The Soviets promised their people a worker’s paradise on earth – and delivered one of the most brutally murderous regimes of misery history has known. Such is the way of the left, whose high-falutin’ rhetoric and grossly inflated self-regard is at stark odds with the realities of their policy prescriptions. But, as Jim Goad says, no matter how many times leftist policies fail or how much misery they wreak, their “heads are so far up their own asses with the idea that they are unimpeachably good, I suspect they may all soon suffocate to death”.
Death, in fact, is something of an obsession with the modern left. Simply put, they’re all for it – so long as it’s other people. Inconveniently dependent people.
In the same week that Stevie Nicks boasted there would have been no Fleetwood Mac had she not aborted her baby, Queensland Premier Anastacia Palaszczuk has vowed to legalise assisted dying.
While pro-abortion arguments invariably jump straight to trying to justify themselves by appealing to the extreme – rape! incest! the mother’s health! – the simple fact is that those reasons account for almost no abortions. Data show that barely one or two percent of abortions are for such extreme reasons. Almost all abortions are for convenience.
Stevie Nicks confirmed what honest people have always known – that, despite the fog pro-abortionists like to create, abortion destroys human life for the convenience of others.
She told The Guardian she had conceived a child with The Eagles singer Don Henley in 1979 but that “there’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly.”
“I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important.”
That’s right: Tusk might only rank at the very bottom of the 500 greatest albums of all time, but it was worth terminating a human life for. Presumably the genocide of entire nations would be but a small price to pay for, say, Sgt. Pepper’s, Exile on Main Street or London Calling.
And we all thought the cost of a Fleetwood Mac album was around $20.
When you feel no shame admitting that you judged the life of your unborn child to be of less value than the possibility of a pop music career, you are acknowledging that our culture has crossed a moral line.
We are rushing even faster down the slippery slope of moral degradation at the other end of life.
If people applaud Stevie Nicks for judging another human’s life worth sacrificing for a Grammy Award, what is to stop those same people judging our lives worth sacrificing for their own peculiar reasons?
This is not a question the Queensland Premier wants anyone to seriously consider which is why she waited until the middle of a pandemic and just two weeks before the state election to announce her euthanasia policy.
Better for voters to feel rather than think when it comes to euthanasia. And what better time to feel the argument for death than after suffering for months at the hands of a stubborn virus and soul-destroying lockdowns.
The argument for euthanasia derives its emotional power from the picture painted of a terminally ill patient with nothing but intense suffering standing between him and death.
Like the “rape” argument for abortion, this is the motte position for the pro-death lobby. The bailey – their real aim – is suicide-on-demand. “Terminal, intense suffering” has a devastating emotional appeal, but it has little to do with the practised reality of euthanasia. Wherever euthanasia has been introduced, “safeguards” are steadily eroded and criteria steadily expanded. “Terminal, intense suffering” very quickly becomes “tired of life”, becomes “on demand, for any reason” and at any age.
As for the so-called “safeguards” – as the Australian Medical Association has pointed out, any practise which apparently requires so many safeguards is obviously inherently dangerous. More to the point, the safeguards are clearly very much less than they purport to be. At its most extreme, an elderly woman was secretly sedated in order to stop her resisting the euthanasia her family and doctors wanted to inflict on her. But coercion to end people’s lives will rarely be so blatant. Anyone with experience of how the elderly are too-often treated knows how often they are made to see themselves as a burden, an inconvenience.
So why not just put yourself to sleep, grandma, and stop being such a nuisance?
The systematic killing of unborn children in huge numbers is part of a general disregard for human life that has been growing for some time. Abortion on its own did not cause the disregard, but it certainly deepens and legitimates the nihilism that is spreading in our culture and that finds killing for convenience acceptable.
We crossed lines, at first slowly and now rapidly[…]
Convenience has, for some time, been the central theme of our culture. Humans tend to be inconvenient at both ends of their lives.
The Dead Kennedys may have said, Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death, but the mantra of “progressive” culture is rapidly becoming, “give me convenience – give me (someone else’s) death”.
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