Civilization 3.0.

Killing the "useless eaters" is becoming more acceptable over time.

//Euthanasia has become a common way to die in the Netherlands, accounting for 4.5 percent of deaths, according to researchers who say requests are increasing from people who aren't terminally ill.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country in the world that made it legal for doctors to help people die. Both euthanasia, where doctors actively kill patients, and assisted suicide, where physicians prescribe patients a lethal dose of drugs, are allowed. People must be "suffering unbearably" with no hope of relief -- but their condition does not have to be fatal.

"It looks like patients are now more willing to ask for euthanasia and physicians are more willing to grant it," said lead author Dr. Agnes Van der Heide of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam.

The review shows that in 1990, before it was legal, 1.7 percent of deaths were from euthanasia or assisted suicide. That rose to 4.5 percent by 2015. The vast majority - 92 percent - had serious illness and the rest had health problems from old age, early-stage dementia or psychiatric problems or a combination. More than a third of those who died were over 80.

Requests from those who aren't terminally ill still represent a small share, but have been increasing, Van der Heide said.

"When assisted dying is becoming the more normal option at the end of life, there is a risk people will feel more inclined to ask for it," she said.

About 8 percent of the people who died in 2015 asked for help dying, the review showed. Van der Heide said about half of all requests are approved now, compared with about a third in previous years.//

Dispatch from Post-Christian Europe.

It is a good thing the good guys won World War II.

Did anyone really think that "euthanasia" would not become an involuntary option for "useless eaters."

//A Dutch woman doctor who asked an elderly patient's family to hold her down while she administered a fatal drug dose has been cleared under Holland's euthanasia laws.

Mailonline reported that the patient fought desperately in an attempt not to be killed.

Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Regional Review Committee, which considered the case, said: "I am convinced that the doctor acted in good faith, and we would like to see more clarity on how such cases are handled in the future."

As a result, the case will be considered by Dutch courts to clarify the law over whether doctors who carry out euthanasia on patients with dementia should face prosecution if they acted in good faith.//

Post-modern return to Pre-Christian values.

Was murdering alcoholics with small children really the kind of horrible suffering that people had in mind when they think or discuss this issue?

Whatever the answer, the weak have no place in our Brave New World.

//The Hague (AFP) - A Dutch long-term alcoholic chose to end his life this year by lethal injection saying he could no longer go on, his brother has revealed in a moving tribute.

Mark Langedijk was 41 and the father of two small sons when he decided the only solution to end his pain and suffering was euthanasia, which was carried out earlier this year in The Netherlands at his parents' home.

"My little brother is dead," wrote Marcel Langedijk, a freelance journalist, in an article for the Dutch magazine Linda published last week.

"It was in his head. It was his problem. What the problem was no one could really ever find out," he added, revealing that his brother had undergone 21 rehab sessions over the last eight years and had had the support of his loving family.//

Welcome to our shiny rational, secular utopia.

Dutch mobile euthanasia units to make house calls:

A controversial system of mobile euthanasia units that will travel around the country to respond to the wishes of sick people who wish to end their lives has been launched in the Netherlands.

The scheme, which started on Thursday , will send teams of specially trained doctors and nurses to the homes of people whose own doctors have refused to carry out patients' requests to end their lives.

The launch of the so-called Levenseinde, or "Life End", house-call units – whose services are being offered to Dutch citizens free of charge – coincides with the opening of a clinic of the same name in The Hague, which will take patients with incurable illnesses as well as others who do not want to die at home.

The scheme is an initiative by the Dutch Association for a Voluntary End to Life (NVVE), a 130,000-member euthanasia organisation that is the biggest of its kind in the world.

"From Thursday, the Life End clinic will have mobile teams where people who believe they are eligible for euthanasia can register," Walburg de Jong, a NVVE spokesman, said.

"If they do comply, the teams will be able to carry out the euthanasia at patients' homes should their regular doctors be unable or refuse to help them," he added.

The Netherlands was the first country to legalise euthanasia in 2002 and its legislation on the right to die is considered to be the most liberal in the world.

But doctors cannot be forced to comply with the wishes of patients who request the right to die and many do refuse, which was what prompted NVVE to develop a system to fill the gap.

Sick people or their relatives can submit their applications via telephone or email and if the patient's request fulfils a number of strict criteria, the team is then dispatched.

Sick people or their relatives....that's re-assuring.

Also:

Every year 2,300 to 3,100 mercy killings are carried out in the Netherlands, although opponents of the practice claim the figure is much higher because many cases are not registered. The Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) supports euthanasia in principle if there is no alternative, but has distanced itself from the NVVE initiative, arguing that giving it the name Life End will foster the idea that it is for those who it said are simply "weary of life" rather than those who are sick.

After all, a 130,000 member "euthanasia organization" in a tiny country couldn't possibly create a social attitude that the old and sick ought to be willing to remove themselves from the presence of the living.

The Netherlands appears to be right on schedule.

One of the most prescient science fiction story I've read is "Lord of the World" by Robert Hughes Benson.

The strange thing is that you really wouldn't have appreciated its prescience before 2008. Lord of the World was written in 1907. It is set near the end of the 20th Century, it seems around the 1970s. The world has secularized. The Catholic Church is hanging on in Ireland and Rome, but churches everywhere else have become museums or vacant. The anti-christ seems to have arrived in the form of a previously unknown Midwestern American one-term Senator, with a gift for charismatic speaking, but no one seems to remember the gist of what he said the day after his speech.

And euthanasia is administered to accident victims by roving "ambulances."

"Lord of the World" is the original "steampunk." "Steampunk" is the genre that re-imagines the future from perspective of assuming that Edwardian and Victorian technology continued in essentially a straight-line development. Robert Hughes Benson was an Edwardian, and a Catholic priest, who envisioned the future as a straightline development of what he saw in his world. People in Benson's future travel by train and "volors," which seems to be a kind of "ornithopter" or, possibly, a winged zeppelin. His sociological developments in particular assume a near-straightline development, and as as consequence, we are shown a world that is both oddly civilized and oddly uncivilized - and completely de-humanized.

Flying squads of euthanizers would have fit right into the dystopian world envisioned by Benson.