A goofy-lookin’ British guy thinks trying to cure cancer is a waste of time, because as causes of deaths go, cancer is one of the better ones.
Death from cancer is the best … You can say goodbye, reflect on your life, leave last messages, perhaps visit special places for a last time, listen to favourite pieces of music, read loved poems, and prepare, according to your beliefs, to meet your maker or enjoy eternal oblivion.
This is, I recognise, a romantic view of dying, but it is achievable with love, morphine, and whisky.
Just putting this out there in hopes it will provoke lively debate and maybe some childish name-calling (because… internet).
He makes a valid argument. I’ve certainly seen firsthand several far worse ways to die.
Back in the real world, no one is “Trying to cure cancer.” More precisely, legions are involved in advancing our understanding of the human body (and mind!) as well as medical science, in order to develop more sophisticated and effective treatment of many disease states, including a great variety of cancers. For a few, “Love, morphine and whiskey” is still the best we can offer.
As our health care system continues to unravel, there is the looming reality that we are on the edge of a new Dark Age. Dutifully, the Monastic Orders in our hospitals and research labs frenetically execute their charge to preserve as much knowledge as they can while the barbarians continue to hammer at the walls of our civilization.
“some childish name-calling”
Okay, I’ll start – this guy is a total asshat.
Why? Because death by cancer is NOT a good way to go – depending upon the cancer it can be painful, terrifying, and very hard on your loved ones.
Obviously, he has never seen someone up close die from cancer.
He doesn’t seem to realize that the “billions wasted on trying to cure cancer” has led to a more than 50% chance of surviving childhood leukemia.
I dare him to say that was money wasted to the parents of those children. He is nothing but a pussy and won’t have the nerve to tell that to any of those mothers because they would kick his goofy-looking ass.
So, I’ll say it again – he is a totally ignorant asshat (and yes he is goofy looking)
That’s his opinion. I can understand why some would think that dementia and Alzheimer’s could be terrifying. Anybody who makes their living using their mind would probably be horrified at the thought of it betraying them.
But, Dr. Richards, watching as a loved one’s body withers and becomes jaundiced, as their organs give out and fail, as they accept the finality of their demise… I beg your pardon, but there ain’t nothing romantic about that. Any death that slowly eats away at the body or mind is terrible. It comes down to a matter of preference: do you want your mind to decay to the point that you aren’t aware of what bad shape you’re in, or do you want to be fully aware of your body’s torturous decline?
On a slightly more positive note: the long-discussed and long hoped-for day when HIV is no longer fatal may be approaching. HIV researchers are reporting that many strains of the retrovirus are becoming less virulent. This makes sense: a virus that takes ten years off your life is more likely to propagate than one that kills you within a year, and one that only weakens your immune system to manageable levels even more so. It’s bad form for a parasite to kill its host.
The point is you have to die of something, Alzheimer’s doesn’t run in my family but living to old age does. If I live to be as old as my grandfathers I will probably out live the US dollar, being gay at that age will suck if I am not a billionaire(assuming a loaf of bread is under $1000 then). This guy should go and do whatever he wants to do before he dies now so he can enjoy it, then get a living will. I am glad I toured Europe before too many revolting 3rd worlders snuck in.
One of the reasons for hereditary risks for cancers is that many people throughout history didn’t live long enough to get cancer. Keep in mind George Washington was one of the richest men of his day yet he got sick several times drinking bad water, had ill fitting false teeth, & had to dress up in nice clothes in the summer without air conditioning. One of his prize possessions was an ice cream maker yet Laqueefa the Queen De Welfare probably consumed more ice cream by the age of 10 than Washington did his whole life.
A Johns Hopkins study reveals that most cancers are a probability crap shoot, not genetic or caused by lifestyle or the environment.
What is really at play with this Brit doctor is the arrogance of some Progressives who sit in judgment of who should live and who should die whether it be in the womb or in the geriatric stages of life.
I just read a PDF of Jonathan Gruber’s October, 2009 Policy Brief: Universal Health Insurance Coverage: Progress & Issues presented to the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Here is one nugget:
Understand, all socialists inherently know and believe that the state controls the lives and destinies of its wards for the greater good of the society. Offing expensive patients by state decree is somehow preferable to denying insurance to people with costly pre-existing conditions.
This Brit doctor is just practicing the social Darwinism understandings which fueled the eugenics movement. Mengele used lab Jews instead of mice. He whacked away at twins, dwarfs, tanning tattooed skin, injecting stuff in various organs and so forth. He harvested “medical knowledge” from doomed humans. We seriously believe that the wasted fetal remains from abortion should be harvested, but we recoil at the idea that it is somehow immoral to do so. In the world outside of the United States, people are regularly kidnapped for harvesting their organs. Slavery still exists. ISIS beheads people, stones people to death and tosses gays off tall buildings.
Just about any “solution” can be promoted if it is not complicated by any facts. Just about anything can be rationalized if the seeds of approval can be planted by declaring it to be for the greater good.
Finally, the Brit doctor uses cancer as a generic term for a kind of “happy” way to die. OK, let him have pancreatic cancer and a smile on his elitist face as he screams his way out of this living world.
I find it amusing that he says, “…enjoy eternal oblivion.” That’s like saying that you’re going to drink from an empty bottle.
I am for concealed carry as open carry leaves you vulnerable to someone trying to grab your piece
I’ll bet you the entire national debt that cures for cancer, AIDS, and autism have already been found. However, they’re being suppressed because it would upset Big Pharma’s bottom line.
I’m a nurse and it is obvious you have not been around death or seen those that are dying. These are generalizations but do have some common threads of experience which aren’t so romantic. 1. Cancer of the brain, they lose there sight and usually die from seizures that don’t stop. 2, Lung or breast cancer usually smother, can’t breath. 3. Pancreas cancer usually have abdomens so big that they get obstructed and vomit their own feces. 4. Melanoma cancer is very sneaky and can show up anywhere. 5. Liver cancer doesn’t allow the blood to coagulate so you bleed endlessly. 5. Ovarian or testical cancer spreads to other parts of the body. Although you think it gives you time to get ready to die – what if your family is not at the same point you are? If I had my choice it would be heart attack. Swift and over quickly. The thing heart attack patients have is momentary regrets on their faces as they fade away. No matter what 100 percent of the patients I see fight it all the way. Get real.
“On a slightly more positive note: the long-discussed and long hoped-for day when HIV is no longer fatal may be approaching.”
it is deeply offensive for people who have witnessed a dear one die of cancer to read this stuff about aids. The gay propaganda has advanced so much that too many people forget 90% or more of the aids cases it is because of your lifestyle. Not so much for cancer and neurological disease.
So I am not happy that the gay lobby pushed so much importance on their disease so that it is not deadly anymore. Other causes deserved way more attention than aids.
@ Susan: Yes, because people who don’t follow your sexual mores deserve to die, don’t they? And heck, let’s just off all those folks who trusted those wicked sorcerers who call themselves “doctors” and underwent the Satanic ritual known as a “blood transfusion.” And while we’re at it, let’s make sure these harlots’ offspring die too, because sins are punished to the seventh generation and all that.
You are a walking embodiment of the Christian strawman. You claim to worship a god who teaches mercy and compassion for the sinful, but turn around say that people who get HIV deserve to die. You are not a Christian; you are a Bronze Age-style Jew who has slapped Jesus onto your outmoded and savage religion to gain public acceptance.
You are proselytizing yet wildly xenophobic; the world is full of sinful heathens who must be converted or eliminated. Your worldview, and yours alone, is the correct one, and all people should subscribe to it. So, besides your language, ethnicity, and Scriptures, what gives you moral high ground over these ISIS animals? Besides the fact that you lack the guts to put your money where your mouth is, I mean.
I am delighted that progress has been made on HIV. it once seemed that the virus was impossible to treat and now it has been found to be curable. The progress on some cancers is remarkable and the grants and research on cancer is enormous world wide. Since cancer is not the same as a viral disease, its challenges are quite different from HIV or Ebola.
If I were to be grouchy about “choices” I would single out the thick-headedness of the powers-that-be who keep mosquitos that carry malaria and yellow fever shielded from DDT in the poorest sections of the world.
I don’t know about gay propaganda forcing a cure for aids. But I do know that, if the cause ever existed, gay propaganda did a miserable job in the effort to stop the spread of aids. Aids wrecked havoc in parts of Africa among heterosexuals because of promiscuous sexual lifestyles.
Clearly, there is a moral component embedded in the spread of aids. Except for transmission by tainted blood transfusion, sharing the virus is limited to extremely intimate causes. Thus, it is mostly a booby prize for taking a chance in a lustful coupling.
If there is a moral component embedded in the spread of Ebola or the occurrence of cancer, I need to be informed of its existence and just which strictures were violated.
@ Heliotrope: Well, Heliotrope, most people who suffer from AIDS are queers. And Africans. And queer Africans. How dare you compare the suffering of good, upstanding Christians from the God-blessed US of A to the smiting that God inflicts on degenerates, sub-humans, and degenerate sub-humans?
Sean L, perhaps you should read this passage.
Emphasis mine.
(Sorry for the double post).
Sean L, perhaps you should read this passage.
Emphasis mine.
That, Sean L, is why Susan has every right to lecture gay people on morality.
Compare Susan’s sexual mores — sex only within marriage, monogamy and fidelity to one partner, no drug use — to the gay community’s and then come back and compare HIV rates. Go ahead.
From a public health and good of society standpoint, she wins hands down. Indeed, millions more would be alive and healthy worldwide if her mores had been followed rather than yours.
Now do you understand?
That is why your vitriol would be better spent on attacking those same gay bigot leaders who supported and endorsed and damn near demanded that gays give tainted blood and contaminate the blood supply just because they were selfish, childish little pigs.
That is why your vitriol would be better spent on attacking promiscuous and stupid gay liberals and other liberals like Lena Dunham whose behavior is what has not only enabled HIV to spread, but which has radically spiked ALL forms of STDs in this country and elsewhere.
Smiting degenerates is not God’s gig. If God is actively picking winners and losers according to His mood swings, He is basically a pretty fickle God.
St. Augustine believed that God is never unjust. Boldly, St. Augustine dared to confront the basic question of inequality by asking: If God is never unjust how can He permit gross inequities to exist?
The actual conflict, St. Augustine reasoned, was: “How can the inherently mutable, corruptible human being dare to question the inherently All-mighty, immutable, incorruptible, unchangeable, all-knowing and seeing God on a point of justice?”
The conundrum was essentially reduced to why God would create an inferior, brutish human nature. The answer lay in man’s fall from Grace and thus having to bear the burden of Original Sin. (Getting caught up in the whys and wherefores of Original Sin is equivalent to computing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It is an irrelevant side road.)
At this point in St. Augustine’s argument, the man who does not believe in God has a far greater reliance on the faith in the perfectibility of man by the temporal acts of man than does the man who believes in omnipotence of God.
God offers salvation and His Grace as a reward for man renouncing evil and striving to follow the path of goodness. The man without God offers zilch.
What bothers me most about those who quote scripture and presume to speak FOR God is their presumptuousness. I am equally bothered by those without God who attempt to speak on some foundation of moral authority as if they are equal to God or out rank Him.
I am not much of an Old Testament man, because the God of the OT was more than a handful of wrath and grief. The New Testament stirred St. Augustine to write: “God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.” We Christians understand that attempting to walk in the foot prints of Christ is the only path to Salvation. We know ourselves in the stark terms of our weaknesses and we know that God knows more about us than we know about ourselves and that is what we take to judgement with us. But we are humbled that God would allow his Son to suffer and die on the cross for as St. Augustine taught: “Through us, He died; through Him, we shall live.”
If a person is comforted by being his own source of morality and ethics and comforted with the belief that his own free will is sufficient to live the good life among his fellow men, I say God bless him with no intended irony.
Now, I’m no sexual prude, but I do have a lot of problems with the current gay attitudes regarding HIV and AIDS. Because HIV isn’t the automatic death sentence it once was, gay men seem to be wanting to have carefree sex lives. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun once in a while. I mean, heterosexual dudebros do it with sorority sisters. However, when you’re the type that’s got 10 sex partners every 30 seconds…yeah…that’s on the too much side.
The attitude which says: “AIDS isn’t a death sentence anymore…therefore I can have unlimited sex!” is like the fat person who says “There are tons of medical advances on heart disease…therefore I can eat 5 cheeseburgers per day and lay around the house and do nothing all day! It doesn’t matter that I’ll get heart attacks and diabetes…medicine will take care of that for me!”
Heliotrope: No one is saying that AIDS is God’s punishment for sins, except for extreme anti-gay bigots. However, it IS possible that promiscuity, ESPECIALLY promiscuity without using protection, can lead to sexual diseases down the road.
If your (fictional and hypothetical) uncle, who was 5’9″ and weighed 275 pounds, and ate cheeseburgers every day, smoked one pack of cigarettes per day, and never exercised, do you think his doctor would just dismiss those habits? Or would the doctor tell him: “Look, sir, you need to change your eating habits and your lifestyle lest you may not survive. Quit the smoking, eat better, and get active!”?
@ ND30: I’ve read that quote before. Trust me, I think Kameny is despicable for saying that. But I can still think the sentiments expressed by Susan on also wrong.
Paul: I made this comment @ #13 above:
My “sermon” @ #16 ties is a continuation of the “moral component” theme. The vices and the virtues are identifiers of good and evil. How we handle evil is the most important component in achieving Grace and auditioning for Salvation.
The “fictional” uncle you presented victimized himself with gluttony. His doctor was only the messenger and not the person responsible for saving the man from himself. We have a lot of people who are on a treadmill of self destruction and gays having unprotected sex are among them. They prefer momentary pleasure to living a cleaner life. They are, in many senses, addicted to pleasure and risk. Not much different from shooting up heroin or playing Russian Roulette.
On a different note, we don’t know how “gay” comes to exist in a human. Some think it is genetic. If it is genetic, is it a “defect” and is it potentially “curable?” Is it a genetic classification worthy of being protected as a “civil right?” There are many more questions that are valid, but you get the drift. One great parallel concern in all of this concerns pedophilia. It is being labeled a mental disorder, but what if it is discovered to be a genetic defect. What if pregnancy tests can discover the defect? As you know, homosexuality was a mental disorder until it was expunged from the DSM.
My construct has now led us to abortion and killing defective humans for reasons of human judgement. This would take me back to St. Augistine, not because he knew everything about everything, but because he thought so much out with such clarity. Those without God, however, just construct a poll and go forward on the societal whims of the times. They are not concerned with morality and ethics; they just want to keep up with the culture. Socialist societies are subject to the “free will” of the government and the “free will” of the people be damned. The government determines what it moral and what is ethical and eventually, everyone is stupefied by an inability to think or do anything outside of the state imposed box.
Will this man feel the same way if he contracts cancer? Or will he be a liberal hypocrite wanting the latest way to save his life?