There is a doctor out there by the name of Marc Siegel. This notable, an associate Prof. at NYU is apparently offended. Why? Because it has been pointed out that there are some patently mercenary buggers in his profession, more interested in making money than in attending to the health and well-being of patients. Furthermore this person, seemingly specially vulnerable to offence, takes exception, seemingly, at the idea that he may be called upon to discuss the end of life with a patient.
Let me cut to the chase. This particular demagogue is determined to combine his professional credentials with a patently nonsense emotive plea in order to sway persons susceptible to such rubbish. He even makes a plea to the theologian Maimonides, bolstering his scarcely concealed superstition and obviously partisan politics with the assumed authority of religion. He cites anecdotes regarding humane treatment of poor and destitute patients in a purely charitable fashion by someone else as if this somehow repudiates the call for efforts to fix what is broken; "Look at this example of something laudable happening! Why do we need to do anything about anything else, which I am not willing to here discuss, when this particular instance runs totally counter to the thousands of demonstrated examples you're citing?"
However, allow me to demonstrate the integrity of proper medical science: here we have a patient, presenting an assortment of septic, oozing sores from which they bleed without clotting, delirious from septicemia and infested with a multitude of parasites but they are able to walk, and talk and just about two thirds of their tissue is still quite healthy. Shall we attempt to make them well, Doctor, or shall we not because, after all, they are still in the majority sound? Or shall we observe the patient as a whole? That is the core of the question; do we settle for letting the mostly functional system go on as it is or do we try to cure what ails it?
The good Doctor specifically refrains from discussing, "what form any reform should take" and here I cannot help but remind the gentleman of the adage about treating the symptom, since he seems more interested in defending his personal ethics, which nobody is attacking; only a genuine idiot would assume that mercenary or litigious behavior by the extreme minority is held to apply generally. Although one my wonder about guilty consciences. Additionally he seems greatly disturbed by the idea that he may have to face the reality of patients dying.
"My principles run contrary to the idea of meeting with a 65-year-old to discuss specific ways I may withdraw care," sounds noble, but the point it references is far more so; human beings grow old and eventually our bodies and thus our lives fail. Would the good Doctor deny useful information to his patients simply because it makes him uncomfortable? Given his invocation of the "death panel" tripe, even to use it as a negative argument, seems to indicate that very thing. How any physician could make it through med school without grasping this fact of life should consider a refresher course. Life ends sirrah, and you can't treat death; it has been suggested (though I forget the source) that we look to the late Senator Kennedy for inspiration. Death is a part of life; we'd be better served if we focused on living through it instead of trying to escape it. Those who've tried escaping life have generally not been either successful or happy.
In any case, I've already wasted too much time on this. The gist is that this Marc Siegel is taking personally something that is not aimed at his person. Bypassing further digression, I'll make the most important and revealing point: Change is hard and in the process something that has been ceases to be, in other words it dies. I suspect the Doctor should re-familiarize himself with the five stages and recall the old adage, "Physician, heal thyself."
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Neville Chamberlain is Alive and Well
Spare me a moment to indulge in a bit of growling in the general direction of one Oliver Thomas for his recent contribution to the The Forum page of USA Today, "Is Secularism Saving Marriage?" (Monday, September 14, 2009)
My views and opinions on ecclesiastics should, by this point, be well known to any person who has taken the time to familiarize themselves with my writing. Furthermore, I dislike finding myself in the position of sending negativity in the direction of person who might otherwise consider themselves to be allies...or at least sympathetic to certain of my opinions. However, I can't allow myself to agree that non-antagonistic faith-heads are not also part of our collective social malfunction right alongside their more vehement and violent Brethren.
O. Thomas's pondering about marriage and his conclusions (such as they are) while not immediately offensive still carry the distinct tenor and odor of condescension that generally raises my hackles. I am prepared to let pass unchallenged his general mystification that secularism does not lead to the "other half" of society getting divorced; I can easily grasp that recognizing that false conclusions follow logically from false premises isn't easy for someone who assumes their premises are inerrant to begin with. What irks me is firstly his assertion that religious institutions should be heeded because they "have constructive things to teach us" about marriage. The breezy citing of the X-ian admonishment against adultery grates however; can he honestly expect any intelligent person to think that a prohibition against pursuing another person's mate is somehow unique to religion? Or is it simply that he supposes the rest of us are too stupid to understand, instinctively, that such behavior would be disruptive, to say the least?
Less definite but more important is the generally magnanimous tone of the article; how generous and conciliatory of him, to acknowledge that it could be possible that good and socially proper behavior might follow from so wayward a source as human behavior which is, in his own confessed opinion, inherently sinful. No doubt he feels both quite clever for seeing such connection and inclusive for expressing it, openly, and even endorsing the way this contributes to the religious argument.
I admit freely that Mr. Thomas most probably means well. It does not escape me that I may very probably be allowing my own bias to color my perception. I have history on my side however and I defy anyone to demonstrate that my growling and pacing is unjustified.
My views and opinions on ecclesiastics should, by this point, be well known to any person who has taken the time to familiarize themselves with my writing. Furthermore, I dislike finding myself in the position of sending negativity in the direction of person who might otherwise consider themselves to be allies...or at least sympathetic to certain of my opinions. However, I can't allow myself to agree that non-antagonistic faith-heads are not also part of our collective social malfunction right alongside their more vehement and violent Brethren.
O. Thomas's pondering about marriage and his conclusions (such as they are) while not immediately offensive still carry the distinct tenor and odor of condescension that generally raises my hackles. I am prepared to let pass unchallenged his general mystification that secularism does not lead to the "other half" of society getting divorced; I can easily grasp that recognizing that false conclusions follow logically from false premises isn't easy for someone who assumes their premises are inerrant to begin with. What irks me is firstly his assertion that religious institutions should be heeded because they "have constructive things to teach us" about marriage. The breezy citing of the X-ian admonishment against adultery grates however; can he honestly expect any intelligent person to think that a prohibition against pursuing another person's mate is somehow unique to religion? Or is it simply that he supposes the rest of us are too stupid to understand, instinctively, that such behavior would be disruptive, to say the least?
Less definite but more important is the generally magnanimous tone of the article; how generous and conciliatory of him, to acknowledge that it could be possible that good and socially proper behavior might follow from so wayward a source as human behavior which is, in his own confessed opinion, inherently sinful. No doubt he feels both quite clever for seeing such connection and inclusive for expressing it, openly, and even endorsing the way this contributes to the religious argument.
I admit freely that Mr. Thomas most probably means well. It does not escape me that I may very probably be allowing my own bias to color my perception. I have history on my side however and I defy anyone to demonstrate that my growling and pacing is unjustified.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Emergent Misbehavior
I am goingto make this breif; I typed a gorgeous 3 pager and then accidentally deleted it.
I have recently identified what I think to be a disturbing pattern in the behavior of the Right Wing of the GOP. Please understand that I am not identifying the GOP as "the Right Wing", because the truth is that this is not the case. Once upon a time they word lead primarily by centrists who were evry good at finding compromises with the center-left leadership of the Democratic Party. After the conservative hardliners took control of the Republican leadership in the mid-90's though, there was an end of it. As I have noted previously (thanks to mum, it was her phrasing) we are no longer talkign about a difference of opinions characterized by, "I'm right and you're wrong and we can talk it out." Now we are quite firmly in the grip of, "I'm right and you're evil and that's an end of it because we will not negotiate with evil."
The pattern I have identified is something that I have dimly, subconciously aware of for years but which only recently came into my immediate awareness in the last year or so and which I have only felt able to properly express since the GOP rebuttal of Obama's healthcare address to the joint congress on September 9th, 2009.
My conciousness of this was first sparked by a British film, In The Loop by Armando Iannucci. In this film, a US official does something that is greatly disturbing. He instructs an underling to run through the available data and find those things which support a particular administrative assertion which in turn is used to justify a particular administrative action. Why is this such an alarming thing?
Reason commands us to observe the data and to follow it, logically, to the conclusion which the data supports. What this fictional official (and I am sad to say this is a photo-perfect characterization of the conservative of the last decade or so) is the exact opposite. He wants information to be produced which supports what he has already decided. Let me be clear, this is not case of making an assertion and then testing it against the objective data; rather it merely seeking to justify an assertion after the fact. That screaming and weeping you here is the entirety of the dead philosophers, logicians, historians and scientists of Western civilization.
Let me give some extracts of mine from a recent thread on Pete's forum:
...This whole incident is sordid and a perfect example of the power of truthiness. Does it matter what the actual facts are when there are people out there ready to believe whatever seems most agreeable to them? Here is an interesting fact: human beings have a habit of assuming the intelligence and integrity of any person who says things they themselves say. The have a habit of assuming the worst in the case of any sort of cognitive dissonance...
And then a little farther down:
...Let me draw a little wisdom from someone who isn't a doctor, but does play one on TV(sometimes); "A diagnosis that doesn't diagnose anything isn't a diagnosis." By the same token, an explanation which does no bonafide explanatory work is not an explanation and, building along this logical progress, any solution which does not actually solve the problem is in no way at all a solution.
So, once again and rephrased, how much time should we commit to nonsolutions, and why...
...The president (and those of us who support him on this issue) are more than willing to entertain and even endorse a multitude of conservative ideas, not because it is good politics but because the ideas themselves are sound.
However, we need to make it understood and to that end I will repeat myself again, "The validity of any one propsition does not in any way validate other propositions from the same source. Nor does said validity invalidate any proposition from an opposing source, purely on the basis of those sources..."
...let me once again reiterate that this issue is not a binary equation, despite the desperate efforts of certain persons to frame it as such; neither is the demonstrated pattern of post-1994 right wing hard ballers of fitting fact to fancy a legitimate method of winning an argument. This gist of any such "method" winds up reducing to, "There are select facts which, exluding other facts, support my assertion and therefore whatever is said by anyone disagreeing with my assertion is necesarily false." Considering that this is the same "logic" employed by these conservative lawmakers' notorious "Real American" constituants, I suppose we should not be suprised...
Keeping all of this mind, let me draw your attention back to the GOP rebuttal of the president's address, as delivered by Representative Charles Boustany. What a damningly obvious proof of my claim. Knowing full well that these people recieved advance copies of the speech, that they are all well educated, that they must be aware of the public's ability and demonstrated willingness to fact-check and that they had to be paying attention as Obama was delivering the address one is left wondering, slack-jawed, at the fact that the first salient point made in the rebuttal was to state plainly that Obama hadn't shown any willingness to budge on what we are calling "the public option" less than ten minutes after he stated exactly that!
Words fail. I am left having to decide if the right wing leaderhsip of the GOP is insane, idiotic or simply so contemptuous of the American people that they are convinced they can ignore reality altogether when it fails to conform to their rhetoric.
I have recently identified what I think to be a disturbing pattern in the behavior of the Right Wing of the GOP. Please understand that I am not identifying the GOP as "the Right Wing", because the truth is that this is not the case. Once upon a time they word lead primarily by centrists who were evry good at finding compromises with the center-left leadership of the Democratic Party. After the conservative hardliners took control of the Republican leadership in the mid-90's though, there was an end of it. As I have noted previously (thanks to mum, it was her phrasing) we are no longer talkign about a difference of opinions characterized by, "I'm right and you're wrong and we can talk it out." Now we are quite firmly in the grip of, "I'm right and you're evil and that's an end of it because we will not negotiate with evil."
The pattern I have identified is something that I have dimly, subconciously aware of for years but which only recently came into my immediate awareness in the last year or so and which I have only felt able to properly express since the GOP rebuttal of Obama's healthcare address to the joint congress on September 9th, 2009.
My conciousness of this was first sparked by a British film, In The Loop by Armando Iannucci. In this film, a US official does something that is greatly disturbing. He instructs an underling to run through the available data and find those things which support a particular administrative assertion which in turn is used to justify a particular administrative action. Why is this such an alarming thing?
Reason commands us to observe the data and to follow it, logically, to the conclusion which the data supports. What this fictional official (and I am sad to say this is a photo-perfect characterization of the conservative of the last decade or so) is the exact opposite. He wants information to be produced which supports what he has already decided. Let me be clear, this is not case of making an assertion and then testing it against the objective data; rather it merely seeking to justify an assertion after the fact. That screaming and weeping you here is the entirety of the dead philosophers, logicians, historians and scientists of Western civilization.
Let me give some extracts of mine from a recent thread on Pete's forum:
...This whole incident is sordid and a perfect example of the power of truthiness. Does it matter what the actual facts are when there are people out there ready to believe whatever seems most agreeable to them? Here is an interesting fact: human beings have a habit of assuming the intelligence and integrity of any person who says things they themselves say. The have a habit of assuming the worst in the case of any sort of cognitive dissonance...
And then a little farther down:
...Let me draw a little wisdom from someone who isn't a doctor, but does play one on TV(sometimes); "A diagnosis that doesn't diagnose anything isn't a diagnosis." By the same token, an explanation which does no bonafide explanatory work is not an explanation and, building along this logical progress, any solution which does not actually solve the problem is in no way at all a solution.
So, once again and rephrased, how much time should we commit to nonsolutions, and why...
...The president (and those of us who support him on this issue) are more than willing to entertain and even endorse a multitude of conservative ideas, not because it is good politics but because the ideas themselves are sound.
However, we need to make it understood and to that end I will repeat myself again, "The validity of any one propsition does not in any way validate other propositions from the same source. Nor does said validity invalidate any proposition from an opposing source, purely on the basis of those sources..."
...let me once again reiterate that this issue is not a binary equation, despite the desperate efforts of certain persons to frame it as such; neither is the demonstrated pattern of post-1994 right wing hard ballers of fitting fact to fancy a legitimate method of winning an argument. This gist of any such "method" winds up reducing to, "There are select facts which, exluding other facts, support my assertion and therefore whatever is said by anyone disagreeing with my assertion is necesarily false." Considering that this is the same "logic" employed by these conservative lawmakers' notorious "Real American" constituants, I suppose we should not be suprised...
Keeping all of this mind, let me draw your attention back to the GOP rebuttal of the president's address, as delivered by Representative Charles Boustany. What a damningly obvious proof of my claim. Knowing full well that these people recieved advance copies of the speech, that they are all well educated, that they must be aware of the public's ability and demonstrated willingness to fact-check and that they had to be paying attention as Obama was delivering the address one is left wondering, slack-jawed, at the fact that the first salient point made in the rebuttal was to state plainly that Obama hadn't shown any willingness to budge on what we are calling "the public option" less than ten minutes after he stated exactly that!
Words fail. I am left having to decide if the right wing leaderhsip of the GOP is insane, idiotic or simply so contemptuous of the American people that they are convinced they can ignore reality altogether when it fails to conform to their rhetoric.
A Furious Vengence
...I return to you, my netizens, like a dead and buried Jesus; I am, however, no meek and mild mild redeemer but like my dear freind Spider, "Pissed as all hell, gnawing my nail-holes and wondering which Roman ass to kick first." ...no offence to any Romans who might be reading this; I deeply admire your civilization, culture and art. Please don't invade me.
I cannot and will not make any excuses for my long neglect of my duties as your beacon of truth and light (get the sun block, mate; I have been known to cause cancer) and will say only this: I allowed myself to be coaxed into the frame of mind that the fight was essentially over, that the grow-ups were back in charge and that I could go back to minding my own business, worrying my own troubles and generally let Fearless Leader do his job. I was wrong. How wrong? Epicly.
Stay tuned.
I cannot and will not make any excuses for my long neglect of my duties as your beacon of truth and light (get the sun block, mate; I have been known to cause cancer) and will say only this: I allowed myself to be coaxed into the frame of mind that the fight was essentially over, that the grow-ups were back in charge and that I could go back to minding my own business, worrying my own troubles and generally let Fearless Leader do his job. I was wrong. How wrong? Epicly.
Stay tuned.
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