Arguments For Euthanasia.

As far as we know, death is inevitable. Most of us fear it, some realise nothing matters once it’s happened and for some of us, it can’t come quickly enough.

If by cruel chance you can no longer breathe without a machine, live life outside a hospital, or even just exist without excruciating, inescapable pain, you may well choose to bring the schedule of life forward.

However, you can’t. It’s against the rules; the rest of us have agreed that it’s best this decision is left to God and his infinite wisdom. So get used to the pain, it’s going to be with you till the very end.

We put our pets to sleep when they lose a couple of legs, incapable of doing everything they live for. Why do we refuse to show human beings the same respect for their dignity and suffering, even when they beg for it?

Because God said so?

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.”

- Genesis 9:6

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.”

- 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

God said a lot of things we no longer adhere to.

Because our disdain for people is rife and we think doctors that train for over a decade so they can save lives might get a tiny high from ending the lives of a vulnerable old ladies against their will? So that happened once, but let’s not pretend there are heaps of doctors out there itching to go on a murdering spree. Be realistic.

If it’s because capitalism has no qualms about forcing suicide to cut costs, then you need to fix the system, not deny people the right to end their pain and suffering humanely.

We now have ‘deathers’ in America, those who support extensive profit from healthcare and an excessive generation of weatlh among the rich, but can’t fathom the idea of euthanasia because it gives their own kind the license to kill. Are they afraid because they know what they’re kind are capable of?

This is just a fundamental lack of understanding and empathy for people that suffer in ways we can’t begin to imagine, and fear of things to come that just isn’t grounded in reality.

Murder is horrifying.

It does make us uncomfortable.

It is something we can’t bear to think of happening to us.

But when it comes to a person who decides death is preferable to the alternative, this is not a decision you deserve to control.

What Happens Next?

I wanted to take a Humanities and Social Science this year to get me into Journalism school. You’d think Media would be a good introduction to Journalism, but I ruled it out from the start. Thankfully, I got bumped off the Humanities course due to an administrative error*. My only options were Media or Education studies, and even then I considered Education as if Media wasn’t the obvious choice. I was finally inspired to take Media by the person who would become my tutor, someone who actually knows a thing or two about it.

I told her all the reasons anyone had ever convinced me of for not taking Media, people who hadn’t ever actually studied the subject. It seems there’s a common misconception that studying Media is just watching TV for credit, my intellectual, but highly prejudiced, father clings to that opinion very tightly. He hates TV with a passion, often without even considering the content. The message was particularly clear from him. Maybe he never realised TV is just an alternative platform to plays, books and… life. It’s story telling, and everyone has a story.

But I’ve learned some quite inspiring things from film studies. In particular, the realisations I came to after watching the film ‘Un Chien Andalou’, which completely turned narrative on its head. I found myself attempting to predict what would happen next throughout the entire film, but couldn’t. I was never aware of this kind of prediction process I go with every film I watch, and I think there’s a tendency to do it with life too.

Films, if you think about it, tell the same handful of stories over and over with only minor differences. I gradually became more and more frustrated with each shot in ‘Un Chien Andalou’, as my brain had to work harder and harder to understand what was going happening. We don’t like to think too hard with a film, like children we prefer to know what’s going on, and be reassured that everything will be resolved in the end. As in real life, there were no guarantees in this film, nothing was predictable and it’s disturbing.

We view the world as we do our films: Each character has a part to play. We record the parts we’ve seen others play, then assign those parts to other people when we meet them, feeling safer pretending we know how that person is going to play out.

But life isn’t a story, as much as we’d love it to be. We think we know what complete strangers are like, what they’ll do and how they’ll respond to us when we map things out in our head. We think they’ll respond the same way characters do in films, but we neglect to realise that in film, every action and conversation is controlled by the scriptwriter. Reality is bent to work for the hero of the story. Some people even go as far as to pretend that life is controlled by a director, just so they feel safe thinking they know what will happen. When you wonder why all these bad things happen to you in particular, you don’t understand that there is no reason. There is no director taking your life in any given direction, you get just what is thrown at you by chance and it’s no indicator of what’s to come. Your life isn’t one of those stories about a person who suffers all the time then one day everything changes for the better, resolved.

There’s no director. We are the only ones in control of anything, we are the only ones who can make life better for ourselves and those around us. Don’t leave anything to play out in the way you think it will based on yours or anybody else’s past.

*This would be one of those moments one might interpret as ‘divine intervention’. The part that makes life a ’story’ controlled by a writer.

…And the award for ‘Bigot of the Year’ goes to…

In reaction to Jan Moir’s column in the Daily Mail, 21,000 complaints were lodged with the Press Complaints Commission. Just desserts just don’t come much sweeter than this.

When the BBC decided to air an episode of Russell Brand’s weekly radio comedy show last year that contained a joke too far, with Jonathan Ross telling Andrew Sachs, “Russell fucked your granddaughter“, the Mail had a field day. They led a campaign for heads to roll and the BBC to apologise.

The difference between ‘Sachsgate’ and Moir’s column is, Moir mean’t every word of what she said and still stands by it. Jonathon Ross and Brand just got carried away trying to be funny. They both apologised, Brand cancelled his show, Ross was suspended and the BBC were fined £150,000. The editor that approved her piece to be published validated the content as acceptable and not in the least bit hate mongering.

So does the Mail apply the same standard it reserves for the BBC to itself? Apparently not. They’ve labelled it a ‘debate’, suggesting Moir’s drivel is still a totally acceptable, if not wholesome opinion to have and of course publish as credible for its readers to agree with and regurgitate to friends and family.

I think this comment posted beneath that very statement says it all.

Fascinating how the Mail does not understand England anymore – its stance here (‘we’ve done nothing wrong’!) is the stance taken now by a clear and diminishing minority of the British people, most of whom were repelled by this nasty and vindictive article. The response to the article – the most complaints about an article in years and years – shows decisively why the Mail’s narrow minded readers will never again form a majority of the people of this country. This constituency is dying out.

Pete, Macclesfield, 19/10/2009 12:10

Why does a woman with such a cynical, twisted view of the world have a stage? Because she has an audience. An audience that will pay to read what they consider reliable justification for the explanations they’ve created for things in the world they don’t understand particularly well.

Do You Want to Fix Britain’s Immigration Problem?

Are you tired of the enduring the occasional phone call to an Indian call centre? Do you think Britain is full up? Do you blame immigrants for our social security system and unemployment levels? And are immigrants stealing your jobs?

Read what Wikipedia puts very well on this subject and relate:

Xenophobia is a dislike and/or fear of things that are unknown or different from ourselves. The Dictionary of Psychology defines it as ‘a fear of strangers’. It not only means a fear or aversion to persons from other countries, but of other cultures, subcultures, subsets of belief systems; in short, anyone who meets any list of criteria about their origin, religion, personal beliefs, habits, language, orientations etc.

While some xenophobes will state that the “target” group is a set of persons not accepted by society, in reality only the phobic person need hold the belief.

While the phobic person is aware of the aversion, sometimes hatred, of the target group they may not identify it or accept it as fear.

As with all phobias, a xenophobic person is aware of the fear, and therefore has to genuinely think or believe at some level that the target is in fact a foreigner. This arguably separates xenophobia from racism and ordinary prejudice in that someone of a different race does not necessarily have to be of a different nationality. In various contexts, the terms “xenophobia” and “racism” seem to be used interchangeably, though they can have wholly different meanings (xenophobia can be based on various aspects, racism being based solely on race and ancestry).

For xenophobia there are two main objects of the phobia. The first is a population group present within a society that is not considered part of that society. Often they are recent immigrants, but xenophobia may be directed against a group which has been present for centuries. This form of xenophobia can elicit or facilitate hostile and violent reactions, such as mass expulsion of immigrants, pogroms, or in the worst case, genocide.

The second form of xenophobia is primarily cultural, and the objects of the phobia are cultural elements which are considered alien. All cultures are subject to external influences, but cultural xenophobia is often narrowly directed, for instance at foreign loan words in a national language. It rarely leads to aggression against individual persons, but can result in political campaigns for cultural or linguistic purification. Isolationism, a general aversion of foreign affairs, is not accurately described as xenophobia.

A political poster of the far right National Party of Germany.

Ignorance Causes Fear. Fear Eats the Soul.

What started as a media class today with a screening of the 1974 West German film Fear Eats the Soul, ended as a sociology class, with a heated debate on prejudice, racism and ageism.

The film is set in Germany, and it’s about a 60 year old woman who falls in love with a younger man after visiting an Arabic bar in her neighbourhood, attracted by the exotic music and her own curiosity. The bar is shocked at the appearance of a German, and she uses the rain as an excuse for her being there. The bartender tells Ali, a young Arab in his late thirties, to ask her to dance so she would feel more welcome. He reacts with initial prejudice, calling her an old woman, but then agrees. Our teacher had told us the film would be shocking, so I’d already guessed that these two would hook up. After walking her home and engaging in some conversation, the two develop an attraction for each other and she invites him in. They get a bit drunk and she sets up a bed for him to stay, after discovering he shares a bedroom with a dozen other immigrants. In the night he gets up and enters her room, and they talk for a while. Before we know it, he’s stroking her arm, then we cut to the following morning where they wake up together. Most of the class is in shock.

Being a gay man, I’ve faced a certain amount of prejudice about relationships myself and have come to the conclusion that it is of nobody’s business but their own if two people fall in love and want to be together. Quite why the friends, family and entire neighbourhood of the parties involved have to get involved themselves is beyond me. Why do they have to make this couple’s life so difficult simply because they can’t deal with the age gap? She’s lonely, he’s shunned and rejected by a racist society and they make each other happy. Why do you have to ruin it because you can’t get your head around it?

I’ve gotta tell you, you can’t get your mind around it it’s because your mind is too damn closed. If you can’t comprehend something that isn’t part of what you know about the world, you tend to come to the conclusion that this is because it’s wrong. That would be ignorance. Stop it.

So by the end of the film, one student says “She was just using him for his body, none of this love at first sight stuff happened here”. I told him that it wasn’t about his body because she was clearly in love with him. The only reason she felt the need to pull his arm out and show his muscles to her friends was because they were showing an interest for the first time and that’s what they chose to be interested in. This behaviour was driven by her own craving for social acceptance and having her old life back, the life she was forced to give up after she married this man. She was forced to choose one or the other, not because he expected her to, but because her friends and family did, they were unable to understand this social situation because it was not the same kind of relationship everyone else has. It’s just love, but it looked different to the way they were used to or have experienced for themselves.

Needless to say, it went over one student’s head and she decided to let me know “That’s just your opinion though, innit?”. No, it’s the plot of the film. I guess that’s your polite way of telling me I’m wrong and you don’t agree because their relationship challenged your paradigm. The film demonstrates that both Emmi and Ali are guilty of the same faux pas, when Ali decided to pretend he didn’t know who she was when she turned up at his place of work because his co-workers laughed about this “grandma” who appeared to be begging him to come home. How anyone with a ’soul’ could laugh at a distressed, vulnerable woman in her sixties like that is also beyond me.

But of course the clue is in the title. Fear really does Eat the Soul. These people, Emmi and Ali’s friends and family, and the two students in my class, really didn’t like the idea of a sixty year old woman being married to a man in his late thirties. They totally lost all compassion and respect for them both as they did everything they could to make it clear this relationship was not ok. But why? Why is it not ok? Because it’s weird? Because it’s icky? Or because it’s just not the kind of relationship you would consider? Not a single rational, valid reason to lose your ’soul’ over it.

Think Poverty: Do You Really Need to Give Birth to That?

A message that appears at the bottom of office emails: “Think Green – Do you really need to print that?”. Well, do you really need to give birth to be a happy parent?

Think about it like this for a moment: When you bring a new child into the world, into your rich, developed nation, that is a lifetime of resources being allocated to that child that will not go to another child in the world who already exists. That child will spend a lifetime without food, healthcare, education or love. A child who was here first, waiting in line hoping to even get fed will get nothing when she could have had everything, if only a newborn baby hadn’t cut in front of her in the queue. Life isn’t fair: There’s no god watching over us to make sure we do things properly, and we as humans tend to make things worse for each other.

Case in point, the taboo surrounding adoption. It’s gradually breaking up, but it’s too gradual. When a parent decides to conceive instead of adopt, they may tell themselves they want their child to be like them. They’re child won’t really be theirs if it doesn’t share the same “blood”. This is where a reality check is needed: kids are rarely like their parents, no amount of genes is going to help you. There’s also the fact that you automatically assume your genes are superior to the genes of your adopted child’s biological parents. Fear of the unknown. Adopting a child is a risk because you think you know less about what your child will become, therefore it will be bad. By adopting, you’re gambling on what future you will have with your child instead of following a safe formula that is” you + spouse = a child just like us”. Again, there is no predicting what you’re child is going to be like.

If you think rationally, it’s much safer choosing a child that you can meet and see in front of you rather than baking your own in the oven from scratch. If this formula you use that tells you so much about what you’re child will be like really worked, why do so many parents have such a hard time understanding their kids? People are unique, your genes play such a tiny role in what you will become as an adult. Love plays a much larger role in a child’s life than genetics or “blood”.

Then of course there’s the issue of race. You can’t have a child that doesn’t look like she came from you, how ever would you keep her adoption a secret? At least if the child is of the same race  you can lie to her and pretend to the world you’re all just a “natural” family and the same as everybody else in society.

Even if it is just pure publicity, this is something I do appreciate in a celebrity. Those that choose to dip their Jimmy Choo’s into the depths of poverty and return laden with impoverished children, regardless of race, to give them exceptionally privileged futures. It’s obvious they do it because it feels good and it’s great PR, but most of all it sets an example to the people who idolize them. I just wish it would catch on a bit quicker.

“I don’t believe that somebody’s family becomes their blood. Because my son’s adopted, and families are earned.” – Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie has adopted three children, one from Cambodia, one from Ethiopia and one from Vietnam.

Record Labels, Meet Perspective.

I’m not the only one getting tired of hearing how “hard done by” the executives of record labels are. Just in case you were beginning to feel bad for them, consider this:

Before some clever people worked out how to record sound, singer/songwriters (beautiful people who just sang songs written by a team of writers were rare in those days) earned peanuts. They may have performed in public places or been hired to perform in houses of the rich and famous, but they were not recognised globally and weren’t worth millions of dollars just because they could sing and look pretty doing it.

That all changed once it became possible to freeze the service they offer into a distributable format and sell it to anyone in the world who wanted it. While this was great for the spread of culture, it was by no means a feat achieved by the singer/songwriters themselves or the record labels that push their products onto people. Yet they alone are reaping the financial benefits this medium brings. That’s just the way the market has evolved, unregulated.

What exactly are the costs incurred by record labels in making their product? They are responsible for finding people who can sing (anyone will do, musical ability can be replaced by technology, engineers and writers, looks are more difficult but not impossible), create songs with them one way or another in a studio and put it on a CD or iTunes, right? Am I over simplifying this? Am I forgetting the vast amounts of cash they spend on getting noticed over their competitors? Would nobody discover music for themselves any other way than by seeing it on expensive TV ads or billboards? Surely there’s a better way.

Also, last time I checked Simon Cowell uses a private jet to get around. Call me a communist, but why are we standing around allowing these cash possessed corporations to get as far as suing people for millions of dollars (money these victims clearly don’t have) because they couldn’t pay the ridiculous price tag that comes with music today, but still wanted to enjoy the culture? Should publishing companies start suing libraries? If you have the money, you buy the music. Those that don’t have the money will not drastically affect a company’s sales because they wouldn’t have bought it in the first place. They’re just depriving them of music in case they one day decide to pay for it instead of paying their bills.

Money flows freely into the pockets of record companies, and now judges are agreeing with them when they complain about “losing” money that they haven’t even earned, probably weren’t even going to earn and couldn’t prove that they would have earned because they can’t see into the future. Why can’t we have a reality check here?

Hate + (Education + Empathy) = Compassion

This might not be particularly great maths, but it’s a nice and simple formula that we should all apply to our lives. I took a coach down to visit my parents in the countryside last night, and in the car on the way home, after much reasoning with her, I had her backed into a corner about her deep rooted homophobic opinions. The final conclusion was this: “I just hate those camp gay men who have to hang their sexuality out for everyone to see it, they should keep it private.”

Fortunately for her, I’m not outrageously camp. Most people have no clue I’m gay unless they have a really good eye, but those are often people who think everyone is gay until proven otherwise.

I knew it was in there. I’ll write about my coming out experience with her another day, but let’s just say she’s had 7 years to come to terms with this and still something feels seriously wrong to me. Perhaps this is it. She hates people who don’t conform to the 1950’s societal regulations that determine how everyone should live their lives, just so there are no surprises for the people who, like her, prefer life to remain consistent at all times.

So this is my advice: If you ever find yourself hating somebody, stop. Learn, understand and put yourself in their shoes. Camp gay men clearly do not act camp to wind people up, that would get incredibly tiring. I learned that gender is a scale, nobody is 100% male or 100% female. Camp men are usually camp from early childhood and they tend to stay camp all their lives, they face an enormous amount of prejudice, confrontation and hate and yet they stay the same, they don’t change who they are. They don’t act straight just because other people hate who they are. Admire them for that at least, but more importantly, understand that this is the way they are. They are not doing this to piss you off and they are not going to change who they are to avoid pissing you off. You’re pretty much just getting yourself worked up for no reason. Deal with it. Learn to like it. If you had been given that person’s genetic make up and life experience, you wouldn’t be living life any differently to how they are.

I’m using this philosophy on myself. I’m less bothered by the somewhat narrow view of society my parents posses because I’ve learned that it merely stems from fear of the unknown. I’ve also come to understand they’re dreadful at dealing with change, it totally exhausts them. They’re constantly complaining to me because I change my mind about things, and they hate it when I update or change their computer software despite the fact it actually makes life easier for them once they’ve gotten used to the slight differences. They would rather be out of date than learn something new. They refer to the changes I make in my life as “handbrake turns”. They fail to understand how my life would be right now had I remained sedentary in this tiny village full of middle class white people. I would not be who I am now. So what’s wrong with being adventurous and adaptive to change, I say?

Addicts.

My dad is on secondment in Dublin right now, my mum visits him every weekend. He makes her gather up all editions of the Daily Mail (similar views to Fox “News”) that arrive through the door each morning and bring them to him at weekends for him to study meticulously, should he miss any speck of hate they print. They’ve been away recently, the stack is building up.

Here we have ‘A Nation of Bad Parents’, ‘Ramsay Panned – by his own customers’ and the false claim that you get a £500 fine for putting your rubbish bin out on the wrong day.

If you have the same problem (your family reads anti-facebook, anti-single mother, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-minority, racist tabloid trash and actually absorb it’s opinions) I recommend you read Tabloid Watch. It’s the best Daily Mail debunking blog ever.

Oxford Places for Oxford Residents!

I’d like to tell you a story about Oxford university, the crème de la crème of academic education in England.

Until recently, only people born in Oxford were able to attend the university, the majority of Oxfordians, about 95%, were successful in getting a place. There are many people born in Oxford who are somewhat ‘limited’, but they get a place anyway because 95% of the residents will, this is where they were born and it is a right they’re entitled to from birth. Many perform poorly and many even fail the course, they take such a wonderful opportunity completely for granted and don’t try very hard at all.

One day, Oxford decides to open it’s borders and allow applications from all over the UK in a bid to get some smarter, harder working students and add a little diversity to the college. The extra revenue they will make from the larger pool of students allows them to expand and improve their facilities, allowing more students to attend each year. However, the total number of Oxford residents that were unable to get a place rose from 5% to about 7%.

Less Oxfordians were able to get in because many more intelligent people, who work a lot harder and want a place so much more than them were applying and naturally getting priority over the less hard working, less intelligent and less grateful of Oxford’s residents.

The streets filled with angry Oxford residents, protesting against the unfairness of this new situation, which enabled smarter people from all over the country to now get a brilliant education and a better future. This came at the cost of places for about 2% of Oxfordians who weren’t trying particularly hard in the first place and expected a place to be handed to them as their birth right. Even some of the people born in Oxford who were good enough to compete with the new arrivals and did have places at the establishment agreed with the protestors. Even though they always looked down upon these people, they were now defending them, even though they always behaved foolishly and lacked attention in class, which was distracting and costly for the dedicated students. But nevertheless, they felt the right thing to do here was put their pride in Oxford above their lack of respect for these underacheivers, and unite against the rest of the UK residents that were “stealing” college places from Oxfordians. After all, the college is getting full of Scottish people and they could not understand a word of what they were saying, and they didn’t see why they should have to try and understand, they aren’t from around here. It was making life for the people of Oxford incredibly difficult, they had never known so much suffering in their quiet, comfortable little neighbourhoods.

So what does the university do in response to these protests? It caves to the majority in blind weakness and agrees. “Oxford places for Oxford people!” the university principle declares. But fortunately a lot of their rules are made by the a governing body in Brussels, so they struggle to follow through on that and continue allowing these intelligent, hard working masses to flock in from elsewhere in the country, applying for a place at Oxford’s prestigious university, alongside Oxfordians. After all, regardless of accent or where the students were born, the college wants the best in its system to help it with its success, not the people who demanded a place because they were born in the same city, the same people who just take it all as granted. Human rights should be for everyone, not just those born in a particular place. If there aren’t enough places at Oxford, only the best will get in.

Borders are breaking, if you want to survive you have try harder. Invest in yourself. The ladder of luxury ‘living standards’ that the people of Oxford have taken for granted until now is going down as it’s shared by more people, those who deserve the opportunities. You will end up on a lower rung if you don’t step up.