Stupid People Thread

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Stupid person 1: Josh Marshall quotes an inadvertently amusing letter from Harry T., a winger opposed to Social Security (or ‘Socialist Insecurity’, as he puts it.) In his screed, Harry T. asks: “It wouldn’t be anyone who supports mandatory Socialist Insecurity, but do you know of anyone who celebrated Bill of Rights Day, on Wednesday?’ As it happens, I can answer Harry T’s question: I celebrate Bill of Rights Day every year, along with Constitution Ratification Day, 13th Amendment Day (which is tomorrow), Nineteenth Amendment Day, Emancipation Proclamation Day, and various other personal holidays. And, strange to say, I support Social Security too.

Stupid person 2: It’s not clear from this article whether Dr. Willie C. Blair lacks a conscience or an understanding of the phrase “under oath”, but I personally plan to avoid using him either as a doctor or as an expert witness for the rest of my natural life. Via bioethics.net:

“The chief of medical staff for Prince George’s Hospital Center has said under sworn testimony that he has tried to ignite a surgical preparation solution on unwitting patients, court records show.

    Testifying as an expert witness in a lawsuit in April, Dr. Willie C. Blair said he had tried to “set people on fire” in a deposition for a lawsuit stemming from an accident in which a female patient was burned in an operating room at the Washington Hospital Center in 2002, according to court records and transcripts of his deposition.

   “I’ve been trying to set people on fire for the last three months and can’t do it,” Dr. Blair said in his April 30 deposition.

    “How did you go about trying to set people on fire?” said plaintiff’s attorney Robert R. Michael.

    “I mean, I put the prep on and wait, and put the prep on and go early; do a lot of using the Bovie [an electric surgical device], but I haven’t been able to ignite anybody,” Dr. Blair said. (…)

   Yesterday, Dr. Blair said he made the statements but described them as “tongue-in-cheek.”

    “I didn’t do it, and it didn’t happen,” he said yesterday. “What I was saying was for the lawyers’ consumption.”

    “I said it, but it didn’t happen,” he said of his testimony about trying to set patients on fire.

    Dr. Blair said he did experiment with trying to ignite a preparation solution, but said no patients were involved. He said he tried to ignite an applicator for the prep solution in a corner of an operating room after surgical procedures had been completed.”

It seems to me that it’s pretty obvious why people at the hospital where Dr. Brown works are concerned about his sworn statement that he tried to set his patients on fire. But not to Dr. Blair: “Dr. Blair suggested that the document is being used by lawyers to silence him because he has become an outspoken advocate for tort reform.” Right.

Naturally, the paper had to ask bioethicists about the morality of all this, since it’s a complicated question that only those who have spent years studying abstruse philosophical texts and wrestling with thorny problems in metaethics are equipped to answer:

“”I still can’t imagine how someone could justify intentionally trying to set patients on fire,” said Robert M. Veatch, professor of medical ethics at Georgetown University and former director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown.

    “I can’t imagine any possible defense. I suppose he could claim he had reason to believe that he couldn’t hurt people by trying this and was trying to prove his point,” Mr. Veatch said.

    “I saw nothing in the transcript of the deposition that could justify attempts to intentionally cause a fire,” he said.

    George Annas, a medical ethicist and chairman of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at Boston University, said no patients would agree to participate in such an experiment.

    “I don’t know what was on this guy’s mind,” Mr. Annas said. “There is no patient who would say, ‘Sure, you can light me on fire.’ ” “

17 thoughts on “Stupid People Thread”

  4. Hilzoy: Clearly, the stupid person is me 🙂
    This is the first time that I remember reading one of your comments and profoundly disagreeing with it. 😀

  5. There was this one time, I was talking to a client who happens to be a fundamentalist christian, and he was trying really, really hard and at exquisitely torturous length, to get me to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior and I remember thinking “If only there was some way I could just unobtrusively set myself on fire…” so I don’t really see what all the fuss is about over Blair’s experimentation. Could be a perfectly useful tool in certain situations.

  7. Has Dr. Brown hired an attorney to represent him in either his perjury trial or his malpractice suit? He acknowledges that he knowingly lied under oath regarding an issue material to a legal proceeding, therefore perjured himself. Unless, of course, he told the truth in his deposition, and engaged in activities that both constituted assaults on patients and violated any medical standard of care. Tort reform? Obviously we need tort reform to protect this model healthcare provider!

  9. Come to think of it… maybe there is something worthwile to offer. As I read in a comment elsewhere (fogot where, but I thought it was inspired by an an article in the LA times – can’t find that either though) – with the shortage of soldiers in Iraq, isn’t it stupid to kick your homosexuals out of the army?

  10. with the shortage of soldiers in Iraq, isn’t it stupid to kick your homosexuals out of the army?
    Some stats, via the New York Times:

    An analysis of Pentagon data reveals that the military is losing gay troops in the occupational areas where shortfalls are most dire. In addition to the “stop loss” orders that prompted last week’s lawsuit, the Pentagon has recalled thousands of former troops from civilian life to fill these gaps.
    Many of these recalls would have been unnecessary if the military had not fired so many gay service members. This year the Pentagon approved the recall of 72 veterans in communication and navigation, but it has expelled 115 gay troops in that category since 1998; it recalled 33 in operational intelligence but has expelled 50 gays; in combat operations control, it recalled 33 but expelled 106.
    Overall, the military has announced the recall of 5,674 veterans since June, but has discharged 6,416 soldiers under its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy since 1998, including 1,655 since the wars in the Middle East began. The discharges covered people in 161 occupational specialties, including linguists; intelligence personnel; nuclear, biological and chemical warfare experts; artillery specialists; and missile guidance and control operators.

    emphasis mine.
    stupid doesn’t begin to cover it.

  11. with the shortage of soldiers in Iraq, isn’t it stupid to kick your homosexuals out of the army?
    It’s certainly going to be interesting to find out what happens when (if) the draft is re-instated.
    Before the UK MoD changed its rules (January 2000, with strong pressure from the European Court of Human Rights) I was on a MoD pinklist – at least, I was assuming they keep names around that long. When I was 18 (and an extremely upfront inyourface pacifist) a friend’s girlfriend got kicked out of the military for being a lesbian. She was offered the alternatives of being court-martialled for being a lesbian, or giving them the names of three women she’d had sex with and simply getting a dishonorable discharge. She took the second option, and gave them the name of the woman who’d named her under the same deal, the name of her girlfriend (who they already knew about), and me – because, she admitted, I was the only person she could think of at that moment whom she knew would never want to join the military, and so it wouldn’t matter that I was pinklisted.
    The stupidity of this was that she’d already terminated her contract and had three months to go before she left the military anyway: they went to a great deal of trouble and expense to achieve nothing more than getting rid of someone who was leaving anyway.

  12. Jes: The Dutch army changed the rules towards acceptance of homosexuals in the army in 1974 (when we still had a draft). The MoD had a study done in 1993 about acceptance of homosexuals and found though there were incidents there was no structural problem with acceptance. There was a cultural problem; people tended to keep their distance socially.
    They started things like educational courses for all new soldiers about homoseksuality and a study in 1998 found that the social distance was much less of a problem. 90% of the soldiers didn’t mind what orientation another soldier was. Which still leaves the 10% that *has* a problem, but you can never win them all I quess.
    It also illustrates that policy of the government makes a difference.

  13. Come On You Guys! This is the stupid people thread. Could we please keep it stupid?! For the Homosexual People Thread please see Edward’s Pinky Lincoln (my vote, by the way, for best overall thread of the month).

  14. Come On You Guys! This is the stupid people thread. Could we please keep it stupid?! For the Homosexual People Thread please see Edward’s Pinky Lincoln (my vote, by the way, for best overall thread of the month).

  15. For the Homosexual People Thread please see Edward’s Pinky Lincoln
    But that is such an American thread xanax, European me does not have much to say there 😉
    Can I make up for it with a Bill O’Reilly link I got of Atrios?
    Titled: “O’Reilly claimed “you don’t see prominent conservatives cursing out Democratic members of Congress””

  16. Excluding the use of accelerants, I volunteer, in the spirit of this thread, as a subject for the good doctor’s experiments.
    I’ll do it for 5000 each hydrocodone 10/500 and Valium 20mg. In advance.

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