The Doctor and The Guillotine

Is there anything to say about the “Tory” (read conservative) ex-Deputy Mayor and physician in the UK who said that severely disabled children should be guillotined?

Sure … a few things:

- “The Daily Mirror” is, I believe, a bit like the “New York Post”, kind of a sensationalist rag, about as subtle as a sledgehammer. I’m not sure what that suggests about how to take the story, but I hope appearing in the paper doesn’t discredit the story itself, if it is, in fact, true.

- It sounds like everyone with any connection to this guy is falling all over themselves to denounce, investigate, and penalize him in some way. That’s encouraging, but it’s also easy to do, because his remarks were so inflammatory.

- I wonder what the reaction would have been if instead of referring to the guillotine, he’d used some more medical terminology, like “euthanize” or “withhold treatment”.

The point being that this particular man is easy to throw rotten fruit at, but the level of outrage doesn’t necessarily reflect how much people reject his general point of view. Some people think some scary, repugnant shit that they rarely say out loud.