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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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"How dare you suggest my 95 year old crippled gramma who spends every day screaming in pain should have the option of euthanasia"

Speaking as a bigoted fundamentalist anti-euthanasia type: it starts out like that.

Then it ends up like this. "Oh, hey, yeah, our new law that we put in place back in 2015? Yeah, we sorta have to revise it a bit because it was working too well":

Under the current law, Canadians whose only medical condition is a mental illness, and who otherwise meet all eligibility criteria, will not be eligible for MAID until March 17, 2023 (see About mental illness and MAID). This temporary exclusion of eligibility in the March 2021 legislation was intended to provide the Government of Canada with more time to study how MAID on the basis of a mental illness can safely be provided and to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place to protect those persons. However, the Government of Canada believes that more time is needed to complete and disseminate this important work.

On February 2, 2023, the Government of Canada introduced new legislation that would extend the delay of eligibility for MAID in circumstances where a person's sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness until March 17, 2024. This proposed one-year extension would allow more time for provinces and territories to prepare, and time to complete and disseminate key resources currently under development to ensure that MAID assessors and providers are ready to address these more complex MAID requests. This proposed extension would also provide more time to consider the parliamentary Special Joint Committee on MAID's final report.

On March 17, 2021, the revised legislation on MAID (former Bill C-7) received Royal Assent and became law. Former Bill C-7 expanded eligibility to MAID to individuals whose death is not reasonably foreseeable and strengthened the safeguards for these applicants. With these changes, individuals whose sole medical condition is a mental illness, and who otherwise meet all eligibility criteria, are not eligible for MAID until March 17, 2023. This temporary exclusion was intended to provide the Government of Canada time to consider the Expert Panel on MAID and Mental Illness’ conclusions and recommendations, as well as the findings of the parliamentary Special Joint Committee on MAID.

So "95 year old grandma screaming in pain" became "persons who are not in danger of death" and then had to be rowed back to "but if you're only suffering from something like depression, we'll put a hold on that for a year or two" probably due to public pushback.

And don't worry, you won't be able to ask for government assisted suicide just on the basis of being homeless! At least for now:

The least popular scenario in terms of participants agreeing that MAID could be a solution, was “a person can’t find affordable housing.” Just nine per cent of participants said they would support the idea of a person in this situation seeking MAID.

The report noted that an Ontario man recently made news after he requested MAID not because he wanted to die, but because he thought it was a preferable alternative to being homeless.

A disabled Ontario woman also applied for MAID after seven years of applying for affordable housing in Toronto with no luck.

So "95 year old grandma screaming in pain" became "persons who are not in danger of death" and then had to be rowed back to "but if you're only suffering from something like depression, we'll put a hold on that for a year or two" probably due to public pushback.

And I'm supposed to favour the alleged interests* of a infintesimal percentage of unproductive disordered strangers to have their decisions overriden over my own interest, and that of everyone I know and love to not end our lives in agony because???

How well do you think opiates control the pain of having fluid building up in your lungs so that you can't breath? What exactly do you think a "natural" death looks like?

Oh, he died in his sleep, you might say. But did he? Did the pain ripping through his chest shake him out of his final dream while he stared into the dark or did his brain merely confabulate a drowning, or burning within it?

Of course I don't expect these issues to matter much to you, just like a woke person's fetish for sacred diversity is entirely unaltered by the mass rape of girls in Rotterham. Both easily disgust the average person, and yet it seems we've been condemned to be ruled by zealots whose vision of morality is entirely unconnected to the reality of the human experience. In either case the Publics preferences are destined to loose most of the time.

I'll add Scott Alexander's poem, inspired by his own experience working in hospitals below:

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the gurney that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sack of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene with cancer, bitter with the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues

My friend, you would not so pontificate

To reasoners beset by moral strife

The old lie: we must try to cultivate

A culture of life.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/

Before I nitpick, I just want to state that I mostly agree with you, and certainly have little interest in Amy's moralizing claims on any given day.

That being said:

How well do you think opiates control the pain of having fluid building up in your lungs so that you can't breath? What exactly do you think a "natural" death looks like?

https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/50/5/1701153

Opioids, other than themselves causing respiratory depression, are also effective in reducing the unpleasantness of breathlessness. It's commonly used for that purpose in palliative/EOL care.

I've seen enough people die ignominiously in ICUs to share your views of euthanasia, but just wanted to correct an error!

Thanks for the data, nitpicks are always appreciated!

If I and mine are to shoulder blame for "death by suffocating slowly on the fluid in your lungs instead of a tidy medical overdose of morphine", then you and yours will have to shoulder blame for "no, we can't get you a stair lift, but how about we arrange to kill you?"

It starts with "mercy". It ends with "lives unworthy of life".

Well not exactly, one is the immediate result of nature and the exact realization of your political values. The other is the (highly plausible) result of my not having full control over other players, most of them my sworn enemies, in a likely slippery slope scenario (*).

Nonetheless, I will bite the bullet and say that yes, I'd prefer a world where the horror stories you mention are normal than one where the current state remains. One involves 1) a willing victim I probably won't ever meet, the other an 2) unwilling one that I'm likely if not guaranteed to know and love. I see choosing 2 over 1 is basically the definition of completely inverted moral instincts.

As for your "lives unworthy of life" comment, I love it how ostensible righties just can't help accusing lefties of being nazis, when leftism in it's current stage is most accurately described as the worship of the weak, the ugly and the stupid.

Of course I suspect our gap is even greater because opposition to euthanasia tends to be a terminal value in and of itself for fundamentalist types; with the horror stories being merely how you lobby people who do not share these. This is of course entirely fair, I just feel it should be mentioned.

(*) I use this phrasing ("slippery slope") reluctantly because I know well that there are agents actively working for the worst case version of euthanasia. A decent person must be willing to face the likely consequences of their actions, and not hide behind platitudes.

To add on to the wild Canadian MAID stories: Alan Nichols relieved euthanasia in Canada and the only medical problem claimed was hearing loss.

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