SkookumTree
1yr ago
While I didn't see the kind of shit that you saw, I saw a different flavor of shit for a month as an Eaglelandian medical student. Terminally ill children, and kids in crisis from sickle cell anemia. Working conditions were good to excellent: 9 to 5, sometimes a four-hour weekend shift. Emotionally: I write about this a lot, but can't do it justice. It was ordinary dumbfucks in hell: most parents, even good ones, just fuck 'dealing with terminally ill child' up mildly to moderately bad. Only maybe five or ten percent of the parents weren't - as the doctors and nurses judged them - weren't some flavor or other of bush league dipshit or dumbass.
I will say that I did not have a traumatic or emotionally difficult or even unpleasant experience! If forced to rate it: 4/10, mildly unpleasant but I don't regret having done it, nor would I mind doing it again.
With war - although I've never been - I think that the thing at play is constant personal, physical danger, seeing your friends killed, and maybe a bit of moral injury from making mistakes in war that cost people their lives. In the cancer ward, there were a lot of eyes on things and relatively few (maybe 1x/week/attending at most) opportunities to make minor fuckups and kill patients.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I would support a rule that for people permanently incapable of lawful consent (which would include Aella's case but also people ruled generally incompetent), actual consent plus the approval of a legal guardian (or family court or whatever) can substitute for legal consent.
I think that could work OK-ish for terminally ill kids; in a hospital for something like this you have a teenager who is more or less of sound mind, not intellectually disabled, and terminally ill. So maybe they're not at full adult capacity for consent but maybe like 75% and usually 75% isn't truly up to snuff...but if they're terminally ill, and their parents agree, and they've had a couple psychologists and maybe a pastor or something talk to them about it, it's good enough. On the other hand, someone who is profoundly intellectually disabled isn't terminally ill and might only be at 10% on a good day, and the +30% isn't enough to boost it over the edge.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah, fair enough - or at least, it's a hell of a lot less wrong. I think that there should be a lot of deliberation and consultation with psychologists and/or religious leaders or something before this...but if a terminally ill 14-year-old wants to go BASE jumping and he and his parents agree on comfort care only if it goes wrong, I'd let him have at it.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
The case for "yes", in my opinion - as someone who's been in the healthcare field for a few years - is in my mind strengthened by their terminal illness. Part of the reason why children are restricted from making certain decisions is in order to increase the chance that they will grow up into healthy adults. We wouldn't allow ordinary, healthy 13-year-olds to hire adult prostitutes partly because we believe this to be harmful to the 18-year-old, the 25-year-old, the 40-year-old that they will almost certainly become.
With terminal illness, this isn't a consideration any longer. As such, a dying child's autonomy vs. security interests are tilted much more heavily in the direction of "autonomy". As such: I'm slightly in favor, in this case, but it is a nasty question to deal with and there is probably no good solution here.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Would you let this terminally ill child get drunk instead?
yes
Get high on LSD?
yes
Dive to see the wreck of Titanic in a flimsy submersible?
perhaps, if they and their parents were well aware of the risks and understood
Euthanize themselves?
yes, if it was determined that they wanted euthanasia, weren't depressed, etc; probably would want the parents to agree but if the child is repeatedly and unwaveringly insistent that they don't want to live with this terminal illness anymore, I wouldn't necessarily want to require this. I don't really have much certainty here but am leaning towards "let terminally ill teenagers choose euthanasia, even without parental consent". My rationale is that as much as that kind of thing sucks, it also sucks to have a 13-year-old who's adamant about preferring death to spending a couple of weeks or months struggling to breathe, doped up on morphine, with altered mental status...forced to endure this, and then die afterwards. Of course, I'll concede that there are reasonable counterarguments here.
As you might be able to tell, I'm very much in favor of death-with-dignity and assisted suicide for the terminally ill. If I see the end coming, I'm going to die like a doctor.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
“would you rather fuck your dad or your mom”
For me: seems like both of us are more or less being raped; I'm assuming that we've got guns to our heads or something. In that case...whichever would be hurt least. Whole situation sucks rotting donkey balls and it's at best a choice between eating five pounds of rotted donkey balls and eating six pounds of rotted donkey balls.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Who else other than someone sexually attracted to minors is going to want to fuck a dying 13 year old who may well be too sick or too weak to participate in the activity as an equal partner, never mind if they are able in the first place to have sex with an adult?
Someone who would have sex in spite of feeling neutral, even disgusted, due to a personal conviction. It could be something as simple as "I'm doing this because I want my client to have this experience before they die; my disgust and feelings be damned".
SkookumTree
1yr ago
why not rape
It's against the child's wishes. It's also bad for the rapist and bad for the people enabling it. Sure, if there was a fixed quantity of rapists and each rapist only completed X offenses per year or lifetime...maybe this wouldn't be terrible but why can't it wait 'till our hapless hero or heroine is in a coma?
Oh no not at all, Aella is not like the vast majority of human beings, she has the innate ability to fully decouple the consequence of sleeping around with dozens of people and the long term effect it has on her mental state. For someone like her who has complete control over herself, sex really is little more than friction that feels good.
I do wonder whether prolonged exposure to tragedy, suffering, and death helps people (Westerners? First Worlders?) decouple things better. There's a stereotype that soldiers, nurses, and adrenaline junkies get around a lot; I can't speak to the first two but the third has been true enough in my experience. I'd like to ask the Indian physician @self_made_human and the American combat veteran @JTarrou whether this has been true for them. [EDIT: "have you become a better decoupler, or less averse to the idea of casual sex because of your experiences"] While I'll definitely contend that extended exposure to the hospital system as a healthcare provider or worker (rather than as a patient) isn't quite as bad as war, I will say that you see some shit and that it is difficult to describe in words.
The vast majority of people though do not have this power, and when they fly too close to the sun they get burned and then go splat as they fall back to the ground. The point I wish to make is not "don't fly close to the sun", it's "don't fly close to the sun unless you have high end heat protection and have made sure your wings are not made of wax".
I'll agree with you there. A lot of this stuff - like those bespoke queer poly communes - is a lot like 'building your own airplane out of a lawnmower or motorcycle engine and a bunch of stuff from the local Home Depot'. If you're a skilled enough airplane designer, woodworker, and amateur engineer...you can pull it off and build something airworthy. However, you had better be very, very careful and know that you're venturing off the beaten path and might just fall out of the goddamn sky.
if they complain and say they want a set of values that work really well for a small set of people who really, absolutely know what they are doing, and errenously believe themselves to be in this set of people, then they should be fully accepting of the consequences for when things go bad for those people who it turns out don't really know what they are up to (which is most of them, but nobody likes to think of themselves in this way).
Fair enough - FAFO. For what it's worth, I think that the accredited-investor bar should be quite a bit lower. IIRC there are ways to get around this, companies offering special shares to ordinary investors through some relatively nontrivial method. People trying this know damn well that this is "go big or go home" territory and that they might lose everything. These are high risk, potentially high reward lottery tickets. It's like backcountry skiing signs. Ideally we'd mark things a bit more clearly...
SkookumTree
1yr ago
In a society run in a way I would like it my answer would be an absolute, immediate no because sex is sacred and powerful, and you shouldn't let them have sex for the same reason you wouldn't hand a 5 year old a loaded revolver.
Generally speaking, handing a 5-year-old a loaded revolver is a terrible idea. However, if that child is terminally ill and has "shoot a revolver" as his dying wish...it might not be a terrible thing for him to go to a gun range with an adult and be allowed to fire a few rounds from a .22 revolver. Hell, there's probably ways for him to just be handed that revolver and allowed to shoot at a target or something in the woods. A remote-controlled intramuscular benzodiazepine injector would allow first responders to safely get to him if he happens to shoot himself; I'm assuming that he's comfort care only.
That would probably be legit kinder to him than keeping him half alive on heroic measures and ventilators and all that stuff.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I don't really have much of a position on that. Having seen some shit working in the healthcare industry, and seen a few children dying from cancer, I am willing to say that this isn't terribly bad, given the child's circumstances. Reasonable people can be on either side of this issue. Cancer is a nasty, nasty disease: this guy is looking down the barrel of Who By Very Slow Decay, pediatric edition. Mercifully that is a bit faster than the geriatric version.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
As a guy with most of a medical degree: falling and hitting your head on concrete can be a motherfucker. Results are a crapshoot and can be anything from a mild concussion to death. I saw a young, fit teenager that very nearly died and will be crippled for life with brain injury...because he fainted and fell off a step that was a foot and a half high. Plenty of manslaughter cases come from fistfights that take place in parking lots; one man knocks the other out and the loser falls, hits his head on the pavement, and dies. I think that this guy was KO'd by the thrown megaphone, hit his head on the concrete, and was mortally injured.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
YouTube my left foot: there's a boatload of local cyclists that can hand me my ass on any given hill without even trying all that hard.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
That is a very strong "maybe". As something that happens once in a long while and secretly, it might not be terrible, might even be the least bad thing. However, I'm strongly against this becoming normalized and accepted. It's nasty, even if there might be some value to it.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Deontologists might also argue that the pursuit of personal excellence is the highest goal; who cares if that sometimes passes through (nominally consensual) prostitution of teenagers? Virtue ethicists might talk about individual freedom or some shit like that. I'm not voting "yes" here - it might be good for the teenage girl, and for the woman she becomes...but probably not good for her parents or society. I guess you could go full consequentialist and say that a human life's worth about $10 million...kind of like what I understand Ancient China to be like. There, you could buy your way out of most crimes with the exception of high treason; murder cost you 200 times a laborer's salary. In US dollars, a modern day laborer construction worker earns $50k/year on average. And the economists have figured a human life's worth around ten million, give or take.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Were they using the hard R, or not?
yes, people in that social rung in those areas with those cultures absolutely do talk that way
Agreed. Class brings...refinement. That's a very different thing from moral virtue; for a fairly harsh example, consider the polite and refined antebellum Southern gentleman.
Pretty damn ironic that black actors ostensibly performing an aspect of low-class black culture wind up getting roasted. It'd be a little bit like redneck actors portraying rednecks getting roasted for being "too hillbilly".
SkookumTree
1yr ago
No, I do not. As far as I know, something like 40 percent of people with gender dysphoria attempt suicide, but that's just attempts, not deaths by suicide. For mental illnesses other than schizophrenia...borderline personality disorder has a 10 percent death-by-suicide rate, anorexia a 10 percent mortality rate. Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches probably have those beat. There are of course the degenerative diseases like ALS and Huntington's, but that's not exactly what we're talking about. There death by suicide might be a kind of self-euthanasia...certainly not a central example.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
The French tried that in the 70s; it didn't work great for 'em. (Some) Westerners have been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
perhaps some dreadful diseases meet that standard
Trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches, perhaps. Controversially, gender dysphoria. Although you've got to differentiate "attempted suicide" versus "died by suicide" here.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Is your plan still to parachute in the middle of alaska with just a knife?
No, it's to attempt a cross country trip across the Brooks Range with a shit ton of gear.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Just find boots that are designed for the weather. They exist.
There do not exist ski mountaineering boots that are designed for extreme cold, as far as I know. If my search missed something, let me know.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Yeah. Especially if the penalty for getting caught is life in Azkaban...if that's the case, I would expect a lot more big-league criminals in this world to fight to the death to avoid being captured by law enforcement. A big league drug lord or something can do OK in prison; a big league Death Eater is just going to spend the rest of his life being tortured by Dementors.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
Your other problem is that you have a completely distorted view of your chances
Too optimistic about my survival chances, or too pessimistic? I think that my chances of being in a relationship with an average American woman are roughly equal to those of surviving the Hock.
SkookumTree
1yr ago
I know several guys putting out half again that much power IRL. Not hard to find - just find your local cycling group; the strongest riders will be at that level. Just like finding a guy that can deadlift 500 pounds isn't terribly hard - just hang out at your nearest commercial gym for a month or two. Six hundred...now that's getting up there.
Yeah. There's probably at least a few people here on the Motte who would sleep with a close friend that they were sexually disgusted by...if it was that close friend's dying wish. I'd do it, as long as they knew that I was grossed out and didn't really want to do it, but would do it in the same spirit as working as a septic tank pumper's assistant for a day. A nasty job, but for a good, dying friend who knows what they're getting? Worse things to do.
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