Welcome to the first full “work” week of June: it’s Monday, June 2, 2025, and National Rotisserie Chicken Day. The best deal, of course, is at Costco, where you get a four-pound bird for five bucks!:
It’s also I Love My Dentist Day (xoxo to Dr. Baer), National Rocky Road Day, and the Jewish holiday of Shavuot.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 2 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
This just in: eight people were torched in an attack while supporting the Israeli hostages still in Gaza. In a demonstration on Boulder, Colorado, an apparently pro-Palestinian suspect firebombed the demonstrators and used a makeshift flamethrower to burn them. Eight people were injured, Another day, another attack on Jews. More on this in tomorrow’s Nooz.
*Here’s a morally fraught question: “Do patients without a terminal illness have the right to die?” (archived here). The intro to the story involves Paula Ritchie, a 52-year-old Canadian woman in intractable and untreatable pain after a concussion two years ago. Canada has recently passed a Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program intended for people like her.
The pain was worse than anything she had ever felt, and Paula had always been in pain. Over the years, she had collected varied and sometimes competing diagnoses: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pain, chronic migraine. Also bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, substance-use disorder (marijuana). Paula told a friend that a veterinarian would put a dog down for feeling better than she did.
In the months after the concussion, she took Percocet, for joint pain, and Lyrica, for nerve pain, and Ativan, for anxiety. She took pills for vertigo and insomnia, and she tried a drug called Lamotrigine: an anti-epileptic that is also used as a mood stabilizer. When that didn’t work, she spent money that she didn’t really have on chiropractors and acupuncturists and reiki energy healers. Everything just made her dizzier, and nothing touched the pain.
She tried to suffocate herself using plastic bags, but failed.
Some of the coverage was about a recent expansion to the legislation. While MAID was initially restricted to patients with terminal conditions, the law in Canada was amended, in 2021, to include people who were suffering but who weren’t actually dying: people like Paula, who might have years or decades of life ahead of them.
Wonnacott [a doctor who is Paula’s MAID assessor] already believed that Paula met most of the criteria for MAID, on the basis of her neurological disorder and lingering symptoms. Still, he wondered if there was anything he could do to make her life better, or at least good enough that she wouldn’t want to die. In particular, Wonnacott wanted to know if Paula would consider seeing a neuropsychiatrist, a specialist who worked at the intersection of chronic pain and brain injury.
“I cannot get through a day,” Paula said. “It’s physical torture.” She wanted to know at what point she was allowed to refuse more treatment.
Why the bill was amended to include people like Paula:
The early paradigmatic cases were people in their 70s and 80s with terminal cancer: educated, affluent men and women who didn’t want to die slowly, perhaps in pain, perhaps slipping in and out of consciousness for hours or days. In one poll, an overwhelming 86 percent of Canadians were found to support MAID’s legalization.
But clinicians who agreed to assess dying patients were visited by other kinds of patients too: people with chronic pain or spinal-cord injuries or slow-moving, early-stage neurological disorders, like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis — people who were suffering terribly but who weren’t dying of their conditions in any immediate way. MAID assessors would have to tell these patients that they didn’t qualify.
At the same time, Canadian newspapers were publishing stories about people who were denied MAID and then went on to take their own lives, alone or fearful. One was Cecilia Bernadette Chmura, a 59-year-old with chronic pain who killed herself with a handful of hoarded pills, crushed in a coffee grinder, and whose husband was taken into custody after her death. Her husband had insisted that his wife die in her own bed, in his arms, instead of alone in a motel room, as she initially suggested to protect him from prosecution. (He was not charged.)
Paula qualified, and a doctor gave her a lethal injection. It’s a heartbreaking story, but the legislation is good.
She imagined that when Wonnacott reached for the syringe, she would flinch. But Paula was calm and still as the drugs went in. “I don’t feel anything,” she whispered.
“You will.”
“Oh, wow,” she said. “This is horrible. I’m just so sorry.” Paula coughed as if she might vomit. Deep, guttural hacks. After a few moments, her body relaxed. A wet tissue fell from her hands. Her skin slowly turned a pale white.
Wonnacott pressed his stethoscope to Paula’s chest. “It’s over.”
I agree that, with the assent of doctors and psychiatrists, people should have the right to get assisted suicide if they just can’t bear living any more, and if they’ve tried all available remedies. But the article details many people who disagree with this—some of them religious. Some ministers whom Paula asked to sit with her while she died simply refused. How callous! In the future, when people realize that MAID for such people is the merciful thing to do, this will become widespread.
*The WaPo reports how Trump is starting to dismantle cases of discrimination based on characteristics like race, and sex:
The Justice Department now is reviewing its entire docket and has already dismissed or terminated “many” cases that were “legally unsupportable” and a product of “weaponization” under the Biden administration, said Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“We will fully enforce civil rights laws in a way that satisfies the ends of justice, not politicization,” she said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The review includes cases and reform agreements forged after years-long investigations that the administration says lacked justification. Civil rights experts estimate that dozens of discrimination cases involving banks, landlords, private employers and school districts could face similar action.
“What we’re seeing is an attempt by the Trump administration to really dismantle a lot of the core tools that we use to ensure equality in the country,” said Amalea Smirniotopoulos, senior policy counsel and co-manager of the Equal Protection Initiative at the Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that has long advocated for the civil rights of Black Americans and other minorities.
. . .At the center of this effort is “disparate impact analysis,” which holds that neutral policies can have discriminatory outcomes even if there was no intent to discriminate. The legal standard stems from Griggs v. Duke Power, the landmark 1971 Supreme Court decision that became a staple of civil rights litigation. In that case, attorneys relied on statistical evidence to show how standardized testing prevented Black employees in North Carolina from advancing at the energy company.
The legal theory has been consistently recognized by the Supreme Court, written into federal regulations and enshrined into employment law by Congress. But President Donald Trump declared it unconstitutional in April, issuing an executive order that kicked off an intense review of civil rights regulations, enforcement actions and settled cases.
At first the Griggs decision would seem insupportable given that colleges are allowed to discriminate against applicants if their test scores are too low. Isn’t that a neutral policy that leads to a discriminatory outcome? And, in fact, the Griggs case did involve a test. However, I can see its point if the “neutral” measure really has nothing to do with the qualifications for actually doing a job. Still, I’m a bit confused why the Court urges colleges to use neutral (race free) measures to discriminate, but prevents it in the private sector.
*The Wall Street Journal notes that Harvard has become a training school for Chinese Communists.
U.S. schools—and one prestigious institution in particular—have long offered up-and-coming Chinese officials a place to study governance, a practice that the Trump administration could end with a new effort to keep out what it says are Chinese students with Communist Party ties.
For decades, the party has sent thousands of mid-career and senior bureaucrats to pursue executive training and postgraduate studies on U.S. campuses, with Harvard University a coveted destination described by some in China as the top “party school” outside the country.
Alumni of such programs include a former vice president and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s top negotiator in trade talks with the first Trump administration.
In an effort announced Wednesday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, U.S. authorities will tighten criteria for visa applications from China and “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
The statement didn’t say how the Trump administration would assess Communist Party ties or what degree of connection would result in revocation of visas. In China, party membership is widely seen as helpful for career advancement—in government and the private sector—and is typically a prerequisite for officials seeking high office.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said Thursday that the U.S. move “seriously damaged the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese students.”
Again I’m in a quandary here. I have no beef with us training Chinese students, and I know how hard it is to identify them as members of the Communist Party. On the other hand, Chinese Communists are basically our enemy. On the third hand, even members of the Party might stay in the U.S., benefitting us, or benefit China in ways that could still benefit us. Readers can (and should) weigh in here.
*As I reported before, Iran has (duh!) continued to secretly enrich uranium to build a bomb, all the while duping morons (e.g., Biden, Trump, and basically all the world) into agreeing that the enriched uranium was for “peaceful purposes.” Now we know the real reason: they’re making bombs!
Iran has continued to produce highly enriched uranium at a pace of roughly one nuclear weapon’s worth a month over the past three months despite talks between Washington and Tehran on a new nuclear deal, the United Nations atomic agency said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a confidential report circulated to member states that Iran had grown its stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium to 408.6 kilograms from 274.8 kilograms in early February, an increase of around 50%. The Wall Street Journal viewed a copy of the report.
That means Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for roughly 10 nuclear weapons, based on IAEA measures of the minimum fissile material required, up from at least six at the time of the last report.
U.S. officials say it could take Iran less than two weeks to convert this highly enriched uranium into enough weapons-grade 90% fissile material for a nuclear weapon.
Iran says its nuclear work is purely peaceful. The U.S. says that Tehran hasn’t decided to build a nuclear bomb but that it would need only a few months to assemble one.
Yet even now Trump is still bargaining with Iran to cease its bomb-making activities, and says that we’re “close to a deal.”
US President Donald Trump on Friday reiterated his belief that Washington was “fairly close” to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran.
“I think we have a chance of making a deal with Iran,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
“They don’t want to be blown up. They would rather make a deal, and I think that could happen in the not-too-distant future,” he continued, adding that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.
That’s a laugh! He’s been bamboozled just like every other recent administration. We should stop bargaining and collaborate with Israel to bomb their nuclear facilities, or at least give them a credible thread and a final warning. If there’s no deal, Iran becomes a nuclear state and Israel is doomed.
*And from the reliable AP “oddities section,” we learn that Brazilians have a craze for lifelike “reborn” dolls. It’s insane!
Videos featuring emotional moments with hyper-realistic baby dolls have sparked both online fascination and political debate in Brazil, with lawmakers even bringing the lifelike dolls into legislatures.
Influencers have staged situations such as birth simulations and strolls in shopping malls with the hand-crafted baby figures, known as “reborn” dolls, creating videos that have gone viral.
In Rio de Janeiro, the city council has passed a bill honoring those who make the lifelike dolls, pending Mayor Eduardo Paes’ signature. Meanwhile, legislators elsewhere across the country have debated fines for those seeking medical help for such dolls, following a video allegedly showing a woman taking one to a hospital.
Here’s a video about them. Oy! These are the updated, AI version of Cabbage Patch dolls:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing entomology:
Andrzej: What are you looking at so intently?Hili: Some little thing is climbing to the top of a blade of grass.
Ja: Czemu się tak przyglądasz?Hili: Mały wspina się na sam szczyt źdźbła trawy.
*******************
From CinEmma:
From Things With Faces: a ghoulish brew:
From America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. I think they mean “Angus.”
Masis is still quiet. Here’s something Martina Navratilova tweeted; more women cheated out of medals:
Women and girls are punished no matter what they do in this misogynistic world… https://t.co/3QtvASgvPG
— Martina Navratilova (@Martina) June 1, 2025
From Malcolm. Look at those reaction times!
Cat reaction time and precision
pic.twitter.com/Y37g8sfcLS— Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) April 6, 2025
From Luana:
Groups like SJP and PYM talk openly about fighting on a front in the war against Israel. They are clear that they’re trying to undermine Israel and America from within the “belly of the beast.” They know whose side they’re on. https://t.co/7etSLiDOPV
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) May 30, 2025
Two from my feed. This is an intriguing one:
Emily Damari had to hide that she’s gay while held hostage by Hamas— because they would’ve killed her.
It’s Pride Month.
If your “queer solidarity” includes Hamas, you’re not fighting for gay rights, you’re betraying them. pic.twitter.com/w1n5muqhhT
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) May 31, 2025
A Narnia entrance:
Grandpa made himself a Narnia door to enter his home library. pic.twitter.com/snikl10y9R
— The Figen (@TheFigen_) May 31, 2025
One I inserted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. First: AI videos:
AI reality: if it’s online we can’t believe our eyes or our earsThis isn’t the future, this is now thanks to Gemini / Google’s Veo 3
— Katherine T. Tyson (@katherinettyson.bsky.social) 2025-06-01T12:48:36.228Z
Matthew says, “Look at the wings.” Yep, they’re homologous to our hands.
Fliegender Flughund #travelphotography#indonesia flying fox #NaturePhotography
— Mathias 🕊️🦋 (@swaninga.bsky.social) 2025-05-26T17:20:13.544Z
No, the “disparate impact” doctrine is about enforcing equity (equal outcomes) not equality. The notion (which derives from court rulings, not from legislation) is that the only explanation for unequal outcomes is discrimination, therefore that if any racial group fails to measure up to any meritocratic standard to the same extent as other groups, then that meritocratic standard cannot be accepted.
But, it’s just a fact that (for example) Asian Americans will pass a meritocratic standard at a greater rate than (for example) black Americans.
Recently in New York the courts awarded $1.8 billion to black Americans who had failed the competency test to be a teacher at a higher-than-average rate. There are many similar suits in the pipeline.
Thus, America needs to either: abandon any meritocratic requirements at all in hiring for teachers, doctors, engineers, air-traffic controllers and everything else, or, overturn the “disparate impact” doctrine and accept unequal group outcomes. (Heather Mac Donald has written a whole book on this, see for example here.)
This is one area where Trump’s team is entirely in the right.
This story about disparate impacts and the hiring of air traffic controllers is extraordinary.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
I disagree.
I am a lawyer, albeit not an employment lawyer.
The “disparate impact” doctrine is NOT about enforcing equality of outcome (“equity”, as you defined it) – it is about whether an apparently even test has a disparate impact on a protected group, and the doctrine is designed to achieve equality of opportunity. The holding of the Supreme Court in Griggs:
“Held:
1. The Act requires the elimination of artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barriers to employment that operate invidiously to discriminate on the basis of race, and if, as here, an employment practice that operates to exclude Negroes cannot be shown to be related to job performance, it is prohibited, notwithstanding the employer’s lack of discriminatory intent.
2. The Act does not preclude the use of testing or measuring procedures, but it does proscribe giving them controlling force unless they are demonstrably a reasonable measure of job performance.”
Alternatively, see Oyez’ summary (from the link to the case in the original post):
“After noting that Title VII of the Act intended to achieve equality of employment opportunities, the Court held that Duke’s standardized testing requirement prevented a disproportionate number of African-American employees from being hired by, and advancing to higher-paying departments within, the company. Neither the high school graduation requirement nor the two aptitude tests was directed or intended to measure an employee’s ability to learn or perform a particular job or category of jobs within the company. The Court concluded that the subtle, illegal, purpose of these requirements was to safeguard Duke’s long-standing policy of giving job preferences to its white employees.”
Tests reasonably related to job performance are fine, tests unrelated to it are not.
I would still support Coel’s view. Even by your formulation (which I agree from my own reading elsewhere is correct) disparate impact should be discarded as a cudgel to beat employers with. The employer should be able to set whatever hiring criteria he wants, as long as they don’t explicitly discriminate by race etc. If he knows, or first discovers when the government sues him, that fewer Negroes will meet the criteria, so what? If I say I want a high school diploma and no arrest record, this will exclude many Negroes, perhaps more now than back when disparate impact was first conceived. So what?
The government can say that these criteria aren’t relevant to job performance. I say they are, and it’s my workplace, not the government’s. Besides even if I did pay a consultant (at great expense) to come up with character and aptitude tests meticulously tailored to all the jobs at my firm, the government would still sue me, because of their disparate impact, to show 1) how they were relevant and 2) that I wasn’t giving them undue emphasis….because dammitall, I still wasn’t hiring enough Negroes.
I know you are just clarifying the law for us and not advocating for it, but man oh man that is perverse. If President Trump is taking a chainsaw to this edifice I’m all for it, too.
These doctrines start off reasonably and then over time suffer “mission drift”. In practice nowadays the doctrine means that, if different racial groups have different failure rates, then instantly the burden of proof shifts to the employer to show that everything about their hiring standards is absolutely necessary. In practice that’s a hard thing to do. Take the example of standardised tests to qualify to become a school teacher, how are you actually going to produce hard evidence that the test is necessary and set at the right level, and in particular that a candidate who just scrapes a pass will then do an acceptable job of teaching children, whereas a candidate who borderline fails would not do so? In the real world, and given all the other factors that go into a teacher’s performance, actually evidencing that would be hard. And yet we surely agree that we want some meritocratic standard for who gets employed to teach kids, and there then needs to be a pass/fail threshold.
“Absolutely necessary” is not a standard used in disparate impact cases, as the appellate case law makes quite clear. The actual standard amounts to reasonably related to job performance. r
If Germany were still a Nazi country, would we be ok with Germans coming to Harvard? Why do we treat Communists differently? They’ve killed a lot more people.
Do you know what they ask immigrants on the entrance test?
Are you a member of the _____ party.
Guess which party IS the answer, and we can wonder why a certain OTHER party is nowhere to be found.
On the Narnia library, I see a lot of shelves but not a lot of books. I do see a bar, though.
Seeing the adult male official apparently sending the two girls packing at the high jump podium ceremony reminded me of the old codger officials at an AAU power lifting meet in 1967, who would not let a wounded Viet nam vet compete in the benchpress event. He had lost both of his legs in battle and thus weighed much less than the typical competitor with similar upper body build. The meet stopped while the officials conferred. We fellow lifters were glad he had found lifting as a therapy and welcomed him in any weight class. The vet remarked of the officials something to the effect that they act like he had gotten his legs blown off just so he could win a weightlifting competition! After all these years, I cannot recall the final resolution, but it was not the only time in my life that I have seen officials mar the joy of athletes in competition.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things. -Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet (2 Jun 1840-1928)
+1
The steaks photo looks AI-generated to me. None of the other text is readable. The shapes of the “steaks” are weirdly inconsistent. There’s something very wrong with the tray at the bottom left. The layout of the shelves doesn’t make any sense (look at the top! look all along the left side!). If this is meant to be in the US (“America’s Decline into Idiocy”…) then how come those (oddly unreadable) prices all have three digits after the decimal point?
I agree. Looking beyond the “Anus” labels shows no readable text.
+1
Also, the biggest label in the upper right spans two packages!
It’s obvious to me now that this is AI. There are several glitches in the matrix.
Strange and misspelled labels posted as memes to get Likes online are often (and maybe usually) just photoshopped or AI.
Maybe they decided to price their steaks the same way gas stations price gas. The steak would be $3.29POINT9 per pound !
I had my say on the CCP infiltration the other day. I admit it is a miserable scenario – the exercise of discernment is, I think, the only guide here… ?
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/30/friday-hili-dialogue-528/#comment-2144063
…. I’d add one more thing :
China is now running a dialectical synthesis of Communism with .. anyone? Anyone? Fascism because .. anyone? Anyone? Communism cannot produce goods, so the market had to be opened up. (couldn’t resist some Ferris Bueller’s Day Off humor there…) James Lindsay’s / New Discourses “Communism 3.0” podcast or The Evilution of Communism (sic – and hey, no way to read it, James?! WTF) discuss the devils in the details of the hybrid monster hiding in our midst.
In other commentary, I love that bat photo!
I have often thought that foreign nationals who come to the United States to go to college or obtain an advanced degree should be required to stay in the United States and work for a specific time after graduation, say, five years. This would allow the U.S. to obtain a greater benefit and would force foreign nationals to wait five years before taking the knowledge they obtained back home and using it to compete against us. Many would probably stay in the U.S. beyond the required five-years and make permanent homes here, enriching both themselves and the country.
Maybe even give them their own housing areas so they can be more closely watched and discouraged from leaving. Maybe have them sign contracts which are torn on a jagged line to help prove the authenticity of the two halves.
Medical killing (lethal injection is not “assisted suicide”, although that too is legal in Canada but less commonly done) doesn’t require the involvement of psychiatrists. (There are nowhere near enough psychiatrists in Canada to vet these requests.) Nor is the “assent” of physicians required. Rather, doctors are compelled to kill patients who request it. Our only role is to verify that the patient’s condition falls within the medical meaning of the exemptions that Parliament has set out, and from time to time amended, to the law of murder. (In parallel, the offence of assisting or facilitating suicide is also excused if carried out according to medical practice.). If the patient qualifies legally and requests to be killed we have to do it.
You don’t see this dimension from reading the Criminal Code, a federal statute. Medicine is regulated by the provinces. The licensing regulators set out policy on this and other aspects of medical practice. A doctor with moral objections to killing people, or to killing people who aren’t near natural death, must still make an “effective” referral to a doctor who will, or risk losing his licence. If there is no euthanologist at a convenient traveling distance for the patient, the Ontario regulator helpfully provides the recipe for the drugs on its website to extinguish the excuse, “I don’t have the skill or training to do this.”
Everyone has the right to die, even many minors and most crazy people, whether by their own hand or by forgoing treatment or the necessities of life. That is settled law and ethics. The issue in medical killing is whether doctors may kill on request and whether they must kill. The law says they may and the licensing authorities say they must.
One psychiatrist was quoted by the reporter expressing concern about lack of gatekeeping. “It’s odd to me. There’s no other branch of medicine where we just do what a patient wants without asking, ‘Is this the right decision?’” Neither the psychiatrist nor the reporter recognized that this is exactly what they do across the street at SickKids Hospital in the “gender clinic”.
Does Canada have a policy re the elderly who are bed-ridden, nappied and have dementia? Modern medicine often prolongs life beyond its ‘quality time’. There should be some sort of way to ‘get out’ of being a cabbage in a nappie/diaper.
Good question. The only “policy” about that is you have to be yourself mentally capable of consenting to euthanasia, so you can change your mind literally at the last second. Euthanasia is not a solution to advanced dementia, particularly since such patients aren’t suffering in any way they can tell us.
If medicine has prolonged anyone’s life past ‘quality time’, it is always because the person said she wanted the treatment, or a family member wanted it on her behalf. Make sure your children know what your own definition of ‘quality time’ is. You can lose the ability to communicate your wishes and preferences quite literally in a heartbeat. The doctors can’t decide for your children. If they say, “I dunno. Do everything I guess,” that’s what will happen.
I find it really sad. In particular with bipolar disorder, the patient may not even believe that in their depressive state they may one day deteriorate to the point that they will do basically anything to kill themselves. Yet with appropriate medication, they would be rescued. A friend of a friend died exactly this way, by hanging herself in her apartment. My friend (also bipolar) was devastated because she talked to her friend before, and could not convince her to treat this possibility seriously. I think in these cases, making it easier to achieve death is a particularly bad idea. We always have to keep in mind that the law is a blunt tool, and regulatory body decisions frequently fall short too.
Re: the antisemitic attack in Boulder.
Remember when the likes of PZ Meyers, Hemant Mehta, and Rebecca Watson were banging on about “stochastic terrorism”? Well, they’re all very quiet about the latest examples of stochastic terrorism aimed at Jewish – or people perceived to be Jewish/Israeli/pro-Israel. In fact, none of them covered the murder of Sarah Lynn Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky at all.
In contrast, PZ was slobbering with excitement over Luigi Mangione and other acts of “resistance”. They’ve attempted to justify this and have encouraged this.
The NYT Magazine article about Paula’s suicide emphasized it was hard for her to get medical help for her illnesses. It touched briefly on the history of alcohol and drug abuse in Paula’s family, and how Paula’s own mental illness prevented her from accessing what medical help was available (missing appointments etc.) or turning to bullshit practitioners who took money she didn’t really have (energy healers, acupuncturists).
Because it’s the NYT I suspect much more of Paula’s tragic story is driven by her untreated mental illness and not by wait times to see specialist physicians. The Times and many civil rights orgs have long opposed involuntary commitment for mentally ill homeless people (Paula herself barely avoided homelessness), insisted that the anguish of these folks is downstream of their economic and social problems, and demanded “housing first” policies that fail for most mental ill homeless people who can’t manage a household or anything else until their mental illness is controlled.
The same civil rights focus leaves mentally ill people homeless and vulnerable on the streets (rather than safe in involuntary treatment facilities) and in desperate need of assistance to kill themselves to resolve their physical and psychic pain (rather than in medical treatment). I’m opposed to coercion but filled with empathy for mentally ill people who can’t recognize their own best interest. It seems like such a waste to not compell someone like Paula into a treatment facility that would treat her addictions and depression first, and give her a chance to not want to die. But I concede there is a shortage of such facilities in Canada (we closed all our mental hospitals too). And maybe cases like Paula’s are just the price we pay for allowing mentally ill people to have the same right we all want to have to not be coerced or forced into treatment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/obituaries/joyce-brown-billie-boggs-overlooked.html
Pathologising inconvenient behaviour has a long and sorry history of abuse, across cultures. Consider the Soviet treatment of dissidents for mental illness. Or the once common use of ECT to manage various sorts of difficult non-normal people. Or legislating that Trump Derangement Syndrome is a clinical mental illness. Or the general level of severe abuse found in many so-called asylums.
I strongly expect that if we as a society actually considered the welfare of the inconveniently non-normal to be a priority issue then there is a lot we could do. But we don’t.
Yes agree pathologizing inconvenient or political behaviour is bad, and there was severe abuse in asylums. So caution is needed before involuntary commitment. But a lot of inconvenient behaviour (and its awful social consequences) arises from schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and other treatable cluster B diseases that are pathological (not just pathologizable) and most important are ~treatable. Should we compel (forcibly confine) someone with those diseases to get treatment before we agree to require a physician to participate in her suicide? Especially as Leslie notes if the physician doesn’t want to help someone kill herself? I’m not sure but sometimes I think we should. Similar to trying all possible psychiatric and psychological treatments for gender dysphoria before a surgeon considers cutting off healthy body parts.
I agree in principle. But there would need to be some due process where the involuntary patient is adequately represented in front of a (hopefully) neutral judge or arbiter. Such processes are resource-intensive, and we currently seem to lack the resources to adequately enable even current legally-mandated due processes. We could if it were a priority, but it isn’t.
There are IMO other, non-judicial processes which could be used, but these too would require currently scarce resources (including political will).
Saw one of those dolls last week in Thailand. It even moved its head to follow me as I walked past. If it was real it was the creepiest looking child I’ve ever seen.
M3gan would not be amused.