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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32853 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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.

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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