domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
HereAndGone
3hr ago
My extreme scepticism around these kinds of bills comes from abortion legislation (elsewhere and here in Ireland). The activists pushing for it run the most extreme cases, swear up down and sideways only a very teeny-tiny few will ever need to avail of this if made legal, and then work their socks off behind the scenes to have the language in the legislation as vague as possible (so it can be challenged in court if necessary) and that a way of gaming the system (e.g. having two doctors sign off on abortion in the UK became 'this is only rote rubber stamping') can be introduced to get what they want.
"Intolerable suffering from incurable condition" means what, exactly? If I'm thirty years old and claim that my depression means I have no boyfriend or no career (instead of a dull job) and I see no change on the horizon, am I not intolerably suffering?
There's a lot of wiggle room between "let everyone assume we mean people dying in horrible pain from mortal cancer" and "in practice, just tell the doctor this script with this exact wording to get it".
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3hr ago
it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?
I agree that if you're about to be literally executed, then the dignified thing to do (or, one of the dignified options you have available to you, at any rate) is to fight to the last breath. Although I think there are some important dissimilarities between that sort of situation and Hlynka's situation (assuming this really was an alt account of his).
To continue to attempt to surreptitiously use TheMotte after you've been banned from TheMotte means that you simultaneously derive value from the community, while also disrespecting the rules and procedures that allow the community to be what it is and generate that value in the first place. It comes across as selfish and confused. You should either respect the site as a whole, or not. (Of course, this is the problem that Socrates considered in the Crito, where he refused to escape from prison and from his own execution because he felt that it would be unjust to violate the laws of the community that had, up until that point, provided him with life and sustenance. In that case I would disagree with Socrates, perhaps because I somehow view "society" and "the state" as being more separate than "TheMotte" and "TheMotte's moderation" are, and also perhaps because I view the right to one's own life as particularly sacrosanct, but, in any case...)
Hlynka will always remain as one of my all time favorite Mottizens, but if he is creating alt accounts without asking the mods first, then that would be quite disappointing.
HereAndGone
3hr ago
As I've noted elsewhere, Switzerland has had assisted dying since 1941. All but nonagerians don't remember a time before some form of legal euthanasia. That is multiple generations, and they are a functional and wealthy society where the elderly seem quite content.
On the other hand, Swiss clinics do have a reputation for dodginess around "if you can pay for it, we'll do it" plus the famous Swiss discretion regarding "it's none of our business where the money comes from: Nazi gold, drug money, African dictators robbing the treasury, we'll give you a bank account".
See the claim here about a Swiss clinic, Pegasos, that provides assisted dying. I don't know what the truth is here, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is "one law for the Swiss citizen, another for the foreign national coming over here to our discreet and legal clinic where what they do is none of our business (so long as they're not doing it to any Swiss)".
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
3hr ago
Alex Jones is a professional liar. If anyone deserves to be unpersoned, he does.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
They're not going to have nightmares or be tortured by their consciences. They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward. If you can't change your fate, then facing it with dignity is better than making yourself pathetic. You aren't helping people do what they are going to do anyway.
Banning people from a forum, of course, is nothing like executing them, and I feel no remorse for banning people who deserve it, so arguing that it's "cucked" to refuse to accept a banning just means you think there is some virtue in being an undignified annoyance. There isn't.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3hr ago
From the Red Tribe's point of view, the Blue Tribe is basically using an exploit in the rules (or rather, several; the education system's another) to generate new loyal voters. This is one of the biggest weaknesses in democracy: if there are any ways to generate new loyal voters en-masse, some arsehole will use them to take over the country.
That's why they take such a hard line on it: because if they lose this, they suspect they lose it all, forever. Hence, no surrender, no retreat, no matter the cost. A substantial amount of Reds would say that if the next Dem President would do that, then the correct response is to raze the Democratic Party so there'll never be one. Indeed, @Dean has since written a QC about Trump using available resources to roll up key supporting structures of the Democratic Party.
When enemy victories build up permanent advantages, worries about escalation go right out the window. To quote Zvi:
When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. If playing it ‘safe’ with your resources means you don’t win, then it means that you die. Either don’t play, or don’t hold back.
The grand irony of all this, of course, is that this is exactly the same mentality that a lot of Antifa subscribe to; they think they've already bet their lives on the culture war and will actually be executed for sodomy/etc. if the Red Tribe ever gets enough power.
There's also concern around organ donation. I've seen some reports online about adopting new guidelines around brain death so that (to put it crudely) they can start getting the organs as fresh as possible.
I think that, too, causes unease: some eager-beaver surgeon pushing for declaration of death while the patient is literally still breathing in order to get the organs as fast as possible.
There's a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I'm too cynical to accept "but that would never happen! slippery slope is a fallacy!" arguments since the slopes have been greased with butter in every other instance of big social changes. Right now the fears around euthanasia may not have manifested, but I think that is largely due to the brakes from social lack of acceptance being put on. Remove the brakes, and what will happen?
EDIT: To clarify that last, I don't mean simply making it legal. Where it's legal, but there is high social opposition to it, that keeps the brakes on. But push for mainstreaming it, run publicity campaigns with the hardest cases (the way activists fighting abortion bans always pick the "pregnant by incestuous rape ten year old" victim when the vast majority of abortions are for economic reasons), and weaken that opposition, and then what happens?
Canadian style MAID where disabled veterans are told "we can't afford to pay for the supports for you to live in your own home, but if you want to kill yourself we can sign you right up"? If a twelve year old wants assisted suicide, then providing a psychiatrist rubber-stamps that they are mature enough to make the decision, it can go ahead? Once again like the bad old days before antibiotics, the danger is not from the illness but from going into hospital, because you're less likely to come out alive?
When you take the brakes off, there's only so long the inertia holds. Then the new normal sets in, and then all the edge cases and "that will never happen" start happening.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
Regarding the UK, do you remember the furore over the Liverpool Care Pathway? Allegations that elderly patients were being ushered out instead of patched up and sent home, on the rationale that they would only get sick and end right back up in hospital again, putting more strain on the over-stretched NHS, and thus it was better all round (and more compassionate) to just let them die - or if they annoyingly didn't show signs of dying just yet, to help them along the way.
Some lurid stories of people visiting sick relatives and noticing another patient begging for water, claiming to be thirsty, and being ignored by nurses, and when the visitors asked about it, they were told this person was 'nil by mouth', they were unresponsive, they were DNR, and it was none of the strangers' business, and so (it was claimed) they were being let die of dehydration by stealth.
Things like that are why euthanasia in hospitals has a very tough opposition to overcome: people are legitimately afraid they, or their loved ones, will be checked off a list by some faceless bureaucrat on the grounds of 'too expensive to keep them alive', and not because of expensive experimental end-of-life treatment, but literally "well they got pneumonia, they may come back in next winter with it again, just let them die this year and save the bother".
There were also some allegations about euthanasia in the Netherlands, one I remember from years back was a doctor deciding on behalf of a sick nun that he'd give her euthanasia because he knew her religion would prevent her asking. That's the kind of fear of "god-complex" doctors that people have. It may be unfounded, but one rotten apple ruins the whole barrel.
There is currently a case where a family here in Ireland claim a Swiss clinic provided "assisted dying" to their mother without their knowledge or consent (but the clinic counter-claim they got permission from the family) and only learned she was dead via a Whatsapp message.
I suppose that my view is "it depends". Sometimes letting someone go without resorting to extreme measures is the right thing to do. Actively intervening to cause death? Yeah, that's difficult for me.
My own experience of this is with my late father. He suddenly, in his mid-70s, collapsed one day with what turned out to be total kidney failure. While in hospital, he had to be resuscitated three times. The hospital asked us (after the first resuscitation) would we want them to try again, should it happen (with the very strong hint that we should say "no"). My mother and siblings insisted that no, we wanted him given every chance.
When they did let him out, it was clearly evident from their behaviour that they considered they were just sending him home to die. He was very weak and very ill, but my mother and I nursed him through it and he got another ten years of life, and good years too - not miserable, confined to bed years. In fact, he bounced back so well that the consultant used to call him his "miracle man" (and we smiled wryly and muttered under our breaths 'no thanks to you bastards, if we left it up to you, he'd be dead').
Come forward to when he's in his early 80s and my mother died of lung cancer the year before. This time, he was gradually failing. Nothing big, but you could tell he was fading. I said to my sister that this would probably be his last year, or if not, then next year. He got a stroke due to DVT clot, and this time when the hospital said that efforts to prolong life would just be futile, we agreed. He was ready to die, and it was his time. Any extreme measures would just have meant waiting for the next stroke, and the next. So, letting him go while keeping him comfortable was a peaceful, and even natural, death.
My point? The first time would have been wrong to let him die. The second time would have been wrong to try and keep him alive. And both times, the hospital was trying to nudge us towards the death side of the equation. That's the lack of trust in medical experts that is at the heart of the debate.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
4hr ago
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
It's worth remembering how extreme Reddit is when you see stuff like that. For example, the board gaming subreddit is extremely woke (as the forum discussed a few weeks ago), but in real life very few people I have encountered are that way. Similarly, the observation that Reddit teachers are crazy does not necessarily show that the wider group of teachers is that way. They may be, I don't have experience or evidence to say otherwise... I just think one needs more data points than Reddit because of how overall crazy that site's users have become.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
Looking at that thread you linked, I am more leaning towards the theory that @hydroacetylene is KulakRevolt, based on politics, the particular style of deflection when they want to deflect, and most of all the curious dedication to the idea of frustrating stylometry/basilisks with artificial tics (Kulak's forwards-from-grandma punctuation, hydroacetylene's "French autocorrect").
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
4hr ago
This matches my experience as well. I find that consciousness almost constantly throws off quanta that emerge as concepts to which language then attaches, which defines and refines the concept into something more definite. My attention inevitably engages something from this firehose-like blast of experience and from this my inner monologue emerges, describing my experience to me. Emotions are unusually intense quanta with fractal-like definition that require much more attention and language to tease out, almost as if I have to weave my thought and language around them to accurately capture what I'm experiencing.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
"Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame" was pretty good, though, and I say this as someone who has no sympathy at all for Parker and Stone's politics (whatever they may be).
ulyssessword
4hr ago
Anything can be a UFO is you're bad enough at identifying flying objects.
Gaashk
4hr ago
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.
That's true, but raising the waterline for the less able and less talented is going to be good for the nation as a whole. Better to have literate, functional (as in "learned how to pay attention and behave, not wreck the classroom"), blue collar or working class kids than criminals-in-training. Sure, they'll never get jobs at Bear Stearns, but they won't be clogging up the jails either.
I believe it was season 21, episode 10, Splatty Tomato.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=STT1ZHPPpGQ?si=0SBcTWEn7GyX2KdJ&t=100
HereAndGone
4hr ago
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
4hr ago
At one point this may have been true. After vaccine mandates and pronoun mandates, the activist have more or less gotten the last of the conscientious objectors out of the profession, and the normies have been indoctrinated.
ABigGuy4U
4hr ago
Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness
Old age and actually having status to lose has made them cowardly. The new school principal character South Park introduced in 2015 was basically a meta-textual admission that they just can’t do the same kind of jokes that they did in the 90s for fear of getting cancelled. Even with their criticism of Trump, they spent 10 years walking on eggshells and are only being really vicious in their parody now that much of controversy over Trump has died down and he has safely solidified into a semi-establishment figure.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4hr ago
Both @Belisarius and I speculated four months ago that @TequilaMockingbird may be the return of Hlynka, but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now. The “Steve Sailer is actually a liberal” thing is so inexplicable a delusion that it’s tough to believe two people could arrive at it independently, but I guess it’s plausible, given a certain set of intellectual priors (and generalized mistrust of urban Californians) which Hlynka and TequilaMockingbird might just happen to share.
I support the ban because anyone who peppers their post full of “dude I’m totally gonna get banned for this one, the mods are gonna be soooo pissed” ban-baiting deserves to get what they’re asking for. This can be true even if he’s not truly a ban evader.
Gaashk
4hr ago
I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.
HereAndGone
4hr ago
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle.
Unhappily, the most vocal and most online ones are the Mx. Smiths in a polycule who were highly indignant over not being able to tell their eight year old pupils all about their sex life as a queer non-binary folx because some repressive, probably MAGA, parent snitched on them to the administration about what was really being taught instead of readin'/ritin'/'rithmetic.
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
(In case you think I'm inventing the polycule teacher, nope, that's a real example from a few years back).
Tree
4hr ago
I am hugely disappointed that rather than taking your ban like a man
Never understood this concept. In Paths of Glory, when they decide to execute three soldiers at random, one of the condemned starts whining and dragging his feet, saying it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?
That quivering mess is the only honest man there, and moreover he’s morally correct. You want your “comrades” to have nightmares for years where they see you begging for your mother – their conscience torturing them is good. You don’t want them to commit a grave crime, then eat breakfast like it’s tuesday.
When you make it easy on them, you are cooperating with defectors. In modern parlance, by acquiescing to your own destruction, you become a cuck.
Out of the loop: can someone give a short explanation who Hlynka is and why he is banned? (I am a long term regular, but I don’t often (almost never) give attention to user names.)
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