some currents

Now that it’s all sadly over, I must say I didn’t much follow the Schiavo case, except to note that the religious right in the US were falling over each other to express indignation and outrage because some poor woman who’d been on life support for fifteen years, in a state of enormously reduced capacity, from which she could never recover, was going to have the plug pulled on her. I didn’t share their moral outrage, and though I recognised that central to the case was the uncertainty about what in fact would have been the wishes of this woman had she the ability to express them, one of my first thoughts on it was – who’s paying for fifteen years of life support to a person in this hopeless state? In how many nations would there be the kind of technology and money around for this to ever be an issue? And with the technology growing ever more sophisticated, and the sanctity-of-life attitude growing ever more prevalent (or at least ever more strident), why not keep everyone alive for as long as possible? I mean, does anyone have to die? Consider after all that nobody really dies of old age, we die because some part of us stops functioning, and that part could be fixed, and isn’t it incumbent on us to do everything in our power to prolong life, and who’s to say that a 125 year-old woman with an artificial heart and kidneys, bionic hips and silicon tits has such a reduced quality of life as to be a candidate for euthanasia? I’m no murderer.

Anyway, Larvatus Prodeo has a view on the case which reads like what I would think if I thought about it more – and researched it more. An excellent place to start.

The pope’s death – I must say the huge numbers and the outpourings have unnerved my anti-catholic self. I’ve no doubt that he was a great bloke, with many endearing qualities, and far more generous to his friends and his enemies than I’ve ever been, as well as something of an intellectual heavyweight in his way, but I can’t really think of anything positive to say about Catholicism. So I’ll say nothing more.

A couple of important visits to Oz. I think this is more than symbolic, and I sense in particular a new era of much improved relations with Indonesia. The future of that particular relationship has never looked better in my lifetime, and it’s happened in such a low-key way, really. The Bali bombing, and the tsunami and this more recent quake, have been the main events to bring us together, clouds and silver linings and all.

A new President, a Kurd no less, has emerged in Iraq, but don’t get too excited, it’s the Prime Minister who’ll have the real power, and there’s still no sign of who that’s going to be and meanwhile the nation’s still in a mess. Quiggin has a thought-provoking piece on whether it was all worth it, with the usual array of comments, of which Andrew Bartlett’s is particularly sensible. No sense squabbling over past decisions, the issue is how do we improve things from here?