Denis O\'Bell wrote:

Zseni: Warrior-Poet wrote:

You suck cock.

Actually, you're sucking mine (but I'll deal with that in another post.)

Anyway the vital element in this whole atrocity isn't the woman, per se, who is a vegetable I mean to address later. It's how the woman has rapidly become something besides a woman for a wide variety of factions: to the right wing Christians, she's an "emblem" of a movement, a symbol, one who, as Michael Savage, was put on the earth to be the catalyst for a new conservative revolution. To the left wing she's a new thing to cry over with insulting, silly, and fruitless tears.

I think one of the interesting things about this is the way it FAILS to break along standard left-right lines. Also, much as we might not believe what our opponents believe, it's a mistake to think THEY don’t believe it. The pro-tubists believe that an innocent woman was put to death for no good reason. That's why they’re outraged. She may become a symbol because of that, but if you miss that step, you miss the whole point.

To her parents she is a necromantic trophy - let's not sugarcoat this, she is a corpse chained to life by the dark arts of medicine, for no reason other than her parents' desire for her to continue living.

The tendency of pro-tubists to demonize Michael and the tendency of anti-tubists to demonize the parents are equally dumb and creepy. You haven't started seriously thinking about this case till you’ve stopped looking for a villain. Also, "corpse" substantially overstates your case :-)

Much more horrifying, horrifying to the extent that nobody will even talk about it except for psycho leftists and the ABA, is that she IS capable of higher neural function, she IS thinking, she DOES perceive her surroundings, and she is conscious of being trapped in a nightmarish twilight in which her carass - in which she is jailed, life sentence without parole, in solitary confinement and deprived of all sensation - decays about her as the people she once loved bray past her and talk to the air and prod her private places and refuse to let her escape from the crushing weight of the hours.

You're imposing your own (depressive-materialist) metaphysic on her (hypothetical) experience, Virginia.

No wonder the Christian wing is so involved in this process: necromancy is their stock in trade. Their religion since the earliest days has been a death cult - it creeped out the Romans, can you imagine how hard it was to creep out Romans?

Cute, but the Romans were insufficiently creeped out by a lot of very creepy things. Twisted people are creeped out by wholesomeness. They love to see apparent wholesomeness revealed to be hypocrisy, even in fiction, where the revelation proves nothing. You don't need to think too hard to come up with lots of contemporary examples.

In a way, this superabundance of life, the babies, the zombies, the procreational-sex-only, the taboos against onanism, the voluptuously overdeveloped maternal instincts of the doll-buyers and serial fathers, is more destructive than porn and gay sex and jacking off and dildos and whatever else the right wing hates these days

Destructive of what? Surely you can't mean…

the children of one's intellect - the sciences and above all the arts.

You didn't just say that Christianity is bad for art, did you? Come on, honey, you know better than that. The children of the Western intellect were at least as above-average when the West was Christian as they are in today’s post-Christian West. Perhaps "inter-Christian," will turn out to be more accurate, who knows…

The choking force of LIFE throttles all that is worth living for, even as it chews up the human race itself by driving to to the ever more insupportable population figures.

So I guess what I mean to say is that how you feel about Terri should reflect pretty closely how you feel about necromancy.

No. It reflects how you feel about life, and what makes it worth living. You just got done ranting about that for 3 paragraphs. One's conclusions about the case will follow rather directly from one's metaphysic (because there is so much uncertainty with respect to the facts of this case.) THAT's why the case is interesting, because it gets people talking about metaphysics -- even people who aren’t aware that they've GOT a metaphysic, or who think (without really knowing why) that the best metaphysic is the one that fits most neatly on the back of a postage stamp.

I feel that the genetic and cultural and social system redundancies built into the 6 or 7 billion members of the human population makes no spirit small, mean, or "disposable"; it only makes the "intelligent" part of intelligent design more palpable, and the wastefulness of our raisers of the dead and their clients more appalling. That the money spent on the Garden of Terri could be spent, as GYWO has it, on actual living people who actually need and would benefit from help, is just icing on the cake.

You know how the Western left will always complain louder about relatively minor injustices perpetrated by the West and its allies than it will about truly horrific atrocities perpetrated by the West's enemies? Their rationale (so they say, anyway) is that they can't DO anything about Kim's concentration camps, or Zarqawi's head-choppers, but perhaps the pressure they can bring to bear closer to home will have some effect (because, though they rarely say this, of the moral superiority of the West and Western systems of government, generally.) Now, as far as that's true, I think it's good (although experience has shown it's often a lie.) I prefer van der Leun's POV to GYWO's for analogous reasons. It is impossible for you or me to reallocate the money the court awarded to Terri to persons we think more deserving. We CAN, however, be charitable (in the older, broader sense of the word) to our neighbors – to treat them (despite the built-in redundancy you describe) as if they were invaluable (even if they aren’t REALLY, if you do the math.)

I have more to say on this point as it relates to places like this, but I will save it for another post.