Recent Posts and Festive Season

Just two posts this month on the issues I’m passionate over: literature and euthanasia.

Literary Ramble IV: Our Literature and JM Keynes.

Long piece that critiques our modern literature, noting how same has been captured by the progressive ethic and turned away from the world – philosophy, politics, economics – to create, in a lineage from Proust to the Bloomsbury Set, a stultified literature of our interiors. Examines consequences of this for readership and culture. Also the beginnings of a suspicion that progressivism dominates contemporary aesthetics.

If you love literature then you’ll hate this post. But you also won’t see another critique like it. Our passive, state-funded, state-affirming literature that has expunged individualism, and therefore the wellspring of creativity, is well on the way to being a dead literature.

Andrew Little’s Abandonment of Euthanasia.

I’m gutted that Labour has pulled Maryan Street’s dying with dignity legislation from the ballot. Managing our deaths should flow seamlessly from our life-long self-management of day to day health issues: there are no moral issues other than the basic right to own our bodies and manage our health outcomes. Yet the state denies us this. Majority rule and the gutlessness of our politicians combine to ensure many Kiwis continue to die in conditions which are abhorrent to them.

 This post is a ‘fluff’ piece shorn off Twitter. More important that you read why there is such urgency for euthanasia legislation to be debated given the current New Zealand Chief Coroner’s actions to prosecute doctors who are over prescribing pain medication to the terminally ill.

 

Happy Christmas and New Year.

 If you are a regular reader, thanks for reading my jottings for another year. If I don’t get to my keyboard through the festive period, then I’ll be back in the New Year.

 Have a great Christmas and New Year; don’t let the wowsers bite.