Being on shaky moral grounds at the South Pole.

@hawkeye10,

Hawkeye perhaps the real problem is that we still allow woman to act as children if they decide to do so and are somewhat surprise in a pleasant manner when a woman such as the doctor acted in a manner we would just expect a man to act.

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@BillRM,

<facepalm>

Yeah, nevermind.

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@hawkeye10,

Quote:

Claiming to be a victim when she got into her situation by way of informed consent is not a morally pure path.

You wouldn't know a morally pure path if it smacked you, OM, Bill, ... upside the head, Hawk.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

My problem with this lady and my only problem is that it appear she is trying to bypass/over rule the judgments of the expert decisions makers by creating public support for an early mission and therefore getting the politicians to over rule the experts.

When you do things like that you likely will end up with outcomes as in the case of the Space Shuttle Challenger of nice fireworks in the sky where men and women had die.

No you should not launch it is too cold got over rule in the above case by the politicians and damn it I see no more justification in over rulings the experts on when you can launch a mission to the south pole.

As I remember it, the story was that
it was overruled by a more senior engineer,
not by a politician.

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@BillRM,

It is more involved than that, but yes. The basic problem is bad education and the parrellel problem of the erosion of standards in modern society, and men are aflicted as much as women. My kids tell me that freshman in college are amazed and distrested to find out that in college papers actually need to be turned in by the deadline, they have been raised to believe that deadlines are goals, are not manditory...just to give one example. People don't feel that the rules apply to them, that anything can be renegotiated if they want to, because increasingly this is how people are raised.

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@JTT,

JTT wrote:

Quote:
Claiming to be a victim when she got into her situation by way of informed consent is not a morally pure path.

You wouldn't know a morally pure path if it smacked you, OM, Bill, ... upside the head, Hawk.

OK, we now see that you can fling a turd. Can you put together an arguement? That would impress me more.

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@hawkeye10,

I didn't fling a turd, I just pointed out that you have the morality of a turd.

Do you have the slightest conception of just how hypocritical you sound talking about morality when you daily provide cover for the most immoral actions possible committed by the US.

Morality would entail that someone so damn close to the action would take steps to address such deep immorality, but no, on you prance, making great pretense that you strive to uphold some measure of honesty, morality, decency.

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@OmSigDAVID,

David they came to the engineer in charge and his bosses told him to take off his engineer hat and put on his management hat.

So the senior engineer was pressure to overrule his own judgment by his superiors without engineering knowledge.

The chain started in the non-engineering non-pilots management of NASA then they applied pressures on the top management of the solid fuel boasters to wavier the temperature rule.

During the Apollo program every major supplier had an astronaut on site overseeing the suppler works and the suppler engineers and technicians had a personal relationship with a man who would be depending sooner or later on their work for his life.

I question that such a overruling of the engineers would had been possible under the Apollo system.

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@JTT,

JTT wrote:

I didn't fling a turd, I just pointed out that you have the morality of a turd.

Do you have the slightest conception of just how hypocritical you sound talking about morality when you daily provide cover for the most immoral actions possible committed by the US.

Morality would entail that someone so damn close to the action would take steps to address such deep immorality, but no, on you prance, making great pretense that you strive to uphold some measure of honesty, morality, decency.

I certainly will not be holding my breath as I wait for you to come up with an argument.

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@hawkeye10,

Quote:

Women are more apt to expect to be saved, to look at a bad roll as injustice, and they start freaking out.

And you accuse me of calling women victims? You used "victim" first.

At least you haven't explicitly argued "She was asking for it", yet.

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@parados,

Quote:

At least you haven't explicitly argued "She was asking for it", yet

What is "it"?

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I think all the silly anti-women comments are obscuring a very interesting question.

When we say "it's too dangerous to fly" that doesn't mean the likelihood of the crew dying is 50+%, it means it is more like 5%. That is much, much higher than usual, but that doesn't mean that it's a death sentence to try and get this scientist, especially if they can plan it all out in advance and have feedback on conditions on the ground. Comparing it to my earlier pilot analogy, I think it is acutally an easier rescue since the unknown factors are a lot less. Someone made a hurricane analogy saying crews don't go out in bad weather to rescue idiots. I think that is wrong on two counts. First, those people were actively avoiding taking common sense actions to provide for their own safety which is clearly not the case here. Second, rescuers actually do go out in storms trying to rescue idiots. While there are several hurricane examples I can think of, a better example is the Coast Guard cutter heading out in a storm to help some idiot boater who thought he knew the weather better than the Weather Channel. (This happens regularly here.) Rescuers put their lives on the line on a regular basis to help people who have contributed greatly to their situations, so why wouldn't you help a scientist in service to her country who is in a bad situation through no fault of her own? If you asked for volunteers, I don't think you would have any trouble assembling a crew.

That said, my take on this situation from the limited information available is that this women is not in immediate danger like that ship wrecked sailor. We're now into spring in the southern hemisphere so a few weeks could be a big difference in terms of reducing the overall risk. I'm not a medical expert so I don't how big a difference does a few weeks make in terms of getting her effective treatment.

If the next few weeks is absolutely critical I think they should put out a call for volunteers. If the damage is already done and it's more a matter of putting together a treatment plan for the future, wait until the risk is lower for both crew and patient to get home safely.

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@engineer,

Quote:

Second, rescuers actually do go out in storms trying to rescue idiots.

Not the same thing, as a lot of effort went into making sure that anyone who ends up at the pole is not an idiot. In depth talks were conducted on the risks, paperwork was signed where she agreed that she knew the risks and knew that she would not be rescued if the rescue attempt would be too dangerous. She knew that if she had a life threatening medical condition at the wrong time that she might die as a result of agreeing to go, and yet she signed, she went.

Informed consent was conducted, she rolled the dice and she lost. She needs to stop sniveling now.

1 Reply

@engineer,

Strange is it not that the woman doctor operated on herself using mirrors and her tumor was fast growing and if the risk was only 5 percents I question under those conditions that a flight would not had been done!!!!!!!!

In fact a high risk airdrop was done for the doctor.

But for some strange reason this lady should be removed when the doctor with the fast growing tumor was not?

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@hawkeye10,

That boater going out in bad weather also knows the rules, took the training, etc, but they still send out the SOS and everyone expects the Coast Guard to go.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

But for some strange reason this lady should be removed when the doctor with the fast growing tumor was not?

I agree. The doctor with the tumor was at a much higher risk than this woman as far as I can tell but it was also at the very worst time for Antartic weather. I don't blame her for calling for help and I don't blame those in command for looking at the seriousness of her condition as a factor in whether to go get her.

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@engineer,

I also do not blame her for calling for help I do however blame her that when told such a mission would be outside the safety limits she begin to mount a PR campaign to attempt to overrule that judgment.

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@BillRM,

Went back and read the full article. Turns out the scientist is not advocating an emergency pickup, her daughter is. Her beef is also not that they didn't send a risky mission, only that they aren't bothering to do anything until the first, regularly scheduled flight. I think that is a reasonable position. "OK, don't take any extraordinary risks, but come get me at the first possibility."

Quote:

“They’re saying the risk is too high,” said Ms. Douceur, who has worked at the South Pole on and off for three years. “But why aren’t you mobilizing and prepositioning planes so that when the weather breaks, you can come get me, instead of just saying, ‘No, you’re O.K., you’re going to wait’? It feels like they’re just stonewalling.”

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@engineer,

Well first of all it could be that she is pulling in her horn a little and placing the blame for going overboard on her daughter love for her.

In any case I am fairly sure that they now had at least two doctors on the base given what happen when they only had one available in the past.

Assuming that those doctors and the doctors they consulted with are of the opinion that she is stable I can see how the government might be somewhat reluctant to spend a million or so on a special mission to get her to a full scale hospital a week or so sooner.

As always the devil is in the details and details being reported by news outlets who first mission is to generate high ratings not reporting in an accurate manner.

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@BillRM,

Quote:

Well first of all it could be that she is pulling in her horn a little and placing the blame for going overboard on her daughter love for her

more likely she does not have unlimited calling capacity with which to mount her PR campaign, so her daughter has taken up the duties. We know of no reason to doubt but that the mother is responsible.

Quote:

As always the devil is in the details and details being reported by news outlets who first mission is to generate high ratings not reporting in an accurate manner

Yep, but American journalism was better than this for awhile. We seem to have gone most of the way backwards towards muckraking journalism, without the honesty of the guys like Hearst who admitted that they were pushing political agenda's and were more interested in selling papers than where the truth was. Today's sleaze peddlers claim to be devoted to truth...what a sad joke.

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Being on shaky moral grounds at the South Pole.

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