I don't know squat, and neither do you, except what's been reported, which is that the person asking for help hasn't given up. As her husband, it's really his decision. You really, really don't get a say in it. Your pet theories about euthanasia aren't relevant to the discussion. If she'd put in a DNR order, she'd be dead now, and I'm sure this was discussed—someone with a condition like that, making decisions like that, would have been asked.

A massive medical setback like this can be severely depressing, so simply asking, right now, at this awful time, "do you want to live or die" is not necessarily going to get the answer from her that she'd give in a week's time, after taking stock of the situation. Even if she wanted to die right now, they'd wait a bit to give her a chance to change her mind. Why the rush? You're letting your ideology get in the way of real life. Being on a respirator yet still conscious may or may not be worse than being dead. None of us here in this discussion know.

If there is a creator of the universe, why wouldn't he/she/it listen to you? If there is not, why argue about it? When something terrible like this happens, people care, and they want to do something, but there's nothing they can really do. So they pray, if that feels right to them. It really doesn't matter whether it works, or whether somebody is listening. It's just what we do.

Wow. Just wow.

Life is suffering. We can all certainly avoid a great deal of suffering by killing ourselves painlessly now, whether we are locked in or perfectly healthy. But life is sweet as well. Dying forecloses on the possibility of further sweetness. This person clearly hasn't given up on further sweetness. This is not a good time to get into an argument about your favorite political hobby horse. I won't say that you suck as a human being, because I'm sure you have some legitimate and possibly heartbreaking reason for having said what you said. But context is everything, and this isn't the place.

I've seen no evidence to support such an accusation against Senator Leahy. Not every politician is a philanderer.

That's not a bad spin. I hope you're right. I have a lot of respect for Leahy (he's one of my senators) but I'm sometimes frustrated by what he does with respect to patent law, and I was really frustrated with what he was doing with copyright law back in the days of SOPA/PIPA. I think he's learned a bit from that experience, but I"m not sure. I still remember watching Batman: The Dark Knight Rises, seeing his cameo and feeling sick to my stomach at the utter tone-deafness that that appearance represented. Sigh.

People who generalize are all idiots. And if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: nobody likes a person who exaggerates.

It appears to be the case that several other democracies are working better, but that doesn't mean that there's a path from our democracy as it is now to a democracy like those. If nothing else, the culture is different. It's easy to think of these things as narratives with clear outcomes, but the reality is that we are where we are, and we move incrementally or discontinuously from there. Incremental change is a lot safer than discontinuous change, because we get to evaluate whether we are going in the right direction at each increment; at a discontinuity, we just have to take a stab in the dark and hope for the best.

That worked out pretty well in Iceland, but Iceland is more the exception than the rule.

Actually, your comment is moronic, because it implies that the right thing to do is cut down the tree, by which I assume you mean destroy what's left of the democracy. What do you think will arise in its place? Something better? Read your fucking history. The right thing to do is take this seriously and get active. It's worked in the past, and it will work again. Burning down the house is not the right way to solve this problem.

It's hard to understand how Leahy could have been forced into shelving the bill. He could have been arm-twisted into it, or he could have been predisposed to do it, but forced? How would that happen?

This sort of rhetoric from people who would rather be angry than change things is why we have 17% turnouts in the primaries. Stop it, or you are the problem. You can comfort yourself by blaming those bastards in Washington, or the Trilateral commission, or the Illuminati, but the blame lies squarely at your feet.

On the contrary. When you vote for someone who can't win, you have wasted your vote—essentially, you are voting for "either of the two bad choices". If you want to get a candidate who isn't a bad choice to win, you have to get that candidate to the point where they can win, not tilt at windmills after it's too late. It may allow you some smug satisfaction to say "I didn't vote for either of those bastards," but the reality is that if you didn't vote at all, you let them win, and if you didn't choose one or the other, you didn't choose. That's the cold, hard math.

Change doesn't happen at the time of the election. It comes from the grass roots, well before the election, or it doesn't come at all.

Obamacare is a Republican health care package that was enacted into law by a Republican administration in Massachusetts and was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation. You seem to have a lot of energy to throw out chaff, but why don't you deal with that one before we go on to the next one?

Pretty much the same on drugs and the UK. Abortion isn't a liberal/conservative issue—it's an issue that politicians state an opinion on that agrees with their base; what they actually think is anybody's guess. Communism? He's taking a pretty firm stance with Putin, who appears to be trying to revive the worst aspects of the Soviet Union, but of course that's complicated by issues that are new in the intervening years. Unions? Pretty much the same.

It's interesting though that you didn't ask about monetary policy, regulation, energy policy, or any major issues—you really tightened down on some pretty minor stuff.

No, we shouldn't. It's like the trolly dilemma. Ethicists who are too in love with their own intellect tend to think that it's answerable, but it's not, because nobody is ever actually in a situation where they know the potential outcomes in the way the trolly dilemma needs them to. A super-complicated ethical algorithm is actually more likely to cause needless injury than prevent it, because it will be failure-prone and will often guess wrong. Better to do the simplest "don't run into things" algorithm you can manage. This is practicable in real life because the computer has a tremendous amount of data about things that are available to hit. Suppose there is a pedestrian close enough to the curb to jump out in front of the car. Chances are that the car knows the pedestrian is there, and what the car should be doing is making sure that there is room for it to stop if the pedestrian does jump out. If you look at the recent Google car demo, that's exactly what it does.

Really, you should write an article about all the fun people will have dancing with cars that have no choice but to slow down to avoid hitting them. It will be the next bit anti-1%er protest fad.

Think of it as evolution in action. But seriously, the car will be able to see your dog and avoid it, whereas a driver won't, because the driver doesn't have eyes down at the wheel level on the side of the car.