Silly stuff, and small triumphs

First, the silly stuff.

Who else is love?

pseudomonas me scripsit anno 2005

Now the small triumph, and from an unlikely source.

When I reformatted the computer, it seems something caused it to lose the graphics card. Since one of the functions of this machine is to provide amusement when I'm stuck in an hotel room, the inability to play games, watch movies and the like was a nuisance.

Since the other aim is to use this as my field computer for crunching images, it was more annoying. I didn't try loading Photoshop, because I couldn't calibrate the monitor, so any work I might have been able to do would need to be redone before I could print/send out for printing. Lo, and behold, I decided (not knowing what was the source of my various problems) to try and play a game a friend wants me to review.

Said game told me (as nothing else had... those applications just crashed, or said my resolution wasn't set right) I had no graphics card.

Which seemed odd, because I'd gone to HP/Compaq and downloaded the driver for my card, right after I installed the OS. With that pointer (since various tech-support emails had told me the errors I was getting were too strange for them, had I talked to...) I was able to do a bit of removing, and reinstalling. I now have a, (so far as I can tell) fully, working computer.

Jill, I can now sit down and finish the picture you ordered.

WTF?

I woke this morning to hear the miners in W.Virgnina hadn't been found alive.

From personal experience I know 1: that such rumors fly with speed beyond imagining. I can't really imagine the grief and despair at finding out it was wrong. I've only had the feeling when on search parties, when it was falsely reported the person being looked for had been found, and then wasn't.

Getting one's game face on to go back to searching is hard.

This must be so much harder. In the grand scheme of things this is as nothing. We're all going to die, and twelve people don't count for much; when measured against the whole. But we don't measure the lives of our loved ones against the whole. For them, for us, they are the whole. We get one life to live, and what comes after may be guessed, but never known.

Empathy is perhaps the greatest thing we have. It's the core message of the Gospels. Want to be saved? Obey the Law, and help others now. That's the Christian take. I can't speak to other faiths, but there seems to be a fair bit of that idea in them too.

Which is why this shit is wrong. This cretin takes advantage of this tragedy, to get on a soapbox and declaim they believed in the wrong god. Where, I wonder, does he get off? Darkpaganism indeed. Then again, reading his replies, it's more a case of shallow, self-involved, self-comfort (he, after all, knows what is right, and those who don't behave correctly get treated thus by fate. Those who disagree are told, "You are a person of low quality, saint_of_me; I am justified in doing whatever I do to your responses. I hope you've matured some." I wish I was able to croggle at the sheer hubris of it (from first to last) but such as this abide in every place.

He certainly deserved to be snarked, but this is wanking too, since I'm not going to waste my breath trying to correct him, it just pissed me off enough to want to vent.

Thank you all for induldging me.

Compare, and contrast

Terri Schiavo

Tirhas Habtegiris

Never heard of the latter? I hadn't either until pnh pointed at Ezra Klein about her.

Th nut of the argument is this, from the Slate column of Steven Landsburg, who seems to be a sad excuse for a human being (in that his definition of compassion doesn't rise to the level I would call adequate. His lack of empathy... there's that word again It's been bubbling in my head for a couple of days now... I'll have something to say about it in a bit, is revolting).

Here, if you don't want to read the whole thing, in all it's putrid wonder, is the nut, "Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.

Bloggers, most prominently "YucatanMan" at Daily Kos, are appalled because "economic considerations," as opposed to what the bloggers call "compassion," drove the decision to unplug Ms. Habtegiris. I conclude that YucatanMan either doesn't understand what an economic consideration is or doesn't understand what compassion is, because in fact the two are not in conflict....

Now let me remind you what "compassion" means. According to Merriam-Webster Online (which, by virtue of being online, really ought to be easily accessible to bloggers), compassion is the "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." By that definition, there is nothing particularly compassionate about giving ventilator insurance to a person who really feels a more urgent need for milk or eggs. One might even say that choosing to ignore the major sources of others' distress is precisely the opposite of sympathetic consciousness.

There is room for a great deal of disagreement about how much assistance rich people should give to poor people, either voluntarily or through the tax system. But surely whatever we do spend should be spent in the ways that are most helpful.

Therefore there's no use arguing that the real tradeoff should not be ventilators versus milk but ventilators versus tax cuts, or ventilators versus foreign wars. It's one thing to say we should spend more to help the poor, but quite another to say that what we're currently spending should be spent ineffectively."

A real person died here. I don't know how aware she was, but this wasn't trivial... she drowned. That's a horrible way to go and his justification for it was that, if you asked her before she got sick, what she'd want to spend an extra $75 on (for a specious, a la carte, "ventilator insurance.") she deserved to die.

Tirhas Habtegris would probably have taken the cash. Then she'd have gotten sick and regretted her decision. And then we as a society would have been in exactly the same position we were in last week—deciding whether to foot the bill to keep Ms. Habtegris alive a little longer.

So there you have his idea of compassion, if they didn't plan for their economic disaster, fuck 'em.