very Normal about robots :]

even if someone WAS just lazy and simply didn't want to do anything but lie on the couch and watch tv, they should still have these things. it's irrelevant whether some people aren't actually lazy because everyone, including hypothetical lazy people, should have their basic needs met.

if we have the resources to do it, there is no defense of letting people die because they don't want to work, and much less because they can't.

when i say that some nurses do not treat the bodies of their patients, living or dead, with the kind of care they are owed, i mean that. maybe it’s less likely for living patients, but all bets are off on the dead (and the near dying). i’ve watched nurses and aides insult the bodies of fat decedents. mistreat the bodies of drug addicts. refuse to help me move patients and left me having to either wait god knows long how long for help or move them laterally myself. quibble over signing transfer paperwork when a patient started coding (dying) on the way to his hospice floor and they couldn’t agree on who would have to handle the work of preparing his body.

there is something to be said in the overwork nurses are put through and shit but man if that episode of M*A*S*H doesn’t exemplify everything i ever wanted to see and was always deprived of in healthcare: genuine understanding of the sanctity of the human body after it has undergone the gauntlet of dying in a hospital. what a cruel place to die for so many people, and crueler still when you’re dying in a combat hospital in a war zone. and M*A*S*H gets that, because M*A*S*H is built on the unfaltering gentle loving kindness of its medical staff and of course they would lift even an enemy soldier at every corner of his sheets and at his sides and lift him smoothly and deposit him so softly there isn’t even a noise. no rolling head, no untucked arm, no quibbling about the paperwork.