Ok with AIDS, people in the 80s became infected with HIV long before anyone knew it existed and people are asymptomatic for years and years while still spreading it to others so I see it as only a choice as much as getting in a car accident is a choice.
fair that at first nobody knew details about hiv, though that also means that it wouldn't be reasonable to expect the government to know about/have any practical means of helping.
my understanding is that the drugs help people survive/live longer with hiv weren't freely available in criticized timeframe either, and as you point out the longer the time since the disease started, the less this was "like an accident" and the more it was a choice. plenty of things about it which sucked, but it's really not a good comp to trans procedures for several reasons.
My "internally consistent reasoning" is that if a government has the ability to easily stop its citizens from dying, they have a moral obligation to prevent that.
i don't want to die, so it would be great if government figured out a way to stop people from dying. so far, everyone dies though, and if it's even possible to do, it probably won't be government that figures out how to stop people from dying. what you can mean (practically) is that government should prevent early deaths where possible/practical. however, again resources are finite, and people put governments in that allocate those finite resources.
it's still worth not losing track of the fact that right now, there is no policy that can possibly prevent death, only delay. when we are talking about policy setting, that distinction is important to make.
We already do this with fire alarms, seatbelts, work safety legislation etc
the cost of these is both comparatively trivial and operates at enormous scales. as i mentioned earlier, resources are finite. it's a bit off topic, but i'm also not convinced compelling seat belts is justifiable in a policy sense. they are different from alarms and work safety, which are policies created to prevent people from being hurt by other peoples' choices rather than their own choices.
so if a government deliberately sets out to let a portion of their people die through easily prevented ways for purely political reasons
"sets out to let people die" is an awkward phrase and it sounds awkward for a reason. it's a reach, to make "government not doing something" with a particular issue sound worse. hyperbole, basically.
there are many things the government does not act on, though, where in principle it could help or save people if it did. it cannot act on all of them any more than you can punch the moon out of orbit bare handed.
You have no clue how the real world actually works do you?
lol. the funny thing about asking me this question is that when policies are created with incoherent reasoning, you are (at best) relying on luck to avoid negative outcomes and at worst are actively creating harm (such as "doing something" like actively spending money to statistically guarantee extra suicides at large scale without a benefit that comes anywhere near justifying that expenditure).
at least in this case, the government is doing less. though posters here have implied that the government wants to directly do violence or something. if that were to happen, it would be genocide, and it would look a lot more like china than florida.
they are not “declining to provide,” they are taking something which even right now they already provide
???
stopping from providing something is not taking. taking is taking. that's why they are different words with different meanings.
but unlike the Don't Say Gay bill
you mean the anti-grooming bill?
Yes, it's true, from the perspective of the victim.
even framing as "victim" is making some assumptions that don't necessarily hold.
sanction or a removal of support? They're 'obviously' different things, but from the perspective of the victim, it doesn't really make a difference if their lives are made worse.
this literally only works if you presuppose victimhood. however, i hold that the source of creating victims is necessarily different between the two, and that the distinction is extremely important if you want to criticize government policies.
- Is the observed 'intent' to help or hurt? We will argue and argue and argue about this, but the intent matters to all of us outside people.
intent is not irrelevant emotionally, but people make a lot more assumptions/conclusions about it than they can actually support.
Now, obviously a culture can only afford so much health services, and Florida
does have trouble. But in any fair world, we use some type of cost-benefit analysis. If treatments meet the threshold, then we try to include them. Some treatments are out of reach, and El_Machinae includes his usual (zero-impact) mantra of "you have to fund the research!". I haven't delved into the statistics, and it is definitely hard to do so (because the science is hella political), but you'll find that there's a tendency to 'be logical' and exclude savings from the calculation in Conservative analysis. That will but up against people who actually like efficiency AND helping people. But when the targeted removal is
this targeted, you know it's not about 'resources'. Or, at least, to look for other biases very aggressively
cost benefit would definitely be useful. this conversation would have looked very different if the assertion were along the lines of "florida is making a poor choice on this policy from a cost-benefit perspective, and causing net harm to its populace for these reasons". as you say, science is politicized around this stuff, and that might have required too much effort for everyone to go into the weeds about. sadly, because that's the kind of thing which governance needs to actually do to function well.
instead, we had someone falsely claim a policy choice which they believe is bad is literally genocide, despite no factual basis for that assertion and choosing own definitions only to show they don't fit the fact pattern...
it seems florida's representatives believe enough of its constituents are on board with how it defines things to get away with its policies. we shall see if their belief is accurate.
When the thread was still discussing 'genocide', I asked if the Taliban was currently genociding Afghanistan women.
what they're doing is pretty awful, but i think it belongs in a different box than genocide. for similar reasons that slavery belongs in a different box than genocide. they are obviously terrible things, but they imply enough different specific actions that the distinction matters.
"Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group."
declining to pay for something doesn't do these things
It would also require acknowledging that the US, Canada, China, the UK, France, Russia, Israel, India, Australia, etc. are actively engaging in genocides at this moment.
it also implies you engage in genocide to a degree (there are cultures and belief systems you disagree with and would prefer to see gone or adjusted), which is a good sign that maybe it's over-broad.
