If she wants to kill herself that's one thing. She didn't need assistance. She was young and healthy and could've just hung herself, or jumped off a tall building, or in front of a train in some other way that doesn't involve someone else, please. The fact that she couldn't muster up the will to do this, honestly makes me question how suicidal she really was in the first place. After all, thousands of people in the Netherlands do this every year. But unlike the bedridden elderly people that are usually taken as an example in these cases, she certainly always had the option.
What I really think we shouldn't be doing as a society is validating or normalizing such a decision. That is not about the details her specific case, but about the example that's set for others. It doesn't even matter if her mental suffering truly were unbearable in some manner. Ultimately only she knows her inner mental state. To an outside observer, she was young and healthy, and she had people who cared about her. (We should all be so lucky!) And we're going to just kill her on request? That shouldn't be normal. It's what's observed from the outside that sets the norm.
marinuso
5mo ago
In the ancient Germanic tribes, men would go around with a sword to show that they were free men. More than just a weapon, it was a symbol of freedom and agency. Decisions were made by free men attending the thing and voting by raising their swords. Women, children, and slaves did not carry weapons, and could not vote. (And I say "ancient Germanic tribes", but parts of Switzerland kept this tradition up into the 1990s, swords and all.)
I get the feeling that in parts of the US, going around openly carrying a weapon carries the same sort of symbolism, even if it doesn't give you the right to vote.
marinuso
5mo ago
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue. To have separate communities you need a certain amount of space between them.
Nowadays, every Arab youth in Europe is on Arab TikTok, and people don't speak to their physical neighbours anyway, no matter if they share a language or not. With the disappearance of physical barriers, it's the language barriers that define the communities.
marinuso
5mo ago
That's completely orthogonal to embryo selection though. We don't magically gain the tech to accurately scan these things from your DNA.
And even if we had it, and decided to use it, we'd look at people's actual results, and we could do that with naturally born people in the same way. Even if they would in general end up performing worse than people born from selected embryos, you'd still not have Gattaca, even though it would be dystopian in its own way. There's no incentive to start discriminating specifically against natural-born people specifically and checking that everywhere.
We already rank people by their traits and abilities, we just do it in a more fuzzy way. For sports it's the easiest. We have them compete and see who's best. Even if we could perfectly predict this using their DNA, nothing would change.
marinuso
5mo ago
We've had screenings for things like Down's Syndrome for a while, and we do not (in general) oppose abortions in those cases. Even countries that ban elective abortions completely tend to allow it in cases of malformation, which Down's Syndrome would count as. And then you just try again. This doesn't seem too different in concept, just a lot easier and more flexible. In this case, too, the only people who don't do this are certain religious people. The genetic material is still coming from the parents, they're not actually making 'designer babies' or superhumans or anything of the sort.
We're not getting Gattaca. The problem there was that they put DNA tests everywhere in their society. That's the dystopian bit. And who would have anything to gain by doing that?
I don't think we are even functional enough as a society. If we're getting a dystopia, we're getting "Brazil". (With perhaps some shades of "Demolition Man".) We kind of already saw this during Covid with the half-working tracking apps and the like. Both in the fact that the government's attempt at oppression frequently hurt random strangers by accident while not even really dealing with the actual dissidents, and in the fact that the general populace mostly just shrugged about it all.
marinuso
5mo ago
South Korea probably wants North Korea to remain exactly as it is.
If the NK government falls, the refugees will overwhelm South Korea. Even if the NK government peacefully reforms, the migrants will overwhelm South Korea - it will take generations for the NK economy to catch up, and in the meantime the North Koreans can travel.
South Korea would be forced to implement immigration control that would make Trump blush (or maybe even Netanyahu), and against what are technically their own countrymen to boot.
There's no way Israel could be anything different. They're surrounded by enemies.
They started out with a fairly "European" mindset back when Israel was founded. That's why they didn't just ethnically cleanse the area back when they could've gotten away with it more easily. A cynic would say that that was a mistake. They are becoming Middle-Easterners in order to survive among the Middle-Easterners. Again, a cynic would say they're not adapting fast enough.
The only other option would have been to do it in a different location. Hand them part of defeated Germany after the war, and move the Jews already in Palestine out. But of course, Germany isn't the Holy Land.
If they had genocided them in the 1960s, they would've probably gotten away with it.
marinuso
6mo ago
I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.
The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.
marinuso
6mo ago
On the other hand: if you aren't an asshole, then why are you wearing their uniform?
All of the groups you mention do "wear uniforms". Whether they are literal uniforms such as e.g. the Nazi would wear, or whether they are other visual markers such as the drug dealer tattoos, the principle is the same. Their appearance marks them as part of a certain group, which is why they adopted that appearance in the first place.
So it seems perfectly reasonable to me to judge people by it.
marinuso
7mo ago
There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.
In most other countries, large personal cars are heavily discouraged through taxation, both of the cars and the fuel. If fuel is $8/gallon and the car tax is based on weight and engine displacement, a Ram is not a practical commuter car, for reasons of economy alone.
But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around. People are willing to pay easily double the American price, for a car that they know beforehand won't fit in any parking garage or even down the road in some places. (They get converted to run on LPG to save on fuel costs.) And they do drive their clean pickups to the office. I bet if it weren't for the regulations there'd be much more of them around.
marinuso
7mo ago
They're sitting on a $50b pile of money, surely they can bridge the Trump administration if they want to?
marinuso
8mo ago
Raising children is valuable to society. We're already seeing, in various ways, what bad effects we get when people don't want to do it anymore. And someone has to do the household work. Also, someone has to bring in money.
I would not call it grift. That's the same kind of take that radical feminists have when they say family life is nothing but oppression to women, just the other way around.
For all the political debates about who should do what, what cannot change is that it is ultimately a team effort, and what also cannot change (except through technological progress) is the list of things that need doing.
Okay, not a train. That's an asshole thing to do. If you're going to commit suicide, don't involve other people.
I included it because it's the stereotypical thing to do (at least around here), but thinking a bit further, it's probably that way because when someone does it, everyone in the train knows. Probably most people have been on a train that's been delayed because of a train suicide. Other methods of suicide don't get that attention.
I do absolutely think we shouldn't be offering assisted suicide to people who are physically capable of unassisted suicide.
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