it isn't called that any more i believe).

or a quicker painful death

Why isn't pumping the patient full of heroin never an option? Hell, keep the little bugger on a cocktails of joy drugs or whatever until it dies of RNA related malnutrition ( You can guess I'm not a doctor ).

I have a doctor story about that. My aunt was in pain and dying of a quick cancer, and I asked a doctor why they couldn’t give her morphine, and he told me that they couldn’t because it would increase her tolerance. I give doctors some slack for their high intelligence to open-mindedness ratio because they have to deal with so many lying idiots, but I still find them insufferable. It’s like they’re not talking to you, they’re just reciting you your miranda rights.

Usually parents have autonomy over their children's treatment. If doctors believe that the parents are acting massively against their child's best interest, then they'll take it to the courts. This is because under law the doctors have a duty of care for the child, otherwise the doctors would be deemed negligent. So here it is a case of doctors vs parents.

In these case, the court will act in the child's best interest. So here, you might think paradoxically, the best interest is to withdraw care and allow the child to die. Modern medical technology can prolong death and make it a long and painful process. See Scott's blog for more on this.

If two parents wanted to let their baby die instead of receive care, would you defer to their judgement in the same way?

If it's terminally ill I would say yes. If it has some easily treatable condition I would say no.

This is one of those horrible situations where I could see myself making this call, and would sympathize with anyone who was in that position... except agents of the british government.
There are legitimately "injuries incompatible with life" that should cause a physician to cease all but palliative treatment; it's almost obscene to go through the motions of treating bisection, brain destruction, and other unsurvivable conditions as if you're seriously trying to save the patient, and every cell in your body being unable to function due to an innate and permanent defect is one of those cases.

On the other hand, people in the US have now started surviving bisection thanks to a tradition of unlimited care in the most hopeless cases, while Canada has slid down the slope of euthanizing patients like a Krieg medic faster than anyone ever imagined. Even if it's a decision I'd make, it's not one I would trust anyone else to.

This is just a weird mind worm that Catholics have. They’ve lost control of society, of culture, Francis is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, Vatican 2 has been in place for 60 years, divorce is commonplace, but one brain-dead infant needs to be pumped full of drugs and kept alive as a vegetable for the longest possible time. Maximizing the number of deformed, disabled, unwanted, underclass or critically sick babies appears - in the 21st century perhaps along with supporting large scale immigration - to be the guiding principle of the Catholic Church.

This isn’t even opposition to euthanasia, because as others have suggested, she wouldn’t survive for any period naturally (which is the traditional threshold), but rather must be artificially kept alive in what amounts to a gruesome and morbid Frankenstein-esque medical experiment.

I will respect Catholic trads when they actually fight for for something that might improve civilization in a material way for people currently alive and their healthy descendants instead of kvetching endlessly about irrelevancies. Until then, for God’s sake if for nobody else’s, they ought to let this deeply unfortunate child rest in peace.

The sanctity of human life as a bright line between good and evil is an important load bearing principle of our civilization that is much too often taken for granted.

It's easy to call Catholics idealistic and impractical, but you're the one who lacks foresight if you think it isn't worth fighting tooth and nail on this particular battlefield.

Consider carefully the horrors that we know lie beyond the door of the State deciding who lives and dies. And remember it isn't you who controls it at the moment.

The sanctity of human life as a bright line between good and evil is an important load bearing principle of our civilization

Are you a staunch pacifist? Do you believe that no human being can ever kill any other human being under any circumstances? Even if your answer is yes, surely you can acknowledge that nearly no other person on earth, including in any nation you consider civilized, holds this belief. The vast majority of people believe that it is completely permissible to take another human life in at least some circumstance. That means that the line you are pointing at is not actually very bright at all, and is certainly not foundational to our civilization.

I am not. However I believe killing is only appropriate in cases where other options are exhausted such as self defense and war. And that it is not something that can be applied to people who did nothing wrong.

I entirely condemn it as a means of administrating a society, which is why though I am sympathetic to the idea of a death penalty for serious crimes, I am against it in practice. The State can not be trusted with the power to kill outside of the regimented confines of necessity. Death panels do not qualify.

And yes this is foundational to Western civilization in general and English civilization in particular which both place a lot more value on individual life than their contemporaries. Which is why the English, who like their rights, have historically not been very fond of the continental style of planned society. And why communism took root in the east and not in the west, contrary to Marx's predictions.

Again, it was England that had the Bloody Code, one of the most punitive and authoritarian legal regimes in European history. Any talk of “the natural rights and liberties of Englishmen” needs to grapple with that. It turns out that actually England does have a robust history of state institutions - such as secret police - that have intervened substantially into the lives of their citizens, no different from any other European state. So, if you’re going to make an argument about why state violence against citizens is a priori wrong, rather than trying to appeal to an extremely contentious and revisionist model of English history.

There’s a difference between a war and the state deciding that one of its own must die. I don’t think the line is death qua death but the line is certainly the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness of those citizens who live within the borders of the state. The concept of human rights is absolutely foundational to the west and I think this is the line that must be defended.

Are you suggesting that the death penalty - something eagerly practiced by every single country you would consider part of “the West” until practically yesterday, is “anti-Western”? Again, if you do, then you’re applying a definition of “Western Civilization” that didn’t exist until about forty years ago at the earliest.

It seems that you have an extremely progressive understanding of Western history, in which the West only started at the exact point in history in which your exact values became solidified. No Western person three hundred years ago cared about or believed in “human rights” in the way you’re using the phrase. Western countries were all totally fine with slavery at that point. Were they “not Western” at that point? England at least was executing thousands of people per year for even petty crimes. Was England not “Western” until it stopped doing so?

It was certainly abolished by appealing to Western principles. Much like slavery.

There's always a distance between the principles people hold and what they actually do.

But this is precisely the shell game I’m accusing you of. “Western countries happily lived one way for hundreds of years, and then very recently they decided to do things a different way. That means the original way they did things, which lasted for much longer than the more recent thing, was never actually Western at all.”

I don't see the enlightenment as a divergence but simply a continuation of the principles that have guided western civilization since it's foundation.

I suppose we might simply disagree there.

Are you suggesting that the death penalty - something eagerly practiced by every single country you would consider part of “the West” until practically yesterday, is “anti-Western”? Again, if you do, then you’re applying a definition of “Western Civilization” that didn’t exist until about forty years ago at the earliest.

I don't think that they were saying that "the state should never decide that one of its own should die." It seems that we can draw distinctions between a convicted child murderer and a child, for example.

However, I agree that human rights, in the modern sense (secular nonlegal rights that one holds because of being human) is extremely recent. The traditional Western view (going back to the days of the Roman Empire) was that one's extra-legal entitlements vs. others came from God. There were other Western ethical systems that worked differently (Stoicism, Peripateticism, Epicureanism) but these weren't based on the legalistic model that Western civilizations inherited from the Ancient Hebrews.

I’m suggesting that killing somebody outside of a state of war without due process (with the exception of self-defense) isn’t part of the enlightenment western tradition. It took a long time to get there, and we’re still working to get there.

There’s a difference between a war and the state deciding that one of its own must die

The death sentence, while slowly dying itself (or being strangled through lawfare and regulations) still exists in many Western states.

Further, there are plenty of cases where the state summarily executes people outside a state of war, try and shoot a police officer, or in the case of the UK, attempt to stab one and see how far the sanctity of life gets you.

Holding human life as sacred/uncomprisable simply doesn't work, at most you can argue that a high premium should be put on it, which is already true in the West, unless people are willfully blind to the historical state of affairs or the misfortunes of the rest of the globe.

Further, one can easily (and correctly) argue that this particular case lies at the confluence of a conflict between multiple different "rights", such as a right to medical care, a right not to be tortured, the right to die, or parental rights over their offspring. No matter how you slice it, someone's sacred ox is getting gored.

States can and will kill people, it's how they perpetuate themselves, and necessary for their very existence until we manage to eliminate violence altogether (hah).

try and shoot a police officer, or in the case of the UK, attempt to stab one and see how far the sanctity of life gets you.

Seeing how regular police officers don’t carry firearms in the UK (aside from in Northern Ireland), you’ll probably get pretty far.

Canada already proved euthanasia is a slippery slope, so I don't buy all the talk about how this isn't an important issue.

I will respect Catholic trads when they actually fight for for something that might improve civilization in a material way for people currently alive and their healthy descendants instead of kvetching endlessly about irrelevancies

All the misery of modernity was brought upon us by people obsessed with material improvement, so I'm happy respecting Catholics now.

I don’t have any issue with Canada’s euthanasia system, and the only flaw people seem to note is that they get upset when someone they don’t think should choose to kill themselves does so. But again, depressives, people dealing with extreme loneliness etc have always killed themselves at disproportionate rates, I don’t consider it morally abhorrent to ease their pain more painlessly.

But I understand the fear. If I were eg diabetic in Canada, I might be a little nervous about where things are headed.

That seems like a gross over-reaction to me, as I've had reason to say already today, insulin is cheap enough that the beleaguered and impoverished Indian government gives it away for free, and we're no NHS or Canadian equivalent.

There is no country in the world that can afford truly unlimited healthcare for all of its citizens, because that necessarily entails spending tens of millions or more on the more intractable cases, or even an indefinite sum if you include exploratory therapies.

I personally support the right of anyone to commit suicide for just about any reason, though I think they should be restrained if it's because of an acute mental or physical illness where we can reasonably expect their future self to desist and be thankful we saved them. I don't succumb to the usual temptation of terming any desire to end your life as a mental illness in of itself, if someone thinks I'm ruling out 100% of people by that heuristic. I recognize plenty of philosophical or personal reasons to prefer non-existence, including more prosaic ones such as terminal or incurable chronic illness that ruins QOL. I'd normally exhort people who think that way to hang on for just a few more years till the Singularity, but my timetable for the same is only a modestly informed guess and I can't demand anyone adhere to it.

I personally support the right of anyone to commit suicide for just about any reason, though I think they should be restrained if it's because of an acute mental or physical illness where we can reasonably expect their future self to desist and be thankful we saved them.

The problem is that very, very many people are flaky and short-sighted. Death is a one way trip, with no ability to undo a mistake. Euthanasia always gets sold based on this ideal image of a well-thought out, persistent desire. In reality, the advocates seem to slippery slope themselves into supporting euthanasia for cases that are light years from the ideal.

For example, an increasingly common scenario in The Netherlands is that someone with dementia in the family writes a euthanasia declaration where they state that they want euthanasia when they get dementia. The problem with dementia is that usually, people don't yet want to die as long as they are still reasonably rational. So euthanasia only becomes an option once they are so demented that they are effectively unable to make rational statements. The horror show that family members experience and which results them into making a euthanasia declaration beforehand, is also not necessarily what the patients feel themselves, once the time comes. We have about as much sense of whether a person with severe dementia experiences enough happy moments to want to keep living, as we do for a cat. People with dementia appear to lose the ability to form a long term happiness level anyway and experience emotions much more in the moment. How can we then judge if the good outweighs the bad?

What happens in practice is that the doctor tries to extract some proof for a persistent death wish, from a person with no ability to reason rationally. In the absence of solid evidence, the risk is enormous that the doctor will interpret their own feelings, or the feelings of the family, as being the feeling of the patient, intentionally or unknowingly.

For example, in one case, a patient would declare that it was too early for euthanasia on some days, but would say that she didn't want to live a moment longer on other days. In the face of this lack of clarity, the euthanasia doctor based her decision on statements by the family and the GP of the patient. Then the patient was killed by secretly putting a sedative in her coffee, followed by a lethal injection while she was sleeping. At no point was the patient even told that she would be killed, so there was no ability for her to object.

A Dutch political party is pushing for euthanasia with no medical grounds (either mental or physical illness is currently necessary) for those that have a 'completed life,' which I consider to be a manipulative propaganda word, which implicitly writes off people who do not contribute a lot to society, as it implies that once you get to a certain stage in life, there is nothing left for you to live for (after all, your life is completed). Research into a desire for euthanasia by the Dutch elderly with a death wish found that:

  • 72% of respondents have inconsistent feelings on the matter, wanting to die at some times and wanting to live at other times
  • 19% of all respondents and 28% of those that want euthanasia (rather than those that have a more passive wish to die, which was a pretty large group) have had a death wish for their entire lives, yet apparently never acted on it, even when they were young and able
  • Factors that the respondents who want euthanasia named as having an influence on their desire to die were:
  • Worrying (81%)
  • Mental or physical deterioration (61%)
  • Loneliness (56%)
  • Lack of control over their lives (50%)
  • Disease (47%)
  • The feeling of being a burden to others (42%)
  • Financial problems (36%)
  • People with a desire to die were disproportionally poor, urban and single

I personally see a lot of red flags in the data, in particular the extent to which the desire to die is flaky and often seems rather weak. Do we really want to kill people who are edge cases and who may just be going through a bad period? Also, a lot of factors that people name as reasons for wanting to die seem like they could potentially be fixed. Excessive worrying might be improved through mental health care or altering people's news diet. Loneliness seems highly influenced by how we organize modern society and was much less in the past. Shouldn't we try to fix society instead of killing the people who are unhappy because of societal pathologies? Similarly, a feeling of being a burden to others seems heavily influenced by modern beliefs, where people are valued on what they can do, versus beliefs of the past where the idea of inherent human value was more important. That the group with a desire to die is disproportionally poor, urban and single, suggests a strong societal component is at play.

Funny you should say this, since about an hour back, I was woken from a much needed nap by a panicked nurse in order to attend to a cancer patient, and arrived to see her grossly decompensating, with particular issues that made most of the initial resuscitation measures I'm in a position to provide useless.

I lost a bit of hair over how I was supposed to treat her, but was incredibly relieved to discover that, despite the nurses losing their shit, she was a palliative patient who had just had her End of Life and DNR forms filled by her family after the consultant in charge had informed them that all hope was lost as the brain mets gradually ate away at whatever made her human.

No amount of medical care any ICU could provide would save her or make her whole, at most we could prolong the process by keeping a living corpse hooked up to a ventilator at ruinous cost and taking space better served with the living. That calmed me down, even if this was the first time I had to deal with a dying patient entirely alone with nobody to back me up, I've read the guidelines, I know the drugs, and after some faffing around because apparently the oncology ward of the fanciest hospital in my part of the country didn't have syringe drivers capable of providing subcutaneous meds (utterly ridiculous, but they almost certainly have them in the ICU, but she was categorically forbidden from being transferred there), I managed to figure out a protocol that would ease the pain, or at least any residual discomfort someone who hadn't been conscious for days and never would be again might feel till her lungs filled with fluid and her heart became fitful and her ribs were no longer a cage for her soul.

So there you have it, I'm complicit in killing someone today, and I think it was a good decision, or at least the least bad of the options at hand. That's euthanasia for you, the modal case, representative of the end of suffering for millions.

It still hurt, at least for me, you'd think that working in an Onco ward would dissipate delusions that you can make sure your patients always walk out hale and hearty, but I did enter the profession because I'm proud to heal people. If that's not possible, may they pass gently into the good night, rage is more appropriate for the living who must deal with the banal, apathetic cruelty of an unfeeling world.

The problem is that very, very many people are flaky and short-sighted. Death is a one way trip, with no ability to undo a mistake.

Speaking very broadly, since practised and legal norms vary so grossly, euthanasia for the atypical cases where they're "physically" healthy involve lengthy periods of consultation and various opportunities to back out, though I think Canada has a more streamlined process, for better or worse.

So it's typically the case that multiple earnest medical professionals and social workers will repeatedly inquire as to the continued choice of the person to continue on the course. Even then, in my opinion, if someone who doesn't have a lack of capacity earnestly tells me they want to die, I wish to do my best to accommodate them promptly, even if I won't literally pull out a gun the moment they say so. This decision is obviously dependent on factors like acute pain or a severe bout of acute depression, where I can reasonably expect that treating them or will reasonably make the patient desist from their demands, but there's nobody who just kills people who have acute pain that I'm aware of, usually it's chronic and refractory to treatment.

People make plenty of decisions that they might vacillate on before death, the act of dying isn't special in that regard even if I agree it's rather terminal. They might want to adjust their will as they succumb to dementia and lose capacity to do so, they might want to feel the arms of a lover estranged for decades, it's the very lucky few who get to leave with no regrets at all.

Should their be due process and a period of waitful watching? I would certainly endorse that, but if someone over a span of weeks, months or even years keeps asking to die, I'm going to live and let die. That's how I address:

Do we really want to kill people who are edge cases and who may just be going through a bad period?

As for-

Excessive worrying might be improved through mental health care or altering people's news diet.

I can only chuckle ruefully at the idea that the majority of people who opt for euthanasia haven't had "mental health care" and oodles of it. They're usually refractory to treatment in the form of drugs, therapy and even physical interventions like ECT. They've failed to work.

I doubt the average neurotic woman with Trump Derangement Syndrome or even those who become anti-natalists or anti-humanists are lining up to kill themselves.

Shouldn't we try to fix society instead of killing the people who are unhappy because of societal pathologies?

That's a false dichotomy in my eyes. We can do both, and should do both.

That the group with a desire to die is disproportionally poor, urban and single, suggests a strong societal component is at play.

All associated with severe unhappiness and poor life outcomes and for good reason. Being poor, "urban" and single against your wishes sucks.

If you have a means of turning such people into rich, rural and married individuals, then I'm willing to hear it, but I doubt anyone does short of waiting for the world to get much wealthier.

That's a false dichotomy in my eyes. We can do both, and should do both.

But in my society we are not actually doing both. At least some of the issues are caused by choices that people are doubling down on, if anything. Loneliness is now only on the agenda because it is becoming such a huge issue, but no one is undoing the cultural and political changes that caused it, or coming up with any real, new solutions. Unless you count euthanasia as a solution.

What I see is a pathological unwillingness to even face facts and instead, everything gets viewed from extremely dogmatic viewpoints, like the idea that all problems will be solved if we achieve things like inclusivity, gender equality, racial equality, etc; despite a completely lack of a rational analysis of what we would actually need to achieve such things; let alone an honest analysis of the up- and downsides of the policies being implemented (politically, culturally, etc).

In the face of such irrationality, 'solving' issues by getting rid of the evidence as much as possible by killing the victims of modern culture and modern policies, seems like a logical outcome that will lessen the pressure to recognize or fix the pathologies of modernity.

All associated with severe unhappiness and poor life outcomes and for good reason. Being poor, "urban" and single against your wishes sucks. If you have a means of turning such people into rich, rural and married individuals, then I'm willing to hear it, but I doubt anyone does short of waiting for the world to get much wealthier.

And yet people of modest means seemed to have an easier time in the past of actually getting the main things that most people want, a house, a partner, children and a decent level of respect (which may have just been 'successful while knowing your place,' but that is a lot better than just a bare 'loser'). And they were poorer than today, so this idea that wealth can fix a broken society seems false, as things have become increasingly broken despite increased wealth.

In my country even the progressives have woken up to the reality that people increasingly see lower education as a path to failure. Of course, their solution is foolish, to rename it to 'practical education,' due to their post-modern belief that words create, rather than reflect reality.

And rural living is itself failing as well. Rural women get convinced that they need to find a leftist yuppie and be part of city life, so they leave for the city, leaving a large gender imbalance, forcing men to leave as well and to become yuppies, but those men often fail, since the official messaging is sabotaging. So many boys don't see this as a path to success. Again, the progressives seem to have finally woken up to this too, but of course their answer is to vilify and censor people like Andrew Tate, rather than fix their own messaging or even just giving a shit about boys/men.

And it is not just sabotaging for men, but also for women, many of whom now seek out parasocial, dysfunctional substitutes for real friends and a real partner, for instance by streaming (although men do that too).

And of course, globalist culture stimulates breaking physical bonds with family and the friends you grow up with.

I could go on, but I think you get the point that I disagree very strongly with sentiments like 'of course the poors/urbans be sad' or with ignoring that society has a big influence on how successful people are at finding and maintaining relationships (romantic, but also friendships and family relationships). I see your beliefs as part of the pathological culture that refuses to learn from the cultures of the past and pretends that its dysfunctions and problems are inevitable.

But again, depressives, people dealing with extreme loneliness etc have always killed themselves at disproportionate rates, I don’t consider it morally abhorrent to ease their pain more painlessly.

As someone who has suffered from bouts of depression and loneliness in my life, I’m glad that I had people around me who cared enough to check in and look after me. They didn’t simply refer me to a government euthanasia program. That would be morally abhorrent. I hope you would never suggest that to one of your own friends or family members.

I wouldn’t, but if after a long time it seemed intractable that they wanted to kill themselves, and they were in great pain, and I didn’t want them to suffer horrifically in e way in which people so often do in suicide [attempts], I would accept their decision to go to Dignitas or whatever. Would I raise it as a possibility? I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t inconceivable that I would.

Canada has proved that conservatives will meme about euthanasia being a slippery slope given the slightest provocation.

It's not like every hospital ward is flooded with sarin gas once a week, I haven't heard any actual horror stories beyond 'someone mentioned to someone that this was one of their many options' or 'someone who was probably a high risk for suicide anyway got to do it painlessly'.

Let me know if you know of something more substantial than that, it's admittedly not something I follow closely but I don't ever remember being impressed by this narrative when I've seen it and gone to read the original source.

Offering euthanasia for anything other than a terminal illness is breaking of the original promise for what it would be used for, and thus a vindication of the slippery slope. If you want to shift the goalposts even more, go ahead.

I don't know what you mean by 'original promise', whether that's a single specific document or a general sense that most of the public got from reading hundreds of politicians and pundits talk about the matter, or what.

Not that I'm totally disagreeing, I'm sure there are some specific groups involved who were either lying or mistaken about what course things would take and didn't project it looking exactly like it does today. Which isn't teh same thing as the whole enterprise being deceptive from the start, I don't know enough of how it was proposed to judge that either way, would be interested to learn more if you are thinking about a specific document or speech.

I think there should be a principled difference between 'this is a slippery slope' and 'this was sold using deceptive rhetoric'.

If so far nothing crazy has happened, and nothing that the original proposers wouldn't have been happy with has happened, and it's only been a short time since it was implemented, then I'm not sure that's evidence that it will slide into crazy things that the original proposers would not want.

It just sounds like original proposers were downplaying how big the change would be, which is bad because it's dishonest, but not strong evidence of an ongoing trajectory.

Anyway, if the proposition is 'Canada has proven that the government can't be trusted with medical decisions involving life or death', then I think I'd have to see the Canadian government do something objectionable before it was strong evidence of that. Not just 'it's being used in sensible ways that weren't originally specified'.

(of course, maybe you believe the current way Canada is using it is objectionable in and of itself. That's something I'd be interested to hear more about, but it's a different argument than the slippery slope argument)

I don't know what you mean by 'original promise', whether that's a single specific document or a general sense that most of the public got from reading hundreds of politicians and pundits talk about the matter, or what.

The latter, and I think it's disingenuous to imply only the former should be relevant in a democratic society.

Which isn't teh same thing as the whole enterprise being deceptive from the start,

"Slippery slope" does not mean an enterprise is deceptive from the start. It's possible for people to really honestly believe it will not go further than the point discussed when pushing through a policy. I actually was on the pro-euthanasia side until recently, and it is because I believed they will be limited to people suffering from a terminal illness.

However given the history of policies growing beyond the originally discussed scope, I think it's justified to assume most enterprises put forward today are deceptive from the start.

I think there should be a principled difference between 'this is a slippery slope' and 'this was sold using deceptive rhetoric'.

One is a subsection of the other. If you asked me for a definition of "slippery slope" it would boil down to "selling a social change through a type of deceptive rhetoric, where the scope of the planned change is much larger than originally discussed".

If so far nothing crazy has happened

(of course, maybe you believe the current way Canada is using it is objectionable in and of itself. That's something I'd be interested to hear more about, but it's a different argument than the slippery slope argument)

Yes, I do believe that. Crazy things have already happened. Even crazier things would have, were it not for public backlash. They're also scheduled to relax the rules even more next year, which will again, ensure even more crazy things happening.

Canada already proved euthanasia is a slippery slope, so I don't buy all the talk about how this isn't an important issue.

Slippery slope? Canada is doing absolutely the right thing when it comes to Euthanasia. It is not being forced upon anyone, merely given as an extra option in addition to the normal healthcare system for those who's diseases are really bad.

Offering to euthenize veterans when they have the temerity to complain that their wheelchair ramp is taking a long time to install is not what I'd call "who's diseases are really bad".

Ah, you mean that grand myth about an offer that was “made verbally” and for which the veteran in question was unable to provide any evidence for whatsoever, that one?

I don’t see why a verbal referral, possibly made sarcastically to a “squeaky wheel”, would have been recorded.

This is one of the reasons American conservatives don’t trust a large, central, bureaucratic government: “The part of the government which oversees the government states they couldn’t find anything in the files of the part of the government which works with citizens who served the government in fighting another government to indicate there was a referral to the part of the government which kills its own citizens to prevent them using excess government resources which could be used for more productive citizens.”

Well it’s relevant becuase in the Canadian bureaucracy (as in most bureaucracies) most things are recorded in writing, including offers of this kind of assistance apparently. Almost nothing in a Western bureaucracy when it comes to interaction between some government body and the citizen would ever happen ‘verbally’, even minor stuff requires 7 forms and a bushel of letters sent to the citizen about everything that relates to anything to do with an issue.

So while the government may have conveniently lost its copy, it’s much more suspicious that the veteran did, especially when she went directly to the press to complain about it.

Almost nothing in a Western bureaucracy when it comes to interaction between some government body and the citizen would ever happen ‘verbally’, even minor stuff requires 7 forms and a bushel of letters sent to the citizen about everything that relates to anything to do with an issue.

None of this is true, and bureaucrats know perfectly well that if they want to get something done, but it's not really up to code, they need to handle it over a phone call, or a face to face meeting, instead of via email for example.

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Well hon, I've worked in a Western bureaucracy implementing government grants and policies, and we often communicated with the public over the phone or face-to-face at the enquiry window. And didn't write down every single word we and the client uttered.

So "interaction between some government body and the citizen" did "happen ‘verbally’". The 7 forms came later in the process.

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Someone claims they want to die but were refused: we must believe them, don't ask for proof!

Someone claims they want to live but were told to die: where's the proof? oral only? it's a myth!

This is reminding me of #MeToo and 'believe (all) women' - when the accusations were against the guy we hate, it was mandatory to believe them and no doubt could be cast on the claims; when it was against our guy, of course the bitch was a lying, politically motivated, fabulist.

but one brain-dead infant needs to be pumped full of drugs and kept alive as a vegetable for the longest possible time

Yes, the better answer is to turn it into ragouts and fricassees since then they would get some return for their time and expenditure.

I don't think you can piously mutter about "this deeply unfortunate child" after characterising it at the start as a brain-dead vegetable. You've shown your real opinion, no need to pretend to care about the child as such. And indeed sick children in general; you explicitly mention "healthy descendants" so - diabetic babies should die? blind babies are a hobble around the ankle of the healthy? At what stage does one reach a sufficient level of "not a healthy descendant" to be for the scrap heap, and at what point is "sufficiently healthy to be allowed live" reached?

I think barring cases where therapy would likely involve growing a new brain for them, such as microcephalic infants, in an ideal world everyone should be kept alive until we have the medical treatment to heal them, which I wager is easily within the current nominee life expectancy of most people reading.

Unfortunately, we live in a far from ideal world and budgets aren't infinite, so I have no qualms about letting die those who are an onerous burden.

For a more formal/object assessment criteria of how much a year of one person's life is compared to the average, we have QALY and DALY which adjusts for "quality" and disability respectively, to formalize the intuitive notion that a year of a doddering dementia patient's life is not worth as much as one of a healthy 20 yo.

A baby that no amount of money would save today before they die would certainly qualify for someone who should be allowed to die, or at least be cryogenically preserved in the hopes of resuscitation in a more enlightened age.

Regardless of earnest hand-wringing about the sanctity of life and how it's beyond such loathsome things as cost-benefit analysis, you don't see the global GDP diverted to help an orphan that fell down a well, or the Pope emptying the church's coffers for the sake of any old malarial infant.

Since it must be done, then it's best done as intelligently as we can manage, instead of letting moral outrage do all the work.

Diabetic babies aren't particularly expensive to rear, the Indian government, impoverished as it is, can give insulin away for free, and even the blind are being cured with reproducible therapies that promise to end the disease once and for all, no need for miracles not of our own making.

we live in a far from ideal world and budgets aren't infinite, so I have no qualms about letting die those who are an onerous burden.

If the cost is being borne largely by private actors, what cost is it to the government? Surely, if a private individual or charity group is able and willing to direct their funds to keeping those children alive, they should be allowed to, no?

Regardless of earnest hand-wringing about the sanctity of life and how it's beyond such loathsome things as cost-benefit analysis, you don't see the global GDP diverted to help an orphan that fell down a well

You do see people expend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to save kids trapped in a cave or save an individual diver who went into a cave, however. Much of that is almost always from the national coffers. To say nothing of charities who's entire goals are to save such people, regardless of said cost.

If society can forward cash from its coffers toward elderly patients at nursing homes, it can spend some money keeping some kids alive. Especially if a society-- hell, an individual- chooses to shoulder that burden, keeping most of the cost of the existence of that child out of a country's own economic burdens. It's one thing to say "the state will not fund this any more" - it's another too deny access and use of private resources.

If the cost is being borne largely by private actors, what cost is it to the government? Surely, if a private individual or charity group is able and willing to direct their funds to keeping those children alive, they should be allowed to, no?

I have no objection to this at all. By all means, people should be allowed to make hail mary attempts as long as they're taking the financial burden upon themselves.

You do see people expend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, to save kids trapped in a cave or save an individual diver who went into a cave, however. Much of that is almost always from the national coffers. To say nothing of charities who's entire goals are to save such people, regardless of said cost.

This does not change the fact that the willingness to pay is not infinite, far from it.

Sure, but our friend didn't make any fine distinctions when talking about "healthy descendants". So what level of health counts as 'healthy' for his purposes?

Refugee is just a modern euphemism for illegal immigrant. Hence why thousands of Albanian men who wash up on the southern shore of England are called 'refugees' by the open border crowd.

Refugees is basically the NGO way to enable large scale immigration.

If you count the millions of asylum seekers pouring across the southern border, than refugee resettlement is at all-time highs surely.

It seems like you are playing semantic word games, using some technical definition of refugee that isn't the common sense definition.

Conflating the number of asylum seekers with the number of *refugee resettlements is itself semantically dubious, isn't it? Especially given that most of those asylum applications will be denied

The application may be denied, but that doesn't force them to go home. They can just disappear into the US.

Well, voluntary departure is a much smarter move, since it avoids having a removal order issued, But I am sure you have data on how many rejected asylum seekers stay illegally.

In Germany, at least, the standard operating procedure is for an illegal immigrant to falsely claim asylum, have his application rejected, and then not be deported.

The Catholic Church and Bishops Conference (ie the leadership body of American Catholicism) also lobbied extensively for Hart-Cellar and for amnesty for all illegal migrants whenever it’s been an issue in American politics. The Sanctuary (city/state) movement evolved out of steps that largely Catholic churches took to harbor Central American migrants in opposition to Reaganite immigration policy in the early ‘80s.

That being said, the historical record shows that in 1965 very few people who supported Hart-Celler envisioned that the level of demographic change would be what it turned out to be.

But how many civil society groups, including the Church, have changed their minds at all, knowing what we know now?

mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal.

I would like to hear your justification for the use of the word "almost" in this sentence - so far as I can tell this baby is doomed, and has nothing in her short future but suffering (insofar as she is even capable of feeling suffering at this point) and death.

The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby.

And the protestants are just being protestant about this and acting under pragmatism rather than dogma.

Look, I'm sure the folks at Bambino Gesu are operating with only the best of intentions, but good intentions don't heal babies with broken genomes. The Vatican would have better odds building a colony on Titan than of saving this child.

Indi is a British citizen. As such the court is bound to act in her interests. Not her parents, hers. It is blatantly obvious to me (and the judge, apparently) that any sentient creature with zero capacity to do anything but suffer is better off in a state of inexistence. Prolonging her life for the sake of, what, her parent's feels? Not justifiable.

And the protestants are just being protestant about this and acting under pragmatism rather than dogma.

Discontinuing care would be pragmatic. Preventing the child from going somewhere else, were care will be given is just as dogmatic.

I think the point is UK courts will rule that letting a child die might be best for the patient and override parental wishes, but they will also override parental wishes to save a child if they deem that best for the patient (With Jehovahs Witnesses and blood products most commonly I think).

So they don't have a, "always preserve life as much as possible" rule, or a "always end life early" rule, but they choose depending on the circumstances.

Papal infallibility is a dogma, even when what the pope says is pretty nuanced. This is just "healthcare system infallibility".

I don't think that makes sense,because we don't allow doctors to make the choice on their own. And multiple witnesses and doctors were called before multiple judges, including up to the ECHR which isn't even British.

When we lock up a criminal after a trial is that dogma because we're assuming "justice system infallibility"? Or that we know its not infallible but decisions have to be made in the best interests of people anyway, even though it could be incorrect?

Normally people are free to take their baby to Italy if they want though -- the UK health system choosing not to treat the baby due to hopelessness seems fine, but actively preventing the family from seeking other options is a bit nuts. (and reflects a high degree of egotism on the part of the UK justice/health system, if not quite 'infallibility')

It's not just due to hopelessness, the treating specialists claimed that treatment was not just useless but causing pain and therefore further treatment was not in the best interests of the patient. As long as you accept that is on the balance of probability true, then the choice is allowing further torture. You don't have to think you're infallible for that. Indeed it went to what, at least 4 different courts (one of which was the ECHR and not controlled by the UK), all of which are checking the work of the other.

It may still be wrong of course. But if you have double checking built into the system, it seems clear the system has at least taken some steps to try to minimise mistakes.

It's the extension of jurisdiction to Italy that is key here -- if Italy (or Vatican City I guess) thinks that the treatment is literal torture, they could ban it.

What even are the mechanics of this -- is the state taking over custody of this kid? ie. if the parents show up with an ambulance and a bunch of Vatican doctors, the police will prevent them from moving the child?

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Sure, if a jurisdiction outlaws, say, gender affirming care, it would be a claim on infallibility if you not only prevented people from providing it within the jurisdiction, but also prevented the from going where it's legal.

No, I think you're wrong there. You don't have to think you are infallible to stop someone doing X, you just have to think you are more likely to be right than they are. It might be a claim that you know better than them, but that's not the same thing as thinking you are infallible.

If I forbid you to take cocaine (assuming I am in a position to do so, and care about you), and when you tell me you are going round to your friend's house to do coke and I lock you up instead, I can freely acknowledge that it is possible that it will be a positive healthy experience for you with no downsides. I just have to think the cost/benefit is tipped too far into the negatives. But it isn't a claim to infallibility. You can ask me "Isn't there a chance you are wrong SSCReader?" and I will say, "Yes, I might be". Yet I still won't open the door. I know I am not infallible, yet, if I think your judgement is (for whatever reason) too badly compromised, I just have to trust it MORE than yours.

It's comparative, not absolute in other words.

Sorry, can you stay within the bounds of my hypothetical instead of changing it so that it no longer applies to the situation?

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What struck me as dogmatic is the prolongation of life as the highest priority, the greatest possible good, regardless of anything. There is no consideration given to the possibility that maybe prolonging Indi's life is not a good thing for her.

It's in your comment too. If you'll pardon me trying to guess your thought processes, the only negative you can even consider is the economic cost of keeping Indi alive. If someone else is covering that then there is literally no downside.

This is only true if treatment is an unalloyed good, which, of course, it isn't.

What struck me as dogmatic is the prolongation of life as the highest priority, the greatest possible good, regardless of anything. There is no consideration given to the possibility that maybe prolonging Indi's life is not a good thing for her.

I find that absolutely backwards. Even if the UK healthcare system ran some advanced calculus on whether it makes sense to keep her alive, they are the ones failing to consider that someone else might come to a different conclusion. Actually, failing to consider wouldn't even be that bad, the issue is that they are so absolutely certain, that they believe they have a right to stop, by force, other people from prolonging her life. A non-dogmatic person does not act this way.

It's in your comment too. If you'll pardon me trying to guess your thought processes, the only negative you can even consider is the economic cost of keeping Indi alive. If someone else is covering that then there is literally no downside.

This is only true if treatment is an unalloyed good, which, of course, it isn't.

Usually we let the patient decide whether or not to undergo treatment, and if they are in a state where they cannot make that decision, we lave that to their family. You're so certain about being right, that you think it gives you the right to override the parents, and you're calling others dogmatic?

I really don't think it is the place of a judge to ever order a cessation of treatment, except to settle a dispute over power of attorney or something similar.

A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.

Now wait a minute, the order is to stop actively keeping the baby alive, which seems pretty different from killing the baby, even if the end result is the same.

The court point of view is that they're ordering the parents to stop torturing their child, and that they can't condone the parents moving the baby to a different country that is willing to torture it. Obviously there's clear disagreement over whether the medical care is comparable to torture.

I don't think the court is obviously right here, but I think you're being unreasonable in claiming they're obviously wrong.

When there are available other ways to provide resources and methods to keep the baby alive, and the court and hospital refuse and actively fight against it, that is exactly the same as killing the baby.

It would be more honest if the court and hospital directly argued in your manner that the parents are torturing the baby in keeping the baby alive. The have chosen instead to argue that more treatment is not in the baby's best interest, and just leave conclusions obvious but nebulous.

I don't agree with the parents here, but I think it would be monstrous and unjust to prosecute the parents for torturing their baby. Even if you think it's dishonest to do otherwise.

If the issue is pain, that's easy to fix with enough painkillers and sedatives. Of course, that probably has terrible side effects on babies, but the alternative is death. Even if the medical care is literal torture there are ways to make it humane.

Seems pretty clear the underlying motivation to end care really is about money, and forbidding the family from leaving is more about control and optics than about the wellbeing of the child.

Do you believe that every human, no matter how unviable, has to be kept alive at any cost?

Not the person you replied to, but here's my opinion - no, every human does not have to be kept alive, and certainly not at public expense. However, if the parents are willing to pay out of their pocket for a chance at keeping their baby alive, I don't think anyone else should have a say in it. Probably a more moral use of their money than buying a sports car or having a destination wedding.

If someone wants to try to do that and use their own legitimately acquired ressources to do it, trying to stop them seems monstrous.

No, but I think if the parents are willing to pay the price, and it's possible to do so without causing too much suffering (e.g. by using tons of painkillers), then it's usually immoral to step in and stop them.

From the article, it seems like the government merely ruled that (government-provided, in the UK) life support should be withdrawn, which does not register as "ordered to be killed" any more than I would consider the government refusing to subsidise plane tickets for unemployed people to amount to imprisonment. The weird part only begins at the point where they also arrogate to themselves the right to prohibit transferring the baby to a different hospital - but this is part of a general tendency towards legal paternalism in medicine. I was under the impression that the appetite for making it illegal to go do something that is not authorized locally (including recreational drugs, experimental treatment, and especially medical interventions that touch upon ethically touchy topics such as abortions, embryonal selection, cloning...) is generally high, and people get away with it it is only due to the inattention of the legal system.

The government is also preventing the parents from taking the child out of the country to get treatment. So, no, the government has specifically decided the child needs to die because keeping it alive or trying to treat it is cruel.

Yes, I understood that (see second half of the post). But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?

But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?

YesChad.jpg

Seriously, I'm perfectly willing to bite that bullet. Even in the case of treatments almost certainly being useless, denying people the option of trying to do something for themselves in the face of a terminal disease is telling them that they must learn to die on the state's terms.

for themselves

If this were true, it would be a very different situation.

Government telling adult citizens what to do is very fraught.

Government protecting the interests of dependent minors in limited cases where parents are not acting in those interests is well-established law and a sad but necessary institution.

There's a very high amount of authoritarianism and arrogance found in senior medical professionals. They don't like to be disobeyed or disagreed with. Look at the "Take Care of Maya" case that just finished.

Another interesting example is that now there are several countries that ban drugs like ketamine, psilocybin, or MDMA for treatment of severe mental disorders. But they allow assisted suicide in those cases. Because a dead patient happens all the time, but to be proven wrong would be truly horrendous.

This contradiction doesn’t hold if the people banning the drugs aren’t the same people in charge of treating severe mental disorders or carrying out euthanasia. Maybe I’m wrong and medical professionals do have a right to use prohibited drugs which they’re not exercising.

t. The weird part only begins at the point where they also arrogate to themselves the right to prohibit transferring the baby to a different hospital - but this is part of a general tendency towards legal paternalism in medicine.

It seems to me most of these stories concern the UK. I don't recall such a story - prohibit privately funded transfer of a hopeless baby - from any other country.

The article doesn't make it clear what mitochondrial disease is responsible, but the UK is probably the world leader in treating it. The caveat: It has to be done via in-vitro fertilization.

This would have to be a defect in mitochondrial proteins that are coded for in nuclear DNA, right? The mother obviously doesn't have the disease, or she would never have lived long enough to reproduce. Since mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother without recombination, then it can't be carried in mitochondrial DNA, unless it's a de novo mutation.

Many (most?) mitochondrial genes have migrated into nuclear DNA, so an autosomal recessive disease could explain how she was able to inherit the disease without either of her parents having it.

I definitely have an issue with how you present the findings of the article. No one wants to kill the baby. They withhold care and not even on cost base, but because there is no benefit. Second - the article is preciously light with details about the treatment that the Vatican hospital proposes. I doubt that the UK doctors wouldn't recommend the baby to be moved to Italy if there was even a shred of evidence that their treatment there would potentially lead to permanent improvement. Or even to advancement for the medicine as a field.

No one wants to kill the baby. They withhold care and not even on cost base, but because there is no benefit.

If you are refusing to hand it over to someone who wants to give them care, how is that not killing them? If you're in an ambulance, is it ok if I block your way to the hospital?

If that care is almost certain to be ineffective, then it's not, regardless of the good intentions of the would be saviour. Suppose my baby was dying and a charlatan offered to exorcise it of the demon that was surely killing it. It would not be murder for me to ignore this claim, or the claims of anyone else who proffered some dubious miracle cure.

Again, I am yet to hear anyone make the claim that the care of the Vatican hospital is qualitatively different from that of the UK system, so if they're charlatans, so is the UK healthcare system.

I am also yet to hear anyone claim that the kid cannot be kept alive for a while longer, people are only claiming that it's ultimately futile. While it maybe true, it is also true that actively preventing people from delivering the child to a place that offers to keep the child alive for a while longer is equal to murder.

What makes a charlatan a charlatan is claiming to have miracle cures, not being unable to produce them (which is true of all of them). That said, I don't know if the Vatican is making this claim, so I couldn't say if they are charlatans or not.

The Vatican hospital has one of the top icu’s in the world, so I don’t think the treatment plan being vetoed is ‘I dunno, will incense and holy water work?’

It seems like what’s actually happening is that UK government bureaucrats- probably someone in the NHS’s cost effectiveness department- doesn’t like being reminded of not owning other people’s children.

If there was actually a credible plan to treat this baby, it would be produced. But so far all I've heard is to keep the baby alive in the hope for a miraculous recovery.

Such a bureaucrat would have no power to issue an injunction. Injunctions like this are handed down by judges, not NICE, which doesn't have power to do anything of the sort or even intervene in individual cases.

The UK healthcare system at least had the decency to desist when it became obvious that the treatment didn't work or, if the diagnosis was made later, couldn't work. A charlatan is someone who knows that their cures don't work, and very much keeps plying them after that becomes obvious.

While I certainly support the right of the parents to take their child to the Vatican hospital since it's not on the dime of the UK taxpayer (beyond presumably airfare and the logistics of getting them there), I still only have disdain for those who demand that a life worse than death be continued at any cost.

It's not the government's right to feel disdain that's in question, it's their right to get in the way that is.

And I don’t think anybody claims that the parents or the UK have the obligation to continue treating the child indefinitely(certainly the majority opinion of theologians in the Catholic Church does not require medical treatment to continue when there is no chance of recovery- although it does require ordinary caretaking[feeding, diaper changing, etc, but not ventilation]). However the parents have the right to make medical decisions for their own children, especially when making the ‘wrong’ one doesn’t make the kid worse off or cost more money(because the Italian government is paying for it).

Would it be murder to stop you from trying it at gunpoint, were you so inclined?

No. Obviously, it is not murder to prevent someone from performing an exorcism. The premise is faulty, that an offer to save someone's life instantly creates an obligation not to do anything to interfere, regardless of how incredible that claim is.

I disagree. I think prisons have a duty to allow for medical care and that armies that close humanitarian corridors are guilty of war crimes.

Bad analogy. Anyway look at the facts - the baby is with major brain damage, needs constant life support, it may not survive the trip, the logistics of the trip themselves are not trivial, and that care is terribly vague. All of the first were could be taken out of consideration if there was some serious data on the last. It is not blocking the way to the hospital, it is blocking the way to a quack.

Your analogy is the bad one, the Vatican hospital aren't quacks.

Everything you brought up is also irrelevant. Can I block your way to the hospital, if I'm sure you will die anyway? That's what your arguments boil down to.

In that case they are - otherwise they would have provided details what magic they would do that the UK doctors won't. No but I can block your way to the torture chambers - and invasive treatment without chance of improvement is exactly that.

IIRC the Vatican hospital(which are not random quacks but a very highly ranked institution in a first world country) wants to try an experimental procedure that the NHS won’t authorize because it’s very expensive and has a low chance of working. It’s fair for the NHS not to want to do it, but it doesn’t seem like they should be able to stop the parents from taking their child to a hospital that wants to do the procedure.

In the article itself is mentioned that the Vatican hospital is quite short on details about what this procedure is.

If the Vatican hospital is a torture chamber, and what they're doing is no different than what the UK hospital did at this point, than the UK hospital is a torture chamber, and all people involved in it must be punished.

In a sane world the baby would be cryopreserved until the singularity.

In a sane world the baby would be cryopreserved until the singularity.

Do you happen to be dath ilan citizen shipwrecked on this planet of apes? I mean, another one?

Didn’t they eventually have to scoop up a decomposed human as bio-goop sludge from the bottom of one of the earliest cryopreservation capsules?

Most of the early cryo-patients didn't survive, the most notable incident being the Chatsworth disaster.

Cryonics has learned from those mistakes. In particular, cryonic orgs now absolutely refuse to preserve a patient unless he has already provided enough money to cover both his preservation and his upkeep, in perpetuity. This is important, because most cryonics failures happened partly or wholly due to financial problems.

From "Suspension Failures: Lessons from the Early Years", first published in Cryonics, February 1992:

One important lesson to be drawn from this tale of woe is that cryonic suspensions should only be maintained by those who have a strong personal interest in being cryopreserved themselves and have made arrangements. This includes the financial backers as well as those in charge of daily care. Those who are personally committed generally have superior judgment and realize the advisability of the neuro option (head-only preservation) in cases where funds are limited. Such people will fight hard to maintain even someone they hardly knew, who is not a relative, as happened at Alcor during the Dora Kent crisis for instance. They are not afraid to take measures others squeamishly shun, when a patient’s survival is at stake. Neuroconversions carried out by such people have saved several patients whose funding ran out [28]. Not one of the many suspension failures was a neuro.

Of seventeen documented freezings through 1973, all but one ended in failure, while maybe five or six later cases, some of them privately maintained, were later terminated (or were continued under questionable circumstances, such as attempted permafrost interment). In most of these cases, finances were a factor.

And from "Don’t Ask, But Do Tell" by Mike Darwin:

Your statement “(CSNY) underestimated the costs associated with maintaining the leaky Cryo-care capsules (sound familiar?)” is incorrect. The estimates for the cost of cryopreservation presented to the public ranged from $8,500 posited by Bob Ettinger in THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY in 1964 to the $10,000 widely quoted by the media as being the cost of indefinite cryopreservation at both CSC and CSNY during the period from1969 to 1972. Of that $10,000 no less than $8,000 was to be invested for long-term care. $8,000.00 in 1969 had about the same buying power as $44,561.80 in 2006, or roughly twice what CI currently budgets for long-term storage for Option One Members ($23,000 per patient). The problem was that this money was never set aside, and indeed never existed in the first place. What’s more, with the exception of Paul Hurst, Sr. (and later Herman Greenberg), CSNY was not consistently paid, or in the case of Steven Mandell, paid at all. Steven’s life insurance was applied for after he was already (terminally) ill and did not pay out. Pauline Mandell never paid Cryo-Span for the CC dewar, the charges for “encapsulating” Steven, or for liquid nitrogen or facility floor space (rent). The $4,500 for the CC dewar, the $1,100 for the Sergeant-Welch vacuum pumps, and the costs of welding, transportation, and miscellaneous hardware were paid for by Curtis Henderson.

A lot of people died attempting to fly before we figured out how to do it.

Didn’t they eventually have to scoop up a decomposed human as bio-goop sludge from the bottom of one of the earliest cryopreservation capsules?

You probably mean Chatsworth scandal, this was indeed one of more embarrassing failures of early cryonics.

Normie introduction

Cryonicist-transhumanist introduction

"The stench near the crypt is disarming, strips away all defenses, spins the stomach into a thousand dizzying somersaults."

If the improbable case anyone is interested in in-depth analysis what went wrong with cryonics, see "Cryonics: An Historical Failure Analysis" series.

When the long awaited ‗freezing‘ of the first man took place on 12 January, 1967, the man in charge was Robert F. Nelson, aka Frank Bucelli, a Santa Monica TV repairman. Bucelli was much more than a TV repairman; he was a convicted felon with a long criminal record beginning in his youth; including violent offenses such as assault and battery as well as numerous charges, and several convictions for fraud and theft.

Yes, freezing people is not easy.

The earliest version of a lot of things didn't work /shrug.

I'm not sure, but this shouldn't be an issue with modern preservation techniques.

It’s not about preservation techniques, it’s about organizational continuity and goal rigidity. Unless the freezing capsules are buried in the Antarctic permafrost, they aren’t passively safe for the occupants and cryopreservation must be actively maintained.

Modern preservations techniques are virtually the same as they were back then; build a human-sized thermos, fill it with liquid nitrogen, stick the patient inside, and occasionally top it off with liquid nitrogen to keep it full as it boils off. The biggest difference is that they now pump a patient full of cryoprotectants to prevent freezing damage from ice crystals, a process called vitrification.

The big changes that were instituted as a result of the early disasters were institutional, not technological. Cryonics companies will refuse to touch you until you have paid them cold, hard cash, or given them ownership of a life insurance policy with a reputable life insurance company. Patients are stored upside-down so that their heads are protected longest in the event of liquid nitrogen boil-off. Cryonics orgs are prepared to convert their whole-body patients into neuros if that is the only way to keep them suspended.

These are all bitter lessons that had to be learned the hard way. Family members would arrange to cryopreserve their relatives, then lose interest in paying for their upkeep as the grief faded. Patients used to be stored upright for optics reasons. Patients that could have been saved were never converted to neuro, usually because of family objections.

I think it's ok for the government to make utilitarian decisions on behalf of children when the stake are high enough and the outcome clear enough.

I don't know for sure if this case meets that standard, I'd need to both be a doctor and read an unbiased account of the situation (and no one without a biased take would bother reporting on this case from either side).

But the pitch is: this infant will die shortly no matter what, it's already suffered severe neurological damage that would prevent it from appreciating any potential positive experiences it might have during that time, keeping it alive on life support for a few months is gaining it absolutely nothing except torturous pain and suffering.

Again, I don't know how well the actual case fits that hypothetical, but in a hypothetical like that I do believe that it's in the infant's best interests to have life support suspended, and I would be ok with the government enforcing that. Children need something to protest their interests in cases where parents are acting against those interests starkly enough (even if they do so out of misguided love), and it's possible to invent a stark enough scenario to justify this intervention.

Of course, aside from what it would be right for the government to do in theory, is the question of what powers and policies we want to government to have in the real world, where it's run by often stupid people and we have to live with the full variance of its actions. In a case like this I am cheered by the fact that the judge is just siding with the doctor's strong recommendations rather than judging the merits of the case on his own; I feel like there's probably some system of relying on expert advocates that produces good outcomes in expectation. But I'd be very sympathetic to someone arguing that the government can't be trusted with these types of decisions, and we just have to accept whatever child suffering denying them that power incurs as the cost of preventing even more suffering if we gave them that power.

From the topic text:

Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Please don't post things like this.

I think I crossed out the parts you didn’t like. Is that what you meant?

Those are definitely the worst parts, but the rest of it ain't great either - it appears the entire point of this post is to complain about someone doing a thing you don't like. What's the point? Why are you posting it? If it's "these people are doing a bad thing", then it's not a good post; if there's some other reason, go into that.

Why are you posting it? If it's "these people are doing a bad thing", then it's not a good post; if there's some other reason, go into that.

He did. The ethics of euthanasia are an interesting topic, and discussing a general topic through a recent example is a very common thing here. You might as well ban the Gaza megathread, if that's you interpretation of the rule.

The ethics of euthanasia are an interesting topic

Then write something about that, not just "look how bad these people are".

and discussing a general topic through a recent example is a very common thing here

Then start a discussion, instead of just dropping "look how bad these people are".

This particular rule isn't new, it's existed before this branch of the forum has.

https://www.themotte.org/post/757/israel-gaza-megathread-iv/158907?context=8#context

Three most recent posts in the Gaza megathread:

Someone writing about an event

A specific set of four questions to people

A specific single question to people

If anyone's just posting "boy look at how bad these people are" then report them, please.

If anyone's just posting "boy look at how bad these people are" then report them, please.

The thing is, I'm not really bothered by people doing that, and I don't think it's possible to not do it while discussing certain events. For example from the CW of the week of the Gaza attack:

Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel.

Sure sounds like "boy look at how bad these people are" to me!

I get it, it's a judgement call. Some things are just The News, and others you kind of have to go out of your way to find, I was just taken aback that describing in plain terms what occurred in this event has made the cut for mod-worthy.


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