Just so you know, they (Morning Edition) did a piece this morning (Friday, 27 February) on that segment and the truth and lack there of in it.
Y'all can say what you like, but I love my local NPR station; it's the reason we don't have cable--why bother?
Of course they dedicate Friday nights to bluegrass, so that doesn't hurt either...
Okay, I'll accept the point that if the families give permission, we should have the right to use such information as was obtained through all means foul and fair.
BUT
I am not convinced that we have the right to use the results of nazi experiementation without the explicit consent of any survivors. It is their suffering, and we do not have the right to set that aside lightly just because it will benefit us.
To me, to do so is akin to telling someone who suffers from a rare illness that they MUST donate their body to science, for the good of all who will follow. Yes, we should try to convince them, but it is not our place to force them.
I've read discussions here about copyright of artistic works, and how long such copyrights should extend past death. Why should artists be allowed to copyright their words beyond their death if we do not allow families to control images and information stolen from the bodies of thier loved ones after death?
If we can claim ownership of our thoughts and ideas, then why should we not have similar ownership over the pictures and information taken from our bodies?
And that does not even consider any religious issues involved. Some faiths believe that all body parts must be buried together, or that if at all possible burial must occur within a certain time after the death. We are talking about not just a violation of their body, but a violation of their faith and effecting what they believe will happen to them in the afterlife.
As far as right to die and physician assisted suicide, I strongly beleive that much of the problem is due to the undertreatment of pain and a fear by doctors to use the tools they have at hand to treat pain.
Concepts such as terminal sedation (sedating a patient into unconsciousness until the death to treat suffering at the end of life), the double effect (treating a patient with stronger and stronger dosages of medication to treat pain, despite any life shortening effects this may have), terminal dehydration (many patients at the end of life do not feel thirst or hunger and this refusal of nutrition and hydration can hurry the end of life without causing suffering to the patient), and so forth should be common knowledge to doctors, and this knowledge should be made available to families and patients, but it isn't.
You're right to worry that there is a very fine line between can and should in the right to die, and I think that is why we need to better use the tools we already, before we start looking for new tools to fix the problem.
In my opinion anyway.
Jeremy:
Thank you, that bit on censorship did help quite a bit. It still bothers me, but I do comprehend the importance of free speech.
As far as fruits of evil, in the situation it would, I suppose, be up to Holocaust survivors to determine what was to happen with the information. But I do worry whether other crackpot 'scientists' and 'doctors' will see that as implicit consent to experiment on humans.
Mitch:
I actually knew the full implications of the question when I asked it, and I have struggled with it. If we are willing to say that the end does justify the means in this case, do we not then encourage others to use all means foul and fair to achieve their ends? Tuskeege was okay, because we achieved valuable medical knowledge from it seems to be the message here. Too bad about all the suffering and death, but we got what we wanted.
In essesnce, there are two arguments: Throwing the Baby out with the bathwater, where we fail to gain anything from the tragedy, and the future encouragement of other madmen, who will see that the ends do in fact justify the means.
Optimally, it should be the decision of those who were abused as to whether their suffering should be used to help others, but I don't think that's possible here.
Mitch & Kevin:
I see what you are saying, and I'm not unwilling to be convinced that I am in error, I just have not yet seen an argument to convince me otherwise.
The selling of nazi German items seems to me to be profiting from the suffering and death of others, and I just have a hard time beleiving that should be acceptable. I mean, I refuse to eat fast food because of the way employees all the way down the line are treated, and profiting off the the deaths of others seems a far worse thing to me.
I read about the resurgenece of neo-naziism in Europe, and hate gangs (in the US, Europe and elsewhere) that use the symbols of fascist Germany as part of their campaigns in current times, and it horrifies me. I just consider whether it is possible for such groups to allow such symbols to mean nothing, and wonder whether those groups, with a good leader, to ever gain power and implement their wishes and desires.
It's easy to say that could never happen again, but I look around the world and see much I thought would never happen, and then begin to worry.
At what point do these worries switch from foolish censorship to a serious problem we must consider and fight?
Mitch--
I hope you don't need Palliative care resources any time soon, but if you do I hope you are able to find people who are able to help you.
As far as companies following the rules of the country where it does business. As far as I am concerned, large companies tend to be amoral--it is to easy to pass the buck, and the consequences for not following social mores are next to nil. In fact the consquences for breaking laws is frequently nil. Take EF Hutton, Enron, Tyco etc.
In other words, the larger the group, the less likely consience is to be a guide, (In my opinion anyway) so we do need laws to regulate business and commerce, to keep them from behaving unethically and harming others. Of course even the laws we do have seem to be ineffective, but it's an attempt.
As far as Nazi memoribilia, I fear I am expressing myself badly, and figuring it out as I go along. Sorry. I suppose that if one wanted to, they should be allowed to collect nazi memoribilia, but should it be made so easy? I think that is what I was reacting to with e-bay. They make it so that anyone with a computer and a credit card can purchase reminders of a painful time with little effort and little or no thought.
It brings to mind the discovery that a commonly used anatomy text book may have used the bodies of death camp victims as subjects. See: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=31704)
Should such a book continue to be used? Should medical discoveries that we made in the death camps be used?
All of this is material that should be considered and pondered, and I fear that ready and easy access to such materials allows one to ignore the history completely. In other words, do we want to live in a society where for many the swastika is no longer disturbing and upsetting?
It's up to the company. If they can manage a way not to sell just the items in that country, then that's great. If they can't find a way around it, then they have the choice of removing the items or chosing not to move their company to Saudi Arabia.
I'm not sure that "so I can collect the whole set!" is a good enough rationale for an individual to collect Nazi memoribilia. Museums should collect these things, because we need to understand the depths to which humanity can sink, but just because it's there...
I mean, I could say that I need plutonium and uranium, because I'm collecting all the elements in the periodic table, but is that a good enough reason to let me have them? (And I need lots, because my collection has to be the largest and most complete of any private periodic collection.)
Mitch Wagner:
My definition of nasty things is pretty well definited: Anything that involves harm to an unwilling individual or a child.
Regarding Kevorkian, the paper I read was an comparison of the deaths in which he was involved compared to Oregon PAS. Huge difference. Only 25% of his "patients" had terminal illness. That is (in my opinion) pretty scary.
Has he devalued human life? As you say, it's too soon to tell, but I think that he may in fact have helped, only because people have started talking about end of life care, and there has now been more interest in funding hospice care, and researching palliative care.
I'm sorry about your mother, although I do have to say that your doctor was right. (First though, I'm neither a gerontologist nor a hospice worker, but I have done a fair bit of research on the subject both for school and on my own, and if you would like I can recommend further resources. Although my interest is Environmental Health, almost all my papers and projects have been in the area of end of life care.)
With many terminal illnesses, there can be a loss of both appetite and thirst, and far from being painful for the patient, this may in fact be part of the palliative care and may help to reduce pain and suffering. If you have further question I would recommend that you get in touch with a hospice in your area, or if you like I can recommend some resources you could read.
You might check out:
http://www.nahc.org/HAA/ Hospice Association of America
http://www.abhpm.org/ American Board of Hospice and Palliative Medicine
http://www.nho.org/ National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization
And living wills vary from area to area, and at least in this area you can be quite specific if your desires, detailing precisely what you would and would not like to happen. This too is something a hospice worker or doctor should be able to explain. And if your doctor does not explain it to your satisfaction, then find another doctor or administrator who will explain it to you. It's important.
Also, there is a difference between euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS). PAS is legal in Oregon and it basically allows a doctor to prescribe a lethal does of medication for a patient. Very different from what Kevorkian did.
Regarding Nazi memoribilia, I just wish that we lived in a world where there wasn't a desire to own any. But until we do, e-bay should follow the rules of the states and countries where it operates. If it does not want to follow those rules and laws, then it doesn't have to sell items in that country.
Kevin Andrew Murphy,
I thought private clubs could do just that? Allow only people who are members in? Hence the uproar over the Augusta golf (er.... Don't know golf terms) game (?) not allowing women on the courses. So you could make a private members only restaurant and allow only those of "your kind" in. I thought also that was why the boy scouts could keep out gays. (And so on and so forth for many examples)
As far as I am concerned, the "we" of the interent means that one country can regulate businesses that work within their borders. The US can regulate all US ISPs, but no one else. That seems reasonable enough.
Regarding e-bay, my understanding of your description (and I could be wrong) is it seems like the Israelis and the Germans said that if you want to do business in our country, you have to follow our rules, otherwise you can't do business in our country. Am I misunderstanding? So if e-bay had the option of removing Nazi stuff OR not existing in Germany and Israel, then they had a choice, yes? They could have chosen not to function in Germany, to block all German or Israeli addresses, and if that is the case, then I don't see that as wrong, since they made a market based decision: the number of customers in Israel and Germany is greater than the number of customers who by Nazi stuff, therefore we'll follow their wishes.
If the Nazi memoribilia people had more money, then e-bay might have chosen in the other direction, right?
So I don't see it as one country dictating terms to a business in another country, I see them offering a choice or us or them. And that seems reasonable to me. It might not be polite, but I do think they should have the right to take their marbles and go home if they so choose, where in this case the marbles are the millions of users who might frequent e-bay.
(Assuming that my understanding of the situation is correct.)
jon,
You seem to be ignoring almost two millenia of facts in your statement that "Christians have done more in history to help Jews". For hundreds of years Christianity persecuted the Jewish people, and after the rise of Islam, it was the Muslims who allowed the Jewish people religious libery and freedom, while it was Christians who segregated and even slaughtered the Jewish people.
The history of Jerusalem going all the way back to the fall of the Temple in 70 CE shows this quite clearly. It was Muslims who allowed the Jews back into Jerusalem, and during the Crusades the Jews frequently fought alongside and died with the Muslims. It was the Ottoman empire that served as a refuge for Jews following the expulsions from Christian Europe in the 15th century.
Christian toleration of the Jewish people is a recent developement starting only in the 19th century. So to be accurate, you statement is true only since the 19th century.
If you are going to look at the entire span of history, then it would be more correct to say that Islam has done more in history to help Jews than anyone else in history.
Does that mean that Christianity should act badly towards Judaism now? Certainly not. Should this past history be allowed to hide the fact of current Jewish/Christian/Muslim relations? Certainly not. But history is history.
Kevin Andrew Murphy,
Unfortunately, I think that someone would have the right to organize a boycott based on anti-semitic or racist reasons. Free speech is free speech, yes? That doesn't make it good or right, but as private citizens I do think they have the right to say and organize as they please. I may not like it if someone boycotts a store for racist reasons, but that is substantially different from trying to burn down the story.
I'm not sure how I feel about the regulation of public utilities and regulation of the internet in general. I don't like the fact that nasty things involving young children are out there, and that predators wander chat rooms looking for young kids, but I don't think that American regulation will change any of that. They'll just move elsewhere, where they can get away with it.
Regarding the slippery slope, the reason I asked is because I am not sure that it works as advertised most of the time.
Why I wonder this is because I was just reading a paper comparing Kevorkian deaths to Oregon PAS deaths to "typical deaths" (The Gerontoligist 2001), and despite the fact that people claimed PAS would lead to the devaluation of human life, especially the devaluation of aged human life, it does not seem to be working that way, which led me to wonder in what cases the fear of slippery slope fails to come true. In some cases it is a wedge in the door that allowed people to bust through, but not always.
In other words, is it possible that we as a society DO in fact have the ability to sometimes say "just this one thing" and leave it at that? And if that is so, then should we not look more critically at every slipperly slope argument and see if it will indeed lead to where we fear, or whether things may not be as bad as we fear?
I'm sorry if that is confusing and wordy, but I'm struggling with the idea, and that makes it difficult.
Kevin Andrew Murphy,
Spies of course. If I'm going to make myself that rich then of course I'm also going to give myself lots of spies.
But seriously...
But to put the boycott business into an analogous situation with regards to a newspaper, let's say that a newspaper is like a web service provider, and individual web pages are like paid ads. You--an outside party--have decided you don't like a particular ad, and threaten a boycott of all the newspaper's advertisers unless the newspaper refuses to accept future ads from that advertiser.
I think I get your point here, but have another question--what if I went around to every single other advertiser and asked them to join my campaign? Got them *all* to say that if the paper continued to print ads by "Bob's EZ Spam Service" they'd stop advertising at the paper.
Do I not have the right to do so?
The difference I suppose is that in this example I am not shutting doen Bob's business, just removing one avenue of advertising?
In which case... Does not an ISP have the right, as a private business, to not host certain types of pages if they don't want to? (This is a serious question, I really do not know the answer.)
If they do have the right to host who they please (and not host who they do not please), then would there not be a good business opportunity there for a company who *would* host such a site? And is that not what The Principality of Sealand does? (Though even they have things they won't host I believe)
And the e-bay banning of nazi memoribilia reminds me of a long discussion once about the morality and ethics of using scientific and medical data gleaned from nazi medical experiments. Are there not occasions where you should draw the line and say "this one thing should not be?"
In other words, is the slippery slope really that slippery?
Kevin Andrew Murphy,
I think perhaps I am misunderstanding you, because it sounds like you're just describing a boycott, and I don't see what's wrong with a boycott, and with trying to convince others to join your boycott.
I don't like our local newspaper, and refuse to buy it and also try to convince others not to purchase it. If I had the financial muscle, would it be wrong for me to tell a local company that I won't do business with them as long as they run ads in the paper? After all, in a way my support of the local company turns into support of the local newspaper as the company can afford more/better ads through my support, and if I am really opposed to my paper, then I should at least make it clear to the local company why I will not be supporting them?
Xopher:
Ah... My mistake.
But I really like that site, since it has larger pictures of the lost, combined frequently with actual stories about the soldiers. (Perhaps like what NPR has been doing occasionally, running an indepth story on a lost life.)
For me, the pictures of when they were alive are far harder to see that caskets. Not to be stupid, but a casket is just a box with a flag over it, while a picture even with just the soldier's name, age and location tells you so much more about that life lost. Especially when so many of the soldiers looked so very young.
When I look at the pictures I see what they were and imagine what they could have been, and for me that is much harder. For the young, I imagine how they thought it couldn't happen to them, how they perhaps left their high school sweetheart behind, thinking they'd be back soon, and perhaps marry that sweetheart when they got back to the states. For the older, I imagine spouses and children and grandchilden left behind. Sometimes in some of the pictures you can almost see the solder holding up a small laughing child.
Those are the pictures that, for me, are hardest to see.
The lists of soldiers who have lost their lives are not that hidden. Since the start of hostilities they have been available on the Baltimore Sun website. (Note: the site is having problems so it may not be immediately accessible)
You can look at an alphabetical list of names or you can go through an reverse chronological list. (If the reverse chronological link doens't work right now, you can access it from side bar along the right, although that also seems to be having problems right now.) The reverse chronological list has an option for searching by state.
I've mentioned these two links every couple weeks on my site, because it's not right that those who died should remain nameless and faceless casualties. And I think that should be true regardless of whether you are on the right or the left.
Hi adamsj & Nathaniel,
I apologize if I skip any points which you find important.
As far as accessability, my county has no excuse absentee voting. Starting (I think) two weeks before election day, you can go to one place downtown and vote absentee. You don't have to have a doctor's excuse or plane tickets or anything else to prove you won't be able to vote on election day, you just go in and vote. And in our county this is the electronic voting system.
If anything, it is more convient to be able to go to one location at any point several weeks before the election, so if those who have difficulty with "regular" ballots have access to electronic voting assistance, then must such voting be implemented across the board?
Right now, to be honest, my biggest problem is the expense of having areas with accurate voting systems take on the expense of switcing to electronic voting. If a switch has to be made (such as in Florida and areas of California) where punch card machines are being used, then it makes sense to swtich, and to swtich to the latest technology. But it also seems to me that there is a faction who insist upon switch to the latest and greatest technology, even when there are no problems with the current system.
Local budgets--some of which are cutting funding for public schools because of state budget crises--have to finance these changes, for equipment that is used only a couple of times a year. It seems to me that voting technology should not just be accurate and tamperproof, but should also be as inexpensive as possible.
One method of creating a paper trail I have heard, so to have to voting machine print out a paper ballot which the voter can then view before it is placed in the ballot box (I'm not sure why multiple ballot boxes are needed--at least where I vote, before you leave the voting station, you place your ballot in a hard plastic sheath and the ballot is dumped from the sheath into the ballot box. No one can see how you voted.) So if we create a paper ballot for each voter we are essentially just computerizing the way a ballot is filled out. The end result is the same, except that instead of filling out the ballot with a pencil, you use a computer.
Isn't that an awfuly expensive way to acheive the exact same result?
The other issue I have is write-in candidates. last year when I had the opportunity to use an electronic voting machine, I did not see any easy way to write-in a candataite. Perhaps it was just that system, or perhaps there was a way that wasn't obvious, for I wasn't writing in a canidate at that time, but that bothered me in retrospect.) Is there an easy way to write in canidates with electronic voting technology? Is there a way to make the system more accountable other than printing out every single ballot? I don't know, and I wish I did.
Of course I live in an area where we don't have many non-English speakers (unless you consider the mangling of the language by the under-educated) so that may have a great deal of influence upon my opinion. But mostly I just can not move past the cost of switching to a new system unnecessarily. Too much of a local focus I suppose.
Hi adamsj,
What is interesting about the debate about electronic voting is that the only voices I have heard arguing against it and being taken seriously are computer people, who I suppose can't be labelled as Luddites, seeing as how they are already in the technology.
My problem is that I seem electronic voting machines as a ridiculous expense that will cause problems where none currently exist. I work with computers every day, and know quite well how unreliable they are, and how easily systems can be manipulated.
I also worry about the effects the machines will have on the poll workers. The poll workers I have ever seen in my county seem to be about 70 years old. I'm not saying they can't learn the technology, I'm saying that they can't lift the technology, (someone has to set everything up after all), and that they won't know what to do if something goes wrong.
After all, right now even a massive powerfailure that takes down all the electricity to the area for days at a time will have little effect upon voting as long as ballots have already been printed, I just can not believe that electronic voting can say the same thing. (I'm 33, but grew up with power fluccuations and outages occurring on a regular basis. I have never believed that our power system is stable.)
I just cannot believe that electronic voting can't be hacked, and the fact that those likely to do the hacking may possibly be further to the left than I still doesn't reassure me.
And nobody it talking about these issues at all.
Call me a Luddite if you will, but I find it curious that everyone seems to be accepting as a forgone conclusion that electronic voting is the way to go.
My county uses an optical scanner, which means that when you go into vote, you are handed a pencil and a paper ballot, and vote in a little curtained booth. No problems writing in a candidate, no problems with power outages, or equipment malfunctions, and no hanging chads.
I don't understand why there is a push to move from this system, which is reliable and easy.
Yes, we can switch to an electronic voting system, but I have yet to come across an argument that convinced me as to why we should. (And that doesn't even go into the cost of implementing a new system, which I don't see how municipalities with already strained budgets, can afford.)
(And if it explains things a bit, my day job is software support)
I am disappointed but not surprised that Watson & Crick made the list without Rosalind Franklin.
I recently read an interview (It would have been New Scientist, Discover or US News, but I can't remember which) with one of the two, and he still belittles Franklin's work.
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