President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

My last word on this topic, I'm going to be purposely crude here for the emphasis.

If you are born with a dick and balls you are a boy. If you are born with a pussy you are a girl. A very, very small percentage of babies are born with genetic abnormalities or birth defects that makes them ambiguous, God bless them all.

For the media to write that "sex was assigned at birth" is a conscious lie. It is complete anti-science liberal bullshit. T managed to climb aboard the gay bandwagon for no reason other than some gay men like to impersonate women and some straight men like to be entertained by gay men impersonating women.

As for "gender confirmation surgery", of course no taxpayer or taxpayer supported insurance should pay for cosmetic surgery and hormone treatment, no more than they should pay for breast implants, nose jobs or ass injections. Personally, I think cutting off your dick to spite your brain is ill advised, but if you want to pay for it, feel free.

 

Ragu Wall of Text incoming.

So as someone with a little bit of experience in this area, I hope I can clarify a bit. The doctors weren't concerned the new treatment would cause new suffering - they were concerned it would prolong his suffering for no material gain. There was never any scientific chance this treatment would cause improvement. The (very questionable) hypothesis was that it could halt any further damage from occurring, and that is all contingent on the untested idea that the drug passes the blood-brain barrier (highly unlikely but theoretically possible). However, when GOSH was considering administering this treatment to him in January, his brain started to show signs of massive damage and deterioration via seizure activity. Because the treatment was never going to be able to fix anything that was already broken, the hospital, as is its right under British laws, made the decision that the "benefit" of the treatment was simply prolonging the suffering of a child dependent on machines for almost all vital functions with no improvement in his current status.

British law has a strange kind of "dual" decision making when it comes to medical care for children. They posit that children are legally independent entities who are not mature enough to make decisions for themselves. Unlike most cases in the US, parents are not considered the sole authority at what is right for a child medically; in serious cases, the opinions of the medical professionals are considered in equal weight to the opinions of the parents and the case is brought before neutral arbiters to help make a decision. (And to be clear, in the US we reserve the right to take away medical decision making powers from parents. I see it regularly at my children's hospital in cases where the parent's preferred treatment is clearly a harmful choice, such as naturopathy over chemotherapy for cancer, or refusing a blood transfusion for the of a Jehovah's Witness.)

So this treatment wouldn't have caused suffering. So why did the physicians feel it was unethical to pursue? Because it's most optimistic outcome would only extend Charlie's current state, and his current state is/was the essence of suffering. Being on a ventilator is awful and painful. Foley catheters (which he almost has) are painful. Manually having to disimpact bowels, since the muscles throughout his body atrophied and cannot move food through in a normal fashion, is painful. His parents have said they believe Charlie can feel pain, and if that's true, he must be suffering greatly.

One of my physician mentors used this analogy. Imagine you are drowning, a horrible, frightening and painful way to die. A doctor walks by and says "Well I can't save your life or make your situation any better, but I can maybe extend the amount of time you're actively drowning for another couple weeks." Is that ethical? Beyond the fact that there's almost no rationale that the treatment would have worked, even if it did, the only outcome would be to prolong his suffering. If you're really interested in the science I can go into it, but the damage he'd sustained could not be undone.

I ache for Charlie's parents. It's an unimaginable position to be put in, to have a child with a fatal disease that cannot be treated. Parents in this situation (and I've known far too many) grasp onto straws held out by sham physicians or, in this case, a far too optimistic researcher with a questionable grasp of research ethics. They are pretty clearly in the denial stage of grief, and I can't imagine that being brought onto an international stage. That said, Charlie is the patient. He is suffering, and it is awful and unfair and unfixable. His right to not be put through needless suffering with no meaningful gain is the very definition of "Do no harm."

 

Vlad wants Alaska back?

 

Worth reminding everyone that the youngest living liberals to have voted for Bill Clinton as president are 39 now. Given the average age of voters, most of them are well past 65.

The percentage of the Democratic base that was in that fight is less than a majority and shrinks ever years.

 

Team Trump appears to be in Do Unto Other Before they Do Unto You mode. I think they've burned the boats.

 

Way behind and catching up, but I've watched hours upon hours of Paw Patrol and none of Skip Bayless, so this isn't really surprising to me.

 

Yep - they want to fuck everything up as much as they can, as fast as they can.

And hopefully (from their standpoint) fuck it up badly enough so it can never be fixed.

That's what they're there for. That's the reason behind this hell-bent stampede on health care.

They don't know or give a fuck what they'd do instead, they just want to fuck up the system in current effect.

 

Heh. There's a school of thought out there that Alaska was never actually sold in 1867 but "rented" to the United States for 99 years.

A Russian Viewpoint of the Purchase of Alaska

 

How many times has that been run through babelfish?

 

Well, learn English motherfuckers!

 

There's also a school of thought out there that the Earth is flat.

 

Chelsea with the slap down of the Amazon Washington Post: