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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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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.