We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Many moral questions are tricky, requiring complex theories and difficult judgements… but many more moral issues are really very simple when you look at them clearly. Manditory mass medication is one of those simple issues. I am as keen as anyone else to not see epidemics of infectious disease and in the case of such, I take the view that it is rather like why you have states to fight against foreign armies: a collective threat to everyone can sometimes only be faced by a government acting collectively. However very few things fall into this category, but infectious disease is one which indeed does – a collective threat that can only be defeated collectively. So yes, I am all for property rights but that does not include having a malarial breeding swamp on your property next to mine or infecting everyone’s water supply with some nasty bug.
Birth defects on the other hand, are not a ‘collective threat’ and so taking folic acid to avoid certain birth defects is the responsibility of anyone who does things likely to get them pregnant. So when Max Pemperton writes an article in the Telegraph opposing government plans to force bakers to add folic acid to bread, you would think I would be supportive of him, right? Well no.
In his article Folic acid is not the best thing since sliced bread he goes into a great song and dance about the pros and cons to various groups in the population of adding folic acid and whilst he does talk about civil liberties, he is mostly just making a utilitarian argument of net-benefit. He ends with saying “It’s certainly a complex moral dilemma”… and that completely fogs the issue.
No, it is actually a very simply moral dilemma: does anyone have the right to alter my body chemistry to benefit other people when my body chemistry poses no threat to anyone else (unlike if I have smallpox, for example). The question (does the state have this right?) and the answer (no) are not complex at all. If women want to avoid neural tube defects in their children, they should take folic acid. Making me take it as well will not help and is none of anyone elses damn business.
Few things are as impermanent as medical theories of ‘what is best’, so the utilitarian argument is utterly irrelevant. As it happens I take folic acid pills for a medical condition so I have nothing against the stuff myself but that does not change the fact the state has NO moral right to medicate me in such a way and anyone who trusts the state to pick ‘what is best’ for your health and make it a force backed law really needs to take a look at the state’s history of screw-ups and ask themselves is this is an institution which should have the right to mess with your personal body chemistry.
Fans of the great Stanley Kubrick satire, Dr Strangelove, will struggle to suppress a wry smile over this story:
Fluoride in drinking water – long controversial in the United States when it is deliberately added to strengthen teeth – can damage bones and teeth, and federal standards fail to guard against this, the National Academy of Sciences reported on Wednesday.
The vast majority of Americans – including those whose water supply has fluoride added — drink water that is well below the limit for fluoride levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Maybe all that stuff about flouride in the water being a crazy Commie plot may not have been so nuts after all. On the other hand…
This story about advances in creation of artificial limbs and muscles caught my attention:
Scientists have developed artificial, super-strength muscles which are powered by alcohol and hydrogen. And they could eventually be used to make more advanced prosthetic limbs, say researchers at University of Texas.
Writing in Science, they say these artificial muscles are 100 times more powerful than the body’s own. They said they could even be used in “exoskeletons” to give superhuman strength to certain professions such as firefighters, soldiers and astronauts.
As we ponder the flow of day-to-day news, it is easy to overlook the tremendous advances going on in fields like this. As the article mentions, applications of such medical technologies apply not just to repairing existing injuries or coping with the terrible effects of losing a limb (a sobering reality for victims of terror, car accidents, conflicts, etc), but even for perfectly healthy people looking to augment their physical strength.
The story demonstrates how blurred the boundaries now are between medical technologies that can be used to repair or heal injuries and those used to make what we have picked up in Darwin’s great lottery draw even better. The genetic fatalists will decry all this for tampering with God’s Will or whatever, but I don’t see any difference between this and say, laser surgery for the eye, or technologies to make it possible to vastly increase our hearing strength, or enhance our cognitive capacity, and so forth.
Mind you, it makes me wonder how this technology, if it really works, is going to affect sport. At the moment the sporting authorities controlling events like the Tour de France cycling event, say, or the Olympic Games, treat any form of human augmentation or performance enhancement as off-limits. I guess so long as participants agree in advance not to use such techniques, then they cannot complain if they are caught breaking the rules. But in some occupations like those mentioned in the story, such as astronauts experiencing the effects of zero-gravity environments, this sort of stuff might be a basic necessity rather than a luxury.
Meanwhile, here is an interesting story about nanotech and possible cures for blindness. And I can recommend this book by Ronald Bailey.
Makes a change from writing about Tony Blair, anyway.
Exhibit A from the United States. That 100 pattie burger looks tasty…
(Spotted on Marginal Revolution)
Exhibit B from the United Kingdom – wait a few seconds to be diverted.
Both sites for the epicureans amongst us, most certainly.
I have come across a press release from Britain’s National Health Service. The NHS is currently trying to prevent obese people from having hip replacement operations as they do not “deserve” to have such treatment, despite the little matter of their having been taxpayers like the rest of us.
“The NHS, like any proud creation of a socialist, inclusive Britain, has to operate under certain priorities. Indeed its founder, the great Soviet leader Nye Bevan, stated that socialism is about priorities. Well, there is no place and certainly no priority to treat people, who, by laziness, sloth and lack of intelligence, choose to make themselves ill or incapacitated. In fact ill people are a positive nuisance. It is the fit, able-bodied and alert people of Britain who deserve to be treated by the Greatest Health Service Devised by Mankind. No more obese people. No more smokers. No more drinkers. No more red meat eaters and chocolate fans. Such habits have no place in a socialist Britain. Let such vile habits wither away.”
I am still trying to vouch for the authenticity of this release. Looks plausible to me.
As Christmas is almost upon us, it is a pleasure to read a nice article by a doughty basher of nanny-state puritanism, Jacob Sullum. Sullum states what many of us probably instinctively know to be true – a bit of what you fancy is good for you. Dark chocolate (yeh!), red wine (yeh again!) and even red meat (thrice yeh!).
So in the interests of good health, I am now eyeing a bottle of fine Rhone red wine sitting on the rack in the kitchen.
I have long gotten a laugh from Dilbert, the socially inept engineer comic created by Scott Adams. Usually, Dilbert is harmless, but occasionally he causes real damage. Last Sunday’s cartoon, which features Dilbert’s mother in an excessive shopping adventure that ends with organ harvesting struck me as rather amusing, but according to Scott Adams’ blog, dozens of people failed to see the humour in it:
Recently I killed thousands more people. I don’t have exact numbers yet. The problem stems from my comic that ran on 11-20-05, implying that retail stores might harvest organs from bad customers and sell them on eBay. I’ve received dozens of letters (long ones!) from very angry people who assure me that the Dilbert comic will reduce the number of organ donors. The concern is that people will think their parts will end up on eBay and so they won’t be inspired to donate.
This would only have an impact on exceptionally dumb potential organ donors. But as you know, that’s a large block of the general population. Now I have to wonder how many people are smart enough to read an entire Dilbert comic and still dumb enough to think that the first person on the scene of an accident might be there just to harvest organs for eBay. It can’t be more than 1%. Let’s see, we estimate 150 million people read Dilbert, so 1% would be 1.5 million. And only 10% of them might have donated an organ anyway, so I’m probably killing 150,000 people.
It’s times like this when “oops” doesn’t seem sufficient.
I bet you did not know that cartoonists could be so dangerous. If you ever meet Scott Adams, approach with extreme caution.
One of the concerns appearing on the radar is the impact of a flu pandemic upon Africa, where a rudimentary infrastructure for health is combined with the largest number of individuals with HIV and AIDs. A common mistake is to view this latter group as the most vulnerable to a flu pandemic, with a potentially catastrophic death rate.
Recent comments by Dr. Robert Webster, at an avian-influenza conference, organised by the Council for Foreign Relations, in New York, theorised that HIV positive patients and those suffering from cancer could act as incubators for the virus, leading to more virulent strains. However, there is evidence to support the view that immunologically compromised individuals will not facilitate the spread of the pandemic:
Stephen Wolinsky, chief of the infectious diseases division at the Feinberg School of Medicine, concurred that prolonged shedding of the virus was a definite problem but referred to a study published earlier this week that stated that immunodeficiency may in fact be a benefit in the face of avian influenza.
The study, published in the journal Respiratory Research, indicated that the young and healthy may be those most seriously affected by avian influenza, as the body’s immuno-response was to produce a storm of cytokines that can lead to respiratory difficulties.
Wolinsky opined that, for Africa, the lack of access to doctors and hospitals may prove to be a greater concern in the fight against avian influenza than the continent’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.
This region has been identified as a potential outbreak region for the pandemic. Farming practices that bring farmers into close proximity with poultry, are compounded by non-existent public health schemes and a large proportion of the population suffering from ill-health and malnutrition.
The H5N1 virus overstimulates the immune system, and many of its powerful effects are caused by what medical expert call a “cytokine storm”, after the immune molecules excited by the disease.
It was the cytokine storm that overwhelmed so many victims of the 1918 flu pandemic. Aids patients may be spared that fate.
But equally possible, with their immune defences down, they could succumb easily to the disease.
“In that situation,” said Laurie Garrett, “vast populations of HIV positive people could be obliterated by the pandemic flu.”
Laurie Garrett, senior fellow for global health at the Council of Foreign Relations, was identifying the worst case scenario.
Alexia Harriton, an Australian woman who is deaf, blind, physically and mentally disabled and requires round-the-clock care, is suing a doctor for allowing her to be born, with the full support by her mother. Never mind that rubella during pregnancy does not guarantee what happened to Ms. Harriton.
I have a better idea. If she is competent to sue the doctor, she is competent to tell the people giving her round-the-clock medical care to get lost and let nature take its course. Hell, she could tell one of them to leave a nice sharp knife or a cup of water and a bottle of sleeping pills within reach if she wants to expedite things and if she cannot manage that, well seeing as how her mother is so supportive…
Why should a doctor be liable for an ‘act of God’? So he did not diagnose how thing would shake out correctly. Too bad, no one is perfect.
Seems to me that Alexia Harriton and her mother were born moral and emotional cripples too. Nature dealt them a seriously crap hand and that is truly tragic but it is no one’s fault. It happens. Deal with it, but please, deal with it yourself. Think I am being a little harsh? Well I do not think so and I have my reasons.
A study claims that the long-term effects of smoking tobacco can impair mental functions. My goodness, what other horrors can the dreaded weed be held responsible for? I don’t smoke and dislike the pong of cigarette smoke in my clothes after visiting a pub, but is there no limit to the ways in which our blessed medical profession want to condemn smoking? The claim rings false to me (I am not a scientist mind so if this can be verified in a peer-reviewed journal, I’ll stand corrected). There have been lots of brainy smokers over the years, surely.
I wonder how many members of Mensa have been smokers?
Just as the NHS is the darling of the British people, it will come as no surprise that its failures are increasingly covered by the tabloids, who have found that the crisis in health provision is a concern to those who have to rely on the state through no fault of their own. High taxes and expensive private health care denies choice to the majority of the population.
One of the latest (and incredible) stories to emerge is a lack of mops in Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow:
PATIENTS spent two days in “grotty” wards – after a hospital ran out of mops.
Cleaners at the Victoria Infirmary in Glasgow were left stunned after bosses told them of the shortage. And it took two working days for the hospital to replace all the mops.
A source at the closure-threatened hospital said: “We knew things were bad here but this takes the biscuit. Cleaners went to work on Wednesday and were told there were no mops and nothing could be done about it
Only scenes such as these could be caused by a state monopoly of health:
After replacement mops arrived on Thursday, a source revealed that hospital staff celebrated.
The insider revealed: “People were dancing around the boxes, singing and chanting, ‘We have mops.’ ” The source added: “No wonder our hospitals are riddled with MRSA superbugs and such like if they can’t get something as simple as this right.”
Only the NHS could ration health and mops!
“Organic farming has been put forward as one of the major pillars of a new, more-sustainable human society that would be “kinder to the earth”. Unfortunately, organic farming cannot deliver on that promise. In fact, organic farming is an imminent danger to the world’s wildlife and hazard to the health of its own consumers.”
Dennis Avery, quoted in Fearing Food, (page 3) by Roger Bate and Julian Morris.
Something for George Moonbat to ponder, I reckon.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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