Answer me this: is a man, say a veterinarian, more or less moral because he has memorized all breeds of dog? Does this give him a better grasp of right and wrong? Given a veterinarian who can name all breeds, does it follow that he ought to be able to legally and forcefully take your dog away and subject it to a surgery that makes your dog look superficially like a cat?
I’m sorry, did I say dog? I meant puppy. And kitten, not cat.
Is there any amount of surgery, or surgery plus drugs, that will turn a dog into a cat? What would you say of the veterinarian who insisted there was? Would his pointing to his qualifications, his many degrees and certifications and professional memberships, be sufficient to convince you that a dog can become a cat by the twist of his knife?
Is a man, say a doctor, more or less moral because he has memorized all bones in a human body? Does this give him a better grasp of right and wrong? Given this man can name all bones, does it follow that he ought to be able to legally and forcefully take your little boy away and drug and carve up (surgically) your boy to make him superficially resemble a little girl?
Is there any amount of surgery, or surgery plus drugs, that will turn the boy into a girl? What would you say of the doctor who insisted there was? Would his pointing to his qualifications, his many degrees and certifications and professional memberships, be sufficient to convince you that a boy can become a girl by the twist of a knife?
A doctor is a person who has, to the best of his or her ability, memorized how bodies work. You can ask doctors questions like, “What does this body part do?” or “If I do X to this body, what is the uncertainty Y happens?” And they may or may not be able to tell you, depending on their level of study and intelligence, whether they went to med school pre- or post-DIE, and things like that. That is it, and nothing more. I stress nothing more.
A doctor is no better than a non-doctor, and in our culture is often worse, in answering questions like “Is it mortally right to do X?”
It does not make the doctor wiser or more moral if he can answer, with perfect certainty for every X and every Y, “If I do X to this body, what happens to Y?”
And, even if the ability to answer these questions did make one moral, many cannot answer many of these queries. Others do answer, but their answers are wrong, or insane.
Yet we, as a culture, have most unwisely ceded to doctors moral authority on many of these questions, grateful, perhaps, that we don’t have to wrestle with the ethics and morality of certain difficult situations.
We did this because of scientism. This is the fallacy that those who claim to know how things work get to say what should be done with these things, and under what circumstances. This is like letting your mechanic decide you must install hydraulic lifters on your car, and be barred from driving it to Church. Or it’s like an HVAC technician being empowered to go house to house and convert furnaces he does not like to look of to blow only cold air.
Or it’s like letting a doctor decide a girl is really a boy, seizing the girl from her parents, and drugging her against her parents’ wishes.
It’s like this story (one of many): “A Swiss couple are taking legal action to regain custody of their daughter — the 16 year-old has been a ward of state since they withheld consent for puberty blocker-based ‘gender transition’ treatment following a disputed gender dysphoria diagnosis.”
Or it’s like gender Experts who send the police to arrest a woman who wrote she did not like these situations.
Or it is like a doctor of the mind insisting publicly that ordinary people do not get to decide to ban “puberty blockers” for children. (There are no such things as “puberty blockers.”)
Or it is like teachers (now called “educators”) forcing a law to pass which hides their grooming of children, and makes it a crime to reveal it. Gruesome Newsom when he signed this law was influenced by scientism, and likely by his own enjoyment of perversion.
The Man said it best: it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea.
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Perhaps not just scientism.
Years back (2004), I read an excellent book by french author Olivier Clerc (Medicine, Religion et Peur; l’influence cachee des croyances) which laid out the idea that medicine has become the new world religion.
https://www.amazon.ca/gp/offer-listing/1932181148?condition=used&tag=bookfinder-ca-b-20
(Modern Medicine: The New World Religion: How Beliefs Secretly Influence Medical Dogmas and Practices)
-physicians have taken the place of priests;
-vaccination plays the same initiatory role as baptism, and is accompanied by the same threats and fears;
-the search for health has replaced the quest for salvation;
-the fight against disease has replaced the fight against sin;
-eradication of viruses has taken the place of exorcising demons;
-the hope of physical immortality (cloning, genetic engineering) has been substituted for the hope of eternal life;
-pills have replaced the sacrament of bread and wine;
-donations to cancer research take precedence over donations to the church;
-a hypothetical universal vaccine could save humanity from all its illnesses, as the Saviour has saved the world from all its sins;
-the medical power has become the government’s ally, as was the Catholic Church in the past;
-“charlatans” are persecuted today as “heretics” were yesterday;
-dogmatism rules out promising alternative medical theories;
-the same absence of individual responsibility is now found in medicine, as previously in the Christian religion;
-patients are alienated from their bodies, as sinners used to be from their souls.
All,
My enemies have a sense of humor, I see. Normally the typos they insert are embarrassing. This one is amusing. I have change the “mortally” back to “morally.”
Steelmanning is hardly one of the strong sides of this post. … You may be entertained, as well as horrified, to learn that a ‘conservative’ academic dissident neurologist judges that the male/female issue must be complex: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=malcolm+collins+gender
A Law should be passed where no doctor can qualify to make such decisions until he/her has him/her-self gone through the surgery/vexxine and experienced their lived decision for a period of 10 years.
As a friend of mine, long ago, referred to doctors as “plumbers to the body,” it would be equally fitting to have your plumber decide questions of morality and ethics. And that’s not disrespectful of plumbers, for they certainly can decide such matters for themselves…
In a previous post, I mentioned “The Island of Dr Moreau”. Now, I’d just like to know if anyone out there can transform me into a multi-millionaire…?
“Yet we, as a culture, have most unwisely ceded to doctors moral authority on many of these questions”
It’s worse than that. Because it’s not the doctors making these decisions, it’s their professional groups. The AMA puts out “guidance” which the doctors then have to follow. Or the AAP or any other of the many professional associations. These professional groups are every bit as captured by SJWs as any government or international agency. They have many, many other reasons for existing other than the promotion of what are truly the best practices. Not only are they morally corrupt, but these “treatments” for gender confusion are extremely profitable.
Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law.
Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law.
Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law.
Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law.
Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law.
Are we not Men?
Who ever thought Doctor Moreau would become real? They are not men and men in dresses are not women.
Back when I was a kid in the ’60s, I remember my dad railing against the “doctor-gods” who had such elevated opinions of themselves and their exalted place in society. Wow, if he could see them now!
I lost my last shred of respect for the medical industry back in the COVID days. Specifically, when I heard a doctor relative attack Ivermectin as “horse paste” which should never be used by humans and which could kill you if you took it. If he had just said that it was not effective against COVID and that claiming that it was was dangerous due to giving people false hope, I would have respected him. But he really should have known that Ivermectin is a medicine which has human uses against scabies, trichuriasis, strongyloidiasis, etc. What made things worse was the fact that I know him to be a very intelligent person and a very competent doctor normally. This meant that when he heard about Ivermectin treatment he did not look to the medical research on the topic but instead let himself be guided by the news media or the hype among other doctors. Why should I then trust him when it comes to anything else remotely controversial? And given that he is one of the best doctors I know, why should I trust the average doctor?
(My respect for the profession had been eroded before that by multiple problems where I had to see specialist after specialist who claimed to have a 100% effective cure, only for it not to work and the next specialist to say that something completely different was going on but that THIS cure would now be 100% effective.)
More than Scientism….more than our obsession with Expertology…..we have become a very timid, a very frightened people: scared to death that we will somehow ‘choose wrongly’ about, well, anything. And wrong choices always, or so we believe, lead to Crash & Burn.
To avoid that horrible, terrible, no good possibility, we, of course, rely upon Someone Else Not Me to make decisions for us. That way nothing’s our fault.
Whatever condition one inhabits — be it depression, anxiety, regret, sadness, frustration, anger, boredom, anomie, apprehension, nervousness, fear, dysphoria, you name it — we’re scared of it. And we need Someone Else Not Me to tell us what to do.
So yes, Expertology & Scientism play a part in all this, but it begins with a depth of personal fear unseen in past generations. And worse, it’s a fear founded in an utter lack of confidence in our ability to reason independently UNLESS one has a certificate in the very thing which threatens us.
Ideally the solution provided, scientifically, by Experts is a pill….or maybe therapy….or perhaps pills mixed with therapy and the ongoing purchase of multiple support services which can wrestle with all those things which make us anxious (and everything makes us anxious).
The alternative, of course, is to try to make it on your own…rub a little dirt on it….and complain to like-minded friends. Unfortunately that will undoubtedly lead to ‘malicious communications’ and arrest and imprisonment. Oh well. The good news is that there are, indeed, therapists and pharmacists in prison, too!
Mr. Briggs, how do you go from
to the following ridiculous conclusion?
I have the impression that doctors do not want the responsibility of making decisions for you and your children. There are reasons why patients need to sign an informed consent form before undergoing surgery.
Some of the courses taken by medical students, such as pathophysiology, require more than just rote memorization. (I know!)
Briggs, why do you dislike teachers so much that you feel the need to distort their words and actions? Have you ever heard any children say that they are the way they are because their teachers have made them so?
BDavi52,
This is ultimately why LLM AI is so popular and why people are trying to use it in places where it is obviously unsuited for. If the AI does it, then no one is responsible! Not even the people who made the AI, since they didn’t program it directly.
Rudolph H.
Sounds like a wonderful solution to the ‘life makes me anxious’ problem. AI tells me what to do…and no one’s responsible for AI….ergo IT’S NOT MY FAULT; it’s not anyone’s fault!
Now if they just gave us all a bowl of ice cream (and tucked us in at night) to go with the provided instruction, life would be perfect.
JH, why are you confused?
Briggs’ conclusion easily follows through.
Are you deliberately trying to act confused?
Or are you just naturally stupid?
You should apply to head the Secret Service. The educators are already overstaffed and well overpaid for stupid.
Your impressions of doctors is also off. They want gub’mint and regulatory bodies staffed with stupid to force you and children to obey what they desire, against your will. Teacher aid in making you stupid so that you don’t resist. And the answer to your last question is – YES – Hence the many lawsuits by children, now older, and regretful, coming for your precious stupid teachers. You know this, but you are feigning stupid, by choice.
Something wicked this way comes.
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/pandemic-20-fda-grant-emergency-use-authorization-eua-mrna-bird-flu-shots-just-what
I just saw a rerun of the movie Coma, from 1978. RIchard Widmark has some lines about the doctors being the deciders of life, death and morality. Why doesn’t anyone learn from distopian movies?