Right to Die

 Here's a comment I posted yesterday, well, this morning as the clock goes.  The context is that Scott Sumner writes about the politics of right-to-die laws (they seem correlated with right-to-marijuana laws) and the low level of support for them among younger people, who usually lean towards making more things legal he speculates that "Perhaps if you are 30 years old then you can still envision a better future." and so will be less likely to see assisted suicide as being possibly the least bad option.

I wrote from my present point of view:

I’m 63 and can still envisage a better future.  But fast forward 25-30 more years and that will change.  Judging by what happened in previous generations of my family, I shall already be dying, peacefully, in slow motion.  Talk of “saving” or “taking” my life will be, well, misplaced.  The question will simply be whether it is mine in fact or just in name.

I long ago chose what I would live off and where I would live.  Later, I chose who would live with me.  We chose when to engender children and live for them.  I shall choose when to stop living off my work and start living off my savings.  I’ll also choose how hard I try to keep myself healthy, so I’ll have imprecise control over how much longer I live.  But my first degree was in mathematics, and I don’t like such imprecision, nor will it do anyone else much good.  So assuming I suffer no unforeseen illness, I still want to make one last choice.  Tell me, will this life be truly mine, to hold or discard?

215 dead children

 I've just read the gruesome news from Kamloops Indian Residential School.  It needs little further comment from me, and one should not say too much in the heat of the moment, but:

• Canada is far from the only country where Native Americans were treated like this.
• The school was run by a missionary order of the Roman Catholic Church.  He that hath ears ....

Some people involved in this cruelty (I refer not only to the treatment of the children, but also to the fact that families were not notified of the deaths) may well be as little as ten years older than I am.  So perhaps they can give evidence.  It should be interesting.

Oh.  Yeah.  California's "Hispanic" inhabitants have experiences like this in their past, a few centuries back.  Spanish is by no means their ancestral language; it was imposed on them by ... missionaries.

Vaccines (less snarky)

We knew enough to do things like stockpiling PPE and syringes, but we failed to fund them. That was bad.

We didn't think about how our laws, regulations, supply chains, and other organizational factors would need to be prepared for a pandemic, because we failed to imagine one, even with examples like World War Z right in front of us.  That was worse.

In countries with unelected governments, laws and regulations didn't much matter, because they could be revised at Internet speed to meet the needs of the moment.  (I grant that dictatorships are often delusional at the top, but authoritarian governments aren't necessarily more delusional than elected ones.)  In countries with elected governments, we let our laws and regulations and traditions of freedom and individual rights get in the way of an effective response to the pandemic. The result has given freedom, democracy, and rule of law a bad name.  That may have been worse yet.

I would like to believe that humans will learn from this tragedy and emerge saner and stronger.  Yes, I very much want to believe that.  But even more, I want it to be true.

Vaccines (snarky)

Far too much is being written about them already, albeit with good reason.  I think the gist of the story can be quite short:

When that one great Scorer comes to mark against your name

It matters not who won or lost, but how you place the blame.

(Emphasis added.)  One of my favourite authors articulated another aspect of the problem very well, and I hope his literary estate will not object to this quote:

The people at the top only get there by doing what the people at the bottom want them to do.  Which is nothing, because the people at the bottom don't know what they want.

From a different author: 

"As a securely dominant species, you could afford to lose touch with reality ..."

and the aliens are talking, not about religion, but about democracy.  We WEIRD people have indeed lost touch.

Do I have anything to say in my own voice, then?  Yes.  It's not surprising that Israel has done such an impressive job of jabbing most of the population.  Israeli institutions are used to dangerous situations where results count and excuses don't.   It is surprising that the UK, especially with Boris in charge, has succeeded as well as it has -- today I hear that over half the population (or the adult population?) has had its first jab.  And as for the USA, there are much worse places I could be.

Things to come

 I've been reading so much Substack lately that I'm tempted to express myself on various topical topics, if only to get certain opinions off my chest.  This blog is the natural place to do so. There is little danger of what I write here being read by anyone who disagrees with me ... or who agrees with me.

I see that Quora has cleaned its question stream up quite well, so I'll probably be back there too.

Declaration of allegiance

 All the cool kids are at substack these days.  So I've subscribed to Matt Yglesias and am following Noah Smith and (could you doubt it? would you believe me if I said I wasn't?) Scott Alexander *******.  I also still read Tyler C and Alex T's joint blog.  On recommendations from the above, I'm reading Zvi Mowshowitz, Jason Crawford, Susanna Viljanen, and Derek Lowe sporadically.  OK, nobody had to recommend Susanna to me.  So if I write something you haven't already heard eight million times, check to see which of the above can have inspired it.

I remain a proud and loyal subject of Her Majesty.   Not that anyone who knows me is wondering about that.