What the *fuck*?

The BBQ Pit
21

Underlined emphasis mine.

Excuse me? I only have one spouse and only one child and I live in America’s “land-'o-plenty” culture and I sure as shit couldn’t provide “adequate care” for my child if she was accidentally badly burned at home. I’d call a fucking ambulance.

We’re not giving him “a pass”–the man took his injured children to what were probably the closest fucking doctors around to see if they could at least temporarily ease their suffering. Maybe we should just shoot him instead, the bastard.

And so far as his being in a different culture, the only impact that has on the whole story is related to your assumption that he obviously can’t take care of his kids because they were playing with

See, in my comfortable area of America, there simply aren’t bags of explosives sitting in the streets outside my house for my child to be burned by. So the horrified reaction that he gasp allowed his kids to play with explosives is a little tempered by the fact that errant explosives probably aren’t as unusual in that area as they are in suburban, middle-class American neighborhoods.

The doctors were heartless, cold, inhuman idiots. And the fact that our military supports their decision to blatantly disregard individuals who were in need of medical attention is repugnant.

22

If we only did what we were strictly obligated to do the world would’t be worth living in. IMO the law needs to be revised a.s.a.p.

23

Yeah. We’re on to you, Mr Mutlaq. We’ll forgive you this time, but the next time you callously start a family in the middle of what at some point in the future might become a warzone littered with deadly ordnance, we won’t be so nice. Yeah.

To answer your question, milroyj, no-one (except you) is blaming the father because not everyone is an irredeemable shithead. It’s a small silver lining, but there it is.

24

Hippocratic Oath – Modern Version

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

25

Maybe these two guys were Major Frank Burns and Major C. E. Winchester.

14 kids! Wonder if his lawn looks nice?

Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.

26

So you take it out on his kids? Good god, you’re one cold hearted son of a bitch!

:eek:

27

Exactly. In this thread, we have injured Iraqi children, which must be the fault of the United States, but in the alligator thread, with the dead American kid, the parents are to blame, according to some posters. So I guess the order of outrage works out something like this:

  1. Injured Iraqis = evil war-mongering Americans, not the Iraqi individuals’ fault

  2. 7 dead alligators = horrific slaughter of innocent animals, not the animals’ fault

  3. Dead American = stupid kid, with bad parents, their own fault

Since most of the people posting in both threads are American, I ask why is the only blame assigned in either thread against Americans?

Sorry, I haven’t fully learned this whole moral relativism thing yet.

28

By adequate care, I didn’t mean that every parent should also have a medical degree. Of course one would call an ambulance or seek out the nearest doctors.

On the other hand, we’ve been hearing so much lately about how bad off the Iraqis are, how poor, hungry, and without medicine they are. So why the fuck did Father Bonehead decide to have 14 kids in the first place? Although he may have the resources to properly feed, clothe, house, and educate 14 kids, I kinda doubt it. And he absolutely failed in another parental responsibility, that of supervision. People complain all the time about how they can’t keep their eyes on one child every minute, which is true, but why multiply that problem 14-fold? 14 kids (and two wives) is just irresponsible.

29

Maybe because birth control isn’t readily available?

30

Yeah, when you strip out as much relevant information as you can, it is easy to come to rather dumb conclusions.

Dead American kid: 12 years old, (old enough to babysit other kids in the U.S., presuming a certain capacity for good judgment), lives in Florida, in the heart of alligator country where parents are expected to teach children respect for dangerous wildlife.

Injured Iraqis: oldest is 8 (at least an order of magnitude lower on awareness of dangers and consequences), encountered munitions that were never there prior to sixteen weeks ago, reducing the possibility that one could teach them about the dangers of munitions. (I knew two kids who were hurt by surplus WWII weapons in suburban America because their parents did not realize that a hand grenade or a rocket grenade were–unlike alligators–objects about which they had to warn their kids.)

(Now, I would not blame the parents of the Florida kid–12-year-olds do dumb things–but if someone wanted to blame the parents, it would more likely be based on the complete picture rather than on some strawman assertion of American vs not American.)
In addition, your claims that the man is irresponsible having that many kids is simply ignorant on a couple of levels:

  • First, you have no evidence that the man is not providing for the kids. The one photograph I’ve seen and the two descriptions I’ve read indicate that the kids are sufficiently well fed and (aside from burns) healthy.
  • Second, in third world countries, it is actually an intelligent action to have multiple children, increasing the odds that more will survive to adulthood in spite of childhood diseases and so provide more opportunities to care for their parents in the parents’ old age. The U.S. population engaged in that exact behavior until WWII, when sufficient progress was made in halting childhood diseases to guarantee a higher percentage of children reaching adulthood and sufficient social programs were put in place to provide for the parents even when they limited their family size.
31

No. It goes:

  1. Injured Iraqi kids who were in no way active participants in this war = tragedy.

  2. Doctors (irrelevant of nationality) who were fully trained and available refusing to treat injured kids = appalling and unprofessional.

  3. Father having 14 kids = his own damn choice. In no way do I want to promote the ‘evil American’ image, and I’m not absolving him of any part of the blame. The issue isn’t how these kids got hurt, because kids get hurt. All kids do. My parents have two of us, they’re wonderful parents. When I was nine I fell out of a tree and literally nearly broke my neck. Their fault? No. I was a kid.

The issue that has me outraged is just that someone (indeed, 2 someones) who could provide treatment refused to do so. As a weak comparison: I’m CPR certified. If someone who knows this about me comes running up to me and begs me to help their child who desperately needs resusitation, I would feel obligated to help. Admittedly, this shouldn’t be compared to a life-or-death situation as I just did, but still. I was under the impression that if a doctor is approached by someone who needs medical attention, they’d, you know, feel some sort of moral obligation to do something. I don’t see where the fuck any of this other stuff comes into it: the thing that got me pissed off was the ‘doctors’ refusal to help.

32

I blame those specific doctors. Should they be immune to criticism because they are Americans?

33

Can’t he put a sock on it, figuratively? Did he have to fuck two different women at least a total of 14 times? No, he didn’t.

34

Yes, the munitions shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Even without the munitions, why were children 8 years old and younger, playing in the street with fire? Lack of parental supervision, perhaps?

**

But people on this board DID blame the parents of the Florida kid, which is what I was responding to. YMMV.

**

But I thought that conditions were so very bad in Iraq because of the big, bad U.S. sanctions. That’s what some people have been claiming for the last twelve years. Hungry children, poisened water, going without needed medicine, etc. If conditions were so bad, why did he have 14 of the little rug-rats? Or maybe, just maybe, things aren’t as bad as some people like to think it is.

35

If you’d like, I can explain things using smaller words. This question was already answered:

“How bad it is” might be a relative judgment. Making observations that ignore historical realities and contexts is simply promoting ignorance instead of fighting it.

36

After all, it’s not as if any child has ever slipped the leash, even for a moment. :rolleyes:

37

The point here is that a couple kids got hurt accidentally. It happens. No matter how carefully you watch–kids get hurt. Their father took them to the closest doctors he could find. They refused to help him.

The rest of this crap is just that–crap.

Why did he have 14 kids? Who cares? It doesn’t have any bearing on the fact that a physician refused to treat an injured child.

Why were the children playing in the street? The pool at the local country club was probably closed for cleaning. :rolleyes:

So far as this goes,

Um, that’s what the parent in question did. And they refused to help him.

I didn’t read about the alligator kid or anything but if a kid was attacked by an alligator and they called an ambulance and the paramedics refused to treat him, that would also be vile and disgusting.

People hurt+doctors help=good

People hurt+doctors ignore=cruel, evil and wrong

38

At the end of the day whomever is to blame for the situation there were injured KIDS in front of 2 doctors and they turned their back on them.

Fucking maggots.

There are numerous examples of doctors treating the worst scum in the world because they were there and they were doctors and that is what they do. How these fuckers can sleep at night amazes me.

39

milroyj, even if the father had set those kids on fire HIMSELF, does that excuse the doctors refusing to help them?

40

Milroyj, drop it because you are in the wrong, and your increasingly polarized comments are verging on outright racism. So the guy had 14 kids by 2 mothers; how does that justify doctors walking away from patients who needed care?

There is NO justification for the US doctors who ignored their duties as physicians and human beings. None.