Harry Clarke » death

Dying to avoid old age

hc — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 23:03:58 +0000

This woman choose assisted suicide because she decided she did not wish to die of old age.. It’s a twist on the usual motivation for euthanasia but one that seems to be reasonable if the case for voluntary assisted euthanasia can be justified on the grounds of severe I’ll health or chronic pain.

Guns in America

hc — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:03:52 +0000

I don’t like guns or the idea of owning guns for ‘protection’. Gun ownership delivers a Prisoners’ Dilemma where there is a collective loss in legal law-abiding welfare and where ownership increases the stakes in planned criminal acts. Having more than a few punch-ups is socially preferred to having only a few killings. You buy a gun to ‘protect’ yourself and others buy guns because you own a gun. And crazy male psychopaths/libertarians buy guns because they fear that they have excessively small testicles, a problem that (fortunately) doesn’t trouble me. I am a carnivore but I question the intrinsic reasonableness of killing animals for ‘sport’ so I treat hunters as rather ugly people.

Obama was supposed to be anti-gun but the expectation that he might be and the fact that he apparently is not have had serious impacts on gun control in the US. The US states are engaged in a new push for expanded gun rights, even passing measures that have been rejected in the past:

In Virginia, the General Assembly approved a bill last week allowing people to carry concealed weapons in bars and restaurants that serve alcohol and voted to repeal a 17-year-old ban on buying more than one handgun a month. The actions came less than three years after the shootings at Virginia Tech that claimed 33 lives and prompted a major national push for increased gun control.
Arizona and Wyoming lawmakers are considering many pro-gun measures, including one that would allow residents to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
Lawmakers in Montana and Tennessee passed measures last year — the first of their kind — to exempt their states from federal regulation of firearms and ammunition that are made, sold and used in state. Similar bills have been proposed in at least 3 other states.
Gun control advocates say, Mr. Obama has failed to deliver on campaign promises to close a loophole that allows unlicensed dealers at gun shows to sell firearms without background checks; to revive the assault weapons ban; and to push states to release data about guns used in crimes. For example, Obama signed bills last year allowing guns to be carried in national parks and in luggage on trains.
The Indiana legislature passed bills that block private employers from forbidding workers to keep firearms in their vehicles on company property.

In the gun-loving US guns are becoming more popular – Federal background checks for gun purchases rose to 14m in 2009, from 12.7m in 2008 and 11.2 million in 2007. Pity.

Car speed & death

hc — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:07:44 +0000

Again a retrieved post – thanks Christina.

The horrific car crash near my university which killed 5 kids and left one critically injured leaves me feeling shaken. I’ve got kids of my own and can (nearly) imagine the trauma the parents of these kids must now be experiencing. The driver was speeding – he had hit 150 km per hour in Ivanhoe and was travelling at 130 km per hour+ when the accident occurred in Bundoora. Police and ambulance officers describe the scene as the worst they have ever witnessed. What a senseless waste! What a tragedy for the kids involved, their parents and friends! One message speed kills! Another: kids you are not indestructible. How do you get these truths across? I posted earlier on traffic accidents, speed and fatality.

Jan 18, 2:44 PM

The horrific car crash near my university which killed 5 kids and left one critically injured leaves me feeling shaken.

I’ve got kids of my own and can (nearly) imagine the trauma the parents of these kids must now be experiencing. The driver was speeding – he had hit 150 km per hour in Ivanhoe and was travelling at 130 km per hour+ when the accident occurred in Bundoora.

Police and ambulance officers describe the scene as the worst they have ever witnessed. What a senseless waste! What a tragedy for the kids involved, their parents and friends!

One message speed kills! Another: kids you are not indestructible. How do you get these truths across?

I posted earlier on traffic accidents, speed and fatality.

Kevin misses Button funeral

hc — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:24:00 +0000

Kevin Rudd couldn’t make it to the State funeral of Labor legend John Button yesterday. He was visiting Cate Blanchett and her newborn baby in hospital. Cate will make it to the ‘ideas summit’ just 6 days after giving birth to her third child even though Rudd told her not to attend if she ‘didn’t feel up to it’. Kevin loves celebrities.

Bloggers who cark* it

hc — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 11:58:00 +0000

Overworked and underpaid, yes, but at least I am still alive.

*An Aussi slang term.

A ramble: time, golf & death – the last taboo that you cannot postpone with optimism

hc — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:50:00 +0000

Another week disappears as 2007 gets devoured – time passes quickly as we age since each year is a smaller fraction of our life so far. Yet our discount rates decline – we become less impulsive. This is the reason that the initiation of destructive drug-taking is concentrated among kiddies and the reason some of us are wise.

The blogosphere goes into partial hibernation each weekend and I feel a bit too disgruntled this morning to make a sensible effort at posting to meet limited reader demands. So this ramble is it.

My golf game yesterday was full of high hopes but disintegrated into a sequence of bad shots. This damaged what was otherwise a promising end to the week. The Zen of a good golf swing - it eludes me!

I am still thinking about death and two websites caught my attention last night:

The Australian Museum has an interesting online discussion of death. One of my favourite web pages at this site is the page on ‘corpse fauna’. It is an eexcellent discussion of death.

I also liked this post from ScienceBlogs on whether cancer patients benefit from a positive mental attitude. In short they don’t live longer but they do, of course, enjoy a less painful exit.

This is not quite consistent with the advocacy of my earlier post on rational death – I favour realism rather than unthinking optimism but, if you do want to exit with the help of a cognitive error, this is the way to go.

Enjoy your Saturday.

Euthanasia

hc — Mon, 07 May 2007 21:27:00 +0000

I watched the Four Corners show Final Call last night. It concerned the euthanasia debate and the right of elderly citizens to suicide when they feel their lives are not worth living.

The elderly people interviewed impressed me with the care of their planned exits and with their resolve to achieve this final act of self-determination. They seemed highly intelligent people who had thought through the consequences for their families and for themselves of suicide. For the most part they wanted to die peacefully by taking a dose of Nembutal. They were not depressed, they were enjoying life now to the fullest and were not making their plans on the basis of short-term discomfit or pain or because of concerns they might be a burden on others.

The strength of their convictions was illustrated by their journeys to Mexico to secure illegal supplies of Nembutal and by their organization into groups to home-produce the drug. When the interviewer asked one chirpy 96 year old whether he was worried about being sent to jail for being involved in illegal activities his response was simple ‘they won’t be able to keep me there long’. It was a great reply.

The views of the medical profession and the ethicists on the show were unconvincing and shallow to me. They were essentially trying to impose their values (and in the case of the medical profession to secure a valuable market) on sensible, independent people who seem to have a perfect right to choose – it is their life.

Denying the right of such people to painlessly die forces citizens to unnecessarily experience pain and suffering. It is asserting the value of extending life as an absolute ideal irrespective of the views of the person whose life is being extended.

I am in favor of developing a pill, such as Nembutal, that provides a painless death to well-informed adults who seek to die. A concern is that the pill might come to be abused by adolescents and others who experience transitional emotional or other difficulties. Such deaths are unnecessary and impose enormous costs on others. I am absolutely not in favor of an open access regime to death pills for all. The difficulty of avoiding suicides by irrational youth or those needing urgent transitional care can be dealt with by prescribing the pill only to those people who are judged by a knowledgeable councilor to be well-informed and not acting irrationally on the basis of short-term problems.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to suppose that elderly people make a rational judgment that their life is not worth living. It is their ‘Final Call’ and I cannot think of good reasons why their choice should not be respected. Of course those who choose to live their lives to the end even in the face of pain and suffering also deserve to have their views respected.

I am interested in the views of readers on this long-standing debate. I must acknowledge that I have not searched hard for counterarguments to the pro-euthanasia position and I would be interested in thinking about such arguments.