So wrong on so many levels...


Michael Stuart Kelly

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We can now return to our regular programme: NON-stop Moralizing and Posturing. It's the Objectivish thing to do ...

As opposed to NON-stop Factualizing, you mean?

Ah, come on. You know that's why you love O-ish sites. You can go round n round

with media information, or the social condition of humans, anywhere else - but on OL you can find judgment-calls (at times) of morals and principles.

Whether I moralize too much or not, or whether this particular case calls for it,

there are principles involved, one can't avoid. They connect everywhere - only the actualities change.

Right now, in some other place, the exact same immoralities of self-abnegation, authority-reverence and denial of humanity are happening, or will happen. By the facts and principles both, shall we know them.

Anybody wants uncaring caregivers, non-educating educators, power and wealth grasping politicos (and mobs of demanding, entitled, State workers) look no further than the Republic of South Africa.

See what collectivization can do to people when Socialism - once the old apartheid

variety, now with a Marxist flavour - is unopposed and gains the upper hand.

There is likely a Bayless-type occurrence several times a day, here. The many I've heard of, and some personally witnessed are iceberg-tip. It either goes unrecorded and unremarked, or gets squashed by bureaucrats, or is squeezed to the back of the media by more obviously horrible aberrations.

Sorry to repeat - the principles don't vary, they are precisely the same in Darkest A, as anywhere. Here it is more blatant to see, and I can't stop sounding off about them.

Over and above your advanced political dispensations, may be it is the self responsibility - and personal decency and standards - of most North Americans that makes for the telling distinction from there to here.

(And it's testament to those characteristics that a single old woman's death does not go unnoticed.)

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How many OLers are/were doctors? As far as I can tell, only two, Leonid and, if by a whisker, our new friend from Florida.

f you suspect I added a bit of tongue-lash to my fantasia for those who presume to knowledge, yes. Medical advice to and on the subject of Lorraine Bayless is Five for a Penny when given by spectators like me. I have been cursing myself privately for so rawly saying so much, and so undressed.

William,

There's a nuance I'm not sure you have addressed. I, personally, don't pretend to have the medical credentials to know for sure what is best in an emergency situation where an old lady has passed out and is not breathing correctly.

But I do know that there were two people who had those credentials involved in this sad story. And they were in conflict.

My beef is the way the one with the power--the nurse--conducted herself. She transformed from the dispatcher's ally (focused on saving the old lady) to bureaucratic gatekeeper (focused on covering her own ass and saving the company some legal grief). She would no longer help, nor would she let anyone else help. Once the ambulance was called, the outcome of the old lady's trouble was no longer a problem to her. Her only concern was to keep herself and her organization blameless.

Two experts with credentials. One doing all she could to avert disaster. The other the Drooling Beast to whom no amount of reason could penetrate.

And the Drooling Beast was not only the one with the power to actually do something or get someone on the phone who would, she exercised that power to do nothing and make sure nobody else did either. She was not making an expert disagreement with another expert based on her medical knowledge. She simply hunkered down and blanked out the problem after making sure her ass was covered.

That's what turned my stomach.

Michael

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Apropos of nothing in particular, it took me the longest time in this thread to look up the acronym IHOP.

Initially, I thought it meant the International House of Pancakes and that there was some humor I was missing. As the thread progressed, I began to suspect my understanding was not exactly what it should be.

:)

Finally I looked it up. If any reader is where I was, IHOP means Improved Health Outcomes Program. I don;t know what that program is, though. I tried to look it up, but I got bored. There are tons of calls for proposals for local IHOPs, so I imagine it is some kind of general federal health program.

Unless someone explains it in simple language, or someone else wants to look it up and explain it in simple language, I'm not interested enough to pursue it further. I'll content myself with my limited imperfect speculation. Ya' gotta choose your battles in this age of information overload...

Michael

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IHOP, in my fantasies == International House of Pancakes. I used this acronym to stress the Chain aspect of the Senior Cargo Facilities Management Consortiums such as Our-Slogans-are-Shit Seniors Inc as in Bakersfield. And failed.

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Gulch is a Doctor...

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...

To the dead, says Hitch. To the dead. Cheers, cheers all. To Death, may You take me unawares. To my lovely Friend Carol, whom I have never yet met, what a moving prose poem of your death, your mother as her eyes turned to glass. Brant, brother OLer, may we meet in actuality.

I suggest rather fantastically that MSK decree an OL Conflab in Chi-town in 2014 or sooner or whenever -- a self-organizing social, a Ball of Reason, an Event. No papers delivered. No formal speeches, no icing on the cake. Just OLers being their passionately reasonable best. As good as if not better than the Kissimmee Konklave of long ago SOLO-RoR.

We could loudly but reasonably finish this skirmish then, brother Brant? I do so want to meet a few lovely cronies like Carol and MSK and Kat and you before we become cargo ourselves.

...

To the dead, says Hitch. To the dead. Cheers, cheers all. To Death, may You take me unawares. To my lovely Friend Carol, whom I have never yet met, what a moving prose poem of your death, your mother as her eyes turned to glass. Brant, brother OLer, may we meet in actuality.

I suggest rather fantastically that MSK decree an OL Conflab in Chi-town in 2014 or sooner or whenever -- a self-organizing social, a Ball of Reason, an Event. No papers delivered. No formal speeches, no icing on the cake. Just OLers being their passionately reasonable best. As good as if not better than the Kissimmee Konklave of long ago SOLO-RoR.

We could loudly but reasonably finish this skirmish then, brother Brant? I do so want to meet a few lovely cronies like Carol and MSK and Kat and you before we become cargo ourselves.

Bill, thanks. Ma would have loved her funeral (she was a connoisseur of funerals); her idol Lloyd Robertson even sent flowers. In her casket we put the sonogram photo of the first great=grandchild who entered the world five months later, bringing back her mischievousness and fiercely loving heart.

Chicago 2014! I'm there. But I warn you, I will prob ably sing.

Just a dirty room and a silver spoon will do for me. I can bring the spoon.

May I recommend to you and everyone Ye Gods, by Tom Holt, in which Osiris escapes from a nursing home after a food protest, and assisted by a lorry driver and a State Registered Nurse, raises the walls of Jericho via ram's horn.

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I did not realize what this was about. I only read this today from another post.

First, at this point, we just venting. Everyone is expressing their own personal views of how they feel about this. Everyone is offering facts and reasons in support of what they already believe to be true about themselves. That much is fine, as long as we are clear on this. I did not read all of this closely, but I did not see any post where anyone said that they actually were in such a circumstance as the nurse. I am.

[edit: I found Adam's in #48.]

I work as a security guard. I am often between the Scylla and Charybdis of contractual limits ("post orders") and the moral mandate to keep other people safe. Most of the guards I know - I daresay all of them - have some internal morality that supersedes the rules -- and they know it. We have different rules. I just worked with two guys yesterday, both prior military, and both them explaining different personal theories of operations, neither one of which I would ever subscribe to. But the goal in all cases, theirs and mine, was to do the right thing, whatever that is.

Moreover, have you ever heard of malicious compliance? As security guards we also follow the rules to the detriment of those who make them. "OK... You got it..." It just depends on how we are treated as human beings. You respect us, you get ours. You treat us like idiots, that's what you get. But most often, we rise above that, ignoring their idiocy to save them from themselves. It goes with the job.

All of that was vernacular. I can reframe it as formal Objectivist philosophizing if you need that.

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...

To the dead, says Hitch. To the dead. Cheers, cheers all. To Death, may You take me unawares. To my lovely Friend Carol, whom I have never yet met, what a moving prose poem of your death, your mother as her eyes turned to glass. Brant, brother OLer, may we meet in actuality.

I suggest rather fantastically that MSK decree an OL Conflab in Chi-town in 2014 or sooner or whenever -- a self-organizing social, a Ball of Reason, an Event. No papers delivered. No formal speeches, no icing on the cake. Just OLers being their passionately reasonable best. As good as if not better than the Kissimmee Konklave of long ago SOLO-RoR.

We could loudly but reasonably finish this skirmish then, brother Brant? I do so want to meet a few lovely cronies like Carol and MSK and Kat and you before we become cargo ourselves.

...

To the dead, says Hitch. To the dead. Cheers, cheers all. To Death, may You take me unawares. To my lovely Friend Carol, whom I have never yet met, what a moving prose poem of your death, your mother as her eyes turned to glass. Brant, brother OLer, may we meet in actuality.

I suggest rather fantastically that MSK decree an OL Conflab in Chi-town in 2014 or sooner or whenever -- a self-organizing social, a Ball of Reason, an Event. No papers delivered. No formal speeches, no icing on the cake. Just OLers being their passionately reasonable best. As good as if not better than the Kissimmee Konklave of long ago SOLO-RoR.

We could loudly but reasonably finish this skirmish then, brother Brant? I do so want to meet a few lovely cronies like Carol and MSK and Kat and you before we become cargo ourselves.

Bill, thanks. Ma would have loved her funeral (she was a connoisseur of funerals); her idol Lloyd Robertson even sent flowers. In her casket we put the sonogram photo of the first great=grandchild who entered the world five months later, bringing back her mischievousness and fiercely loving heart.

Chicago 2014! I'm there. But I warn you, I will probably sing.

Just a dirty room and a silver spoon will do for me. I can bring the spoon.

May I recommend to you and everyone Ye Gods, by Tom Holt, in which Osiris escapes from a nursing home after a food protest, and assisted by a lorry driver and a State Registered Nurse, raises the walls of Jericho via ram's horn.

Well, obviously that put everybody entirely off. I might as well go full disclosure: I will probably sing hymns: "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Galtgulch city of our laud...."

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