Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Villainy and engagement, in reply to nzlemming,
Celebrity Rehab
You’re better informed than me, all I can offer is that I definitely don’t want to go there. From what I recall of Miller’s brainchild it was very much in the early Big Brother mould of creating the occasional celebrity from a crop of nobodies. Back then everyone sponsored an African child, though most only seemed to discover this once they’d made it to the final heats and the media wanted to, like, know stuff about them.
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Hard News: Villainy and engagement, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
This is NOTHING like drug addiction or mental illness; it’s exactly what corporate media do to get the only thing they give a shit about – ratings, media attention and revenue.
Back in the late 90s, after the first flush of Big Brother, Harry M. Miller pushed the envelope of creepiness by taking a proposal for a reality show to one of the Sydney channels. Clients of a drug rehab clinic would be given the star treatment, with the possibility of real-life relapse replacing being voted out of the house or kicked off the island. While the wretched thing was rejected, I gather that they took the trouble to check out the legal implications before doing so.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Sacha,
to the point where women will be compelled, even against their will, to carry a disabled foetus to term.
disabled people would have to be valued a heck of a lot more before that would ever happen.
Which on the face of it appears to be Martin Sullivan’s agenda, and by unfortunate association possibly even yours. This is my problem with the blinkered nature of single-issue activism. Those who present any attempt at liberalising laws governing the right to die as a eugenicist plot to send Forrest Gump to the gas chamber can just as readily be accused of being stalking horses for the anti-abortion lobby.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Sacha,
It’s not a zero-sum thing. We are capable of solving balancing acts like this in other areas of public policy.
Well that’s what I’d expect from you Sacha, given your past form here. But it’s not what Martin Sullivan appears to be saying.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Martin,
prenatal screening is the new eugenics aimed at the elimination of disabled people in the womb
While I have no problem with ensuring that any liberalising of the rules governing the right to die should absolutely protect the rights of the disabled, I’m reading that as advocating the privileging of the disabled over the supposedly abled, to the point where women will be compelled, even against their will, to carry a disabled foetus to term.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to tussock,
There’s things were done with abortion and birth control last century that are also abhorrent, but we do allow women to choose birth control and even consciously terminate a pregnancy now
I'm sure I'll be swiftly corrected if I'm wrong, but I recall Sacha appearing to make a case here for disability advocates to be given some form of counseling access to women who faced the prospect of giving birth to a Down syndrome child. At the time it bothered me, because it appeared to threaten a woman's hard-won right to control her own reproduction, in much the same way as certain church groups attempt to do. While it may be a long bow to draw, it seems no more so than the claim that liberalising the right to die will lead to a repeat of the holocaust.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
If terminal illness and the process of dying is so terrible there would be more advocacy for euthanasia from palliative care clinicians – yet they are some of the staunchest opponents of it.
I’m sure that counts for something, but I’d imagine that compliance with legal oversight would be as big a factor as any. One of the most sweeping changes that seems to have happened in the so-called developed world over the last few decades has been the legal enforcement of patients’ rights.
In the late 1980s there was an exchange of letters in the Listener about alternative cancer treatment, which culminated in a senior medical academic openly gloating over the death of a man who’d traveled overseas to undergo an unauthorised form of treatment. No doctor would even dream of doing that today.
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The last time that the right to die came anywhere near being written into effective law in this part of the world it proved to be the kind of issue that doesn’t divide along familiar left-right lines. In 1995 the Northern Territory’s Rights of the Terminally Ill Act was instigated by then Northern Territory Chief Minister Shane Stone, whose politics were somewhere to the right of Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
Stone’s motivation was personal. He became a born-again advocate of the rights of the terminally ill after witnessing his mother’s final suffering. In his usual draconian fashion Stone pushed the legislation through without a conscience vote. Prime Minister John Howard used his Federal powers to overturn the act within a year of its becoming law.
While Howard appeared to have been motivated by his usual innate conservatism, he gained some unexpected supporters. Caroline Jones, the long-time host of ABC Radio’s The Search For Meaning, outed herself as a closet Catholic when she claimed to be bound by her Church’s teaching that one’s life is not one’s own to take. This came as something of a surprise to the audience she’d gained over the years, as her program had featured a scrupulously non-denominational approach to spiritual matters.
Palliative care was something of a rallying cry among those opposed to the Northern Territory legislation, despite plentiful evidence of its limitations. Yet within a year of the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act being overturned Howard cut Federal funding for palliative care.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
You dismiss Martin’s argument as ‘headiness borne of single-issue activism’ – if that activism is to promote disability rights, well someone has to.
A single-issue activist attempts to advance their agenda by dehumanising their opposition. It's a take no prisoners approach that precludes the possibility of negotiation. Acknowledging that advocates of the right to die may be driven by the same common humanity that motivates those who advocate for the disabled might have been a more constructive start to this discussion, rather than pitting the disabled against the supposedly abled.
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Access: Right to die?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Joe, the Holocaust is relevant to this discussion. The killings started because a father asked the State to kill his disabled infant son. The doctors and officials thought about it, worked out how to do it and realised it could be done on a large scale. It is estimated that over 200,000 disabled people were euthanised by the Nazis merely because they were disabled. There is now a memorial to them in Berlin, naming many of them. So it is not surprising that Martin mentions this era as a warning...
And if I were to tell you that all of that was news to me, you'd probably believe me.