UK's Suicide Vote: Nation Pulls the Plug on Itself

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
One of the phrases I hate as a pro lifer
is the word or the expression culture wars. That conservatives
are getting too tied up in culture war debates and
they're not focused on what's you know, really important, like
you know per capita GDP, or you know, whether the

(00:23):
reconciliation bill is going to pass, or or cutting the deficit,
which will never actually do. It seems like this word
culture war, this phrase culture war got created specifically as
a way to minimize the importance of social conservative issues.

(00:44):
Social conservative issues, particularly like LGBT related issues, marriage debate,
and most especially abortion. And it's a particularly American thing,
much to the grown own eye rolling dismay of European
liberals and American liberals who wish they were European liberals

(01:09):
that in America and I don't know what it is.
It's the specifically American character, the character of American Catholics
and American Evangelicals most especially, that has allowed us to
keep fighting these fights when Catholics and Protestants in the

(01:30):
Old World stopped, when Catholics in much of Europe gave up,
not all of Europe. Poland is still very vigorously Catholic
Ireland was pretty vigorously Catholic until a little bit ago,
but for the most part, Europe just kind of gave

(01:51):
up on fighting against abortion. The Europeans legalized gay marriage
without a tussle, without a fight, and without much debate.
And there's a certain when you go over to Europe
and you look at political parties over there, and you'll
see someone characterized as far right, far right, a far

(02:15):
right political party, which it's so ridiculous the way the
media characterizes European political parties. So there's usually usually the
division of labor is if they say that it's a
left wing party, what it means it's borderline communist. When

(02:36):
they say it's a center right party, it means pretty
much has the same beliefs as the Democrat Party in
the United States does. And then when they say hard
right or far right or extreme right, what they mean
is something that's almost as conservative as the Republican Party.

(02:56):
That's what usually that's usually what they mean when you
read any American media account of European politics. That's how
you have to translate it. When they say the center
left party, what they mean is almost socialist or pretty
much totally socialists. When they say center right, they mean
about as liberal as the modern day Democrat Party. And
then when they say far right, hard right, they mean

(03:18):
almost as conservative as the Republican Party. Because even like
they're far right parties, they're hard right parties. Abortions not
on their radars. It's not even a debated issue. Family stuff,
transgender stuff, it's not really the subject of debate. And
Europeans will talk about how, oh, you know, well we

(03:38):
don't have the kind of culture war fights like you
guys have in the United States. Well maybe you should.
Maybe you actually should, because in over the course of
this week, the United Kingdom has legalized both abortion through

(04:07):
birth and assisted suicide. Just today legalized physician assisted suicide.
Parliament has just passed this, and I want to talk
about these things. So the sort of settlement that most
of Europe had landed on when it comes to abortion

(04:29):
was basically abortion restricted to the first half of pregnancy,
more or less, and that's actually the case in most
of Europe. In fact, that was one of the weird things.
When America was still living under rov Wade prior to
twenty twenty two, the United States actually had far more

(04:50):
liberal abortion laws than any country in Europe did pretty
much all of Europe banned abortion after about the twenty
week point of pregnancy, which is the halfway point. Many
countries in Europe restricted abortion only to the first trimester.
Some countries in Europe had other kinds of restrictions that
American pro abortion advocates would scream and shout and flail about, like,

(05:15):
you know, certain certain hour like forty eight twenty four
to forty eight hour waiting periods, mandatory counseling before you
got an abortion, stuff like that. There are all kinds
of these European restrictions. You know, we would think of
Europe as so culturally left wing. Actually they were more
conservative than American liberals are when it comes to the
question of abortion. But it's just not a live political

(05:42):
issue over there. Especially in the United Kingdom, members of
the so called Conservative Party are just as likely to
be pro abortion as members of the Labor Party, the Tories,
the Conservatives don't seem to give a hoot about abortion,
and it seems almost as if attitudes on abortion and

(06:03):
assisted suicide just seemed to vary from MP to MP.
You have some prominent members of Parliament like Jacob Breeze, Mogg,
who was very prominent under Boris Johnson, who was a
very devout Catholic and he disliked abortion and things like that.
But Boris Johnson was I believe, was more okay with

(06:26):
it David Cameron okay, I mean such that it wasn't
even really that big of an issue. So they introduced
this bill to expand Great Britain's legalization of abortion too,
all the way through pregnancy forty weeks, and they pass
it with an enormous majority. Let's remember right now that
the Labor Party is in control in Parliament under Keir Starmer,

(06:51):
who's the Prime Minister of Great Britain. They pass legal
abortion by a massive majority and without even like any debate.
That's the craziest thing about this. They passed Like you
guys may remember this, how like New York back in

(07:11):
like twenty nineteen, twenty eighteen, and a bunch of other
states were passing these very aggressive pro abortion laws to
you know, get rid of penalties for babies who may
have survived childbirth, survived and attempted abortion and then just
not providing them with care. New York was decriminalizing certain

(07:35):
kinds of criminal abortion, like getting there's all kinds of
these insane super pro abortion laws that were being passed
in twenty eighteen, and they were huge national news stories.
In the United Kingdom, they just passed this law to
expand legal abortion all the way through full term pregnancy,

(07:55):
as in, in the United Kingdom, it's going to be
legal to kill a thirty nine week old baby in
a forty week long pregnancy, which by the way, can
be done, I mean it is done in some states
in the United States. Pro abortion folks try to argue

(08:17):
that it's only done because of medical emergencies. It's not
only done because of medical emergencies. Very often it's done
just for pure birth control reasons. And they just pass
it with, as they call it, just a minimal amount
of so called backbencher debate, meaning it's the backbenchers, the

(08:41):
people who sit at the back benches of the Parliament,
who are, you know, the less important members of Parliament,
the people nobody's heard of doing debates that no one's
really following very closely. So earlier this week they just
passed that how hum whistling past the graveyard, and then

(09:03):
today they pass physician assisted at suicide. Now this was narrower.
There was much more national debate about this. The bill
would allow patients to be killed. So let's understand the
structure of most physician assisted suicide legislation. So and let

(09:23):
me define some terms. There's euthanasia and there's assisted suicide,
slightly different things. Physician assisted suicide basically means a doctor
prescribes poison to you that you ingest in the form
of a pill or something. So it's not the doctor

(09:45):
directly killing you, it's the doctor assisting you so that
you can kill yourself. Euthanasia is the doctor's the one
plunging the syringe. The doctor's the one adding the poison
to your IV. That's euthanasia. Okay, so there's a slight difference.

(10:11):
They're both bad. And the way most assistant suicide laws
are structured. This is how California's law is structure. This
is how the potential New York law is going to
be structured. This is how the UK's laws structured. Is basically,
you get someone with some kind of a serious diagnosis that,

(10:33):
in the view of the lawmaker, renders one's quote quality
of life to be lessened. Whatever that qualifying state is
that qualifies you to receive a prescription to request a
prescription from a doctor for physician assist at suicide. Now

(10:53):
here's the problem is that what is that definition of
what is that qualifying condition? So in California it's a
one year termminal diagnosis. You receive a terminal diagnosis that
you're not going to outlive a year. Well, first of all,
those kinds of things are good faith estimates on the
part of doctors. They are not set in stone, lock

(11:17):
it down one hundred percent certainty guarantees. Right, It's not
like if a doctor tells you you have eight months
to live, like on you know, seven months and twenty
nine days, you're perfectly fine, and then at you know,
seven months and thirty one days, you keel over dead
immediately at the stroke of midnight. That's not how that's

(11:40):
not how it works. It's an estimate. Maybe you'll make it,
maybe you won't. Maybe you'll live way beyond it, maybe
you'll have a really amazing recovery and you'll respond perfectly
to treatment in ways that people can't always foresee because
there's a gazillion different variables, And maybe you'll outlive your
diagnosis by twenty years. Now, the problem is that the

(12:06):
category of who qualifies once you've crossed that fundamental boundary
of actively killing is okay. As opposed to the universal
accepted Western medical ethical practice of there is a significant

(12:31):
distinct difference between actively killing someone and deciding to withdraw
extraordinary means of care allowing nature to take its course. Okay,
there's a massive difference there, and it makes sense given

(12:52):
the anthropology behind this, Like you really have to go
down to the fundamental question, why is killing people wrong?
Why is killing people bad? All right, let's actually break
it down, let's actually try to think about it and
talk about it. Why is it bad to kill people? Well,
it's bad to kill people because we can see that
life living is a good. Okay, it is the good

(13:17):
towards which our bodies are oriented, towards which our human
nature is oriented. Death comes about through our bodies breaking down, malfunctioning,
not operating according to their proper ends. This is the
sense in which in Christian theology we would say death
is on or really maybe more Christian philosophy we would

(13:40):
say that, and not exclusively Christian philosophy, either Greek philosophy
Aristotelian philosophy. We would say that death is not natural. Yes,
it is a thing that happens to everybody, but it
involves the body breaking down, not functioning according to its
proper flourishing. So here is death as this ill, as

(14:04):
bad as this natural evil, which, while it's contrary to
the good of our flourishing, is where we're all ending up.
That's where we're all going to deliberately actively bring that about. Then,

(14:24):
is clearly something different from letting it happen. It is
eventually going to happen to all of us. To actively
do it, though, to take a life involves this massive
disruption to the social order, taking someone out of the

(14:46):
political community that the community of all of us living together.
This is why murder is bad. Life is good. Human
beings are good. Human beings have connections to other human
beings because they are political animals in a community with others.
We love them, We care for them as goods in
and of them, as things that are good in and

(15:07):
of themselves. When you kill someone actively, you are acting
in a way that's contrary to nature, letting death happen,
allowing this natural evil to happen. Once you realize that
you cannot forestall it is one thing actively killing someone

(15:28):
is different. Once you cross the line of saying yes,
I can actively kill someone for some kind of quality
of life reason, where do you stop? Where do you
draw the line? How do you define what is or
isn't a good quality of life? The slippery slope has

(15:50):
to happen. Slippery slope argument is not a logical fallacy
when it comes to something like physician assistant suicide. Once
you have accepted the premise that you can actively kill someone,
including yourself, there is no stopping point anything that makes
someone say I don't if you say that someone should

(16:13):
die on the basis of some quality of life judgment,
there is no stopping point anymore. And that's why we
see with this bill in the UK, someone with anorexia
may be able to qualify for physician assistant suicide. We're
seeing this in the in Canada where people with depression

(16:35):
are qualifying for physician assistan at suicide. They're just offing
anyone who is becoming And this is what's happening as
people become inconvenient, and people are very inconvenient at the
end of their life, and we'll talk about the cost
things next. This is why disabilities groups so often opposed

(16:59):
physics assisted suicide because they are difficult, they are burdens
on society, and someone could push them to make value
judgments that their life is not worth Continuing now, when
we return, I want to talk about the financial side
of assisted suicide and the deep injustice there. That's next

(17:19):
on the John Girardi Show. The United Kingdom just legalized
physician assisted suicide today. It's already legal in California, it's
legal in Canada, and I'm afraid it could spread to
more and more states throughout the United States. And this
is one of the reasons why I'm so terrified of it.

(17:42):
I retweeted this post to my Twitter account at Fresno Johnny.
This is a Twitter post from this woman, Caroline Pharaoh,
who is some kind of British TV news talking head.
She posts this sign that the anti assisted suicide advocates,
one of the anti assistant physicians' suicide advocates, was holding,

(18:06):
saying it won't be our choice for long, and then
has two little graphs, one for one cycle of chemotherapy
which costs three eighth and eighty five pounds, assisted suicide,
which costs one hundred eighty three pounds and that's it
right there. It is much cheaper. And this is a

(18:33):
huge appeal of physician assisted suicide that people are not
wanting to talk about on the pro assisted suicide side.
The pro assisted suicide side is trying to talk about autonomy,
allowing people to make their own decisions, and they're covering
up the enormous temptation that assisted suicide is going to propose.
For countries like the United Kingdom that have socialized medicine,

(18:55):
they got to balance their budgets, as well as countries
like America that have insurance companies that don't like paying
out for things. Assisted suicide is much cheaper than end
of life care, and that is its enormous risk. Most

(19:21):
of the healthcare resources that you are going to take
up over the course of your life, listener, you are
going to take up those resources in the last year
of your life. When I think of like my dad,
for example, Okay, my dad who passed away from cancer

(19:42):
back of March in March of twenty twenty four. My
dad was a very healthy man. I don't know what
medical resources he took up over the course of the
first I don't know, sixty four years of his life.
Regular checkups. I don't know if my dad had ever
had a surgery. I don't know if he ever broke
a bone. I guess maybe probably broke a bone or

(20:03):
something when he was a kid. I think he had
like some little skin cancer things that got whacked off,
but nothing serious. The enormous majority of the healthcare resources
my dad took up over the course of his life,
he took up in his last like two or three
years of life. During his during the time that he

(20:27):
learned that he had cancer and treating the cancer and
surgeries to treat cancer, et cetera overwhelming percentage of it.
And we knew that my dad was likely was likely
going to die of his cancer pretty much for the

(20:48):
last year of his life. He died in March of
twenty four. We had learned in March of twenty three
that the cancer had spread extremely broadly and that, you know,
his long term odds were not good, And so we
knew that my dad certainly would have qualified for physician

(21:11):
assistant suicide at that point, and certainly it would have
saved everyone a lot of money if he had taken
up on that. And I'll just say this, I wouldn't
trade that one last year I had with my dad
for anything, And I know it was horribly difficult on

(21:35):
my mom. It was difficult on everybody. I mean, he
had all kinds of complications, especially towards those last months.
But you know, he got to see my kids grow
one year older. He got to be with my kids
a little more. He got to see his grandson play
a flag football game. He you know, he got to
sit together and just but yeah, you know, I'm gonna

(22:03):
start crying if I talk too much more. But the
point I'm trying to make is from a public policy angle,
social liberals who are okay with killing people because that's
apparently there they're mantra they are going to in. They
are hugely incentivized from a cost saving perspective to push

(22:25):
people into physician assisted suicide rather than getting end of
life care because end of life care is way more expensive.
And I think that's especially. I think that's going to
be true both in countries with socialized medicine like Canada
and the United Kingdom, and I think it's going to
be true even in certain cases in America with insurance

(22:48):
companies who don't want to pay out for things. It
won't be your choice for long, and especially in the
socialized medicine system where you know, not everyone can get
cataly care, they might start saying to people, the government's
not going to pay for your chemotherapy, but we will

(23:09):
pay for a physician assistant suicide. So it's going to start,
as you know, voluntary physician assistant suicide, and it's going
to slide into direct and involuntary euthanasia. I'm it's hard

(23:32):
to think how the financial pressures don't immediately push in
that direction. And that's why people with disabilities so often
opposed physician assistant suicide because their healthcare is really expensive too.
When we return, all the worst people in American politics
have all gotten mad at Donald Trump in the course
of the last seventy two hours. That's next on the

(23:54):
John Girardi Show. All right, I want to talk about
Ron for a little bit and the way that Donald
Trump has managed to make all of the stupidest people
on both sides of the should we shouldn't we get
involved debate. So there are two kinds of extremely stupid
people in the debate, and then I think two kinds

(24:16):
of more reasonable people. So the two kinds of extremely
stupid people and I'll have the two sides. It's not
really left or right, it's restrainers and interveners. And by
the way, this seems to be a conversation that's only
happening on the right. The left, I feel, is like
totally disengaged from the Iranian conflict, and I feel like

(24:41):
all they're really doing is trying to position themselves to
say that whatever Donald Trump does is bad. So if
Trump does intervene, he's a horrible, escalating warmonger monster who
didn't go to Congress for congressional pproval or whatever. If

(25:02):
Trump doesn't intervene, then oh, he loves Iranian terrorists, and
different Democrats will sort of position themselves to criticize him
for that. If he does attack, then the AOC types
will say that he's a monster if he excuse me.
If he does attack, the AOC types will say he's

(25:24):
a monster. If he does not participate, does not engage,
does not attack, then maybe the sort of more moderate
leaning types like I don't know, maybe John Fetterman will
criticize him, or Chuck Schumer will. I don't want to
use Chuck Schumer or Josh Shapiro as the examples because

(25:44):
they're both Jewish, but I could I could see more
moderate liberals criticizing Trump for that. Anyway, the left seems
totally disengaged. So I'm gonna this is an intra right
wing argument, intra and write argument. So you've got the
restrainers and you've got the interventionists, all right. The stupidest

(26:08):
restrainers are the Candace Owens types, and to a certain extent,
Tucker Carlson. Candace Owens I think is dumber than a
bag of rocks. And I think she's always been kind
of dumb, and it's only now that people are starting
to kind of see it that she's pretty anti Semitic

(26:28):
at this point. And the anti interventionists who are just like,
we're not gonna die for another Israeli war is all right, Well,
let's calm down. Israel was not the reason we intervened
in Afghanistan or Iraq. That wasn't the reason why. And
we haven't actually fought any of Israel's wars. Israel has

(26:51):
fought all of them. Now, do I think maybe we
are too over involved with Israel? We give them lots
of military aid, which redounds to our ill in the
long run. In many cases. I mean, one of the
chief reasons why countries in the Middle East hate are
Guts so much is because of our support for Israel.

(27:12):
Am I generally against the idea of proxy wars and
the fact that we fund Israel militarily so much that
it puts us on the hook for stuff that they
do in various kinds of ways. Yes, I'm critical of
all those things, but I never veer into the kinds
of anti Semitic sort of nonsense that Owens does. And

(27:33):
I think Carlson and Owens have been sort of stooges
for some of the stupider foreign policy ideas, the idea
of Vladimir Putin's actually maybe a really good guy, and
why are we being so harsh on him? Like, well, no,
Vladimir Putin's a bad guy. No one needs to dispute
that it's bad to invade other countries. Whether he was

(27:54):
he felt some sort of pressure to do it, you
still shouldn't do it. It's bad. Okay. I'm not gonna
be crying alligator tears for Vladimir Putin because countries in
Europe wanted to join NATO. Forget No, I'm sorry, I'm
not gonna feel bad for Vladimir Putin for starting a
horrific war in which what is it now, hundreds of

(28:17):
thousands of people have died. No, Vladimir Putin's a bad guy.
He started that war. It's his fault anyway. So the
candae Owens and Tucker Carlson types were totally dismayed a
couple of days ago, and it looked like the United
States was about to join up with Israel in air
strikes on a run. Super ticked off about it, and

(28:39):
all the neocons were gloating. Now this leads me to
the other group of people I despise, the mega neocon
types who were gloating against the Tucker Carlsons of the world.
That ha, the President is ready to go. He's gonna
tax see you you all, you restrainer types. You thought

(29:02):
you had Donald Trump. You thought his foreign policy was
your foreign policy. Turns out he's not as doctrinaire about
any of this, and you guys are gonna lose. And
Trump's gonna bomb a run ha ha. And the super
interventionist types who have wanted regime change in Irun for forever,
and frankly, who doesn't want regime change in Iran. It's

(29:22):
a horrible regime. The problem is how do you do it?
And the restrainer types would say there's no way to
do it easily. However, the interventionist types swiftly shifted from
you know, support for whatever the Israelis are doing, to oh,
maybe we give them some bunker buster bombs to regime change.

(29:47):
Let's regime change. And it gets to the point where
the worst people on the interventionist side. Probably the worst
person on the interventionist side is Bill Crystal. Bill Crystal
formerly of The Weekly Standard, which was once famously called

(30:13):
by a talk radio host on a competing station, I
believe the Weekly Standard w e a k l y Standard,
which a phrase that I love. Bill Crystal, who hated
Trump so much that after twenty sixteen he basically completely
abandoned all of his prior conservative positions. He ran conservative publications,

(30:38):
He was a talking head for Fox News who predicted
confidently that McCain would win eight and Romney would win
in twenty twelve. He was on the board of directors
of pro life organizations, like he was mister Conservative. And
then Trump comes along and he not only does he
just say I'm still a conservative, I just don't like
Donald Trump. No, he abandons ship on all of his
prior positions and adopts pretty much the entire Democrat Party

(31:01):
platform except the one thing he stayed consistent on is
his constant neocon desire to invade hot sandy countries in
the Middle East, and he has wanted to intervene in
Iran for decades. Crystal once it looked like so at first,

(31:23):
earlier in the week, it looked like, yeah, Trump was
about to launch airstrikes against I Run. Then a day
or two later, it looks like Trump wants to reopen
negotiations with the Iranians again. And now all of the
worst intervener neocon types now they're all mad at Trump.

(31:43):
And Crystal's basically saying, well, it's a constant move by
totalitarians that they want to shore up support at home
first before they do something, that their focus is always
on dominating things domestically. So apparently, according to Bill Crystal,

(32:04):
it's totalitarian to not want to topple a foreign regime.
That's what's really totalitarian. Now, the actual debate, I think
is between limited interventionists versus limited restrainers. There are limited

(32:27):
restrainers who say, all right, if there is a way,
have we determined there is a way to stop the
Iranian nuclear program through a limited American air strike perhaps
at the four Dow that all of the focuses on
this four Dow nuclear plant, that the Iranians have buried

(32:51):
two football fields down in the side of a mountain
underground that apparently the Israeli military ordinance their bombs can't reach.
But America has these so called bunkerbuster bombs that apparently
can reach it. So the thought is, either the United
States gives Israel some of these bombs, or the United

(33:14):
States itself launches such an attack, and if by doing
so ends the Iranian nuclear threat, the threat of Iran
getting a nuclear weapon, Okay, that could work, And I
think there are a lot of restrainer types who are
open to that idea. A lot of the restrainer types

(33:37):
are saying, look, yes, we agree, Iran having a nuclear
weapon is against the interests of the United States. Now
there are the limited restrainer type, the limited interventionist types
who are saying, look, we don't want full scale, like
twenty year long occupation of Iran, but the Iranian regime

(33:57):
is now all of a sudden extremely a ton of
their senior leadership has gone. It might be that we
know where the Ayatola Comania is. What if we took
necessary military action right now through airstrikes in such a
way that maybe we could kill Kamani and bring about

(34:21):
regime change, And that's tantalizing. Iran is the world's biggest
state sponsor of terrorism, has been for decades, has hated
the United States, has killed hundreds and hundreds of American
servicemen serving in Iraq. They fund all of the worst
actors in the Middle East, Hamas, the Houthies, et cetera.
You know, uh, the horrible Assad regime in Syria, although

(34:46):
God knows if the new regime that toppled the Assad
regime in Syria is going to be any better. It's tantalizing.
It would be a good thing to not have the
Islamic Republic ruling in Iran. But this is where I
think I ultimately side with the restrainers. Yes, I would

(35:06):
love a magic ferry dust scenario of we topple the
current regime and then a new regime, fully formed organized
with the full support of the Iranian people, allegedly comes
to the forefront. Stably and the United States doesn't have
to do anything to prop it up. Do you think

(35:29):
that's gonna happen. No, I would predict this. If the
Iyatola is toppled and a new government comes in, Iran
is going to descend into civil war, and it'll be
in our national interest to support one side over the other.
And Russia might get involved for wanting to support one

(35:50):
side over another. And all of these interventionist neo con
types are all of a sudden gonna say we gotta
get involved. No, I don't want to get involved. I
am fine with doing the first Trump administration policy towards Iran,
completely cutting them off financially with sanctions so that they

(36:16):
can't export terror, they can't keep funding Hamas in the Hoothies,
cripple their nuclear weapons ambitions. That's fine. I feel like
if you topple the regime, if we actually seek regime change,

(36:38):
it could lead to a much worse and more involved
situation that we're gonna have to get involved in because
the Europeans can't do it, and the only other country
that could credibly do it is Russia, and we don't
want them to have more influence in the Middle East
when we return. How oddly enough, the person I trust

(36:58):
the most in all of this is Donald Trump. Next
on the John Girardi Show. You know, in the whole
Iran debate that's happening on the right, where you have
interventionists who are like, oh, yes, we should push for
he should accomplish regime change, and then I think being
ridiculous about not thinking through, Well, you do realize there's

(37:20):
an enormous chance we get drawn into that. If there's
regime change, there's gonna be internal conflict in Iran. We
will obviously have an interest in supporting one side over
another side, and then we're gonna get drawn it, and
I don't want us to get drawn in. Now in
that whole discussion, oddly enough, the one person I actually

(37:44):
trust the most in all of this is Donald Trump. Trump,
who absolutely does not want a twenty year Middle East
rebuilding project. He just does not, as much as he
wants to be strong and do something that's effective, and
he doesn't want to run to have a nuke, he
also doesn't want that. So I'm actually out of anyone

(38:06):
in this whole debate, the crazy neocons on the one side,
the Candae Owen types on the other side. I trust
Trump more than anyone else that'll do it. John Girardi Show,
See you next time on Power Talk