British courts have ruled that parents of eleven-month-old Charlie Gard do not have the right to take their son to America for treatment they hope may save the boy’s life. Even though the parents planned to pay for this last attempt at saving their son, they are ordered by the courts to let him die, because the courts judge their hopes to be vain. Thus the liberal state now gives itself the power to thwart parents’ attempts to save their own children’s lives.
European liberal governments continue to promote immigration from Muslim countries, mainly immigration of young Muslim men, even though these governments already spend untold sums trying to keep an eye on the immigrants they’ve already allowed in. Germany has passed laws that make criticizing the behavior of these newly arrived Muslims a “hate crime”. Thus the liberal state now gives itself the power to remake the culture of its own territories, while criminalizing open discussion of the slated remake.
Meanwhile in North America, young people continue creating designer genders for themselves, and in the US these pseudo-genders are eking their way toward Title IX protection, with the result that any citizen who refuses to use the proliferating swarm of ersatz gender pronouns may soon be liable to prosecution for committing a human rights violation. In Canada such laws are already on the books. Thus the liberal state now gives itself the power to ratify in law whatever new identity fad it chooses, as well as the power to punish those who disagree as "human rights offenders".
For so so many reasons, our Western liberal left must be smashed out of existence. Yes, it is sad. The left potentially had so many things going for it. But it has taken all the wrong turns, and has morphed into a full-blown intellectual cancer. Smash it at every turn.
Eric Mader
Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. at Amazon.com and begin the long, hard reckoning.
4 comments:
Well, I guess I’m done here.
1. You’re factually wrong about the Charlie Gard case. You seem to have swallowed whole the most inflammatory talking points about it without checking into the facts yourself — much like with your incorrect understanding of the Kelvin Cochran situation on the other thread.
In the real world, the parents were — brutally — given false hope by one (1) American doctor WHO HAD NEVER EVEN LOOKED AT THE BABY’S BRAIN SCANS OR READ THE MEDICAL NOTES, in contravention of all the British doctors who had, you know, actually examined the boy, and paid attention to the full medical record. The parents, quite undertandably, clung to this false hope, when the child’s situation had actually been hopeless for most or all of his short life.
All this information is out there. You just have to look.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/24/charlie-gard-parents-end-legal-fight-over-critically-ill-baby
Believe it or not, I actually share some of your discomfort in the state’s role in this situation. I’m a parent myself, and that frankly feels a little squicky. But, contrary to your glib take, it actually is a balancing act among the rights of the parents AND OF THE CHILD HIMSELF. Just like various cases involving Christian Scientists and other groups in the US, parents don’t necessarily have an absolute right to make medical decisions for their minor children. Sometimes parents (for all the right reasons) are blind to the cold medical facts, and/or are led by charlatans down a garden path that would result in a frankly horrible outcome for the child. But the children have rights too, and, in awful cases like this one, sometimes there’s no easy answer.
Since at least December of last year (if even then), there was NEVER an option of “saving the child’s life”. NEVER. You are 100 percent flat-out wrong about that. Every medical professional who had actually looked at the record reached the same conclusion. One uninformed, self-dealing doctor from the US gave false hope, which he then rescinded the moment he actually bothered to study up on the case. HE’S the one you should be mad at.
Glibly blaming this awful situation, that everyone is univerally sad about, on “the left”, is reprehensible. Full stop.
2. “Governments continue to promote immigration” is an incredibly misleading way to characterize the reaction to an ongoing REFUGEE CRISIS involving people of various religions (including not a few Christians) in the Middle East. Maybe your genuine reaction is “fuck them all, let them be brutalized/raped/slaughtered in their home countries, no other country has any legal or moral responsibility here”, but “liberal European governments”, to their credit, disagree with you.
3. If you’re unwilling to give people the bare courtesy of referring to them how they ask to be referred to, I don’t even know what to tell you. “Prosecution for committing a human rights violation”: paranoid fever dream, man. Get a grip.
To be blunt: You seem to be suffering from late-stage *conservative* intellectual cancer, where you just adopt the latest outrage talking points and perseverate on them, without actually thinking it through for yourself, or doing any independent research. So: It’s been real. I wish you well. Take good care.
I’ll try not to let the door hit me on the way out. :-/
nnnnn:
In fact I DID read into the Gard case, and knew the basic argument you raise. The Guardian piece is not at all as clear-cut as your framing of it would suggest.
On the other issues, I simply flat out disagree with you. Refugees should be taken in, after cases are selectively reviewed, but cannot be taken in en masse as Europe has done. It's idiotic.
As for "Prosecution for committing a human rights violation" thanks to rejecting the 57-plus designer gender pronouns on offer, it is NOT a paranoid fever dream. Not at all. It is precisely the language used by many "Human Rights Commissions" now pushing for just these laws. I have zero sympathy for this movement. It is Orwellian, sick, literally sick as in disordered, objectively so, and it has quickly morphed into a kind of solvent undermining Western civilization. At a rapid page.
Your penultimate paragraph is daft: "To be blunt: You seem to be suffering from late-stage *conservative* intellectual cancer, where you just adopt the latest outrage talking points and perseverate on them, without actually thinking it through for yourself, or doing any independent research. So: It’s been real. I wish you well. Take good care."
Obnoxious, presumptuous, strawman BS. But you know what? I'm not part of your fake-ass authoritarian left. So I'm not going to censor it.
Cheers.
Look, the entire first paragraph of your OP hinges on the idea that “saving the boy’s life” was ever in play in 2017. It was not. That’s a fact. Everyone now agrees on that, including Dr. Hirano, now that he’s finally actually bothered to do his due diligence.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own set of facts.
~~~~~~~~~
“British courts have ruled that parents of eleven-month-old Charlie Gard do not have the right to take their son to America for treatment that may save the boy’s life.”
There was no treatment that might have saved the boy’s life in 2017. This sentence is false.
“The parents must instead allow him to die, because courts judge that post-treatment his “quality of life” would likely not justify saving him anyway.”
Post-treatment “quality of life” was not the standard being used in this case, and you know it (or at least you should know it). The standard that was used is whether there was any treatment that had any chance of saving the boy’s life in 2017… which, again, there wasn’t.
“Thus the liberal state now gives itself the power to thwart parents’ attempts to save their own children’s lives.”
Sweeping generalization based on false facts. Simply flat-out false.
~~~~~~~~~
Look, Eric, you got this one wrong. It’s OK; there was a whole bunch of mis- and disinformation flying around while the case was underway, and a lot of groups are still trying to muddy the waters because it’s in their interest to do so.
But digging in on it now doesn’t really help your case that the liberals are the ones who are ignoring objective reality to further their ideological goals. In point of fact, that’s exactly what you’re doing here: ignoring objective reality to try to score rhetorical points.
It’s your blog, so do whatever you want, I guess. I just find it hard not to point out that you’re doing exactly what you’re accusing others of doing. If that constitutes “intellectual cancer”, you, yourself, have it too.
nnnnn:
Yes, now that I've had more time to read into the case, I think you are generally right about my first paragraph as originally written, specifically about its phrasing and what it implies. I will change it, but here is the paragraph as it was:
"British courts have ruled that parents of eleven-month-old Charlie Gard do not have the right to take their son to America for treatment that may save the boy’s life. The parents must instead allow him to die, because courts judge that post-treatment his “quality of life” would likely not justify saving him anyway. Thus the liberal state now gives itself the power to thwart parents’ attempts to save their own children’s lives."
As for the general issues of the case, however, my basic point stands.
For one, there are myriad differences between my own Catholic conception of human life and that which increasingly holds sway in Western liberal societies. My thinking is Thomistic and is based on a hylomorphic understanding of the person as necessarily comprising both body and soul--a human body and an "intellectual soul" that is necessarily present as form regardless of whether or not the individual's mental capacities are occluded or damaged.
For another, I remain horrified at the presumptuousness of the courts in intervening in the Gards' attempt to get treatment for their child. And note: I am and always was horrified by this even if the treatment sought out was 99% certain not to work. I agree with you that in certain very rare instances courts must intervene to safeguard a child's well-being against the wishes of his or her parents, and that sometimes this may even step over the lines that protect religious liberty. One obvious instance would be parents who refuse life-saving medical treatment for a child because they are Christian Scientists.
This piece gets at some of the points I'd raise:
http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/otn.cfm?id=1226
On our other areas of disagreement, they remain disagreement. Though I wish it weren't so, for many many reasons I remain convinced our "left" has become a cancer.
Cheers, nnnnn
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