TriflesMinutiae

I know too much about Thedas. They/them

[retrocvnt @retrocvnty]

Anthony Stewart Head has tragically passed away at 72, he will be missed by many 💔🕊️

[adri ♡ @socialistadri]

OMG @hasanthehun's FACEEEE 😭 SHE ATEEEEEE

[RJ Palmer 🔜 Gen Con AS-90 @arvalis]

The thing thats so insidious about using AI this way is that one of the main ways artists get hired are studios looking for art references and they find us and reach out.

This is removing a major avenue to get work if they can just generate nameless derivations of our ideas.

[Natalie Grace Alford @NatalieGABand]

During the Nuremberg trials, Nazis would say the prisoners that died from disease were only the elderly&children who always get sick anyway. And besides food is hard to get during wartime.
It’s a cornerstone argument in Holocaust denial.

[Accursed Farms @accursedfarms]

The UK petition has reached 100k signatures! This means it will be brought before Parliament and we can ignore the old garbage answer that didn't address the problem. Will have a video on it later. Keep signing for safety margins!
https://t.co/q7pNzilBf7

[Accursed Farms @accursedfarms]

We have passed 800k! This is suspenseful for me, since I've seen the momentum crash once before and I'm sure people know how interest can surge then fall off quickly online. I don't see this as a sure thing, but if we keep this up, we could make it!
https://t.co/EpnNTDR85U

[Accursed Farms @accursedfarms]

We have passed 500k signatures! I didn't enjoy making the last video on the initiative, but it seems like it really removed a roadblock we were having with the momentum. It's anyone's guess how long we can keep it going, but it has more of a chance now.
https://t.co/EpnNTDQAgm

[Seth Harp @sethharpesq]

These days when DHS and ICE come knocking, they remotely take out your WiFi beforehand so that you can’t livestream the interaction, and to disable Ring cameras. From ⁦@radleybalko⁩’s substack. H/t ⁦@mazsidahmed⁩

[Dr. Cait S. Kirby (she/her) @caitskirby]

Don't argue with RFK Jr's dehumanization of autistic people by saying, "Well I'm autistic/my son is autistic and I/he can do those things!"

You're feeding into eugenics when you do that.

Discard RFK Jr's argument wholesale: we don't measure human value that way.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

Today I’ve seen cats eating bodies of Palestinians in Gaza, rescuers trying to save refugees in burning tents after Israel bombed them and bodies wrapped in muddy sheets scattered on the street.

You wouldn’t know if you follow Western media, they just pretend it’s not happening.

[The Canadian Border @border_canadian]

Reminder: Canada Post employees wanted to do a rotating strike, so the mail would still get through, just not everywhere all at once. The employer locked them out.

[victoria ♀️ @fatfabfeminist]

now that everyone is bringing up their issues with the healthcare industry, is this the time to talk about how medical fatphobia and bias puts fat people’s lives at risk bc we receive appearance based care rather than symptom based care or should we save that for another day

[soul khan, msw @soulkhan]

you can be driven into homelessness by someone like brian thompson, then legally murdered by someone like daniel penny, while the money that could have saved you is spent on murdering children in gaza.

[Gabrielle Peters 👩🏻‍🦽 @mssinenomine]

If I go to the doctor for a cold or flu & they offered me MAID, please be clear I'd be considered Track 1.
I was considered "terminal" a decade & a half ago. Their prognosis projections are terribly unreliable and inaccurate - even before factoring ableism, classism, racism in.

[Gabrielle Peters 👩🏻‍🦽 @mssinenomine]

I'm getting really fed up with the people on here asserting that disabled people don't understand the issue of dying.

Like aside from almost dying a few times, being dx'd "terminal" etc. I have spent a lot of time caring for & in company of people at end of life.

[Yipeng Ge 葛义朋 @yipengGe]

Dr. Sheikh Noor Ul Amin shares testimony about his time treating patients in Gaza, with no access to clean water and sanitation to provide proper medical care. “This is a genocide and we should call it that…The gap between rhetoric and action must be closed.” @eyewitnessgaza

[Paul Yowell @pwyowell]

DOUBLESPEAK ABOUT ASSISTED SUICIDE

With a blitzkrieg of euphemisms, the campaigners for the so-called Assisted Dying bill are misleading MPs and trying to force the NHS into providing what Diane Abbot calls, with strict accuracy, a ‘national suicide service’. Campaigners have appropriated the language of ‘dignity’, ‘compassion’, and ‘choice’, and are using it to cast opponents of the bill—which include palliative care doctors who have given their lives to reducing pain for those who are dying—as menaces who cause people to undergo an agonising death. The campaign is being led by a group founded in 1935 to promote voluntary euthanasia. Its posters now line the Westminster tube station with happy photos and taglines such as ‘My dying wish is my family won’t see my suffer. And I won’t have to.’ In 2006 this group rebranded from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society to Dignity in Dying.

George Orwell would have understood. In his essay ‘The Politics of the English Language,’ he perceived the tendency of politicians to ‘defend the indefensible’; thus ‘political language consists largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness’. Kim Leadbeater, the sponsor of the bill, said on BBC radio that she finds the term ‘assisted suicide’ offensive. People should be suspicious when politicians refuse to name the thing they are promoting. The long title of her bill refers to providing terminally ill adults with ‘with assistance to end their own life’. This is physician-assisted suicide. ‘Assisted dying’ is a misleading term and was likely chosen for that purpose. A Survation poll found that only 43% of people understand that ‘assisted dying’ means providing people with less than 6 months to live with lethal medication to end their life. A majority think it means something else: giving people who are dying the right to stop life-prolonging treatment (42%) or providing hospice-type care (10%); 5% answered ‘don’t know’. Campaigners claim some polls show large majority support for the bill, but closer inspection reveals that this depends on people believing that the bill has safeguards that it in fact does not have, or on misunderstandings such as those in the Survation poll.

Leadbeater also obscures reality when, quoting Nick Boles, she says the bill is all about choice in a liberal society: ‘If you don’t like the idea of assisted dying, don’t seek medical assistance to arrange your own death. If liberal democracy means anything it is this: that every individual should be free to live their life in the way they want’. It is surprising to see such a bare appeal to what Isaiah Berlin called ’negative liberty’ (lack of constraint) in this context and from a Labour MP. The Labour Party has historically stressed positive liberty, which people have when they can freely pursue opportunities without being subject to lack of economic means or implicit forms of duress. How meaningful is a choice to die when you have a terminal diagnosis, or are struggling with depression, mental illness or disability, or feel that you are being a burden on your family or the NHS? Are you truly free to say no when a doctor raises the possibility of choosing to end your life—as doctors are expressly permitted to do under the bill—and when palliative care is underfunded?

Wes Streeting, Secretary for Health, and many other prominent Labour MPs have refused to support the bill, saying that we should not even be having this debate given the dire state of funding for palliative and hospice care. And yet campaigners persist in casting opponents of the bill as not only lacking in compassion, but as willing agents of causing others to suffer. Dignity in Dying says on its website: ‘This is an issue about compassion and changing an inhumane law which tortures dying people.’

A group of eminent lawyers, including Lord Falconer KC (who proposed a similar bill in 2014) echoes this line in a recent letter to the Observer: ‘Our current law does not serve to safeguard the sanctity of life. By criminalising assisted suicide, it can cause people to end their lives before they require help to do so. Our law does not protect weak and vulnerable people: it requires people to take decisions about their end of life out of sight, alone and without the help of professionals.’ This relies on hidden premises that, among other things, normalise suicide. And the argument is like saying that the law that forbids people from buying heroin in pharmacies is forcing them to buy adulterated doses on the street. Orwell said that ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.’ The language of the above argument is corrupting; it twists our understanding of what is causing the pain and casts aspersion on people dedicated to caring for the terminally ill until death. This bill is opposed by the Association for Palliative Medicine, the British Geriatrics Association, and by a coaltion of 350 disaiblity organisations, including Not Dead Yet. A group of more than 3000 medical professionals have signed a letter opposing the bill. Wes Streeting, who as Health Secretary would have to implement the bill, opposes it, as does Shabana Mahmood, who as Justice Minister would oversee the judicial approval process in the bill.

These and many other opponents of the bill have pointed to a lack of safeguards and to the rapid, dramatic expansion of physician-assisted suicide in Canada, where 4% of deaths are now administered by its MAiD programme: Medical Assistance in Dying (yet another instance of the sort of euphemism Leadbeater is employing). Originally confined to terminal patients whose death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’, similar to the Leadbeater bill, MAiD has been extended to people in need of better care. In a 2022 article on MAiD, Yuan Zhu reported that ‘a disabled woman applied to die because she “simply cannot afford to keep on living”. Another sought euthanasia because Covid-related debt left her unable to pay for the treatment which kept her chronic pain bearable’. A former Paralympian who requested a stair lift for her home said that she was offered MAiD in response. In 2027, MAiD will be extended to people whose sole condition is mental illness.

Proponents of the bill say that this will never happen here, and they castigate opponents as either not understanding the Leadbeater bill or fear-mongering. Make your own best judgment about who is right on this point, and what the future is likely to hold in a country with a chronically underfunded public health service. But we can all rest assured that if the UK adopts the bill, and then gradually expands it in the direction that Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium have all taken, comforting euphemisms will flow in a steady stream. The real arguments are, in Orwell’s words, ‘too brutal for most people to face’.

[Dr. Alexander S. Burns @KKriegeBlog]

So, with the greatest respect to Derek for his fashion sense, which in a modern setting completely outstrips my own, I do want to offer a few thoughts on this thread, as a professional historian who has constructed many reproduction items of clothing from the 18th Century. 🧵1/20

[Brendan McGeever @BrendanMcGeever]

The violence in Amsterdam last night has been widely described as a pogrom against Jews. This is not only misleading but politically dangerous. A thread.

[Greta Thunberg @GretaThunberg]

The climate justice movement must be a decolonial, anti capitalist, antifascist movement that fights against genocide as well as ecocide, that demands liberation and justice for all, and a system that puts people and planet over profit. 3/4