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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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This seems preoccupied with aesthetics. Is cutting yourself in half with a sword more badass than a death doula? Probably. Is it the most pragmatic choice? I wouldn't say so. For one thing, samurai swords are expensive and if you use it, someone needs to wipe the blood off or it's going to mess up the steel.

I further disagree with your elevation of suicidal terrorists. They're rabid dogs who need to be put down, not someone to be celebrated. But the dichotomy between assisted suicide and homicidal last-ghasp sprees is a keen observation, so i'm going to talk about that instead.

Has the stigmatization of suicide pushed people towards murder followed by suicide by cop? One has to wonder if we could reduce the number of spree killers if we responded to their initial self destructive impulses with 'yeah, you can schedule a death, won't take long, and you get a free pizza.'

Maybe that's too extreme a swing. Maybe we just need to not treat suicide as the worst possible outcome for a mental health crisis, and instead treat murder as the worst outcome and suicide an acceptable alternative. If we oriented healthcare and pseudo healthcare that way, there might be a chance...

But then, suicide is probably far more common than murder-suicide, and we don't want to cause 10 suicides to prevent one murder, right?

I suppose not.

And I think Aesthetics might be more powerful than we realize. See, your swordsmen and your mad dogs and your teenagers all have one thing in common: they're imitating behavior, playing out a narrative they've got in their heads. Is there any way to get the djinni of a dangerous narrative back into the bottle? (Dangerous as in, you die at the end of the story!)

But then, suicide is probably far more common than murder-suicide, and we don't want to cause 10 suicides to prevent one murder, right?

No, actually. Ten suicides, or even a hundred or more, is definitely better than one murder. All of the people committing suicide actually want to die; no one is being harmed (at least not directly). With murder, a person who presumably wants to live is being, well, murdered.

samurai swords are expensive and if you use it, someone needs to wipe the blood off or it's going to mess up the steel.

I mean, the ultimate in stoic badassery would be that you use your last minutes of consciousness to wipe the sword clean yourself.

The 'pain' avoided in the latter scenario is precisely the knowledge that death is bad and sacrifices the potential use and greatness of the rest of your life. A wholesome morphine injection, with associated hospital and regulatory paperwork for the assisted suicide and nurses and doctors and psychologists, could plausibly be more expensive than a street closure to clean up your split-in-half body. Why need a dozen people to sign some paper to accomplish what a small piece of metal in an artery could?

I further disagree with your elevation of suicidal terrorists. They're rabid dogs who need to be put down

Unless they're john brown or george washington or jesus!

Isn't John Brown about on the level of a militia commander during the Yugoslav Wars?

If you can't tell the difference between George Washington and a suicidal school shooter kid, we're going to have difficulty finding any common ground.

I'm disagreeing with a direct interpretation of the specific statements you made, not their most favorable applications. Obviously 'guy who shoots up house party and then kills himself' isn't john brown.

Define your terms, then. Most school shooters aren't even terrorists, political ideology isn't what motivates them.

In the next sentence I used:

homicidal last-ghasp sprees

Which should have made it clear I wasn't talking about Jesus.

Imagine having so little sense of self worth that a sword and someone having to mop seems an undue expense.

You're dying, subjectively the outcome is no different than if the world itself ended...

Deneathor was mistaken in fact, but his instinct wasn't wrong... at the death of your line and the end of all things, one should hope for the dignity to go out like the heathen kings of old.

Whether that be a heroic or anti-heroic last stand... some poetic demise of swords, haiku, and cherry blossoms... a last dramatic plunge from the golden gate bridge...

Something to assert your humanity in the face of the void and evil banal bureaucratic erasure of the subjective...

.

the spree killer, as dystopian as they are is at least still recognizably human... the dystopian Cyberpsycho breaks and turns to massacre because the last human element which hasn't succumbed to the machine rebels against its steel cage...

The willing submission even in death to the biomedical security state... now that is vastly more dystopian... the final acceptance of one's place as mere cell accepting the signal for Apoptosis. A native program of the matrix accepting its final purpose is to return to the source for deletion.

Imagine having so little sense of self worth that a sword and someone having to mop seems an undue expense.

Hey give me some credit here, I didn't go for the obvious mess argument and instead injected a fun fact about Samurai swords.

You're dying, subjectively the outcome is no different than if the world itself ended...

People who only care about their own subjective experience and not at all about the future others experience are either not going to worry themselves into a suicidal state, or are the same nihilistic problem individuals that we need to solve for. Unfortunately most do not choose the honorable way out.

the spree killer, as dystopian as they are is at least still recognizably human...

Eh, recognizably mammalian perhaps. From humans I expect more; I expect a human to profit from its acts of violence, even if only to make sure you think twice before fucking with the next human you encounter. Going out in a pointless blaze of glory against unwitting strangers is the type of nihilistic destruction I instead expect from housecat.

The willing submission even in death to the biomedical security state...

Or the triumph of the individual against an inhuman healthcare monstrosity to force the beast to do the one against its decrepit programming: allow the patient to die peacefully.

Or the triumph of the individual against an inhuman healthcare monstrosity to force the beast to do the one against its decrepit programming: allow the patient to die peacefully.

To force it? Only in the sense that, by placing an order and swiping your credit card, you force Starbucks to hand you a triple latte. Suicide is just one of these healthcare systems' products, and your last act is one of consumerism.

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