Taboo Maintanence

I found an article on the BBC website about a practice known in the Netherlands as "duo-euthanasia." Put simply, it's when both members of a couple decide to end their lives together, because both meet the criteria for physician-assisted suicide.

After the title (Dying together: Why a happily married couple decided to stop living), there's a quick, 50-word, brief laying out some basic facts. And then, there's a warning:

Some people might find this article upsetting.

There's also another article, Boy, 13, shot dead by New York police had replica gun, authorities say. In that article is the following:

One officer then wrestled [Nyah Mway] to the floor. “During a ground struggle”, another officer fired a single shot that hit the teenager in the chest, the police chief said.

So, apparently,while one officer wrested with a teenaged suspect, another shot him. There is no warning message.

The story of Jan and Els is fairly straightforward, and presented as a human-interest piece. Jan was a retired cargo worker, in constant pain from back injuries. Els was a retired teacher and developing dementia. But it's not really a story about the couple. It's a story about the continuing debate over assisted suicide. There's no violence, no in-depth examination of the controversy surrounding the practice, no examination of trauma. Just the story of a couple in their seventies who decided that they were going to die on their own therms and together.

It was difficult to see what, other than the subject matter itself, that explained why "some people might find this article upsetting." Except for, perhaps, the warning itself. While Dr Theo Boer, professor of healthcare ethics at Protestant Theological University may worry that: "[T]he taboo on intentional killing - that’s eroding, and especially when it comes to duo-euthanasia." I don't expect to see a sudden drop in the human population due to assisted suicides anytime soon. Psychiatrist Dr Frank Koerselman, another Dutch critic of assisted suicide speaks of a person's lack of hope that things will improve as a contaminant that others can avoid. But I don't know that this is a useful way to think of it. Hope can be irrational, too.

As much as I understand the arguments that Doctors Boer and Koerselman make, I'm not sure that this is a problem in the way that they portray it. There seems to be a pervasive worry in some quarters that destigmatizing suicide will open the floodgates to all sort of problems, and completely undermine the ideal that every life is somehow objectively infinitely valuable.

I found nothing remotely upsetting in the story of Jan and Els, because there didn't need to be in order to tell it. Portraying it as a difficult story to read seems to do nothing other than reinforce a taboo that's unlikely to go anywhere soon.

Creaking

I didn't bother watching the debate between President Biden and Donald Trump the other day. I don't have enough faith in politicians to find listening to them worthwhile. Besides, it's the Congress that enacts laws, so that's where I consider it more important to place my attention. But the coverage of the event has been extensive, and fairly unanimous.

Now that people are convinced that President Biden has shown himself not to be up to the task of remaining in the Oval Office, the chatter about whether he should step aside ha started up again with renewed vigor. The problem is that it's four years too late. The Democratic Party believed its own "demography is destiny" hype, and I believe that it convinced them to take their eye off the ball. Convinced that the Republican Party was going to implode of its own volition, they stopped working to cultivate people who could carry their banner forward. I have nothing against Hillary Clinton, but she was a deeply unpopular person. Joe Biden only won in 2020 because Donald Trump's performance was poor when it counted, and obviously so.

Given that human beings grow old at the consistent rate of one year every year, the fact that President Biden would be 81 years old that this point was, basically, predictable. And he may have been the only person who could have defeated Donald Trump in 2020, but the grooming of replacements, and their introductions to the Democratic voter base should have started then, as well. If Joe Biden was going to be a "bridge President," the work should have started on preparing the opposite shore.

Donald Trump, for all that he was disinterested in the actual work of the Presidency, and tends to fuel, rather than smother, conflicts, was able to unify the Republican Party behind him by taking advantage of their shared disdain (hatred?) of Democrats. To a Republican, the difference between any given Democrat and a Socialist is purely a matter of semantics. Those Republicans closer to the political center may not like Donald Trump, but they don't see themselves as being in the crosshairs of his policies.

The Progressive and Centrist constituencies of the Democratic Party, on the other hand, are at odds with one another. And to most Progressives I've met, the difference between any given non-Progressive, no matter what their party affiliation, and a Fascist is a moot point. Accordingly, a Centrist Democrat sees a direct threat to them from Progressive policy preferences, and Progressives see Centrists as enabling the same old injustices that have gone on for far too long. And so they are disunified. Simple fear of Trump, or of the consequences of his being President was never enough to bridge that. Hillary Clinton was exactly right when she said the Supreme Court was at stake in 2016. For all the good it did her.

Columnist George Will once noted that the United States doesn't prevent disasters, it simply reacts to them. Congress, like the population at large ignores problems until they are directly impacted by a crisis, and then they respond with panic, rather than thoughtfulness. There's been a lot of hysteria over the threat to Democracy that Donald Trump is supposed to pose, but very little mention of the fact that he's only in the position to be a threat because he has the backing of people who don't believe that the recent practice of American Democracy have lived up to the promises made on its behalf. People complain about the workings of American government, but only when those workings are problems for them; there is widespread dissatisfaction with the Electoral College system, but the party in power has never seen fit to change it.

American Democracy, in my mind, is not broken, any more than saw is broken because it can't be used to hammer nails. The United States is not, and has never been a unified polity. There has always been cost shifting, broken promises and simple theft. And that history has eroded the trust that people had in the system, even when it worked in their favor, because they understood that it could turned against them. And this is the result.

And so, four years too late, certain people on the American Left are calling for the resumption of a process that should have started at least four years ago, if not sooner; that of looking for candidates that can united the Democratic Party for something, and really make the case for Democratic leadership. We'll see if they can somehow make up for lost time.

Vocal Insight

It's fairly common to see posts on LinkedIn that concern themselves with character. Some of them offer heuristics for determining character, like this one:

"A person's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation."

Mark Twain

So, here's a question: Can a person's character be learned from the accuracy with which they attribute quotes?

Because (as I'm sure you've guessed), this is not a Mark Twain quote. Let's unpack this a bit.

It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman: The Optimist, “Conversation” 1850

Samuel Clemens' wife, Olivia, is thought to have written the paraphrasing (using the language of the time) in her "commonplace book" as a teenager. And that's likely why this particular item became associated with him. As near as I can tell, it doesn't appear in any of Mr. Clemens' works - I was unable to find an attribution that came with a citation. The closest was one attribution with a date of 1907.

"Conversation" is an essay about the art of, well, conversation, and after the quote above, Mr. Tuckerman notes that whether someone is enthusiastic, dogmatic, subdued, acute, soulful or so on, can be determined by the words they use to describe the world around them. It's a fairly obvious point, when one thinks about it; it's common for people to understand the way a person speaks as indicative of not only their current mood, but their broader personality. People alter their speech patterns to convey a certain impression of themselves, even when the impression they're aiming for is authenticity; and they scrutinize the way others speak to look for clues for everything from past actions to future plans. Given that it's currently campaign season, examples of this abound.

Likewise, impressions are part of the goal of LinkedIn posts, or for that matter, a blog; for the writer to convey something about themselves through what they write, and what they write about. I don't know that I, personally, do a great job of that, being a rather... haphazard author. Although I'm sure that people have picked up on the fact that I can be a bit wordy at times.

Drafted

I haven't read Rolling Stone in a while, so I hopped over to see what was new. I read their long-form piece on James O'Keefe and the implosion of Project Veritas. It's interesting, but I really didn't think of it as being very newsworthy. I remember Mr. O'Keefe's time in the media spotlight, but was never really that interested in him. And, in the end, the story feels like a reminder of something that people already know.

Most conservative culture warriors no longer perceive the U.S. political divide as two factions that disagree with each other, but as a war between real Americans and godless communists working to destroy the country.

Of course they perceive it as a war. That's why they call themselves "culture warriors." What else does one expect? Just like the people who see the fight for social justice call themselves "Social Justice Warriors." The term may prompt eye-rolling in the greater society, but the ones I knew wore it with obvious pride. There's always something to go to war over in the modern United States, as more and more of what were once the ordinary disagreements between citizens (disagreements that one would expect in a nation whose main coastlines can be 2,500 miles apart) have come to be viewed as existential matters of Good versus Evil and/or life and death, sometimes literally.

And in a society in which neutrality is viewed as either a craven capitulation to the unjust side of the argument at best and a cynical refusal to acknowledge one's support for deliberate wrongdoing at worst, it's seemingly become fashionable to fight over which side the people who emphatically are not fighting are fighting for. Which is how it goes, I suppose, when the fighting itself becomes the point.

Because if the only acceptable course of action when confronted by evil forces bent on destruction is to fight, fighting can become less about actual prosecuting the conflict and take on an air of virtue signalling, where it's important to be seen to be fighting, and for the right side. And what was really James O'Keefe's genius; he understood that it didn't matter if he were actually gathering evidence of deliberate wrongdoing, hypocrisy and malfeasance. As long as he was affirming what his audience understood to be true, the fact that he needed to resort to duplicity and entrapment to do so simply showed that he was fighting, and the need to continue to do so.

Tricolor With Red

I would have called this "Flagged" but I've already given at least three posts that title.

A series of Palestinian flags, arrayed along a bridge over I-405 in Bothell, Washington. I don't know that it counts as a "protest" per se... it seemed to be more of an opportunity for people to show either support or disdain for the Palestinian cause.