I'm a STEM/Medical nerd so tend to be concrete in my thinking, but once in while I check out the history of where a word came from and how it changed in defintion.

Usually this happens slowly, and culture evolves, but sometimes it is a deliberate thing imposed from above for ideological reasons. Mr. Orwell call your office.

This video is about reality vs newspeak. Most of it, but not all of it, is about the transgender movement insisting we distort language from reality so we don't hurt someone's feelings: but as Peterson predicted long ago, it has morphed from being polite to government coercion.

But they also discuss the distortion of language as part of a larger problem.

I worry. You see, as a doc who worked with the mentally retarded (which was what those with congenital mental defects were once called) I can only say that the argument of redefining words for ideological reasons rather than using words as they are traditionally used by ordinary folk is something that Orwell first described, and is in full swing in today's world and it has horrific implications if not recognized.

My interest in this is because in the modern western world, ethicists are busy redefining who is human: and the reason is to justify that we could ethically kill them, or in more mainstream ethics, why we should just deny them medical treatment when they get sick.

Here is another Peterson interview.

This is about the intellectual/Marxist/Fabian roots of eugenics.

...

This didn't start with Biden, covid, or even the new century: It was being written in medical ethics journals since at least the 1980s... and indeed, it has roots in the Eugenics movment of the early 1900s,

The agenda has been around for awhile..Here is the blurb for Callahan's book Setting Limits, second edition, published in 1995....

SETTING LIMITS Medical Goals in an Aging Society with "A Response to My Critics" Daniel Callahan 

A provocative call to rethink America's values in Health care. Reviews "Callahan addresses the problems of aging in a clear, comprehensive, sensitive, and compassionate manner. This is a pivotal work that poses hard questions and proposes provocative answers. Setting Limits promises to be the benchmark for future moral, medical and policy discussions of aging."—New York Times Book Review.

 Italics mine. the hard decisions are, of course, deciding to kill Grandmom or your Down's syndrome child to save the government money, although to defend Callahan, he actually opposed direct killing, and only says don't treat them and let them die naturally.

Sort of like how Obama said Maybe You're "Better Off" Taking Painkillers And Forgoing Surgery

Nat Hentoff, a First Amendment activist, once called these bioethicsts "apologists for death", and one reason he opposed Hillary's health care bill was that the ethicists behind the bill were of this ilk: and he insisted that he saw no place in the constitution that said the government could decide your medical care.

well, I don't know how it is in the USA right now, but in the UK, this vision is implemented by an institution that has the Orwellian name "N.I.C.E."...

NICE website here.PDF of their future plans.,,

,,Provide dynamic, living guideline recommendations that are useful, useable and rapidly updated. They’ll incorporate the latest evidence and newly recommended technologies to maximise uptake and access for patients.

Drive the implementation of our guidance, forming key strategic partnerships to make sure it’s used. We’ll make sure it delivers improvements and contributes to reducing inequalities, with measures to routinely track adoption.

italics mine. 

Sounds nice, until you realize tha that part about "drive the implentation of our guidelines" means to force patients and hospitals and docs to go along with their decisions. 

and the guidelines include the notorious QALY idea: 

In other words, quality-adjusted life year measures how many additional months or years of life of a reasonable quality a patient or person may gain due to treatment. The QALY metric is essential in health economics, medical costs calculations, program evaluations, and insurance coverage determinations..

again, italics mine. 

This 2008 essay from Lifesite discusses how CS Lewis fortold this type of thinking and accurately predicted what we are seeing in pushing the covid epidemic precautions/vaccines to the max, so that even a pro vaxxer like myself is wondering if the conspiracy theorists are right, and this is about government power and control, not public health.

In that novel, That Hideous Strength, the ironically acronymed N.I.C.E. takes over Britain and attempts to create an anti-human totalitarianism in which human rights are abolished and people are used as disposable tools in medical and social experiments. The guiding principles of Lewis’ N.I.C.E. are immediately familiar to people on the pro-life side of our current Culture Wars: a mechanistic and ultra-utilitarian, anti-life philosophy that regards human beings as merely a disposable means to an end.

In today’s Britain, these same nihilistic philosophies are being adopted by the medical establishment and government, with effective abortion-on-demand and increasing calls for legalized euthanasia.

Over sixty years after Lewis warned what might be the outcome of an overweening anti-Christian materialist philosophy, combined with the union of state, industry, and academia, and the manipulation of the mass media, reality is coming increasingly to resemble fiction.

 And it seems beyond a coincidental irony that a real-life, government-funded organization that bases its decisions on the same utilitarian principles, could be known by the same acronym: N.I.C.E.

the NICE website: 

Set up by the Labour government in 1999, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (N.I.C.E.) produces “guidance” for the NHS on what drugs and treatments should be provided by Britain’s government-funded health system.

From the extraction of wisdom teeth, to the funding of Alzheimer’s drugs, to the provision or withdrawal of nutrition and hydration to disabled patients, N.I.C.E. lays down what will and will not be paid for by Britain’s National Health Service.

italics mine. 

as lifesite predicted:

Classical utilitarianism proposes that medical treatment ought to produce “the greatest good for the greatest number,” a formula that has been translated by bioethicists into the three euphemistic principles of “justice”, “beneficence”, and “autonomy”. As they are interpreted by bioethics committees, these new principles are at odds with the classical, Natural Law, or Christian-based medical ethics that start with the principle, “do no harm” to an individual patient. The new utilitarian principles, in the matter of a nationalized health system where private medical care is largely unavailable, require that some are judged worthy of treatment and others not, in order to benefit the greatest number possible.

The N.I.C.E. describes its template of criteria as being based on “efficacy and cost effectiveness,” in which a key formula is the “quality adjusted life year” (QALY). 

The QALY “takes into consideration the quality of life of the patient during any additional time for which their life will be prolonged”. The clinical and cost effectiveness of the treatment is then used as the basis for a recommendation as to whether or not the treatment should be provided.

To make things worse, the experts for at least 50 years have been hinting that maybe it's okay to do these things because some people lack the criteria for "personhood": by redefining "Personhood" in a way that the mentally ill, mentally damaged, senile and infants are excluded.

I first discovered this in the mid 1980s when I was recovering from surgery and was reading the latest blurb in the NEJM, where these ideas were being discussed. 

I wrote the philopsopher who wrote the book review, asking if this was true, and if this was true, could that mean we could use these "non persons" for organ donations etc? He kindly answered me, saying that in today's philosophical community, not only is there no good philosophical argument that the the old, very young, mentally damaged etc. should be considered full humans with full human rights, but there was no way to argue why any human has any of these rights.

SecularProlife Website has recently published an article about these problem.

No, God is not allowed in these arguments: not only the God of religion, but the creator of the enlightenment. And this is a revolutionary idea.

In psychology, we had a rule: The cabdriver rule. Often you would get involved into the story that the patient would tell you, but we were told to stand back and ask yourself: What would the average cabdriver think of this? And if he said ït was crazy, then maybe your patient had a psychiatric problem.

We now have a world where the crazies are silenceing those who object to the craziest behavior, while one only has to read articles from Canada to see that this isn't about a trouble teenage girl having a mastectomy, but the next step is killing the unteremensch and depressed.

and yes, thanks to the devout Catholic Joe Biden (/s), doctors in the USA might not be able to opt out of doing procedures that they feel are immoral.

Alas, one suspects few doctors, who for the last 30 years have been essentially pressured into being employees in the wellness industry, will object to this (and heaven knows, most medical associations won't object, because they are run by left wing activists because most of us are too busy caring for patients to run for these administration type offices).

but there are several ways to fight this ruling; 

One is to cite the Civil Rights law of 1964 (section 7) and citing religious objections to doing something, so you can't be fired.

This worked for me in the 1960s when I refused to do abortions, 

The second way is an old fashioned strike. 

One of my friends related that the Muslim OB/Gyn doctors who were told to do abortions refused to do so, because most of them were done for convenience, not for disabled infants or the mother's health (which are allowed by some Musilm ethicists). The university hospital threatened to fire anyone who refused to do the abortions, (which would have meant not just joblessness but losing their American work visa). So how did these Muslim doctors respond? The Muslim residents stood together and said: Fire one of us, and ALL of us will quit...not just all those in OB/Gyn but in other specialties.

the hospital backed down.

to complicate matters, many hospitals are Catholic or merged with Catholic hospitals agreeing to follow Catholic ethics. Could these hospitals break their contracts? Or would the bishops and the Catholic health association merely say rather than do immoral surgery or killing we will shut them down?

One doubts it, even though ths would stop the government power grab, too many will just submit, and even quote the now anti life Pontifical academy at the Vatican pronouncements (not by the Pope, of course. He says A but lets his minions push B) 

With this type of confusion coming out of the Vatican, dare one expect the American bishops have the backbone to object? One wonders. Alas, with all the sins of overlooking sexual scandal, the dirty little secret is that it is easly to destroy someone threatening you by finding someone to discover he or she was molested 40 years ago, but just happened to remember it now.

Sigh.

This is too long I know: But few read my blog anyway.

Dean Koontz, call your office.