Uber widerlich
Thursday, February 12 2009
As a dissenting view of the sort of thing I was talking about here, consider this:
Consider the following statement: “It must be made clear to anyone suffering from an incurable disease that the useless dissipation of costly medications drawn from the public store cannot be justified.”
This notion is fully in the spirit of the partisans of efficiency but came from a program instituted in Hitler’s Germany called Aktion T-4. Under this program, elderly people with incurable diseases, young children who were critically disabled, and others who were deemed non-productive, were euthanized. This was the Nazi version of efficiency, a pitiless expulsion of the “unproductive” members of society in the most expeditious way possible.
This, as Matthew Holt puts it, is “beyond disgusting”. It goes way beyond Godwin’s Law into a bizarre new territory of dishonesty and intellectual cowardice. I mean, I know it’s the Wash. Times – but this has to be some kind of all-time record low even for them.
