I heard the bells on UBC’s clock tower singing in the distance for the first time at 4 PM yesterday, and again at 2 PM today. Twice in two days? Where have I been for the past two years? Did the bells just start ringing recently or have I been camping on other parts of campus too often? For a moment, I felt like I was in a small European town.

Speaking of Europe, which has a relatively better health care system, here’s another passage or two from Worst Case Bioethics:

As Franklin Roosevelt first noted in 1944, just before D-Day, denying healthcare denies equal opportunity and is an assault on human dignity. Concurrently, the language of social justice should be employed, especially by using stories of real Americans denied needed healthcare, to convince Americans — who probably don’t need much convincing — that it is simply unfair to deny uninsured and underinsured (and even many insured) Americans decent healthcare, as it is unfair to deny decent education to Americans who cannot afford it. Healthcare is a moral issue and denial of healthcare based on inability to pay is immoral.

Since we’re on the topic of morality, let’s talk about torture. Lawyers and physicians working for the United States government and military played essential roles in ensuring the torture of suspected insurgents. Physicians had (and still have) the “licence to torture” from the sanction of lawyers, while lawyers and law-makers made torture legal, despite the result of the Nuremberg trials and Geneva conventions, through the supposed “medical evaluations” of physicians.

Read the following statement from the former White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales:

…the war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm… Our Nation recognizes that this new paradigm — ushered in not by us, but by terrorists — requires new thinking in the law of war.

And compare it with Hitler’s policy:

The main theme [of Hitler's instructions] was that this was the decisive battle between two ideologies and that this fact made it impossible to use in this war methods as we soldiers knew them and which were considered to be the only correct ones under International Law. The war could not be carried on by these means. In this case completely different standards had to be applied. This was an entirely new kind of war, based on completely different arguments and principles.

At this conference the Fuhrer stated that… since the Russians were not signatories to The Hague Convention the treatment of their prisoners of war does not have to follow the Articles of the Convention.

What I am inspired by, though, is that such critical remarks and analyses can be freely discussed and even published in America and much of the Western world.