Things that make you go What the F**k?

[marty34]

Not sure where to put this.

O'Callaghan saying Defense forces will be used to moved the lorries and tractors off the road.

It's almost like they want it to turn violent.

Who? The protesters or he government?

I'd say a lot of right wing will be hoping things kick off. Suits their idealogy.

I hear protests in the north next week also. Similar thing on the main roads.

[Baile Brigín 2]

https://www.liveaction.org/news/teenage-boy-netherlands-euthanized-autistic

A teenage boy with autism has been euthanised in the Netherlands.

Had a quick skim through the article...liveaction, no idea who they are but with their 'key takeaways' and warnings, must be pro life or the like, there's definitely a fairly political slant to that article?

https://www.liveaction.org/news/teenage-boy-netherlands-euthanized-autistic

A teenage boy with autism has been euthanised in the Netherlands.

Even that biased, activist article doesn't claim he was 'euthanised' because of his autism.

The ultimate conclusion was that the doctor's decision to euthanize a mentally ill child was acceptable and sound, with multiple other health care practitioners agreeing that the boy should be euthanized

Why did you put euthanised in inverted commas?

So again, not because he was autistic.

[Baile Brigín 2]

Not sure where to put this.

O'Callaghan saying Defense forces will be used to moved the lorries and tractors off the road.

It's almost like they want it to turn violent.

Stick a Debenhams logo on the oil terminal. The Gardai will be in like Flynn with the batons then.

It is literally incredible how incapable they are of standing up to a right wing protest.

[RedHand88]

https://www.liveaction.org/news/teenage-boy-netherlands-euthanized-autistic

A teenage boy with autism has been euthanised in the Netherlands.

Had a quick skim through the article...liveaction, no idea who they are but with their 'key takeaways' and warnings, must be pro life or the like, there's definitely a fairly political slant to that article?

https://www.liveaction.org/news/teenage-boy-netherlands-euthanized-autistic

A teenage boy with autism has been euthanised in the Netherlands.

Even that biased, activist article doesn't claim he was 'euthanised' because of his autism.

The ultimate conclusion was that the doctor's decision to euthanize a mentally ill child was acceptable and sound, with multiple other health care practitioners agreeing that the boy should be euthanized

Why did you put euthanised in inverted commas?

So again, not because he was autistic.

In that case, wouldn't autism be in inverted commas, not euthanised?

[gallsman]

There was a horrific case here a few weeks ago, about fifteen mins from me. This is about as neutral a report on it as there is.

Long story short: 25 year old wanted to die after being left paraplegic following a failed suicide attempt following years of sexual abuse, including a gang rape. Her father (with whom she essentially had no relationship and wasn't a significant part of her life growing up), either driven or supported by the Christian right, fought a legal battle to the last minute to prevent it from going ahead.

[Armagh18]

Have I missed something? Why are the fuel protestors far right ffs.

Protests 100% need to happen. Prices an absolute disgrace.

[marty34]

Have I missed something? Why are the fuel protestors far right ffs.

Protests 100% need to happen. Prices an absolute disgrace.

No. I think, initially, the protestors are genuine farmers and haulage contractors etc. but there's a few lads now starting to jump on the bandwagon as they see it now as an anti-government 'campaign'. 

[Armagh18]

Have I missed something? Why are the fuel protestors far right ffs.

Protests 100% need to happen. Prices an absolute disgrace.

No. I think, initially, the protestors are genuine farmers and haulage contractors etc. but there's a few lads now starting to jump on the bandwagon.

Hopefully the scum element is kept away then, surely they'll not blame this on the immigrants....

[trileacman]

The Atlantic article


Dr. menno oosterhoff leaned forward in his living-room chair, took a sip from his coffee mug, and told me about the first time he ended a patient's life.

She was 18 years old and had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, an eating disorder, and autism. Despite years of treatment, she was still bedeviled by negative thoughts, and she told Oosterhoff, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry in the Netherlands, that she couldn't stand any more suffering. He suggested deep brain stimulation, an invasive procedure sometimes used to treat severe OCD. She insisted that she wanted help dying instead.


Dutch law gave Oosterhoff the power to grant her request. In 2002, the Netherlands began allowing doctors to administer death to patients who make "voluntary and well considered" pleas to end "unbearable" suffering from any medical condition—provided there is no "prospect of improvement" and no "reasonable alternative" to dying. Eighteen-year-olds are adults and can request euthanasia even over family objections. Children as young as 12 are also eligible, with parental consent; for 16- and 17-year-olds, only parental consultation is required.

Oosterhoff's patient had no physical illness, fatal or otherwise; he concluded, rather, that she was "mentally terminal." An administered death would be preferable, he thought, to prolonged suffering or the possibility of unassisted suicide. To comply with the law's requirement of "due care," he consulted another psychiatrist and convened a "moral case deliberation session."

Telling me about his internal conflict at that moment, Oosterhoff's previously casual tone became more intense. At the age of 70, he is no longer an adherent of the strict Dutch Calvinism he'd learned as a child, but he said he felt haunted by the idea of "final judgment" in the afterlife; his patient's request for euthanasia made him think, God is testing me.


So Oosterhoff imagined a dialogue with God. If he didn't help the girl die, God would ask him why he had allowed her suffering to continue. "I was anxious," he would reply, but God would say, "I told you: You should do what your conscience tells you." If Oosterhoff did end his patient's life, however, God might reproach him for having acted without knowing all of the consequences. In that case, he imagined telling God: "You didn't make it clear enough. I did what I could."


On the appointed day in October 2022, Oosterhoff went to the girl's home and asked one last time whether she wanted to die. When she said yes, he injected her with a series of chemicals: first lidocaine to numb the area where the needle entered, then a coma-inducing drug, and finally rocuronium, a muscle relaxer, to stop her breathing.

Afterward, a colleague asked Oosterhoff whether he still felt anxious about the final judgment. "No," he replied. "If this is not good, then God should make a better user manual for our life."

The right to die by euthanasia is popular in the Netherlands. It is even a point of national pride. The country has a tradition of decriminalizing once-taboo behaviors, such as prostitution and marijuana use, which allows them to be managed under the law. It's a reflection of the high value that Dutch culture places on individual autonomy—the notion that "our thoughts and beliefs are holy and should not be interfered with," says Rosanne Hertzberger, a former member of Parliament from New Social Contract, a center-right party. "People say, 'Who are you to tell me what to do, what to think?'"


But while absolute prohibitions might feel oppressive, they can also be useful, because they spare us the costs of making difficult moral choices—and the potentially catastrophic risks of getting them wrong. Seeking euthanasia for psychiatric reasons is the grayest of gray areas. It's very hard to know whether a suffering person could get better, and the desire for death can be a symptom of the illness itself. The decision to die is drastic and irreversible; should it really be left up to a young person whose brain is still developing, and who is susceptible to influence by peers and authority figures?

Now Dutch physicians, politicians, and journalists are beginning to sound alarms. The overwhelming majority of physician-assisted deaths in the country of 18 million still involve terminal physical illness—about 86 percent of the 9,958 cases in 2024. But the number of people who received euthanasia solely on the grounds of mental suffering spiked from 88 in 2020 to 219 in 2024. In that five-year period, doctors ended 675 lives for psychiatric reasons, more than in the previous 18 years put together.


Especially troubling is the number of very young people requesting euthanasia because of their mental suffering. In 2024 alone, 30 people ages 15 to 29 were killed because of psychological conditions. This represents 3.1 percent of all deaths in that age bracket in the Netherlands.

Oosterhoff played a prominent role in these developments. With his inhibitions vanquished after his dialogue with God in October 2022, he personally administered lethal injections to 12 psychiatric patients in a 13-month stretch from 2023 to 2024. The oldest was in his 50s. The youngest were 16 and 17—the first minors in any country ever lawfully euthanized for mental illness. These represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of people who reached out to him in response to an aggressive advocacy campaign he launched through social media, TV interviews, and a book, Let Me Go.

The termination of lives that could be expected to go on for decades, based on psychiatric diagnoses and prognoses that are inherently far less certain than those for physical illnesses, has spawned a wrenching debate—one that is tame by U.S. standards but vicious for the Dutch.

"Most psychiatrists intuit that it's not a logical thing to equate somebody with a death wish at 25 and somebody with two weeks to live at age 80 wanting to die in a dignified fashion," Jim van Os, a psychiatrist and the chair of neuroscience at the Utrecht University Medical Center, told me. Doctors are generally reluctant to speak publicly about the issue, he said, because they fear being branded as opponents of euthanasia generally. But in September, van Os was one of 87 Dutch psychiatrists and health-care professionals, along with 46 colleagues from other countries, who signed an open letter to the Dutch Psychiatric Association, warning that current practice "inevitably carries the risk that psychiatric patients will die unnecessarily by euthanasia."

"It's not a logical thing to equate somebody with a death wish at 25 and somebody with two weeks to live at age 80," says psychiatrist Jim van Os, a critic of psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands.
The potential repercussions extend beyond the Netherlands. As populations age and traditional religion loses influence, the demand for a right to die is rising globally. Some form of doctor-assisted death is now allowed in 12 countries, and more are likely to legalize it soon. So far only the Netherlands and Belgium regularly see cases of euthanasia for psychiatric reasons, but the law in some other countries doesn't rule it out. Canada, where 16,499 people were medically euthanized in 2024, is likely to start permitting psychiatric euthanasia in 2027.


With 12 U.S. states and the District of Columbia allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to terminal patients, and New York set to join them in June, Americans also have something to learn from the Dutch experience. It suggests that the right metaphor for the risks of euthanasia is not a slippery slope but a runaway train.

Supporters call oosterhoff a savior; detractors consider him a fanatic. Either way, he looks the part. His face—framed by white hair, crisscrossed by age lines, and rendered strangely magnetic by unusually small, ice-blue eyes—has become the face of psychiatric euthanasia in the Netherlands.

That role was confirmed last fall when Dutch public television broadcast Milou's Battle Continues, the most-watched TV documentary of the year. It tells the story of Milou Verhoof, a 17-year-old girl who received euthanasia from Oosterhoff to end her psychological suffering.


Once the cheerful daughter of a well-to-do family, Milou was deeply shaken at age 11 by the near-fatal illness of her beloved brother. At 13, she was raped and spiraled into post-traumatic stress, depression, and violent self-harm. At a secure in-patient facility, she was reportedly sexually abused again, by a fellow patient. She made several suicide attempts and requested euthanasia, but psychiatrists demurred—until, in late 2022, her family contacted Oosterhoff after learning about him through the media.

Milou's story could be told as an indictment of the Netherlands' mental-health system, which failed a troubled, victimized teenager and then had nothing left to offer but medicalized death. But the documentary—which was chosen as Dutch public television's entry for this year's International Emmy Awards—adopts the viewpoint of Oosterhoff and of the girl's parents, who praise Oosterhoff for understanding their daughter's suffering, respecting her autonomy, and sparing both her and them a lonely, undignified suicide. As Milou's mother, Mireille Verhoof, put it in an email to me: "Because of Dr. Oosterhoff's extremely careful and cautious approach, we as parents trusted that his conclusion—that Milou truly could not go on and that the days were unlivable for her—was the only correct one and confirmed what we as parents had long seen in our child."


Before dying, Milou got her nails done and picked out an evening gown and high heels to wear in her coffin. On October 2, 2023, Oosterhoff gave her a lethal injection in her childhood bedroom. "Girl, have a good trip," he told her, as her mother and father looked on. "You've been through so much." Oosterhoff spoke at her funeral.

In April 2024, 14 psychiatrists and doctors wrote to the Dutch public prosecutor to raise concerns about Milou's case, including the way Oosterhoff publicized it. Two months before he euthanized her, Oosterhoff recorded a video conversation with Milou about her wish to die. After her death, he posted it on the website of the KEA Foundation, which he established to support psychiatric euthanasia and to encourage more psychiatrists to perform it.

The doctors' letter suggested that Oosterhoff's video exploited Milou, who, they wrote, "may not have been fully decision-competent to assess her own right to life or adequately safeguard her care needs in a situation of acute distress." The Dutch newspaper NRC published a transcript of part of the video, in which a despondent Milou says, "I would have liked to have had another life, but that was not granted to me." Oosterhoff then asks how she would respond to those who might say, "Yes, but you're still so young." Milou answers, "It's not about age; it's about the suffering." Oosterhoff replies with an approving murmur. Milou continues, "I tried everything I could to make it better," as Oosterhoff nods.


The doctors sent their letter privately and didn't explicitly request a criminal investigation, but when Oosterhoff found out about it he fired back in the media, demanding that the letter's authors apologize. They refused. To this day, he is furious, insisting that everything he did was consistent with the law and that, as he puts it, "Milou wanted attention for her situation." Oosterhoff's foundation has since removed the video from its website but he insists that it "contains nothing controversial that I would need to hide." (He declined my request to see the video, telling me it has since been destroyed.)


Oosterhoff has a point. All of the euthanasias he performed were reviewed after the fact, as a matter of standard procedure, by the Netherlands' Regional Euthanasia Review Committees (known by the Dutch initials RTE), and his conduct passed muster. Without a finding of fault from the RTE, prosecutors would have been very unlikely to start a criminal investigation into Milou's case.


The RTE, however, was designed on the assumption that it would need to review a moderate number of relatively clear cases—not the thousands of euthanasias, including psychiatric ones, now flooding the system. RTE panelists do not conduct independent investigations but rely on physicians' written reports, augmented in a few cases by additional questioning. Oosterhoff says the RTE called him in to discuss Milou's case because of her young age.

As a practical matter, doctors have little to fear from the RTE. From 2002 to 2024, it found that physicians failed to meet all of the "due care criteria" in just 144 out of 110,591 euthanasia cases, including 14 of the 1,123 psychiatric-euthanasia cases. Of these, prosecutors took exactly one case to court. Marinou Arends faced murder charges for allegedly euthanizing an unconsenting elderly patient in 2016. She was acquitted and later made a knight in the Order of Orange-Nassau, in recognition of her career as a geriatric physician.


Whatever procedural checks and balances surround euthanasia in the Netherlands, the system necessarily relies on an individual physician's judgment as the ultimate safeguard. And to spend time with Menno Oosterhoff is to understand vividly that there is no such thing as a purely professional judgment on euthanasia. His approach seems to reflect his idiosyncratic, still-unfinished spiritual journey as much as his medical training

[tyroneStatto]

https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1sg4eda/shankill_est/

[Baile Brigín 2]

Have I missed something? Why are the fuel protestors far right ffs.

Protests 100% need to happen. Prices an absolute disgrace.

Wander down to a protest. The element has arrived. We are all supportive of the aims, but blocking ambulances and fuel trucks isn't a logical protest against fuel. This is becoming and anti everything flag fest.

But ultimately it's a farce. Harris on social media whinging about it like he isn't the Taniste.

If this was lefties, trade unionists, greens or Fenians the Gardai would have battered them by now.

[Armagh18]

Have I missed something? Why are the fuel protestors far right ffs.

Protests 100% need to happen. Prices an absolute disgrace.

Wander down to a protest. The element has arrived. We are all supportive of the aims, but blocking ambulances and fuel trucks isn't a logical protest against fuel. This is becoming and anti everything flag fest.

But ultimately it's a farce. Harris on social media whinging about it like he isn't the Taniste.

If this was lefties, trade unionists, greens or Fenians the Gardai would have battered them by now.

Will reply in other thread BB2

[Mourne Red]

https://x.com/maffewslevin/status/2043685235250913545?s=46&t=zMI0pHqP8aYtYYerofczvg

James McClean certainly seen something fit for this thread