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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32851 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 believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.

Exit rights to life are intrinsic, you just have to actually commit suicide. Granted, it's not easy, but it's not impossible either.

I tend to agree with OP that this slope has proven alarmingly slippery.

I guess, but I also feel like it's terrible to have to make it painful for people. Ask almost anyone how they want to die, and they'll say something like "painlessly and in my sleep". How many people actually die like that? Very few. I don't expect most suicides are as painless as lethal injection would be.

I was under the impression that painlessness was debated. Looking it up, this issue seems to be a complete shitshow.

Yikes, I didn't realize until I just looked it up myself. It's strange, when I look up whether it's painless for people, everyone seems to say that, no it's not. When I look up whether putting pets to sleep is painless, everyone seems to say, yes, it totally is. Do they use different drugs in these scenarios? Is the protocol different? Or are people just fooling themselves into thinking their pets are having peaceful deaths?

I think pets are put to sleep with a barbiturate overdose, while executions involve some bizarre cocktail of drugs that persists only because the anti-execution lobby will seize on any change to the status quo as an opportunity to create years of delay and billions of dollars of legal fees for the state.

Can you elaborate? Why would the anti-execution lobby want more painful deaths?

For the same reason the green lobby "wants" higher carbon emissions - most people aren't utilitarians.

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