Category: Uncategorized

I’m rather ambivalent about right-to-die laws. On the one hand, I think people who are terminally ill should be able to decide for themselves if they want to end their lives, especially people who are in severe pain. On the other hand, personally I want absolutely every medical intervention possible and have told my wife that I’ll come back to haunt anyone who pulls me off life support. But beyond that, a bigger question looms — do right-to-die laws work? More specifically, can societies give doctors the right to help patients who want to die, without giving those same doctors license to kill.

Typically, supporters of right-to-die laws simply dismiss the idea that such laws will turn doctors into killers. Most euthanasia laws have a series of built-in safeguards that require consent of the patient to be very clear. But those legal safeguards really won’t mean much if a subculture of death takes hold in the medical profession.

Opinion Journal (the online version of the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page) has an interesting summary of various studies and surveys about euthanasia in the Netherlands, The Dutch Way of Death.

One of the more disturbing things about euthanasia in the Netherlands is that there seems to have developed a view among a significant minority of doctors that consent is not necessary to end a life provided that the quality of that life is below some subjective threshold. Almost 5 percent of people who died in the Netherlands in 1990, for example, were killed by doctors who never received explicit consent for their actions. Even more disturbing is that a 1997 study found that as many as 8 percent of infants who died in the Netherlands were killed by their doctors.

A major part of the problem, in my opinion, is that supporters of euthanasia seriously underestimate the likelihood of influential groups emerging that favor involuntary euthanasia. Already in the United States prominent philosophers such as Peter Singer explicitly argue that people’s whose lives aren’t worth living should be euthanized — involuntarily if necessary — and a large segment of medical ethicists who wouldn’t come out and say they support involuntary euthanasia nonetheless have at the core of their views a disdain for individual rights where such rights impose real or perceived costs on the larger society.

A good example of how effortlessly feminists denigrate anyone who disagrees was recently provided by Feminist.Org’s Daily News Wire in a brief story, Article Reveals Bush Connections to Independent Women?s Forum. Feminist.Org is apparently bent out of shape that several people affiliated with the IWF are under consideration for positions within the Bush administration.

Here many of us thought that one of the most important goals of feminism was to expand opportunities for women to serve in a variety of roles, including public service within the government, but now Feminist.Org informs reminds us that only women with a sinister agenda would want to serve in a Republican administration.

In fact, Feminist.Org is on to the truth about the IWF — these women are just a front for men. According to the brief story, “Its [IWF’s] purpose was to be the counterpoint to feminist groups, providing a female face for the far-right, anti-women’s rights agenda.” The notion that women of a conservative bent could come together to voice their concerns is, of course, absurd. There must be some nefarious anti-woman conspiracy.

Ah, sisterhood is powerful indeed, especially when it turns into an Inquisition aimed at anyone who dares dissent from the party line.

Source:

Article Reveals Bush Connections to Independent Women?s Forum. Feminist Daily News Wire, Feminist.Org, May 1, 2001.

I don’t think I could have written a more bizarre story than that written by Elliott Balch for the Harvard Crimson. The story outlined a plan by the Radcliff Union of Students to host a sex toy party for Harvard women, as Balch put it, “to emphasize women’s sexual independence.”

The kicker to the story is the role that one of the organizers apparently thought such an event would have in fighting “the patriarchy.” Balch reports that RUS president Elizabeth Vogt sent an e-mail to all RUS members saying that among other things, the sex toy part would give women a way to “challenge patriarchal society.”

“If you know that you can satisfy your own sexual desires without relying on someone else, you can gain a lot of power in romantic relationships,” Vogt wrote in her e-mail message.

Interesting how some feminists have no problem conflating sex with power — a view that traditionalists were long criticized by feminists for maintaining.

Source:

RUS Plans Women’s Sex Toy Event. Elliot W. Bach, The Harvard Crimson, April 20, 2001.

DailyRadar, one of the slickest of a number of irreverent gaming sites, has put up a notice that it is “no longer publishing.”

Of course the editors couldn’t resist one final shot at game designer John Romero with whom they got involved in a back-and-forth over Romero’s last “game”, Daikatana.

With game sites going down all over the place, can we perhaps have a little hope that Jeff K. might move on to bigger and less bizarre things?

The World Bank just released its annual report, World Development Indicators, which focuses on the ongoing poverty that continues to afflict a substantial number of people in our world. But the best bet for alleviating poverty may be for developing nations to ignore the World Bank altogether.

First, the indicators. Summarized by the BBC, among other things revealed by the report:

• 1.2 billion people live on less than $1/day
• 10 million children under five die annually from preventable diseases
• More than 113 million children do not attend school
• 500,000 women die annually as a result of complications from pregnancy and childbirth

Of course the situation throughout the world — even in the worst areas of Africa and Asia — still represents a substantial improvement over the early part of the 20th century, but how should countries go forward to increase living standards?

The World Bank’s answer, not surprisingly, is that developing countries should more closely follow the World Bank’s advice. But so far the World Bank has yet to demonstrate that it understands what causes poverty in the developing world, much less the best solution to the problem.

After all some of the poorest areas of the world, say India for example, have been flooded with aid assistance attached to programs put together by World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other agencies, all pretty much for nought. Since 1951, for example, India has received about $55 billion dollars in foreign aid, and yet up to 40 percent of its population still suffers from abject poverty. Many countries in Africa who accepted aid from the World Bank or IMF actually saw their per capita incomes decline after going along with “structural adjustments” prescribed by donor agencies.

A lot of the recent anti-globalization rhetoric within the developed countries is way off base, but the notion that the World Bank and IMF do little in the long run to help alleviate global poverty is more than vindicated by the evidence. Developing countries should just say no to such “aid.”

Source:

World Bank’s plea for poorest. David Schepp and Kevin Anderson, The BBC, April 29, 2001.