Journal the_mad_poster's Journal: Twenty One to Nothing [UPDATED] 20
[Update at the end]
So an appellate court in Atlanta has again ruled against the parents of Theresa schiavo, upholding lower court rulings that she would not want to live in her present state and that there is no compelling evidence that Michael Schiavo's actions are unwarranted or that he is unfit to make the decision.
And yet the braying continues from a bizarre subset of the population arguing some odd "right to life" angle.
The "arguments", such as they are, basically boil down to a few bizarre points.
1. Michael Schiavo abused his wife.
If this can be proven, which has not been proven to date, then there is reason to believe that Michael Schiavo is not fit to be the legal guardian of Theresa Schiavo. What I want to know is this: if it's so obvious, why haven't the parents brought this to the attention of the legal system, and why hasn't the legal system not only removed his guardianship status, but jailed him?
The only obvious thing here is the answer to that last question: there's no, or insufficient, evidence that any such abuse occurred. Attempts to determine what, if any, abuse occurred have all turned up nothing. The allegations didn't even surface until the case really blew up for the first time a few years ago when they started claiming that bone scans - which would still exist today - showed evidence of abuse. If that's the case, then the doctor who took them has certainly been subpoenaed and the scans seized as evidence, and obviously nothing has come of it.
I could make allegations that anybody is abusing anybody else, but nobody would believe me until I presented some sort of convincing evidence that I was telling the truth. Somehow, that reasoning doesn't apply in this situation to these looney tunes on the fringe of this case, and they have no problem effectively slandering a man who's watching his wife die in a hospital bed. What compassionate individuals we have here. What good Christians.
2. Theresa Schiavo could recover through therapy.
This is, by far, the most unrealistic tripe pushed by the mainly conservative base arguing for the reinsertion of the feeding tube.
I'm not saying that they're "dumb" because there is a difference between a lack of intelligence and ignorance. You cannot really overcome being less intelligent because it's just a limitation of your body. I'm never going to compete in one of those strong man competitions no matter how hard I try because my body just isn't built that way. Less intelligent people are like that - they're limited in their ability to think.
However, while conservatives aren't necessarily "dumb", they ARE less educated, by and large. They're less likely to have a college education, they're less likely to read challenging material, and they're less likely to have a job that requires more knowledge.
This is an example of that ignorance manifesting itself in a dangerous way. An example of the apparent fear many hardline conservatives have of educating themselves.
Most of Theresa Schiavo's cerebral cortex is DEAD, DECAYED, ROTTED, LIQUIFIED MATTER. You could drill a hole in her head, stick a straw in and drink it (which would be really gross and probably dangerous, but it's true) and you wouldn't hurt her. It is NOT possible to recover from that. When she collapsed, her oxygen was cut off for so long that HUGE portions of her brain DIED AND ROTTED in her head. The odds that there is enough living material left in that soupy mess to even recover the most simplistic ability to process information - to bring her back to the functionality of, for example, a newborn - are so ridiculously steep that she'd probably first get hit by lightning - indoors - twice, AND win the lottery a couple of times. The only reason there's a chance at all is because of the anamalous nature of human knowledge: you can't know what can't happen, so you can't LOGICALLY say that she CAN'T recover. It would be like saying "Well, Kang and Kodos from the Simpsons could come to life from someone's TV and enslave the whole human race". Yes, it COULD happen because you can't know what CAN'T happen, but nobody is going to be arguing that we destroy all the TVs on the planet anytime soon to prevent it.
Arguing that Theresa Schiavo could recover is just as ridiculous.
3. People should be given every opportunity to live.
This is an opinion, and not one that's supported by thousands and thousands of years of precedented human behavior. Mercy killing is a fairly common occurrence on pitched battlefields when it's recognized that attempting to save a victim of war would be a completely futile attempt. We recognize that in some situations there is no hope of even partial recovery for an injured human being, and that whatever time they have left - hours, days, weeks - would be spent suffering. American soldiers made hard choices in Vietnam to that effect, executing mortally wounded Vietnamese civilians: men, women, and children, when they had no way of treating the wounds, in order to alleviate what had become a short life that would be lived only in excrutiating pain.
Terminal cancer patients routinely reject intensive, last-effort treatments, choosing to live their remaining time in some level of comfort rather than suffering months of agonizing pain knowing that it is almost a forgone conclusion that they will not survive.
Humanity has rarely chosen to force people to suffer in a futile effort to prolong a doomed life. Yet, the lunatics on the side of the Schindlers have no problem doing that now for some reason.
4. Speciousness and Inacurracy
There are several arguments floating around that are completely specious or inaccurate:
- Michael Schiavo bedded another woman early in his wife's treatment.
- Theresa Schiavo can move by [various means], breath, etc.
- Theresa Schiavo was a catholic.
- Michael Schiavo wants his wife to die for money.
#1: This is really quite irrelevant. We have never recognized infidelity as automatically terminating a marriage, although it is a very good reason to take someone for a ride in court when you divorce them over it. The only way it will become an issue is if Michael Schiavo decides to sue himself, on behalf of his wife, for divorce (which he could, technically, do).
The same people, generally, who will happily argue for all of the important protections of marriage being retained will, in the same breath, argue that those protections be removed in this specific case because it is an inconvenient barrier to their current designs. Not only is there no consistency as they show a willingness to arbitrarily adjust their beliefs to a given purpose, there is no legal standing for their argument either.
#2: This has been rehashed so many times it's not even funny, though it is another example of conservative ignorance and the danger people who fear education pose. The brain stem of Theresa Schiavo is completely intact and properly functioning. There are two types of movement: voluntary and involuntary. The former requires active cognitive direction to perform. You must voluntarily move your arm to catch a baseball. The latter requires only the proper signals - against your will - to be sent in order for them to occur. For example, you cannot stop your heart from beating. This is involuntary movement. There is some overlap here and there. We've learned, for example, to control breathing and orgasms to some extent. However, you can only control the former until you cease conscious thought (the purpose is quite simple: we've developed a need to hold our breath in unfavorable environments such as underwater, so we've figured out how to override the involuntary movement with conscious thought - the instant conscious thought ceases, however, the circuit on unconscious control closes and we begin to breathe again). The latter can be controlled now (it wasn't always subject to voluntary override), but only to a limited extent. Furthermore, people scream, flail about, and cry all the time without intending to do so. These can be involuntarily driven movements if you're not conscious, as anyone who's spent a sufficient amount of time sleeping next to a spouse can attest.
#3: I have two words: "so what"? First off, claiming allegiance to a religion doesn't really mean so much these days. I know lots of people who say they're Christian, I can think of one that can name all the books of the bible (and he's an old pastor), and none that actually follow the rules of the Sabbath properly. Not only that, but, more importantly, 21 courts, now, have reviewed this case and come to the conclusion that she'd not want to "live" like this. It seems to me that if the parents had evidence of her devout Catholicism, that would have swayed at least one of them, but they all said the same thing: she'd want the tube out.
#4: This one doesn't hold water at all when you look at the FACTS. Not only did Schiavo keep his wife on support for a decade, paying all the bills, he isn't the one that decided the tube should be yanked. He could have just told them to pull it thirteen years ago if he'd wanted to keep all the money, but he didn't. He waited for a decade and then he petitioned a Florida court to collect all the evidence everyone had - his, doctors, parents, sister, friends, etc. - and rule as an impartial third party whether or not she'd want to have the tube taken out. The COURT issued the opinion that Michael accepted and acted on: she'd want the tube removed because she wouldn't have wanted to live in her current state.
And, In Conclusion
In conclusion, there's really no issue here. Michael Schiavo, if you just look at all the FACTS of the case, doesn't appear to have done anything wrong except, arguably, have an affair. If he'd wanted money, he could have just pulled the plug way back when he won the malpractice suit. If he was hiding something, he could've pulled the plug nearly fifteen years ago and she'd be rotting in the ground now, rather than laying around in a hospital bed as a huge piece of evidence.
In addition, it's quite clear that Theresa Schiavo, short of a miraculous advance of science allowing us to regrow and imprint functional brain tissue, is not recovering.
This is just another slap in the face to americans from the right, really. Bush and Congress are politicizing the issue in a frighteningly abusive attempt at a power grab, right wingers are running around saying "liberals want to kill this woman", and almost nobody is bothering to look at the medical evidence and court opinions on the matter.
I keep telling you... this is what happens when a country decides that anybody on any side of any issue who tries to think things through rather than just regurgitating PR and spin is an "elitist". This is what happens when schools train answer keys rather than critical thinking.
Country of drooling boobs, I tell you....
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Update, 12:46 EST (3.23.2005)
Oh for the love of.....
"Let it not be said that Terri was starved with a Republican majority in the [state] House, the Senate and the governor's mansion," [Rev. Patrick Mahoney] said [to Tom Lee, Florida Senate President].
The governor (Jeb Bush) apparently agreed with the sentiment.
Now the Schindlers, unquestionably having gone batshit insane over the fact that what made their daughter their daughter is now nothing but a mess of soup in her cranium, are trying to push the Florida legislature to AGAIN illegally intervene AND they are petitioning the Supreme Court a FOURTH time to hear the case.
I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:2)
But on to hubby.
No doubt the first few years this fukker was a Saint. A total Saint. Did everything he could. Now clearly he has lost hope. And rigthfully so.
The problem?
Not the new "wife" and kids. Not even the money.
Why is he only NOW telling us she told him she wouldn't want to live like that? That, I find very unnerving. (And by NOW I mean within the last 2 years.)
Re:I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:1)
It's not necessarily that he's never said it, it's just that until the parents started this endless appeals process it wasn't being abused by the media and government. Remember - this circus is starting up on the tail end of the Schiavo family fiasco, so anything he did or didn't say or do before the press started flogging it in 2001 (which was probably w
Re:I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:2)
1) Make Living Will a Water Cooler topic
2) Open the Youth In Asia Work Can
Please elucidate (Score:2)
She cannot feel pain, thanks to replacement of dead brain by soupy spinal fluid in her cranial cavity.
She is little more than a body with a fully-functioning autonomous nervious system, and cannot "feel." When you say an action is cruel [reference.com], that means the recipient can experience 'suffering'. Can she experience suffering with her lights being all burned out?
Re:I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:1)
I do not have enough medical knowledge to judge whether or not this person has a chance of recovery, so I must trust the opinions of the doctors who have examined her. If the situation is hopeless as they say, then she should be allowed to die as quickly, painlessly, and with as much dignity as possible.
The circus that this case has become is the opposite of this. Her suffing has been prolonged. She has been paraded on the media wearing makeup, obviously applied for effect, and her involuntary smiles and c
Re:I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:1)
I don't know much about medicine either, but I know that if brain tissue dies and rots we can't recover it, and I know that if your cerebral cortex is what dies and rots, and most or all of it dies and rots, you'll never be anything even remotely approaching an active, thinking human being again.
I certainly wouldn't want to be kept alive for years in a vegetative state, burdening my loved ones with medi
Re:I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:2)
Actually, make that the last seven years.
My assumption is that he didn't know / hadn't yet accepted the fact that she couldn't recover for several years. He had intensive experimental therapy done on her for several years after her collapse.
So, while there was still hope he tried therapy. When he realized there was no hope of recovery, he followed thr
Re:I don't really see this as a Left Right issue (Score:2)
I didn't know that you lived in Staten Island...Cool!
Here's what happens in similar cases... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Here's what happens in similar cases... (Score:1)
The first is that I tell them, in as deadly serious a manner as possible, that I was involved in a horrific motorcycle accident, and had lost a significant amount of cranial tissue. I therefore insisted that they send me someplace where
sabbath (Score:2)
There are no Christian groups that follow all the rules of the sabbath, and most follow none at all. Seventh Day Adventist, Baptist, etc. vainly try to follow some of the law.
There is a very good reason for this. The Apostle Paul clearly lays out in his letter to the Galatian church how obedience to the law never saved anyone.
Some churches have confused Sunday and Saturday, and they try to follow a patchwork of ideas from the Old Testament law, but it i
Interesting (Score:2)
I found this [about.com] while researching the "Nobel Prize Nominated" doctor I kept hearing about who said that Teri could have some sort of recovery with treatment. When I did a search on Google news, I found that just about every article that mentioned his name was from either a known right-wing press outlet or a religious one. I'm learly of trusting information when it is only found on biased news sites. If the page I linked to is true, it really gives me serious doubts about some of the things I've been heari
Re:Interesting (Score:1)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Re:Interesting (Score:2)
Heh. Yesterday I *accidentally* read a similar "Insightful" (LOL) post by some idiot a who offered the following bit of (lol) "Logic"
1) Those "Demoncraps"[sic] are out to starve that poor woman
2) Stalin starved the Russian populace
3) Ero, "Di
Congress has nothing better to do (Score:1)
Re:Congress has nothing better to do (Score:2)
Family values? (Score:2)
(Relevant satire here.) [bojack.org]
Re:Family values? (Score:1)