Wednesday!

* In Galileo's time, science was clashing with religion; today, Robinson believes, we're living in a "Galilean moment" again, in which climate change means science has become politicised. This time, though, the clash is with capitalism. "There are cultural forces in our society which say, you can save the world or else you can make a profit, and they'll say sorry, we have to make a profit. So we have a strange religion now." As his global-warming-themed trilogy, which ends with 2007's Sixty Days and Counting, shows, a major theme for Robinson is ecological sustainability, and he stresses today his belief that "the climate crisis is an emergency." Another interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, this one focusing on his new time travel novel, Galileo's Dream.

* Fun graphic analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, including Inside UFO 54-40, the only CYOA with an impossible-to-reach ending.



* The rhetoric of Google's suggested searches. Via Ezra Klein, who summarizes:

For instance: the most popular searches beginning with "how 2 ..." are "how 2 get pregnant" and "how 2 grow weed." Searches beginning with "how might one" tend to be about music or, weirdly, Andrew Jackson.

More titillatingly, people asking "is it wrong to" tend to have something sexually indecent in mind. The top results are "sleep with your cousin," "sleep with your stepdad after your mom has died," and "like your cousin." Searches beginning with "is it unethical to" tend to be about white-collar crime and animal rights.

One notes, at least in my geo-targeted region of the world, the top suggested result for "is it wrong to" is actually "is it wrong to sleep with your sister."

* Yesterday's Daily Show had a pair of fantastic clips: one on the Berlin Wall and another on Sean Hannity flagrantly lying (with video!) about the size Michelle Bachmann's health-care protest.

* Chart of the Day: Rock Music Quality vs. U.S. Oil Production.

At 12:28 p.m., a Memorial administrator typed “HELP!!!!” and e-mailed colleagues at other Tenet hospitals outside New Orleans, warning that Memorial would have to evacuate more than 180 patients. Around the same time, Deichmann met with many of the roughly two dozen doctors at Memorial and several nurse managers in a stifling nurse-training room on the fourth floor, which became the hospital’s command center. The conversation turned to how the hospital should be emptied. The doctors quickly agreed that babies in the neonatal intensive-care unit, pregnant mothers and critically ill adult I.C.U. patients would be at great risk from the heat and should get first priority. Then Deichmann broached an idea that was nowhere in the hospital’s disaster plans. He suggested that all patients with Do Not Resuscitate orders should go last.

This story from the New York Times Magazine about the breakdown in medical practice in a stranded New Orleans hospital during Katrina will stick with me a long time. Unprepared for the severity or duration of the crisis, believing things in New Orleans to be much worse than in retrospect they were, and apparently significantly undertrained in proper triage procedure or in the deep ethical minefields surrounding end-of-life care (including apparently not understanding what a D.N.R. is), these doctors made some very difficult choices that a layperson like myself cannot possibly judge them for—but what happened at Memorial Medical Center should be standard-issue training in medical, schools, nursing schools, and hospitals so that things never go so badly off the rails again. This was not a zombie attack; it was not the end of the world. Katrina was only a local disaster. To paraphrase the patient quoted in the article: If they have vital signs, Jesus Christ, get ’em out.

Thiele didn’t know Pou by name, but she looked to him like the physician in charge on the second floor. He told me that Pou told him that the Category 3 patients were not going to be moved. He said he thought they appeared close to death and would not have survived an evacuation. He was terrified, he said, of what would happen to them if they were left behind. He expected that the people firing guns into the chaos of New Orleans — “the animals,” he called them — would storm the hospital, looking for drugs after everyone else was gone. “I figured, What would they do, these crazy black people who think they’ve been oppressed for all these years by white people? I mean if they’re capable of shooting at somebody, why are they not capable of raping them or, or, you know, dismembering them? What’s to prevent them from doing things like that?”

The laws of man had broken down, Thiele concluded, and only the laws of God applied.

Some appropriately heated discussion at MeFi.

Tuesday Miscellany.

* Sarah Palin's controversial proposal to create a "Department of Law" with the power to block ethics claims against the president is turning a lot of heads this morning.

* I really want to read 1Q84.

* Swine flu: now more popular than Viagra.

* Steve Zissou: scientist.

* Another That Makes Me Think Of from Ze.

* We Are Wizards, a Harry Potter fandom documentary, with appearances from Brad Neely of Wizard People Dear Reader fame. (via @austinkleon)

Dial B for Blog, once again drawing closer to its final issue, celebrates Goofus and Gallant.

Fair enough, though Gallant's hand appears to be slightly radioactive.



It seems unreasonable to hold Goofus responsible for this.



Gallant is a quisling. Only Goofus has revolutionary consciousness.

See also one of the best McSweeney's pieces ever, "Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon."

Alex, high-school teacher of Goofus:
Goofus had a top-notch bullshit detector. Most teenagers think they have one, but his was the real thing, and I'm one of the few teachers who can relate to it. I introduced him to Kerouac, Bukowski, Burroughs. He acted enthusiastic about writing a paper in which they interacted. But it turned out to be seven pages of ... well, I was one of the characters in the scene, which was extremely graphic and not what we agreed on.

Everyone is getting all political over Dark Knight.

* Andrew Klavan in the Wall Street Journal finds the movie a grand apologia for Bush:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

* But Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias want to trouble this understanding, where Matt makes what I thought was an interesting point about the leap from comic to film:

Shifting a bit away from the issues of the day, though, one interesting thing about the film is what a difference it makes to rip Batman out of the context of the broader DC universe. The DCU's other anchor character, Superman, is far more powerful than Batman. And of course Superman's hardly alone in this regard -- Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, etc. all wield vast power and even lesser lights like the Flash outpace Batman by far.

In that context, Batman rather uniquely doesn't suffer from a substantial legitimacy problem. You don't look at Batman and say "no man should wield this much power" in a world where Superman can see through walls. It's those other guys who have legitimacy problems and Batman is one of the important checks on them -- especially on Superman, who specifically entrusts a kryptonite ring to Batman for that purpose.

* But it's Kugelmass who has probably the best review I've seen thus far.

The reverse is also true, though—The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other—I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people—Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

* And for the fanboys in the audience, via Jacob, 8 great villains we want in the next Batman movie.

Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky.

Eberhart Theuer: A legal person would be something like a company or a certain society that in itself, or a fund that has certain rights without being a natural person.

Anita Barraud: This is similar to the US in common law notion of a juristic person that can apply to corporations and organisations that they're artificial persons created by the law.

Eberhart Theuer: Exactly.

Paula Stibbe: It's not talking about the rights for non-human animals to go and vote or be able to go to university, that would clearly be inappropriate and ridiculous. This is about recognising that non-human animals share with us sentience, which means that they have the ability to suffer, and that they have interests which can be damaged.

In sci-fi-philosophic terms, this is the distinction between sapience and sentience; while apes likely cannot "think" in the human sense, they and other animals can certainly feel pain, and that capacity is something we are morally obliged to respect.

I say likely because I am by nature extremely wary of the anthropomorphistic tendency to project human emotions and consciousness into animal behavior that is actually instinctual or learned—in general I'm impressed with Daniel Dennett's theory in Kinds of Minds that our dogs appear to "love" us precisely because we've selected for just that impression over millenia of canine domestication. But as an anecdotal matter I must admit this is really evocative:

Paula Stibbe: I've learned what he likes to do most, what food he likes to eat most, though that would include some games. He likes to use charcoal with paper sometimes to draw, or chalk.

Anita Barraud: What does he draw?

Paula Stibbe: They are kind of abstract angular kind of works and he takes the paper and the chalk and he leans against the wall, he bites his bottom lip and concentrates really hard on what he's doing. He won't let himself be distracted while he's drawing.

(cross-posted at culturemonkey)

Candleblog hits back at Warren Ellis following his call for an end to linkblogs. I am mentioned, as is the sorely missed Gravity Lens. Meanwhile, Quark Soup is fed up with blogs altogether:

Stop and consider this in detail: someone afraid to even use their real name asks for an analysis of an extremely complex situation, decades in development, merely because Yglesias spent a few days in the west -- and in airy Aspen, at that.

RoboticGhost doesn't ask any journalist in the southwest who covers the water beat 40 hours a week, or any of a half-dozen writers who have written detailed and thoughtful books about the west and its water, or a thousand administrators whose job it is to ensure as smooth a water flow in the sw as possible. He asks a casual traveler.
And this casual traveler, who has spent his entire life living in apartments on the eastern seaboard, actually thinks he has something valuable to say, because a year ago he spent a few days in a Best Western somewhere in the southwestern US.

With no evident local knowledge whatsoever -- even admitting as much -- Yglesias nevertheless offers a solution to this enormous, complex problem, a solution based purely on some political theory he read in a magazine somewhere last year and which has absolutely no naunced understanding of the complexity of the true situation on the group or its many years worth of layered complexity or what privatizing water supplies would mean for hundreds of thousands of southwestern ranchers or the million living there facing ever rising water bills.

For what it's worth, Yglesias concedes the point:

The only thing I have to say to defend myself from those charges is that I don't think the post was really about why I suck, it was about why the punditsphere as a whole sucks with me just as a prominent example. And he's right. To gain any worthwhile information about any topic whatsoever, you need to be reading the work of someone with real expertise. To develop real expertise requires years of study, research, etc. And years of study, research, etc. can't be adequately condensed into a blog post. Thus, blog reading is a completely worthless exercise and nobody should really engage in it. I started writing this blog as a hobby; I thought it would be a fun thing to do. And I not only continue to enjoy writing it, but people pay me to write it. But the mere fact that I'm writing it doesn't make it a worthwhile thing to read, which is why the overwhelming majority of Americans have never read this blog and never will.

Frankly, this is exactly why I tend to restrict myself to linkblogging. Nobody should expect themselves to be able to come up with The Big Answers after ten minutes of shallow speculation; hell, it's taken me at least a decade and a half of trying to even start to get a handle on what the questions are.

Curiosity, generosity, honesty, and humility: these are the four pillars for all intellectual labor, and they're the keys for blogging too.

Mightygodking.com achieves the Geek Harmonic Convergence with this marriage of comic book characters with Dungeons and Dragons alignment. Via NeilAlien.

Leading off this lovely Tuesday linkdump is Barack Obama's college poetry. (Thanks, Tim!) Also in what I loosely refer to as the news:

* Strange Maps tracks the path of a shipment of plastic yellow duckies that fell off their transport in 1992 and still turn up in surprising places. Paging Ze Frank...

* Marginal Revolutions has fun naming ethics papers.

* Bitter Laughter has the sad story of the Rainbow Man.

* And hulu has the original Japanese inspiration for The Office, a surreal and characteristically too-long SNL skit to which there is little to add but Ricky Gervais's own valedictory remarks: "It's funny because it's racist."

The American Scene lays out the competing moral claims Clinton and Obama make on the Democratic nomination. I like this article because it acknowledges, as many similar articles do not, that the situation is not strictly black and white. The fact that Barack can't get the job done in big states is troubling, the undemocratic nature of the caucuses and the failure of the delegate system to map directly onto the popular vote is problematic, and on and on. Obama clearly has the better of the argument as the winner under the rules, and accordingly he will be almost certainly be the nominee however long it takes to get there—but it costs me nothing to concede to the Clintons that, yes, the rules are not holy writ and they are not Objectively Fair and Just. They are merely the rules agreed-upon in advance by all parties involved.

My worry, going forward, is that Clinton can see the writing on the wall and will conclude that her only chance for the nomination is to turn her ship around and fly, guns blazing, at the DNC itself. Clinton's last card is a big one, a kind of doomsday device—she can attack the delegate system and the rules themselves, claiming that various features of the primary have perverted the actual will of Democratic voters for reasons X, Y, and Z. From a procedural standpoint, this is nonsense, and from a partisan standpoint it is a total disaster, because if the delegate system is delegitimized in the eyes of Clinton supporters there's no way to declare Obama the winner in a way they will accept and therefore no way to bring the party back together again afterwards. But it remains, nonetheless, a card she can play.

(As I wrote the other night, this total disaster scenario may even be a feature, not a bug; see possibility #3 in this comment thread.)

My point in writing all this is simply to acknowledge that, regardless of its relative lack of merit, Clinton will still have an argument that she should get the nomination over Obama even if she loses the race by every conceivable metric (as it appears she will)—and, worse, such an argument could actually take root in a party still smarting from the injustice of the 2000 election, with a press that is anxious to find some way for the Democrats to improbably let this gift-wrapped election roll, Buckneresque, right through their legs.

Obama supporters need to be ready to counter this.

The Dmitiri Nabokov saga continues.

You'll recall that when we last left Dmitri Nabokov, he was once again publicly (in the journal Nabokov Online) and privately (to me) hinting that he would carry out his filial obligation to destroy the manuscript, thus abiding by the wishes of a perfectionist father who loathed the idea that a work that did not live up to his exacting standards for completion should be exposed in blemished form to the world.

Dmitri's threat was the latest episode in the long, twisted saga of Laura, which by then had become the literary equivalent of an old-fashioned serial melodrama, as full of cliffhangers as The Perils of Pauline. The irascible Dmitri would tease us with hints of Laura's thrilling salience, then suggest he was inclined to destroy it, anyway; following which, the literary world (most of it) would beg him not to. Dmitri would then back off—"reserving judgment"—only to stir things up by giving interviews (or, in my case, sending e-mails) that once again suggested an intent to destroy. (For instance, the irritated e-mail he sent me—A LONG, SINGLE PARAGRAPH ALL IN ANGRY CAPITAL LETTERS—after the publication of my recent Slate piece.)

I've already weighed in on this. Don't burn it, obviously.

Some random links I've been hanging onto this weekend:

* Congratulations to Girl-Wonder.org, finally getting their memorial for Stephanie Brown (Robin IV) in the Batcave. Finally, there's no more sexism in comics. At last.

* Here's Shift, a quick but enjoyable platform game that relies on rotating the playing field for its gimmick.

* Deal to end writer's strike near?

* There were five accidental taser deaths in January. It's a good thing these things are non-lethal...

* And finally, via MeFi, here's an interesting article wrestling with the tough questions at the margins of of attorney-client privilege. The MeFi comments have a lot of other good links on the same subject. I recognize intellectually the reasons why one ought to be a absolutist in favor of procedural protections like attorney-client privilege, but I have to admit that in practice I feel willing to sacrifice ironclad rules in favor of results that seem plainly more just. The important point for me is that the Law is only a proxy for justice, an approximation of it; the Law and justice are not the same thing.

The question, always, is where the move away from strict legal proceduralism stops—and the impossibility of drawing any sort of line short of pure absolutism inevitably pushes me, dialectically, back towards absolutism again...

I'm using today to catch up on a few things I've let slide, but it would hardly be a day at all if I didn't link to stuff on the internet:

* Radar Magazine has the skinny on how to survive just about any apocalypse.

* Nabokov's last, unfinished novel sits in a Swiss vault while Dmitri Nabokov decides whether or not to destroy it as his father asked before his death. This has the form of a moral dilemma, but it actually isn't one. The dead are gone, Dmitri; we owe them nothing. Publish the stupid thing already.

Does it matter what V.N. would feel, since he's long dead? Do we owe no respect to his last wishes because we greedily want some "key" to his work, or just more of it for our own selfish reasons? Does the lust for aesthetic beauty always allow us to rationalize trampling on the artist's grave? Does the greatness of an artist diminish his right to dispose of his own unfinished work?

No, yes, yes, yes. Publish! My heirs have free reign to do the same to me.

* Via Boing Boing, there's an interview with comic artist Peter "Backwards City #1" Conrad [PDF] at The Reverse Cowgirl, including pages from a recent project about sex workers.

* Speaking of BCR, it just occurred to me to check if Verse Daily had published any poems from our last issue. It turns out they did, two of my favorites: Lynne Potts's "Whole Worlds Had Already Happened" and Tim Lockridge's "On Realizing That I Tend to End with Nature Imagery."

* Have geneticists discovered a way to increase the human lifespan to 800 years?

* UFO spotted in Texas.

* And finally, AICN reports that the prolonged writer's strike may have revived the thought-dead Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica.

Some random snippets I've been collecting over the day:

* When people pondered the dilemmas that required killing someone with their bare hands, several networks in their brains lighted up. One, which included the medial (inward-facing) parts of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in emotions about other people. A second, the dorsolateral (upper and outer-facing) surface of the frontal lobes, has been implicated in ongoing mental computation (including nonmoral reasoning, like deciding whether to get somewhere by plane or train). And a third region, the anterior cingulate cortex (an evolutionarily ancient strip lying at the base of the inner surface of each cerebral hemisphere), registers a conflict between an urge coming from one part of the brain and an advisory coming from another. Steven Pinker on the moral instinct.

* “I don’t want the campaign at this stage to degenerate into so much tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, that we lose sight of why all of us are doing this,” Mr. Obama told reporters at a news conference here. “We’ve got too much at stake at this time in our history to be engaging in this kind of silliness. I expect that other campaigns feel the same way.” Obama tries to put the brakes on the scorched-earth primary. We'll see if it works. More comment at TPM Election Central andDaily Kos.

* "Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships. *Seeing?* Where have you been, man? Marx was all over this in 1848.

* Vast areas of the Antarctic ice sheet -- which has 10 times as much ice as Greenland -- is losing mass much faster than anyone expected. And the rate of ice loss has quickened in the last decade. In fact, 2007's ice loss was 75% higher than 2006's. Just imagine how bad this would be if climate change were real...

Cowboys vs. mobsters: Boing Boing compares the codes:

A list of ten rules found in a recent raid on an Italian gangster's home:

1. No-one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
2. Never look at the wives of friends.
3. Never be seen with cops.
4. Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.

vs.

Gene Audry's 1930 cowboy code:

1. The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man or take an unfair advantage.
2. A Cowboy must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. A Cowboy must always tell the truth.
4. A Cowboy must be gentle with children, the elderly and small animals.
5. A Cowboy must not adovcate or possess racially or religiously interolerant views and ideas.
6. A Cowboy must help people in distress.
7. A Cowboy must be a good worker.
8. A Cowboy must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits.
9. A Cowboy must respect women, parents and his nations's views.
10. A Cowboy is a patriot.

The postmodernist epistemological challenge to "the Enlightenment"—its attack on master narratives and its critique of truth—also loses its liberatory aura when transposed outside the elite intellectual strata of Europe and North America. Consider, for example, the mandate of the Truth Commission formed at the end of the civil war in El Salvador, or the similar institutions that have been established in the post-dictatorial and post-authoritarian regimes of Latin America and South Africa. In the context of state terror and mystification, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. Establishing and making public the truth of the recent past—attributing responsibility to state officials for specific acts and in some cases exacting retribution—appears here as the ineluctable precondition for any democratic future. The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not fluid or unstable—on the contrary! The truth is that this general ordered the torture and assassination of that union leader, and this colonel led the massacre of that vilalge. Making public such truths is an exemplary Enlightenment project of modernist politics, and the critique of it in these contexts could serve only to aid the mystifactory and repressive powers of the regime under attack.

In our present imperial word, the liberatory potential of the postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy.

This passage from Hardt and Negri's Empire really leapt out at me as perhaps the difference between 1999 and 2007: the Bush administration has again taught elite intellectuals the incomparable power of truth, of knowing and of being able to name. The "postmodernist epistemological challenge to the Enlightenment" we saw reach its apex in the 1990s is possible only in a moment in which politics is viewed as essentially inconsequential—now that we know that (surprise) history isn't actually over and (surprise) it's still possible for the forces of global capital to make human life much, much worse, those old master narratives don't seem quite so destructive or misleading anymore. There's something there worth rehabilitating.

This isn't to say that we must return to some epistemology of rationalist certainty, or that we already have—quite the opposite, any movement forward will need to synthesize positivism and relativism while moving past both—but merely that a politics of utter truthlessness has no ground on which to stake a claim, much less revolutionize anything. And this ground will never ultimately be anything but ethical-moral—the concept of justice, as in every resolution in every high school debate I ever did, remains our central value, the only rhetorical space worth claiming.

I think this notion of the irreducible supremacy of justice, and the inescapable claims it makes on us, is what Derrida is getting at from the other direction when he talks about fidelity to the spirit of Marx in chapter 3 of Specters of Marx, a book I really need to read again soon:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or exterminated on the earth...

Searching for the moral directive in The Watchmen. Via Gravity Lens.

That suicide should be both legal and available by prescription seems so obvious to me that I have difficulty remembering that the other side of the argument even exists. The woman described in this Salon article was 87 years old, in constant pain, nearly blind, and could not even go to the bathroom by herself—why should she be forced to refuse medical treatment in the hopes that she'll bleed to death one night in her own bed? Why shouldn't she, or any of us, be empowered to say, "This has gone on long enough?"

Given Jaimee's longstanding interest in human anatomy, it was inevitable that we'd wind up eventually at the Bodies... exhibition at Southpoint Mall in Raleigh. Today was that day. There's a lot to like about the exhibition, and a lot to dislike as well—I'm a firm believer in the educational value of exhibitions like this one, but there should always been mixed feelings about the instrumentalization and commodification of the human body, especially when those bodies are coming to us from post-colonial spaces. This review from the Independent and the ensuing shitstorm in the comments covers both angles nicely. Check out SDR's comment in particular for some good links about the "So where did the bodies come from?" elephant in the room.

When I asked about this at the exhibit, I was told they came from a Chinese hospital and had either been explicitly donated to science or else gone unclaimed. Turns out, maybe not.

All in all, no regrets—though I do wish I'd done a little more reading about this before giving them our money.