RE: Cash for vasectomy....
October 22, 2010 at 7:16 pm
(This post was last modified: October 22, 2010 at 7:25 pm by Existentialist.)
This is in answer to everyone from Post #55 of this thread onwards as I haven't had many chances to answer posts in the last couple of days. Sorry to batch you all up like this - let me know if I've missed you out!
Attempts to de-nazify eugenics on the basis of superficial information sources, particularly citing such dubious authorities as Wikipedia, are convincing evidence of considerable emotional immaturity of de-nazification's main protagonists in this thread. This is not the first time that the political right in these pages have shown a failure to appreciate the ways in which all the words people use carry personal meanings based on legitimate political passions, subjective impressions and deeply-felt individual experience that no approximation to objective definition can emulate. The fact that this thread is still going strong having briskly swept aside some juvenile attempts a few days ago by some right-wingers to demonstrate the oh-so-horrific dangers of allowing people to use their own words is a testament to the value of personal freedom of expression against vicious reactionary censorship.
It is undeniable by anyone with an ounce of sense that eugenics became inextricably tangled with the nazis after 1933 and remains so to this day. Attempts to intellectually separate eugenics from the nazi experiment invariably arise from far-right motives. Support for the £200 bribe for reproductive surgery can only come from people who think about ethics in the same pitilessly concrete and ruthlessly logical, yet dehumanised and emotionless way that the 1930's eugenicists prided themselves in, many of whom were scientists. If the result of the relentless dictionary-thumping and demands for scientific evidence that never cease on these forums is that the rest of us "have to" stop referring to the undeniable marriage of eugenics and nazism, a marriage to which no wikipedia-loving amateur can plausibly grant a divorce, there can be no better case that dictionaries and encyclopedias should once and for all be thrown smartly in the trash can so that Left can talk to Right using words of our choice, instead of being compulsorily channeled through the notoriously inadequate cipher of the OED, Dictionary.Com, Wikipedia or any other relatively unimportant publication whose purpose was, in fact, only ever to inform, not to dictate, the political and ethical issues of the day.
Paying a person with drug problems £200 to be sterilised through an operation that is reversible only if the Tory spending review deems you deserving, only if you are assertive enough to demand the reversal and only if you are organised enough to attend the appropriate clinic on the appropriate day is hardly a convincing description of reversibility. On the medical side, the major personal and life-changing decision to consent to a vasectomy has been trivialised as the equivalent of root canal work. Show me a root canal filling on a healthy tooth that has a 100% success rate of reversal with full replacement of the nerve, pulp, dentine and tooth enamel, available on the NHS, and I will increase by a small fraction the respect that I have for that argument, which at the moment is zero. Let's instead have a look at the current commercial cost of vasectomy reversal. Here's one link, for example. 'Most vasectomy reversal centers charge between $7,000 and $10,000'. My taxes are supposed to pay for that, when the patient underwent the initial procedure as the result of a bribe? I don't think so.
I agree with Eilonnwy, this bribe is an attempt to control someone else's reproductive choices through coerced sterilization of people at their most vulnerable. I think it's a disgusting, repulsive, right-wing nazi con-trick, and the irony is that when its victims start settling with the NHS out of court, I'll be the one footing the bill. So don't involve me in your childlike word games. I oppose these payments.
Attempts to de-nazify eugenics on the basis of superficial information sources, particularly citing such dubious authorities as Wikipedia, are convincing evidence of considerable emotional immaturity of de-nazification's main protagonists in this thread. This is not the first time that the political right in these pages have shown a failure to appreciate the ways in which all the words people use carry personal meanings based on legitimate political passions, subjective impressions and deeply-felt individual experience that no approximation to objective definition can emulate. The fact that this thread is still going strong having briskly swept aside some juvenile attempts a few days ago by some right-wingers to demonstrate the oh-so-horrific dangers of allowing people to use their own words is a testament to the value of personal freedom of expression against vicious reactionary censorship.
It is undeniable by anyone with an ounce of sense that eugenics became inextricably tangled with the nazis after 1933 and remains so to this day. Attempts to intellectually separate eugenics from the nazi experiment invariably arise from far-right motives. Support for the £200 bribe for reproductive surgery can only come from people who think about ethics in the same pitilessly concrete and ruthlessly logical, yet dehumanised and emotionless way that the 1930's eugenicists prided themselves in, many of whom were scientists. If the result of the relentless dictionary-thumping and demands for scientific evidence that never cease on these forums is that the rest of us "have to" stop referring to the undeniable marriage of eugenics and nazism, a marriage to which no wikipedia-loving amateur can plausibly grant a divorce, there can be no better case that dictionaries and encyclopedias should once and for all be thrown smartly in the trash can so that Left can talk to Right using words of our choice, instead of being compulsorily channeled through the notoriously inadequate cipher of the OED, Dictionary.Com, Wikipedia or any other relatively unimportant publication whose purpose was, in fact, only ever to inform, not to dictate, the political and ethical issues of the day.
Paying a person with drug problems £200 to be sterilised through an operation that is reversible only if the Tory spending review deems you deserving, only if you are assertive enough to demand the reversal and only if you are organised enough to attend the appropriate clinic on the appropriate day is hardly a convincing description of reversibility. On the medical side, the major personal and life-changing decision to consent to a vasectomy has been trivialised as the equivalent of root canal work. Show me a root canal filling on a healthy tooth that has a 100% success rate of reversal with full replacement of the nerve, pulp, dentine and tooth enamel, available on the NHS, and I will increase by a small fraction the respect that I have for that argument, which at the moment is zero. Let's instead have a look at the current commercial cost of vasectomy reversal. Here's one link, for example. 'Most vasectomy reversal centers charge between $7,000 and $10,000'. My taxes are supposed to pay for that, when the patient underwent the initial procedure as the result of a bribe? I don't think so.
I agree with Eilonnwy, this bribe is an attempt to control someone else's reproductive choices through coerced sterilization of people at their most vulnerable. I think it's a disgusting, repulsive, right-wing nazi con-trick, and the irony is that when its victims start settling with the NHS out of court, I'll be the one footing the bill. So don't involve me in your childlike word games. I oppose these payments.
