This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 think most people who support euthanasia have an ideal case in mind: the person is not going to survive much longer, they're in constant, terrible pain, and so it's a mercy to allow them to end their lives.
This is similar to animal euthanasia. If a dog's existence consists entirely of only suffering, most people seem to think it's a mercy to end its life, even if we have no way to know if that's what the dog wants.
However, to euthanize a dog who isn't in that state, and hasn't shown itself to be irredeemably dangerous, seems monstrous to most people. Imagine a person who has grown bored of their dog and so kills it.
This seems much closer to the bored-of-my-dog case than the life-is-endless-suffering case.
I have to wonder if this woman would be alive had she been exposed to different ways of thinking about adversity rather than to be medicated so heavily that she complained she couldn't feel anything anymore. It seems the doctors had nothing else to offer her.
What would it take to convince you that she was actually in constant, terrible pain?
It was only two years of alleged mental agony. That's barely enough time to even consider different ways of thinking. The doctors must not have been trying.
After all, there's just no way to ask what the dog wants.
How about her successfully killing herself on her own, for starters?
I mean, didn't she? She used the best tool available. I mean I have great methods in my nightstand, but I'd guess most depressed teenagers in Belgium don't. How does having/lacking the brains or wherewithal to tie knots or acquire pills indicate suffering or lack thereof?
No she didn't. The Belgian medical establishment killed her.
That's not a grammatical or agency distinction we would make in ordinary conversation. I just bought a really nice refrigerator at Home Depot because it was 80% off, but it's too big for the space in our cabinets. So I'll just widen the space by a few inches to make it fit. Except I'm not going to do it myself, because I'm not a cabinetmaker, I'm going to get my friend who is a talented cabinetmaker to come and do it on Saturday. Because he can shrink the offending cabinet by an inch rather than just ripping it out sloppily, which is what I'd have the skill to do. Only a prick trying to make some kind of weird point would object to me saying "I widened the space to make the new fridge fit;" and only an autistic philosophy major would question if I "really" wanted the fridge to begin with if I wasn't willing to go buy a trim nailer and do it myself.
The best method for me to widen the cabinet space isn't a trim nailer and a miter saw, it's another person with professional skills and tools suitable to do a proper job. The best way for her to kill herself wasn't rope or pills, both of which fail or get messy or have various other problems, but to contact and hire professionals who will get the job done cleanly and completely.
Of course, the next objection will be something like "Life is sacred, it's not a fridge, you can't apply the same grammatical or agency standards." But that's just political correctness, no different from feminist claims that "consent" in sexual encounters means something different from "consent" in every other aspect of your life every single day, such that under certain feminist definitions I've probably only consented to like three or four things in my entire life. It's smuggling in contested positions by redefining common-sense terminology.
Most people (and the law) consider it meaningfully different to use a nail gun on a cabinet as opposed to a person. Yes, you can describe "killing a person" and "remodeling a cabinet" as both "tasks that may be more efficiently performed by an expert," but I don't think it takes "political correctness" to say that collapsing the two acts elides an important distinction.
But the argument being made above by /u/westerly here isn't that there is a distinction between homicide and carpentry, it's that failing to do something personally indicates a lack of willingness to do it. That's clearly false in most other usages. It's an attempt to smuggle in the conclusion, that life is sacred and assisted suicide is wrong, by assuming that assisted suicide isn't a method of suicide. In every other case contacting an expert to perform a task properly is as or more indicative of serious desire to perform a task properly than is doing it yourself.
Elsewhere in the thread it's pointed out that many suicide attempts are "cries for attention." But if you were looking for attention you wouldn't contact an expert with a 100% success rate at killing you, you'd pick a method with a lower chance of actually killing you. Which is all of them, really. To my knowledge Euthanasia has never failed to kill someone, while I've heard of methods as "certain" as a shotgun failing and leaving the would-be suicide with half a face. Nothing indicates more seriousness than getting an expert involved who will never fail to kill you once they get started.
To stick with the analogy, I take on little DIY projects for fun as much as to use the thing I'm making afterward, and I'm not too serious about them. When I'm serious about getting something done for use reasons, I contact a professional.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link