Medical Mafia

"Medical goods and services are immorally controlled by a monopolised profession which transfers the right of decision from the patient to the doctor."

Starting from here we could have a much more exciting criique of the British NHS.

Section 28

A few weeks ago I wrote to the British MP William Hague, lately Shadow Foreign Secretary. When he was Leader of the Opposition in Parliament I well remember the fun he had at Labour's (and Tony Blair's) expense in relation to the proposed repeal of Section 28 of the Local Government Act. This had been introduced by the Conservatives in 1988. Among other things it prohibited local councils from distributing any material, whether plays, leaflets, books, etc, that portrayed gay relationships as anything other than abnormal. Young William clearly thought that such a stand would be electorally popular.

More recently David Cameron, the present Tory leader and likely next Prime Minister has adopted a new approach. On Section 28 he now says "we (the Tories) got it wrong. I hope you can forgive us."

I wished to know from Mr Hague whether he is at one with his party leader in the fulness of this apology, and, if so, to seek a fuller account of the nature of the mistake he had made?

I have written again, repeating my request. I am still awaiting a reply.

Beware Philosophy

Thai teacher caught on cellphone beating pupil

BANGKOK - A Thai teacher faces prosecution after cellphone footage showed him beating a pupil and slamming the boy's head into a whiteboard for forgetting his textbook, officials and reports said Tuesday.
The video, shown on local television stations, showed the male teacher at a privately-run Thai-Chinese secondary school in Bangkok grabbing the 12-year-old by his throat and hitting him around the head several times.

I have a question. What if the abuse was witnessed by other members of staff who had failed to follow procedures and report the assault they had seen? Would they too face disciplinary action? If so this is one clear advantage of cellphones.

Fair play

And just in case you are tempted to blame modern commercialism for the decline in standards of sportsmanship, The Times letters page contains this apt reference:

" . . . in book five of The Aeneid, during a running race, Virgil writes that Nisus “rose from the slime and threw himself in the path of Salius and knocked him head over heels” in order to allow his dear friend Euryalus to win. Even 2,000 years ago they were not averse to a bit of cheating in sport."

No pain, please!

Matthew Taylor finds in a new opinion poll evidence that voters still don't accept that they have to share in the pain.

How about this for a judgement on this Christian country of ours:

Ours is a society in which millions volunteer, donate to charities or adhere to religious or secular creeds advocating selflessness, but the message of our poll is inescapable; when it comes to addressing the fiscal crisis what matters to people is not fairness, or the best interests of the country, but simple self-interest. . . . our elected representatives feel compelled to tell us we can have our cake, eat it and walk out without paying.

Being bored

From a recent interview:

Ian Hislop: I remember being told by my teenagers that Church was boring and thinking, good it's meant to be boring. You need a lot more boring in your life and in the middle of it, you'll find something.

Rowan Williams: I have to confess that has been in the past one of my regular confirmation sermons. Get used to it. It's not always going to be fun. Life isn't always going to be fun and there's something to be said for sitting things out...”

It put me in mind of R S Thomas' The Moon in Lleyn where he addresses those who stand in empty churches to proclaim that religion is over:

But a voice sounds
in my ear: Why so fast,
mortal? These very seas
are baptized. The parish
has a saint's name time cannot
unfrock. In cities that
have outgrown their promise people
are becoming pilgrims
again, if not to this place,
then to the recreation of it
in their own spirits. You must remain
kneeling. Even as this moon
making its way through the earth's
cumbersome shadow, prayer, too,
has its phases.

Prey for me

The weekend Times led with the awful story of the kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard. She was abducted, imprisoned and raped.

In the same issue Simon Barnes was extolling the the ugliness, cruelty and the beauty of nature. Let us celebrate cruelty, he writes, as we do ugliness, with a full heart.

I am not inclined to intervene to protect garden birds from predatory sparrowhawks, though one creature being destroyed and consumed by another in full view is a harrowing sight. For myself I choose to lead as un-predatory a life as possible. I disapprove of slaughterhouses and eschew their produce. I am happiest following the vegan way but I sometimes lapse into a woolly, even fishy, vegetarianism. A rational basis for my position I find in Peter Singer's 'Animal Liberation'.

My problem is with the use of the word 'cruelty' to describe both what was done to Jaycee and what sparrowhawks do in the wild to their prey. Surely sparrowhawks are neither cruel nor kind. These are human attributes. Nature may indeed be red in tooth and claw, but sparrowhawks, being predators, are just - predatory.

Being looked after

A woman I know in her seventies seems to be 'losing her marbles'. It may pass but, if it doesn't, she could well end up being 'looked after' by members of her family. Not the worst outcome you may think. They will be good and kind to her. But they will patronize her. They will not listen to her and take her seriously. They will edit what she says to fit in with their own understanding and priorities. They will tell her what she is feeling - and why. They are all good people - but they never really listen.

How sad.

ORTHODOXY

Going through some old scribblings of mine today I found these words which I was glad to be reminded of:

Orthodoxy is based on a fallacy - that we can all agree - and a judgement - that we should.

It suddenly dawned on me

The one who inspires me is not one who is in a minority - but one who stands alone - the true individual.

Celia Green again

Anyone who can write this stuff is worth a closer look:

The question is whether anyone has ever been, in any serious way, not sane.

My best candidates are Nietzsche and Christ. It may be objected that their ideas cannot possibly be of interest, since one went mad and the other was crucified. However, I think we should not hold this against them.

They may have felt a trifle isolated.

It can't be long now

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

- George Eliot

Christianity and Sadism

There may be something in this:

I have long had a theory that the popularity of Christianity has always depended on its appeal to the sadism of its adherents. The exceptional should be crucified, saith Society; and somehow everyone suspects (in spite of all arguments to the contrary) that if there is a God, he may be exceptional in some way. So the figure of Christ crucified becomes the figure of the dangerous exceptional alien—suitably defeated. 'Only a suffering God can help', said Bonhoeffer, licking his lips.

Celia Green

News to me

"Shortage of homes for sale expected to push up prices by end of the year

But the bad news is they could fall again next year"


This was a headline in today's Times newspaper.

How has the concept of news been so corrupted that the word is now used to describe things that haven't happened and may never happen? News bulletins are occupied by predictions. Yesterday's news is about tomorrow.

Explaining Evil

Thanks to Norm for this:

Over at Mick Hartley's invaluable site, we are directed to a report by Adam Hochschild on the Congo that details some of the nightmarish horrors which have been inflicted on the helpless inhabitants of that unhappy country. Hochschild asks, among other things, how it can be that some of the warm and friendly and helpful people that he met there were also rapists, torturers, and murderers; and he offers an answer:

What turns such people into rapists, sadists, killers? Greed, fear, demagogic leaders and their claim that such violence is necessary for self-defense, seeing everyone around you doing the same thing - and the fact that the rest of the world pays tragically little attention to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of our time.

No doubt all these things are true; such factors do contribute to the enactment of evil. But there's an explanatory gap between the causal factors cited (greed, fear, and the rest) and the horror of what's done. How does greed – the desire to get more and more good things for oneself – or fear – the worry that one may be harmed – lead a warm and friendly and helpful person to eviscerate and dismember a man, force his wife to collect up the scattered body parts, and rape her on top of them? How is it supposed to work, this claim that the sight of other people acting out our worst nightmares turns ordinary men into monsters ready to do such things themselves? The causes on offer seem too ordinary, too everyday, too small, to adequately account for the barely believable enormities to which they lead. This excess, this overflowing of atrocity, this leap from mundane cause to inventively hideous effect, is what's in need of explanation - an explanation which by and large we entirely lack. (Eve Garrard)

New Every Morning

A reflection on the nature of reality:

"The comedian Steven Wright tells this joke deadpan:

“I woke up one day and everything in the apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.

I said to my roommate, ‘Can you believe this? Everything in the apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.’

He said, ‘Do I know you?’ ”

A de-bap, a doo-bop, a wa-wa-waah

News today that you'll soon be able to baptise the kids and marry your partner in the Church of England without even juggling different orders of service. But what if one of the kids has second thoughts later on. Here's Norm on de-baptism.

"Here's an item about atheists who are going through de-baptism ceremonies as a way of marking the renunciation of their former faith. Notwithstanding the emphasis placed by those involved on the lighthearted and satirical nature of what they're doing, it does rather look like they're testifying to the power of the original they're purporting to send up while undoing it, if they feel the need actually to go through a ceremony of reversal. You lost or renounced your faith? I mean, you really did? Then, it has no power and you can just walk away from it without more ado. But if you need a ceremony...

"Of course, like everyone else, atheists are allowed rituals. But given what we atheists don't believe, it would be better if would-be atheist rituals didn't mirror religious ones. Why, you could go for a walk and mull things over."

The decline of violence

Stephen Pinker shows how our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Given the stunning lack of regard for human life in the Bible, a history of socially sanctioned mutilation and torture, one-on-one murder, and casualties of war, all the evidence is that we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

The future is Pinker indeed!

Preaching and Practice

Desmond Tutu is always on the side of the angels but, as Norm points out, his logic can get a bit muddled.

"Here's a view:

The West should in general, he warns, beware of preaching about corrupt African dictators. "You could say the same about Europe. You get a Churchill and then there's a long wait... What gives me a great deal of hope for Africa is looking at the history of Europe. Very recently you had two world wars, you had the Holocaust, you had dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece. There was a time when Italy was changing governments like you change pairs of socks. There was the Soviet Union, Stalin's gulags. You forget that you really made a mess of things. It was a Western country that was the first and only country to use weapons of mass destruction. [Africa] is not on a level with Western people.

"I can be nice and say there's hope for us. When I'm a little angry I say 'For goodness sake you need a fairly large dose of modesty. You ought to be hiding your heads for the things you have actually done'."

That's Desmond Tutu speaking. Still, what he says is wrong. And that it is, is shown by the fact that he's the one who's saying it. Nobody will gauge his criticisms of non-African countries by reference to the appalling record of apartheid, because as an opponent of apartheid Tutu was not responsible for it. But, equally, individual Westerners aren't responsible for the Holocaust, or dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece, and they - or, at least, many of them - have the right to condemn African dictators. This isn't about non-Africans preaching to Africans; it's about democrats, anywhere, speaking their minds, speaking critically, about governments that deny the fundamental rights of the people they govern."