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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.
I don't think this is a good topic to discuss because there is no objective way to look at things. You value human life very highly, I value a reduction in suffering as higher. This is all subjective opinion, you can't quantify either of those 2 things in a scientific way.
So any possible arguments are going to exist merely to manipulate observers into this or that camp.
What even is this comment? The vast majority of the things we discuss in this forum have no objective answer. That’s what makes them interesting, and why they are able to sustain extensive conversation. If there was an objective way to look at things, you could just look it up and there wouldn’t be much to discuss. It seems like your comment is a fully-general argument against most of what this community is all about.
I've been a silent part of this forum (and its predecessor) from pretty much its inception. And up to this point, I just saw it as a funny comedy kind of thing. "Haha, what will the silly clowns in the US do next?", "Oh, that black rapper said what about the jews?" etc.
But this is not comedy. This is something involving real people. I've been living under the weight of suicidal depression for the past 15 years. This girl? That could have been me. It could have been my sister. There is a non-zero number of people who have been forcefully put into insane asylums. And that decision, to put someone into a room with nothing to do for years or decades (torture imo) or euthanasia is mostly decided by this kind of discussion. An entirely subjective discussion based on nothing concrete that will impact real people in real and horrible ways.
You're familiar with the witch trials, right? This is that level of discussion, with that level of consequences. I don't want to be a part of this.
I think most people here see things like the chilling effects of speech, involvement in wars, trans issues, etc, etc, as things that aren't comedy and involve real people. I appreciate that when it's you it feels different, that discussing your issue as opposed to a faraway one feels real and horrible.
Still, 'an entirely subjective discussion based on nothing concrete that will impact real people in real and horrible ways' is far more far-reaching than you'd think, and there are large numbers of people who have their lives impacted by issues that seem like silly culture-war bullshit. I'm sorry it's causing you misery, and for what it's worth I hope you don't feel compelled to keep answering if it's going to cause you pain.
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At a certain level, everything is political, and everything political has real-world consequences. That you thought culture war was just silly entertainment about clowns in the US until it became about something that touches you personally says more about you than about how "real" this particular issue is compared to anything else. Someone could just as easily say about discussions of HBD or Holocaust denial or homelessness or crime and law enforcement or immigration or trans issues or Presidential elections or gun control or drug addiction: "Hey man, this is serious, this involves real people, you shouldn't be talking about this like it's just an entirely subjective discussion when it will impact real people in real and horrible ways!"
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Eh, agree-disagree. It could be that many things have objective answers that are just very hard to figure out. I think a lot of people arguing here act under the premise that they can convince people, which only works if they're right and others are wrong.
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