Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

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Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

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On November 25, 2024

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Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

  • In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.[71]
  • In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.[72]
  • In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.[1]
  • In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.[73]
  • In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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What if We Threw a Civil War and Nobody Came?

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On August 28, 2024

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UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:

Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.

These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.

There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.

As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.

Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.

The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.

Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?

Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:

The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);

517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;

Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;

Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;

35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;

25% were armed;

18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;

Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;

Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;

22.2% had a criminal record.

Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.

And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.

If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?

But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.

TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:

Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.

Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:

DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.

Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.

MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS

House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.

Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”

And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”

DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.

These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.

But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.

And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.

But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.

But that’s a big if.

Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.

That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.

Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?

Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.

Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.

For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.

It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without  leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.

If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.

But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:

In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.

It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.

“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”

Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”

“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.

…

Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.

Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”

“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”

As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.

That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.

 

The Life and Death of George Bush, Sr.: The Best of a Bad Bunch

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On December 1, 2018

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Well, he’s dead at 94. He lived a long time, appears to have chosen his wife badly, and had kids of whom he may have been proud.

He was the best of the Republican Presidents from Reagan on, but still, overall, not very good.

His decision not to go to Baghdad was incorrect, and it allowed lot of Saddam’s enemies to get crushed after he encouraged them to rise. It would have been simple enough, even, to use American air-power to keep the Republican Guard down, and the rebellion would have succeeded. That would have avoided that big mess under his son, Bush, Jr., who appears to have wanted to get Saddam to avenge his father.

The Gulf War was questionable on its face, as Kuwait was created, basically, to keep oil from Iraq, and under the control of a small, very corrupt elite. The execution of the Iraq war included a lot of destruction of civilian infrastructure, including sewage systems. It was a war crime and led to a lot of death and suffering.

Meanwhile, Bush, Sr. was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal: clearly illegal. He won the ’88 election on the back of the Willie Horton ad, a clearly racially incendiary strategy.

He did do a decent job of shepherding the end of the USSR (the aftermath of which was fucked up beyond belief by Clinton, which has lead directly to the current US/Russia problems).

The best of a bad bunch, I suppose. Better than Reagan, his own son, or Trump, that’s for sure.

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Why Republicans Are Unlikely To Impeach Trump

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On June 6, 2018

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This is why the bar for impeachment is so high.

In Alabama, GOP voters delivered a rebuke to incumbent Rep. Martha Roby, who is headed for a runoff against former congressman Bobby Bright — whom Roby defeated in 2010 when Bright held office as a Democrat.

Roby angered constituents by un-endorsing then-candidate Donald Trump after the 2016 release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he bragged about groping women. In TV ads, Bright accused Roby of “[turning] her back on President Trump when he needed her the most.”

The Access Hollywood tape was the “grab them by the pussy” tape.

The base supports Trump. You have to get past the base in primaries to be a candidate in the general. This is why the fact that Democratic primary voters are basically ok with Democrats makes change from the left hard: they did mostly vote for Hillary, Bernie’s won independents.

The right did take over the Republican party, and they did it by winning primaries. Every recent attempt by the left to do the same in the Democratic party has failed.

Trump has very consistently acted to frame Mueller’s investigation as partisan, so that whether to impeach him becomes a political decision. In any Congress where Republicans have enough votes to stop impeachment, it will be very hard for Republicans to vote to impeach Trump: doing so will mean a serious primary challenge they may well lose.

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Reagan and George W. Bush Changed the World More than Bill Clinton or Obama

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On December 1, 2016

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We have a problem.

Left wingers and centrist, technocratic types are enamoured of intelligence. Of being smart.

Smart is all very nice. I am smart. But smart is not a synonym for effective or competent or wise or, well, most other words. It isn’t even a synonym for clever.

George W. Bush, by the time he got to the White House, was not smart. You listen to him talk, and it’s obvious. This is not a smart man (he was smart when he was younger–something went wrong).

George W. Bush had his two terms, and he changed the nature of American government in ways that neither Clinton nor Obama did. Bill Clinton ran Reagan’s economy better. Reagan was not smart. Reagan changed the nature of American government more than any President since FDR.

Bill Clinton was Reagan’s butt-boy. Understand that. Internalize it. He ran the neo-liberal economy that Reagan had created, and yes, he ran it better than Reagan, but he was living in Reagan’s world.

Obama ran Bush’s government. He kept deporting people–he deported even more people than Bush did. He ramped up drones. He kept troops in Afghanistan, he attacked Libya, he kept extending the Patriot Act and AUMF. He was operating within a constitutional order set up by Bush, and he never challenged it. Not once.

Obama was Bush’s butt-boy. Understand that. Internalize it.

It was famously said of FDR that he had a second class mind and a first class temperament. FDR created a framework for the US that ran, substantially from 1932 to 1970 or even 1980. Even Nixon, who overturned the post WWII order, didn’t overturn the New Deal. Heck, Nixon wanted universal health care.

Every Republican President after FDR and before Reagan, was FDR’s butt-boy. They ran the country he set up and they did it largely by his rules.

FDR wasn’t stupid, by any means, but he wasn’t as smart as Clinton. He might not even have been as smart as Obama. But he was far, far more effective. He got his way, he changed the nature of America, and he made it stick with his enemies.

Smart is NOT a synonym for effective.

This is very important to understand when dealing with someone like Trump.

I’m going to pound this issue a bit more, in a bit more detail, but for now: Stop underestimating people because they don’t have the sort of smarts you were taught in school matter, and which mostly matter because school selects for them. If you don’t, people like Trump and Bush will keep winning.

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I guess the Tea Party isn’t finished

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On June 10, 2014

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Every time I write about the Tea Party, I note that they have power because they are feared: they can win primaries.

Every time I write about the Tea Part progressives tell me that they’re finished, they’re past the peak of their power, blah, blah, blah.

They just defeated Eric Cantor.

This is why the Tea Party has power.

It is not even conceivable that progressives could do the same to Nancy Pelosi despite the fact that she has often betrayed progressive interests.

Tea partiers are willing to vote their values.  Their values may mostly be retrograde, but they vote them.  As a result, they have power.

Reports of the Tea Party’s death were premature.

Another note on Republicans

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On November 18, 2012

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They seem to be moving to change protected works (so called IP) laws, to make them less punitive.  I didn’t expect this, but it makes sense:

1) Hollywood is a Democratic bailiwick, and IP is how they make their money.

2) Libertarians took a couple percent in a lot of states, sometimes more.  Something that can peel back some of that support makes sense.

3) It’s something they can do which appeals to the young, who hate the current regime of protected works.

4) It is fairly populist, and when Dems vote against it, as they will, it will demoralize the Democratic base, again.

Republicans aren’t doing this for any good reasons, but if they do get serious about it, I’ll support them on the issue.

The Democratic party is so right wing now that left flanking the party on some issues makes sense for the Republicans.  And in a sense, this isn’t even all that left, 19th century conservatives hated patents and copyright, and for good reason.

Ron Paul Hysteria

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On January 3, 2012

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So, I’m noticing a ton of attacks on Ron Paul from progressives.  The reason is simple enough, Ron Paul is great on some key things the left cares about, and horrible on others.  His last ad in Iowa says he’d ban abortion, for example.  On the other hand, he wants to withdraw all troops from foreign wars and bring back the troops from America’s far flung military bases.  And he’s the only candidate to unequivocally state that he would never order the assassination of Americans.

Paul’s economic policies are straight up insane, and would throw the world into a full catastrophic Great Depression, even worse than the one we’re in now and worse than the one in the 30s.

But the problem is that current policies by more “mainstream” candidates just get to the same place more slowly.  And maybe not even that much more slowly.  Numerian thinks this could be the year of the big crash, for example, one where even the first world has food shortages and so on.

We’re going to get there.  There is a consensus for austerity amongst the transnational developed world elites which is breathtaking in its unanimity, imperviousness to argument and lack of regard for democratic niceties.  There is no consensus on how to deal with the oil bottleneck, no plan for actually dealing with the leveraged debt overhang, no understanding of how to create real growth, as opposed to bubbles.  If they do manage to hang on, what will happen is a huge non-conventional oil boom (read Fracking) and that will devastate ground water and turn large areas into wastelands.  Nor will it last all that long or feel all that good (it’ll be better than now, but probably not even as good as the best Bush years.)

After that I see no scenario in which things don’t crack up, completely.

So Ron Paul will cause a crack up, possibly a little bit ahead of schedule.  That sucks for old people who might have died before the world went to hell, but for young people, you might as well get it done.

But Ron Paul also might do some real damage to the military industrial complex.  There is no route forward for the US which does not require taking that misallocated effort, and using it for other things.  So this is necessary.

Also the movement of manufacturing and other expertise overseas means that the US labor force is a wasting asset.  The longer the decline goes on the fewer people there will be with the skills to bootstrap back up, the less of an industrial base other than defense there will be, and so on.  Infrastructure will be more degraded, not less, and so on.  So from that point of view, cracking up sooner, rather than later, is preferable because it leaves a clearer path to the future.

But let’s move back to the title.  The reason Ron Paul causes hysterics is he pits interest group against interest group, morality vs. morality. He’s a different kind of lesser evil.  If Afghans got to vote in the US election, who would they vote for?  How important is Habeas Corpus to you really?  What about pot legalization?  Etc…  Ron Paul is awful on some issues, and very good on others.  Are abortion rights more important than dead Afghans and Pakistanis at weddings?  (I don’t claim they are, or aren’t, I simply note Paul forces you to make that choice.)  And Paul would end all bank bailouts.  Hate the banksters?  Think they’re the key problem?  Paul’s your man.

Obama is objectively awful.  Paul is objectively awful.  But unlike Romney, Paul is objectively awful in different ways than Obama.  Romney would just be Obama, but slightly worse.  If you’re going to choose a lesser evil, you might as well choose Obama.  But when it comes to Paul vs. Obama the equation changes.

And that’s why many progressives are attacking any other progressive who says anything good about Paul, because Paul threatens to split the left, and because Paul makes progressives decide what they value most.

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