 Let's talk about euthanasia. So euthanasia is the practice of basically having, being assisted in committing suicide. And it's the idea that, if one is desperate to kill oneself, particularly if one is in pain, in pain or you have a disease that's killing you anyway, or, I don't know, I could imagine at the beginning stages of Alzheimer's where you know your mind is going, you know, a lot of people make the choice that they would rather die than continue living because life, the quality of life is so deteriorated. And indeed, so that can be an incredibly rational decision to make, but it's very difficult to execute on it. I mean, I've been, you know, I'm getting older. So I think about these things. As you get older, you start thinking about things, particularly when you start seeing people around you who are much older, you know, parents, friends of parents, just people, you know, the more and more people are living well into the 80s and 90s, you encounter more people who are clearly in pain or you encounter people who have lost their minds in a variety of different ways and you start projecting about what that would be for oneself, what's the quality of life living that way? Do I wanna live when I've lost, you know, certain functions, functions of the brain or functions of the body? Living is about living well. It's not about living for the sake of living. It's not about just surviving, not about having a heartbeat. It's about living quite human being, which means having a functional brain and being able to biologically take care of oneself. And it's, yet on the other hand, okay, so you could kill yourself, but killing yourself is hard. It's hard, it's messy, it's... I mean, what do you do? You jump off a bridge. I mean, you put a gun in your mouth. I mean, that's pretty messy. Jumping off a bridge, pretty scary. You know, take a bunch of sleeping pills. You don't actually know if it's gonna kill you or not, or how sick you're gonna feel if it doesn't kill you. I mean, it's just a messy process. And I, for one, would like to have the option of being able to get a pill from my doctor that I can take with a glass of wine or a cup of coffee or glass of water or whatever, and take the pill and just never wake up again. And that to me sounds like a dignified, honorable, you know, way to go where it's not messy. You don't put other people, you know, they don't have to clean up your mess in a sense. You don't have to be particularly brave. I think putting, I think jumping off a bridge requires, I don't know, I don't know that I could do it. And when you're old, you have to climb over the fence. I mean, it's, and if you jump off a building, again, messy. So it strikes me as something that would be fantastic if it was available. And, I mean, why isn't it? Why can't I ask my doctor for that? Now, granted, my doctor might now want to give it to me because, you know, some people commit suicide, call it prematurely, commit suicide when they don't really intend it. Some people commit suicide to try to gain attention, or attempt suicide to try to gain attention. Some people commit suicide in a moment of depression. But, you know, my doctor probably knows my medical condition. He knows my mental state. I don't think a doctor is interested in killing off his patients or allowing his patients to commit suicide for no reason. But why can't I just get, why shouldn't I be able to just get a pill and take care of this? And of course, it's illegal to sell me such a pill. It's illegal to give me such a pill in most places. And I think that's an incredible tragedy, a horrific tragedy. And yet, we now see an alliance, both on the left and on the right, of people that are arguing against it. Yes, you could kill yourself by putting carbon monoxide, all kinds of ways of doing it, but none of them are particularly appealing. You could sit in the bathroom and cut your wrists. There are lots of ways you can do it. Why not simplify it? And after all, if we have a right to life, if we have a right to life, which means the right to use our mind to make judgments about the values that we pursue, about what we're going to do with our life, don't we also have a right to say it's over, there are no values to be pursued? I just want a quiet, simple death. Have it over with? It strikes me that you have such a right. I mean, it's funny that a lot of states and a lot of places, most countries in the world I think have laws against suicide. I mean, who are you to tell me that I can't end my life? It's my life. That's the whole point of being my life. I can live it as I see free and I can end it. That's what it means that it's mine. That's what it means to use my mind, my judgment, to pursue my life or to end it. So we are in a country particularly the United States where this is strongly opposed, this idea. Now there are 10 states today that have assisted suicide laws. It's not easy in those states either. But the United States, there are a number of countries around the world that have made it a lot easier, Canada being one of them. Let me just find this article. Where did I lose it? I lost it somewhere. Canada has probably the world's most permissive euthanasia laws. It allows adults to seek either physician assisted suicide or direct euthanasia for many different forms of serious suffering, not just terminal disease. In 2021 over 10,000 people ended their lives this way, just over 3% of all deaths in Canada. And they're contemplating expanding this to include mental health conditions and possibly euthanasia of what they call mature miners, miners who can make their own decisions about this, about these kind of things. Other countries have euthanasia laws. Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, I'm not sure which other countries, but those are countries that come to mind. Australia, New Zealand, Spain, sounds like the UK from what I hear. The United States only 10 states, and again even there it's somewhat restricted. And there's a huge backlash, particularly in the US, against euthanasia laws. There's both from the right, it's not your life to make a decision about this. In that sense, you don't have a right to your life. God has a right to your life, and God will decide when you die. Nature will decide when you die, not you. Suffering is just part of life, accept it, live with it, don't complain. And all the way to the left, which says the state will decide, don't complain. Nature will decide, but a lot of the opposition on the left is poor people don't have the same options as rich people. So poor people are more likely to ask for euthanasia because they have fewer resources to cope with the suffering, to cope with life, with horrors, I guess, of having a horrible disease of suffering from great pain. The argument is that if you're homeless and so on, you're much more likely to seek euthanasia than if you're comfortable and have a jet and can go to the Fiji to relax and to try to mitigate the pain or you can afford more drugs or whatever. Again, that is of course the reality. Yes, having money makes decisions generally easier and expands the number of options you have. The poorer you are, the fewer options you're going to have. But it is truly amazing how many people, how many people, and then both again on the left and right oppose this. I was surprised to find a lengthy article on Barry Weiss's site, The Free Press, it calls itself now, a lengthy article about the horrors of Canada's assisted suicide program. And here, like all stories, they bring out the anecdotes that might horrify you, that might upset you. And the article focuses a lot on the economic issues. It focuses a lot on the idea, even though there are no facts to suggest this is true, the idea that with Socialized Medicine, the government gets to make the decision about whether to accept. You have to still apply. The government can't initiate a process of euthanasia. The government can't initiate to kill you. But you can apply and what the article is arguing is to reduce healthcare costs. The government has an incentive to approve more of the applications. Yeah. But again, why is the government involved? The only role of the government, what should be the government's role in euthanasia in a truly free market, in a free private healthcare system? What would the role of government be in euthanasia? To make sure that it was a murder. To make sure that it was voluntary. To make sure that the person who wanted to die, you know, made that decision and nobody made it for him. There's no coercion involved. Now, if a doctor actually assisted somebody in committing suicide, then I can imagine that the medical profession would have guidelines about when it was appropriate for a doctor to facilitate something like this and when it was not, but the help in and of itself. I don't see what role the government has, you know, I guess, unless it's coerced, as long as it's voluntary. The government has no business in telling me how long I should live and what conditions I should live. I don't think doctors should be helping people commit suicide unless there is a good reason for the person committing suicide, a healthcare reason. That's what we have doctors for. It relates us to a healthcare reason. So doctors should help if a patient wants, should help somebody who's terminally ill, should help somebody who's in massive pain, should help somebody who just has no future because of healthcare issues. And again, this is something that's both a left and a right objective. It is something that both on the left and on the right, they view it as not the purview of the individual to make decisions for himself, but the purview of the state or doctors or specialists to make decisions for him. So, you know, I'm in this basically because I believe in individual choice. I'm in this because I believe that this is the only moral answer to people who struggle with pain, who struggle with disease, who struggle with loss of mind. I think it's the only moral answer is to allow them to end that life and to make it easy for them to do it, to make it easy for them to do it. Now people come and say, oh, it's a sleepy slope, you allow this, and then, you know, we're killing off children who happen to get the flu. Really? I mean, there's very, very, there's no evidence of these laws being used and Europe now has a long history of using euthanasia, so places like Belgium and Netherlands. There's no evidence of a sleepy slope. There's no evidence of these things being kind of misused. Actually, oops, that was a wrong article. Let me just find this. So there's an excellent article which I want to recommend to everybody. It's a writer by the name of Richard Hanania, who I've mentioned in the past. We've talked about a number of his articles, I think two or three of his articles in the past. Richard Hanania, I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but I tend to agree more than I disagree on many of the things that he writes. He comes at things from, I don't know, I don't want to call him, he's not conservative or libertarian, he's not quite a libertarian. But put it this way, I think all of his writing is interesting, even when I disagree with it. He comes at things from a fact-based reality orientation, which is of course a major compliment from an objectivist to give somebody. He is affiliated with the same center that Greg Salamiere is affiliated with, the Salem Center at the University of Texas. But again, I don't think Richard is not an objectivist and certainly wouldn't call him an objectivist, but he certainly is one of the more rational thinkers out there. And he has something about Canada's Canadian euthanasia as moral progress in his later sub-stack, a sub-stack I encourage you to sign up to. I think you'll get a lot of value out of it. It's always provocative, it'll always get you thinking. As Hananya says, as Richard says, Belgium and Netherlands have had permissive assisted suicide laws for two decades and none of the horrors that people say, that people are going to be killed, people are going to be inspired of their wishes, they're going to be euthanized, or that this is going to encourage a massive increase in euthanization. I mean, right now, with the Canadian government, there's about 10,000. It's grown over the last three years quite a bit, but that's because it's a relatively new law, and when it came into being, it was new, and it turns out that there's a lot more demand for this kind of service, and as people discovered that this was available, a lot more people are using it. I don't see that as a negative, I see that as a positive. I mean, the horrors of people having to live with these kind of diseases, in spite of the fact that they would rather die, but being forced to live because the legal system won't catch up to it. In the United States, that happens every single day. So in the U.S., you have to travel to Switzerland, or you have to go to Oregon. I'm not sure Oregon is allowed to do, unless you're a citizen of Oregon, unless you live in Oregon. So in the United States, you're really screwed, and I think the big reason for this is that we are a Christian nation. We are a nation that believes that, you know, it's okay to suffer. Suffering, you know, this comes directly from Christianity. Suffering is a good thing, not a bad thing. And since your life ultimately belongs to God, you'll die when you're supposed to die. Anyway, if you're interested in the topic, I would definitely read this article by Hananya. I think it's excellent. He has a vast discussion, an extensive discussion of this, an extensive critique of the critics of this, of the various arguments against this. People, you know, people almost always use anecdotes in order to combat this, and a lot of times the anecdotes are just not true, just false. They just make them up, or they misrepresent the facts, not make them up. They misrepresent the fact, which is super sad, because there's no real argument against this. There is no argument against this. And indeed, Hananya makes the case, and I think he's right, that if there is a slippery slope, the slippery slope is towards not allowing euthanasia. I mean, there's a bias in our culture towards trying to prevent people from killing themselves, not encouraging them to do so. There's a bias in our culture to do everything to prevent people from ending their lives, and in viewing the idea of ending life as a negative. Now, I think a lot of this is going to change with the baby movements now, getting to the ages where a lot of them are going to be considering this, a lot of them are going to get really, really sick, a lot of them are not going to want to have to go through some of the horrors of cancer treatment, a lot of them are not going to want to get into the Alzheimer's and all of that, and there's going to be, I think, much more pressure on politicians to prove euthanasia laws. As I get older, I view this as a more and more of an important issue, one that is worth fighting for, and one where I'd like my politicians to be on my side. The sad thing is, of course, this is one of those issues where you're more likely to get support from the left than you are likely to get support from the right. And it's, again, you're torn between, you know, you might be in a position in life where your values have shifted, where what's important to you right now is something that the left is advocating for rather than what the right is advocating for. So it is interesting that given the way our political parties are split, there's horrors on both sides, and there's a few sprinkles of good on both sides, and there's nobody you can actually embrace, there's nobody you can actually support full heartedly at all. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. You can do that by going to www.uranbookshow.com. I go to Patreon, subscribe star locals, and just making an appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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