New Testingstan

Oxymoron wrote:Burning books is against my ethics

plus I like to keep them, as some kind of remainder

of what I'm not sure though


Though if someone here wanted to read the books I'd be okay with mailing the package to them.

Oxymoron wrote: so, anyway, there's a question I've been asking myself for a while... what's HPCA's stance on transexuality ?

I mean, I'm pretty sure they see any kind of transexual as weirdos, but do they see them as "weirdos to kill/maim/burn", or just "weirdos to ignore/look down upon" ?

It had been a simple road accident, almost mundane. The column of South African trucks had been heading south, on their way to an embarkation port when a young child had run right out in front of the convoy. The lead vehicle had absolutely no chance to stop and it had run him over. The vehicle behind had done the same and so had the one behind that. By the time the convoy had stopped, the child was very obviously very, very dead. The local police had arrived and started to take statements but Klaas had noted nobody seemed to care very much. One woman was weeping quietly but that was all. From her age, she was probably the child's mother.

"Don't you distress yourself, Sergeant." Klaas noted she had his rank right and spoke good English. Mission-taught no doubt. "Nobody liked that little monster. Uppity child, always telling everybody what to do. And this is a good, god-fearing Catholic village. Why his father converted to Moslem we can't understand but he's been a great distress to us all.

...


"Sergeant?" A painfully young South African officer was calling him. "The police have finished interviewing the truck drivers. They are reporting this as a sad accident caused by a child not being taught to respect traffic properly. Between you and me, most of the village do not seem too sympathetic to the family and the child was very unpopular with the others here. They called him the abomination. Apparently it's a play on his name, you know how much Africans like word games.

Rob Herrick wrote:

Chris Mathewson UK wrote:There’s a huge leap from presumed consent of organ donation after a person dies to the State enforcing medical experimentation etc on still living people. I think you’re being a tad melodramatic, frankly. Even if, for whatever reason, you want to keep your organs after you die then you can opt out and that’s that. End of story.

It's not being melodramatic. It's an everyday facet of the research world. Medical textbooks, ethics literature and the popular press are full of examples where doctors and scientists didn't bother to ask people if they wanted to say no. If you think for a second in your presumed consent world that they would bother to give you the opportunity to say no, you have got to be the dumbest, most trusting person on the planet.

It's full of unscrupulous folks who'll do WHATEVER THE *** THEY WANT to people just because they think it's right. There's plenty of people who will wave a hand and say "do whatever you think is best, doc." Or there are people so desperate that they will do anything, and if you don't believe that there are vultures waiting to swoop in and get them to do anything, I have a bridge to sell you. Or there are people who are not intellectually capable of giving - or revoking - consent, let alone knowing what the hell it is you're actually going to do. We also have populations - like prison inmates and military members - who are a hell of a lot more vulnerable to coersion and therefore in need of extra precautions to make sure any consent is voluntary.

A chief of a neurology department just got busted by the Feds a week or two ago for intentionally infecting the brains of cancer patients, because apparently brain infections caused one brain cancer patient to live a tiny bit longer. So he decided, being the high and mighty head of Neurology, that it was "treatment," not research, and promptly violated every research protocol in the books. He killed two of the three people he tried it on, and is still completely unrepentant and rather pissed off that the muckety mucks at the IRB and the Feds dare question that he knows best. That's after 40 YEARS of the IRB system, which is hammered into the heads of every first year medical and grad student on the planet.

That's the kind of world we live in. Try being a white guy doing research on the Navajo - it's never ever going to happen, because their IRB will never ever EVER approve a research protocol for a white doctor again. Because scientists assumed they had carte blance to do whatever the *** they wanted with samples and data they got and never bothered to ask people if it was okay to use their medical samples in genetics studies of alcoholism, insanity, and origins of the Navajo. You know how they found out they were getting screwed with their pants on? Because a Navajo who'd given genetic material walked into a presentation by a master's student who had been using those biospecimens because their advisor said go ahead and use them. Who cares what the people who gave them wanted? They signed some consent form, so we can presume they'll consent to whatever we want - no need to ask. This was in the late 1990s/early 2000s, by the way.

It's an established fact that one of the major reasons African-Americans don't seek medical care in this country is the legacy of Tuskeegee. People are treated for diseases later than they should be - and many times aren't seen until the disease is too far gone to be treated - because they are afraid they will be experimented on. One study, hundreds crippled or dead, and the bodies keep piling up. Because people presumed somebody would be okay with being a guinea pig, and people weren't. One of the studies I work with is a cohort of 10,000 people who lived within 5mi of a uranium refinery, who, thanks to 35,000 separate documented violations of state, local and Federal law, were exposed to considerable amounts of uranium (up to 80x background rates) and they didn't find out about it until 33+ years after they were first exposed. Because nobody gave a flying *** whether they minded - they never said no, we don't want to breathe this *** in, because nobody bothered to ask them. Hush hush, national security, needs of the many and all that. As an indication of how bad things were, 1) a full time employee had, as their job description, washing uranium dust off employees cars, and 2) you can see houses across the bloody road from the plant, right downwind. Sure, had you asked them, these folks would probably have volunteered. They're stand up folks, and they did, every single one of them, agree to allow medical research so anything that happened to them would help other people. But they're still mad as hell that somebody assumed it was okay to poison them because it made things easier for other people, and they have every right to be.

This is why we have IRBs, and laws codifying exactly how they are to work and exactly how you are to administer consent and obtain consent and you cannot even TALK to a patient without their permission. Because people like you didn't think you'd mind, and didn't think people would be people and ruthlessly take advantage of that. The watchdogs exist because people have proven they CANNOT be trusted.

So don't tell me it's melodrama. It isn't. It's life, and it happens every day.

The Admiral wrote:

Edi wrote: First you complain about my links being to biased sources and then you cite clownhall.com and another blatantly partisan blog as somehow reliable and authoritative sources? The comedy writes itself. Tell me, in the face of such blatant hypocrisy, is there any reason I should ever accept anything you say at face value?

Edi, dial it back. Right now.