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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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If you'd like to add more, let me know, but otherwise I'm removing this post.

A thousand pardons! I'm new here. Won't make same mistake twice.

All good! Thanks for understanding :)

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

  • -17

Did you mean "white people and black people more likely"?

I accidentally posted the comment before finishing typing it, meant to delete it and start over, but apparently deleting it didn't take. Silly me

How is asking women to give up their spaces for trans women different to how we asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to people of color back in the day?

Because black women can have children and transwomen can't.

Race expression is mostly immaterial compared to sex expression, which is more than self-identification at the end of the day. If you want to extend a test to transwomen beyond self-identification, you've a pretty minority opinion among Trans-Rights-Activists.

Your analogy does not really work at all. Racial segregation was not about providing white people with their own space; it was about excluding black people from otherwise public spaces, often because they were seen as polluting or unworthy in some way. Note also that early Jim Crow laws "classified Asian Americans, Native Americans, and all other people who were not Black—either explicitly or by default—as members of the 'white race.'"

In contrast, the purpose of women only "spaces" -- be they bathrooms or sports teams -- is to provide women with their own spaces. it is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy.

That makes more sense. Thanks.

YW

is to provide women with their own spaces. it is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy.

What is the difference between "Whites Only", and "Non-whites not welcome"? Or is there another distiction you are making here?

I didn't actually say that there is a difference between "Whites Only", and "Non-whites not welcome". But since you asked, historically they meant the same thing, obviously: They meant "non-whites not welcome." But, logically they don't have to be the same [edit: i.e, ethnically the same. I take OP as having made an ethical claim], if the purpose of the two rules are different. Because I thought it was pretty clear that the distinction was in regard to the intent behind the laws/rules/whatevers in the OP's analogy. That's why I said that Jim Crow "was about excluding black people from otherwise public spaces, often because they were seen as polluting or unworthy in some way" and that in contrast, giving women their own spaces "is not about excluding a group deemed unworthy."

So, a current rule that said, "whites only allowed in this room" because for some reason only whites need the services provided in that room is not the same as a rule that said "non-whites not welcome" because nonwhites are deemed and inferior.

I think the idea meant to be is that women are inherently weaker and/or in some way less safe around men in a way that whites aren't comparatively to blacks. That the segregation is done for protection rather than... aesthetic? reasoning.

Liken it to boxing weight tiers, if you like. Segregate the heavyweights so they don't accidentally kill the featherweights.

A lot of people are picking at your analogy in ways in which the two situations you described are different. And their answers are correct for there are some differences depending on along which axis you want to find the differences in.

However here's a different point of view. They are not different at all. And them being the same or different doesn't really matter. In other words, conflict theory is a much better predictor of the CW than mistake theory. (I don't assert one ought to be better than the other, merely that one is)

Its a conflict between the people that want a separation and those who don't. They will fight with words and memes and legislation. Both sides will tell you why it ought to be their way, but they are fighting for what is.

Yeah, that's where I couldn't square it in my head.

If course the two groups are different.

But the ask is similar: one group has to give something up so the other group can have something.

That's what I couldn't square off in my head.

And them being the same or different doesn't really matter.

That's another asymmetrical measure.

Whether the differences matter affects whether the attack is justified, and this is actually important.

I'm not a moral relativist so you are not going to get an argument out of me on that. I agree broadly that there are principally consistent ways around which to structure culture/institutions. And some of those ways are better than others, especially if they are self consistent. But in the vibes based world we live in right now,

Day by day I am more attracted to the the really dumb heuristic of "side A finds side B's ideas icky and wants side B to fuck off and die because the TV said as much" really attractive. You will still be left with a really good model that predicts much of the CW.

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I'm thinking about the trans rights debate.

This is an almost perfect example of the sort of trollish "Hi I'm new here, Just Asking Questions" first-time-ever post that @HlynkaCG would say we should summarily drop a banhammer on. But you know what, we're not on reddit anymore, so sure, @TheGuy, I'll approve this post and, as yassine recently described, see if TheMotte takes your question seriously enough to produce quality responses.

FWIW, if you're really just some random newbie who's genuinely not sure if this is "the right place to ask" and just wants to share his shower thoughts (probability 2%), in the future please go to the effort of fleshing them out a bit, rather than just dropping a hot take that looks like someone "farming drama" (probability 98%).

I mean, I'll answer your question in a strictly political sense. Women are a protected class in a way that white people are not.

I think that's the long and the short of it. That's the core of the conflict, I think, and why this sort of thing is so nasty. We've set an expectation that asking women to give up their spaces is an anti-social thing to do. And people are fighting for that expectation to be met. But at the same time, we've also set an expectation that marginalized groups should be able to gain access to those sorts of things.

Essentially, what you're seeing is the Progressive Stack being actualized, and how it creates conflicts.

Now, I think it's more complicated than that, and there's a lot of moving parts (I strongly believe "The Movement" as they're calling it, or at least is my understanding I.E. the Gender Criticals, played a huge role over the last few decades in normalizing the Progressive Stack to the benefit of women. This alone makes things REALLY complicated I think)

I could go on a long discussion about what I personally believe...but I think it's irrelevant (something something eliminating protected classes and replacing them with a liberal focus on maximizing individual liberty and happiness). But understanding the underlying politics...that this is essentially people who model the world, on both sides, in strict oppressor/oppressed frames, and believe that the latter should gain absolute privilege over the former.

Note: This isn't all feminists or all trans people. I think this is the view of a relatively narrow slice of activists and influencers, for whom complexity over power dynamics in our society reveals some undesirable light onto the way we/they live.

Interesting.

So you're sort of saying (that people who believe this are saying), women are oppressed so to make up for that or fight it, they have been afforded certain things, like women only spaces or quotas, which sort of gives them help at a cost to their oppressors (men).

But this thinking also means that trans women are more oppressed than woman, so they deserve to get help, even at the expense of women, because while women are oppressed, they're not as oppressed as trans women?

So there's a hierarchy of oppression and it's OK to encroach on the rights of those above you in the hericachy, even if that group is being oppressed by the groups above them?

I'm not saying this is what you believe but what you said in your reply, dumbed down so I can understand it!

To make it more confusing, trans women also have all the rights of men, so not only are they higher up the heirachy than women, but they also want some of the spaces / benefit woman have?

Has anyone plotted out this heirachy?

The transwomen vs. women kerfuffle is the first time the opression spoils system resulted in tangible costs for women and the degradation of female privilege.

The first time women as a class have been but individual women have regularly be out oppressed by group sin other categories.

If there's anything at all to this question, it'd be much better when elaborated in a few paragraphs at least, rather than just one provocative sentence. Good sounding thing [x] is superficially similar to bad sounding thing [y]. Did you know democrats want to SEGREGATE black people with affirmative action? Hitler also segregated. 10k comments, 5k quote tweets, 30k retweets, 50k likes.

Be careful - framing it like this is a good way to convince people Jim Crow laws were right.

The resistance of MtF to invading women spaces seems to be more widespread than against integration. And women actually deserve their own spaces where they can be themselves and away from the battle of the sexes. Bathrooms, locker room, man caves(for the gents) and ladies nights etc are important part of the social life.

There is no right of belonging to a group or acceptance in one.

And to give even more pragmatic answer - I value real women more, so if something makes them uncomfortable and is zero cost to me - I find it totally ok to support alleviation of said discomfort.

We asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to EVERYONE back in the day. Asking women to give up their spaces for trans women isn't asking them to give them up to EVERYONE, just an additional subset of people. A closer analogy would be if we asked categorically that no women-segregated - cis or trans - space ever exist.

Exactly, and specifically this means that there will be an incentive to misrepresent oneself as a woman (as identification grants access privileges). When blacks were allowed into formerly white spaces, there was no possibility or motivation for someone to misrepresent themselves.

Why do sex-segregated spaces exist in the first place?

Because some places are private and thus by design everything going on there is a he-said-she-said. We don't like rape and non-consensual groping, so we go about in ways to reduce them. Gender segregated private areas is the least bad solution to this problem.

On top of that, women, in the feminist age, wanted to have access to some traditionally male activities for things like developing leadership skills, fitness, etc. They would have no hope to not be crushed in the competition (and severely injured in most) without gender segregation.

Toilets: because women don't want to disrobe/defecate in places where men will (at best) hit on them

Sports: because women would be excluded from competition in all but a handful of sports like target shooting and long-distance swimming

In short, because there are real physical and mental differences between male and female that necessitate segregation at times if "equality of opportunity" is a goal. Mixed-sex sports means almost no women get to be professional athletes. Mixed-sex toilets (unless single stall) mean women in practice will never leave the house without a chaperone. "Whites only" is not about giving whites equal opportunities but excluding blacks from opportunities/public life, and giving them inferior alternatives. "Use the (inferior) black fountain" is not the same as "use the (perfectly fine) male toilet".

If you mean in general, all societies have deemed various places the proper/improper place of one sex or another, whether it be kitchens, the outdoors, the sporting field, the birthing room, the tabernacle, etc. We have decided that the public world at large must be open to women, so we have created female-only toilets so they may go about in public.

The sport example is terrible. Olympic swimming excludes pretty much all black people due to genetic factors, but we don't have an equivalent Olympic category for just "black people" with the same level of prestige as the open competition, but for some reason women get their own league...

Someone should probably alert Cullen Jones to this development. I nominate you.

I did not know this. Apparently black successful olympic swimmers do exist, but equally there's this really tall Chinese basketball dude while I'd say that on average the Chinese are not the best suited for Basketball due to their smaller heights.

Anyways: we don't have a special Olympic category for short (under 5'6") male rowers (lightweight rowing exists but those people are still 6'+) while we do for women. Shortness is almost as genetically determined as being female.

Perhaps Burdensome is channeling Al Campanis

If true, I would imagine there certainly could be genetic factors. Similar to how pretty much every single 100 meter gold medalist in the past 30 years has been of recent African ancestry.

Lung volume for instance, Phelps was exceptional partly because of his exceptional lung volume and upper body shape.

There are bone density differences between the races, so yeah bouancy may well differ because of genetics.

Black people tend to have longer limbs and shorter torsos compared to white people, and having a long torso is beneficial for swimmers because you have less drag in the water. Michael Phelps is a good example of a swimmer with an extremely long torso.

https://www.usaswimming.org/meet-the-team/u.s.-olympic-team

There are still a number of black swimmers on the US team, so it's obviously not insurmountable.

Nowhere did I say Olympic. I'm sure there are national and below swimming competitions where black people could be reasonably competitive (assuming your claim is actually true, I have no idea, I assumed black people not being able to swim was just a meme). There is almost nowhere at the high school level and above where women can compete against boys, let alone men. There are also plenty of other sports where black men do fine/great (running, weightlifting, many team sports), whereas, again, there are maybe two or three things nobody really gives a shit about where women are even vaguely competitive with men. Black people are doing fine overall in the realm of sports even if they're disadvantaged in some, but without segregation the number of female athletes past elementary school would be very close to 0.

assuming your claim is actually true, I have no idea, I assumed black people not being able to swim was just a meme

The claim is false, and i suspect that the meme is driven (at least in part) by number of inner-city kids who join the Navy or Marine Corps and end up spending their first couple weeks of boot camp in remedial swim instruction because they've never been in water deeper than their waist. Go to an actual swim meet and you'll see a fair number of black and mixed guys competing just as you do in pretty much every athletic event.

Because an extremely small minority of mentally ill people is not the same thing as black people under Jim Crow, and trans women are demanding access to the women's changing room is not black men under Jim Crow wanting to eat in the same restaurants as white men.

Being trans is not necessarily a mental illness, though gender dysphoria is listed as such. There are plenty of well-adjusted trans people living happy lives, at which point it's a difference, not a disease. It's worth mentioning homosexuality also used to be listed as a mental illness, but that was only because of social prejudice, and is no longer considered such.

It's not a disease but hormones, puberty blockers, surgeries are labeled "trans health care". The answer is of course that saying "trans health care" allows for asking for public financing of puberty blockers etc, but saying it's not a disease supposedly averts "stigma". Even though the woke seem to also advocate that mental illness and disability are not bad and shouldn't be stigmatized in the first place.

There are plenty of people with other mental illnesses that are happy and well adjusted. Alcoholics come to mind. Pedophiles and bestiality-practitioners would be in this category if their conduct was not stigmatized and illegal. That doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses in general which we need to treat with a deterrence treatment, rather than an encouragement treatment.

That doesn't mean they aren't mental illnesses in general which we need to treat with a deterrence treatment

Sure, but why, in the case of trans? Alcoholism sucks, liver disease, it makes you dumb and act stupidly, etc. "There are plenty of well-adjusted trans people living happy lives" is intended to be an argument that most trans people could be 'well adjusted andhappy' (what does that mean, exactly) and there's no point in 'deterrence'.

Liver disease from alcoholism isn't all that much different in life reduction from hormone therapy + full transition surgeries. The resulting creations are a constant infection risk somewhat akin to an open wound, for the rest of the person's life. Plus, there is little evidence of affirmation actually reducing suicide rate, whereas the suicide rate does plummet for kids who give up on the notion before hormones and surgery.

So there is a massive gain to the individual if they are deterred. There is also a massive gain to society because the deterred is a healthy adult who can procreate.

A lot of trans people, maybe even a majority idk, just don't get SRS at all. That doesn't create an open wound!

It's "somewhat akin to an open wound". Well, how akin? What percent of people with SRS, ten years later - (there were a lot of people who got SRS years ago) - have severe complications today? I'd predict less than 20%.

And the person I know who had SRS doesn't seem to have any long-term medical problems from it.

Do you not think there is a fairly big gap between the quality of life of a transitioned trans person and a birth member of their desired gender(not just because of social factors)?

There aren't any good reasons for 'trans people' to transition in any case.

But I was asking OP to make a good argument for that, rather than just invoke 'mental illness', and non-illuminating claims about suicide or surgery.

Do you not think there is a fairly big gap between the quality of life of a transitioned trans person and a birth member of their desired gender

Not really? If you don't get SRS, which a lot of trans people don't, hormones just make you look ugly and it and voice training and such are a minor cost. I know many trans people who just seem normal and being trans is something they seem to 'benefit' from much more than it 'costs' them, if benefit and cost mean 'happiness' and 'quality of life'. But 'happiness' is just a person's judgement of what they're doing, is it really the same when soyface.jpg is happy about the new marvel movie as when wiles proved fermat's last theorem? Or even just when you have kids? (Arguably: yes, and all that proves is that happiness, itself, isn't worth anything, it's the actual thing that took place or was willed that matters, and that's the confusion). So - given that trans people just pursue images of useful things like signs of being able to have children, but don't do so in a useful or coherent way, being trans is bad. But ... it's honestly pretty similar to modern fashion, makeup, casual sex, and 'consumerism' in that sense. Which, leading nowhere and having no purpose - is just as bad.

"it makes you want to kill yourself at higher rates than Jews during the Holocaust" seems like a good reason to me.

I'm friends with a number of trans people and they basically never bring up suicide or how awful their lives are. They don't read, at all, as a jew during the holocaust. So this isn't plausible. If your goal is to 'ensure universal happiness, and allow all oppressed people to free themselves' - that isn't going to work for right wing ends, like saying 'trans people aren't happy and are oppressed by the schools and medicine'.

The statistics don't agree with your anecdote. Likely because of quite literal survivor bias.

Not enough trans people kill themselves for survivorship bias to matter? It'd need to be at least 20%, and the highest claim I ever saw was 5%.

A hundred times this. If you live in a city I bet you walk past at least one person with schizophrenia every day - not a homeless person (although plenty of the homeless are schizophrenic), a well dressed person going to work or shopping or whatever. You would have no idea, because they are managing their illness and are happy and well adjusted. But they are still schizophrenic, they are still mentally ill.

Everybody talks a good game about inclusion and destigmatising mental illness, but I have yet to see anything that doesn't convince me it is purely because of that stigma that trans people deny being mentally ill despite having an ailment that affects their minds.

Last I checked, refusal to accept one’s own body was considered a mental illness in every other case(anorexia, those people who seek amputation because they believe they don’t have certain body parts, etc). The main difference as far as transgenderism is the political valency.

Yeah I totally agree but it's a counterpoint that came into my head. So I had to ask.

DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY... assisted suicide and the total state

Replying to /u/freemcflurry 's thread below

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Shanti De Corte A 23 year old French Woman has died via assisted suicide. She was 17 when she survived a suicide attack in Rome… despite suffering no physical injury she developed PTSD and 6 years later was given the fatal injections after a panel of doctors signed off on it.

This is not an isolated incident. I hear stories almost every month of young to middle aged people with decades left to live, often with some physical ailment not even catastrophically disabling (loss of sight in one eye, chronic pain, disability of a limb… things vastly less than paraplegia)… and many that are effectively assisted suicides on mental health grounds alone… I can no longer find the story, but was explicitly assisted suicide for chronic depression.

Now there have been many pieces about the slippery slope of assisted suicide and moral arguments… and of course there are going to some progressives or ardent libertarians who insist this is all a perfectly fine choice for a consenting adult to make… but I don’t really care about all of that…

The overwhelming sentiment I have to all of this is crude but simple:

DO IT YOURSELF, PUSSY

The idea someone with less than full locked-in syndrome should get medically assisted suicide is not only insane… its aesthetically revolting.

If you can't summon the will to do it yourself even with full use of your physical faculties (of which suicide only requires one functional finger), then clearly you aren't emotionally competent to assign the task to someone else, and are quite frankly beneath such a grandiose gesture.

I've read multiple books by men who committed sepuku. One was a westerner who was paralyzed from the chest down (and didn't feel a thing)... another was a Japanese writer who, for a myriad of psychological and philosophical reasons, choose to do so in all its pain despite being in fine (actually peak) physical shape, Both of these I found eminently respectable. Whether one agreed with either man, the courage and will involved in either act revealed a beauty of spirit and rendered their logic something that had to be engaged with....

For adults (allegedly physically and mentally competent according to the state that accepts their signature) to choose not just death, but death in the hands of some bureaucrat/matriarch appointed by the state and medical establishment... to seek the return to the womb, and infantilizing comfort of some schoolmarm telling them "everything will be ok", of the disgusting toxic surrender to the surrogate mothering of a "Death Doula"…

This deserves not our pity or concern but our contempt and hatred.

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Say what you will about school shooters or suicide bombers... of the columbine shooters or 9/11 hijackers...Their rejection of this life and the world had the grandiosity and horror such a choice deserved. In their pain, rage, hate, and nihilism they at least had the dignity to let out a primal scream in their rejection of life.

At the hour and venue of their choosing they made their statements, and expressed everything they felt was a summation of their lives without even a thought to compromise... what statement are these assisted suicides making!?

To decide, out of all places on earth, you want to die in a hospital surrounded by the beeps and stench of piss covered by industrial cleaner? To choose for the hour of your demise the half hour slot the office clerk could find on the schedule? To choose as your last confessor the obese nurse some state bureaucrat selected out of the set who were working that day?

This is contemptable. The final farce of the cradle to grave welfare and biomedical security state.

I imagine these depressive but physically fine adults hoping that maybe this extreme expression, this final most extreme plea for help will extract from the uncaring state the love and affection their teachers promised but never delivered. That they might finally receive the love all the utilitarian and progressive rhetoric promised them... that the institutions they've come to see as father, mother, and lover will react to their pleas with all the affection and benevolence they've been taught to expect from neither parent, priest, or partner...

maybe as the bored RN tells them "Its alright, just a little sleep" they'll delude themselves into thinking that's what they've received... the matriarchy's most intimate soothing coo...

.

These people and institutions deserve our hate not for taking life but for the ritualistic mockery they make doing it... The Aztec heart cutters at least had a style and didn't lie about their knives... and the sun god was vastly more appeased than whatever "Comfort and dignity" is supposed to be assuaged by the syringes, hypocrisies, and economical hospital decoration.

The final sublimation of that most extreme, personal, and human of choices into the banal indifference of the bureaucratic state.

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If someone is to reject life and all bonds of the living, then let them lead the police on a high speed chase before crashing into a wall… let them go to Vegas and drink themselves to death… let them wander off into the pale white of an ice-flow or chart their boat into the eye of the hurricane... let them blast their brains out on the floor of the state senate, or commit seppuku in the magic kingdom under the unblinking gaze of mickey's plastic mask... let them crash planes and bulldozers into buildings, or their bodies into the surf or concrete after defiant jumps...

And if one lacks the will and resolve to express their death with all the violence and horror a choice to take one’s life deserves… then clearly they also lack the seriousness to surrender their life to another.

Let them prove they truly lived at least a minute before they died. Let out a primal scream before disappearing beyond the vanishing point.

Just wanted to say that I agree with what you've written here and I've had similar thoughts before myself.

I've always thought that poison was the most contemptible way to die.

Wouldn't poisoning oneself fit the mode of acceptability here? Or would one need to do it with, say, something like arsenic or cyanide, or swallow bleach so it would be particularly agonizing?

The idea someone with less than full locked-in syndrome should get medically assisted suicide is not only insane… its aesthetically revolting.

Hm, what about the aesthetics of going out one's way to write a lengthy disquisition piling on people who are so unhappy or mentally ill that they choose suicide, and doing so solely in regard to the manner of their suicide, as opposed to the fact thereof?

Say what you will about the merits of his comment, but I found it highly aesthetic.

This is the edgiest garbage I've ever seen on the motte. 9-11 terrorists are preferable to depressed suicide victims. Good lord, do I need to debase myself by pointing out how disgusting this is?

do I need to debase myself by pointing out how disgusting this is?

Yes you do. That’s the whole point of this place.

Mass murder is worse than feeling sad. There you go.

In fact that often seems to be the point of Kulak's posts. They're often such very passionately written, readable diatribes that you are forced to think clearly and articulate what about them you disagree with.

I see you are unfamiliar with Kulak's philosophy and worldview

What horror - people want to die for their own reasons and on their own terms, not to provide you with some grand gladiator spectacle, and they definitely do not care whether you "respect" them or not.

There may be value in keeping suicide a crime. If you're suffering so much you want to commit suicide, perhaps you should at least be suffering so much that you're willing to commit the crime of doing it.

Suicide may or may not be technically criminalized, but it feels like a crime in the sense that it is an illegitimate action. We have a society, and society disapproves of your suicide. Suicide is selfish, antisocial, and transgressive; it is not part of the plan and not how the world is supposed to work. Suicidal people may be keenly aware of this, and it might cause them extra suffering. Not only do they bear the burden of ending their life, but also of traumatizing society by performing an illegitimate action. The illegitimacy of suicide makes it extra traumatic for everyone involved because the public and the individual recognize the marginal suicide as small atrocity.

However, the trauma may have some upsides. I will not even argue it effectively deters suicide: I do not know if it does. But even the suffering caused is unnecessary, it might not be useless. This is because as OP alludes to, carrying out the transgression and forcing it onto society makes the suicide mean something. It is an atrocity that demands attention. It might show something is deeply flawed in the mental health system, in modernity, in how we approach aging, so flawed that it would allow something so horrible and so illegitimate to happen. Intuitively it is obvious from a humanistic perspective that if the rate of suicide in society goes up, something is deeply wrong. It may be in the interest of society for everyone to suffer and behold the horror rather than develop means of softening it or defining it out of existence, so that we do not forget.

One might protest that forcing suicidals to suffer more than they otherwise would for the sake of society is cruel because they are victims, and therefore they do not deserve it. But most criminals are also victims, born into disadvantage one way or another, and yet we punish them anyway, because their actions are illegitimate. Punishing suicide attempts seems pretty ridiculous, and posthumously dishonoring suicide victims seems uncouth in this day and age, but insofar as one believes suicide is worthy of being considered socially criminal, for suicidals to reckon with that social standard and transgress it in order to carry the suicide out seems like an appropriate "punishment" for the "crime".

Euthanasia is the rejection of this. It asserts that some people are qualified to legitimately choose to die, and society should provide a legitimate channel to do so. This is detraumatizing because people legitimately choosing death is now part of the plan; that's just how the world is; we have a system for it. It reduces the suffering of sucidals, since they no longer have to commit a grave transgression and can simply go through the legitimate channels, and also of society, since some number of horrific suicides are now legitimate euthanasia cases (which can even be framed as a positive thing, since the marginal euthanasia is preferable to continuation of life after all). The extreme version of this is the argument that everyone has an unalienable right to end their own life e.g. due to bodily autonomy or revealed preferences, the natural implication being that we should provide trauma-minimizing legitimate channels for anyone to do so if they so choose. But even if we insist euthanasia be gatekept to those meeting some qualifications, it is easily imaginable that suicidal people on the margins will aspire to meet the qualifications rather than survive, and illegitimate suicides may be downgraded from "atrocity" to "should have went through the proper channels". Thus suicide is made bureaucratic banal, which is what OP does not want to happen, because we should remember that suicide is insane. If it is going to happen, it should at least happen for extreme and salient reasons, and we should feel it.

To elaborate on the legitimization of a former social crime, we can draw an analogy to one that has already happened: welfare. Welfare is, to put it in the meanest possible terms, the legitimization of being dead weight. Producing less than you consume is fundamentally antisocial since someone else must make up the difference, and you don't even have productive family willing to internalize your losses. When illegitimate, deadweights are extra socially traumatic: they starve, or riot, or steal. It is a small atrocity; things happen that aren't part of the plan and hurt everyone involved. But in modern society where we have wealth and compassion to spare, we make deadweights part of the plan on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds: we create a legitimate channel to be a deadweight, namely, welfare. You can produce less than you consume, just show you have the proper qualifications and do the paperwork. Since people on welfare no longer have to starve or riot or steal, and nor does society have to deal with them doing so, the amount of trauma and suffering is actually reduced. The number of deadweights might not have gone down, but the marginal welfare recipient is now a marginal contributor to a banal statistic, not a marginal atrocity.

But there is a big difference between welfare and euthanasia. When we put people on welfare, we are sponsoring the hope their situation might get better. The main qualification is that they are trying to find a job. When we euthanize people, we are sponsoring the concession that their situation will never get better. The main qualification is that they are not trying to survive. There are various arguments for why welfare is inevitable or even desirable, or that there is a endgame of post-scarcity UBI utopia as net productivity rises. While there may be some dissent and criticism, welfare has already been integrated into society's value system.

The prospect of that happening for euthanasia is troubling, to say the least. To demand to suicidal people DO IT YOURSELF may be a reasonable safeguard.

I am not actually categorically against euthanasia. Policy in real life is complicated. But I think it's important to consider the effect I described, because mere suffering reduction is too simplistic of a model in the face of value drift.

If you're suffering so much you want to commit suicide, perhaps you should at least be suffering so much that you're willing to commit the crime of doing it.

How does this apply to people who are crippled by their illness, or people who have Alzheimer's and can't understand or act?

I don't know. OP made a reservation for people with locked-in syndrome and are physically incapable of suicide and I think I am onboard with that.

If they do not have enough mental agency to DO IT THEMSELVES, it seems creepy and problematic to me for the bureaucracy to determine their life is not worth living, or determine that they have the agency to consent to their life not being worth living. Forcing them to continue to live could of course also be creepy and problematic, it just doesn't have the risk of values drift.

A safeguard for those cases might be to require the consent of family. This is certainly a compromise on the front of bodily autonomy, but it makes the decision less banal.

It applies to the first group just as it would any other. In regards to the second group if they're too rattled by Alzheimer's to understand what's going on, what makes you think they are qualified to make the choice?

It applies to the first group just as it would any other.

To rephrase, what if someone needs assistance because being crippled makes it hard to kill themselves, rather than because they are reluctant to commit a crime?

In regards to the second group if they're too rattled by Alzheimer's to understand what's going on, what makes you think they are qualified to make the choice?

They can have made the decision when they were still coherent, but wanted to delay their death until they were no longer coherent. Would you allow for this?

A crime so heinous that death penalty is the only adequate punishment for the attempt.

it does not make sense to me that people are not traumatized by someone around them that is suicidal, yet become traumatized when the suicidal person kills themselves. its like they dont care about the suffering of the suicidal person as long as he is living, but when he kills himself then they are affected. to me its selfish to require someone to continue living miserably when they would rather die.

I dunno, dealing with actively suicidal people is pretty traumatic.

My uncle died of COVID last December. His son had a psychotic break, convinced himself that he could trade their lives, and attempted suicide twice. From what I hear on the other side of the country, my aunt and cousins are spending as much time dealing with his commitment and the fallout as they are with my uncle’s actual death.

Even just hearing that someone you love has considered suicide is a weight. A challenge to find another way before an irreversible “mistake.” It’s not that people flip a switch and start caring. The main difference is what actions are even left to take.

If I need to go and it’s not happening naturally, I’d probably opt to wander into a snowy forest wined-up, but these people are using protocols set up for weak and terminal cancer (or other terminal illness) patients who want to spare their spouse and kids the sight of their brain splatter or red bathtub full of bloat and don’t want to mess up and end up somehow still alive but worse off. These people are physically weak.

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!)

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.

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.

Entertaining rant, as always. Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.

I find some germs of agreement in your disgust with state-sanctioned suicide and asking someone else to do the job for you. That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people? Your uncharitable projection of a pathetic need for validation and someone to "rescue" them may be true for some of the people seeking this last resort, but I would guess that many of them really, truly are in so much pain that dying seems like the only escape from an existence of undending, hopeless misery. Whether they are entirely rational (some are, some aren't) and whether there might be some cure for them (in some cases there is not) is beside the point. They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.

There are a number of good arguments for requiring that people "do it themselves," but "don't be a pussy!" isn't one of them, and neither is "make it awesome." These people aren't you. They don't care about whether they make a grand statement or go out in a blaze of glory. This is like demanding that someone who doesn't believe in or care about God say a prayer before dying. Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"

From a somewhat more rational perspective, as others have pointed out, the usual suicide methods have a high enough failure rate, with the possibility of winding up not dead but maimed, paralyzed, or brain-dead, inflicting further suffering on both yourself and your loved ones, that it's not unreasonable for someone who lacks your go-jump-in-a-volcano aesthetic to prefer a surer, safer method. And the more spectacular methods (jumping in a volcano, walking off an ice flow, swimming with great whites) similarly seem to be unreliable and/or gruesome. (Ironically enough, while suicidally depressed people generally care not at all about their own lives, they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)

Also a juvenile preoccupation with aesthetics and going out in a blaze of glory as if everyone in the world should aspire to be a Shonen manga character like you do, as always.

How tragic and telling that your first revolted instinct concerning glory is "ew, anime". No appreciation for those who rage against the dying of the light? Nothing in you admires the bold Hound of Cullan, who tied himself to a stone that he might die on his feet?

I've seen you use "immature" as a slight toward others multiple times. Perhaps your inability to understand this facet of the human experience in adult terms shows that you still need to grow. It is not childish to value how you leave this world.

It is not childish to value how you leave this world.

Of course nothing I wrote suggested that. This is a basic reading comprehension fail starting from the first sentence, if I actually believed you misunderstood me.

But you're just reaching for sticks and stones you think will sting, and while I'm more bemused than annoyed with your obsession, you need to stop. Making a personal cause out of antagonizing people you don't like is not acceptable, whether your obsession is with a mod or not.

What you wrote did indeed say that. Your abuse of the red hat is noted, but as I'm capable of wiping my own ass power tripping jannies don't intimidate me. Fuck off with that nonsense.

You're free to appeal to Zorba if you think I am abusing my red hat, but "fuck off with that nonsense" gets you a 3-day timeout since you've already accumulated a number of warnings and have been consistent in your messaging that you have no intention of taking heed.

How much of the cure to an inability to cope with pain in general really is just someone's attitude? If someone is enough of a Life extremist to say to the proposal of a fate worse than death "bring it on!" (as I saw Jordan Peterson do on Lex Fridman's podcast once) they can take satisfaction in meeting with whatever comes next. It's also not even something that requires expending any effort as the real cornering that would be most difficult for any of us to face is being stuck in the present moment exactly as it is. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. This is why religion and philosophy are important even when they're not skeptically empirical. Civilisation is an invention of the human mind to regulate its emotions and all experiences are just different framings of the same hard problem of being.

They really are, subjectively, suffering as much as someone with locked-in syndrome or constant physical pain.

There's really no way to know this from outside of that person's perspective. Depression is often characterized by depressive delusions. I see no reason to take them at their word that they are suffering any more than we should take them at their word that the universe is a dismal joke.

I also don't accept that being really sad all the time is nearly as bad as being in agonizing pain.

I also don't accept that being really sad all the time is nearly as bad as being in agonizing pain.

Obviously no one truly knows what someone else is feeling. But if you think major depression is just "being sad all the time," you have probably not known someone who dealt with major depression. The fact that it's all in their head (literally) does not mean the suffering isn't real.

True, but it also doesn't mean the suffering is real, or at least that it is comparable to living with actual chronic pain.

True, but it also doesn't mean the suffering is real, or at least that it is comparable to living with actual chronic pain.

Clearly the suffering is real unless you believe they are outright lying. As for whether it's comparable, what's the difference between telling someone living with chronic pain "it's not that bad" and telling someone with depression "it's not that bad"? How do you ajudge that someone with depression isn't "really" suffering as much as someone in chronic physical pain? It's not as if chronic physical pain is any more objectively measurable outside the head of the person suffering it. (Hence skepticism about things like fibromyalgia.)

Most of us have no trouble believing in physical pain because we've all experienced it, but if we haven't experienced mental anguish like chronic depression, it's easy to think "They're just sad all the time, that's not comparable to real pain."

I do not think people who claim to suffer from depression are any less reliable reporters of their own subjective experiences than people claiming to suffer from physical pain. In both cases, there are certainly people who exaggerate their suffering or for whom the pain is literally "all in their head," but the fact that the suffering may come from something other than stimulation of pain nerves doesn't make it less real.

Clearly the suffering is real unless you believe they are outright lying.

No, there's a third possibility, which is that they're sincere but deluded. Which we know is the case on many other axes, since depressive delusions arrive in the box with depression.

Most of us have no trouble believing in physical pain because we've all experienced it

There's also a mechanism that makes sense. Nerves send a pain signal to the brain, and brains translate that signal into the qualia of pain. Pain that originates within the brain is much harder to understand. Dysfunctions of the brain present a malfunctioning mind, as opposed to a properly functioning mind responding to a malfunctioning body. If the mind is compromised, we have every reason to treat its claims with suspicion.

No, there's a third possibility, which is that they're sincere but deluded. Which we know is the case on many other axes, since depressive delusions arrive in the box with depression.

I'm not sure there is a meaningful difference between "You are experiencing psychological pain" and "You suffer from a delusion that you are experiencing psychological pain."

I'm not saying we should encourage people with depression to kill themselves, obviously. Just that if you accept that some people experience so much suffering that suicide is a rational option, I don't think you can draw a hard line between "people suffering from physical pain" and "people suffering from psychological pain" and say the suffering of the former is real but the suffering of the latter is not.

OK, here's my effortpost. I have a few minutes, and I haven't given this topic the treatment it deserves.

Partly because I follow Andrew Sullivan and Chris Rufo on Twitter, I've seen a lot of detransitioner stories. These are usually natal women who transitioned to become boys in their adolescence, and then ended up regretting it. What strikes me about it is how many of them report having been depressed, having been introduced to the world of transgender ideology through the usual very online spaces, and then seizing onto it for three specific reasons: (1) because gender dysphoria is elastic enough to be a plausible cause of their unhappiness, (2) because it is a salient transgressive ideology and therefore permits them to scapegoat their families and culture for their misery, and (3) because transitioning is a big project that they can start one step at a time and work slowly toward along a well-lighted path, with social support and a feeling of accomplishment at each step along the way.

There has been a boom in adolescent girls transitioning, and this is a population known for booms in various sociogenic mental health illnesses: eating disorders, self harm, even sociogenic Tourettes, the last of which pretty squarely indicates its sociogenic fingerprints.

Now, many of these sociogenic illnesses are no joke. Eating disorders, self harm, and medically assisted gender transition have potential lifelong consequences. But the Tourettes thing! The reports indicate that somehow its sufferers get "stuck" in their sociogenic Tourettes -- who can fathom what that feels like "from the inside," but it is a clear case of girls suffering from some kind of delusion, where neurology conclusively rules out the usual Tourettes etiology, where they nonetheless insist they are unable to stop their tics even while they protest that they wish they could. There is no known neurological basis for their disorder, but they swear they are unable to stop their tics. Do you believe them? It's hard for me to really commit to a clear yes or no on that question. The best I can say is that there is a real disorder there, but it's hard to know where the disorder stops and the mind starts. Probably the self and the behavior, via the borrowed identity that the behavior is premised upon, have become conjoined. It isn't a meaningful question to ask whether they are capable of stopping, because doing so assumes the distinct identity of a rational mind that can observe the behavior from outside of it, in the way that someone with a broken arm can observe the source of the pain -- or even that someone with classical Tourettes can observe the source of the errant neurological signals, because they show up on the relevant diagnostic tests. I think there's an analogy to depression here, a meaningful analogy which at least requires us to raise an eyebrow to any sort of confident equivalency between depressive misery and physical pain. How unlike do we think they are, really? Is a clinically depressed person more or less able to get out of bed, shower, and have a productive day than a sufferer of sociogenic Tourettes is to stop exhibiting tics? Intuitively they seem to be in a similar category.

Anyway, imagine that we broadly accept the concept of medically assisted suicide as a treatment for severe depression. We'll put in lots of checks and balances, lots of consultations, require doctors to line up and swear on their souls that there's no alternative: pick your policy suite. What occurs to me is that we started with the same policy suite of checks and balances to avoid premature transgender HRT and surgery. And those checks and balances weren't enough. Arguably the checks and balances contributed to the problem, in the sense that they engendered online spaces dedicated to guiding people through the process, and presented a neat and exciting problem for depressive people looking for social affirmation and a sense of accomplishment in breaking down a big challenge into bite sized chunks and overcoming them step by step.

So whatever procedural safeguards you set up around medically assisted suicide for mental illness, as soon as that pathway is open legally, a subculture will spring up to guide people through it. They will study the criteria and share stories about meeting or not meeting the criteria, about their experience with this doctor or that, which will cumulatively provide a series of beacons for passing through all of the checkpoints that you've established. It will become a project for exactly the population of adolescent girls who are currently transitioning.

And the worst part is that these girls, the ones who fall prey to sociogenic Tourettes, sociogenic transgenderism, sociogenic eating disorders and sociogenic self-harm behaviors -- they usually grow out if it if they can be kept safe for a few years. They are usually fine in the long run! So the result of legally assisted suicide for depressed people, no matter how hard you try to prevent it, will be a lot of dead girls who would have grown up to be healthy and well adjusted women, and a lot of bereaved families who could perhaps be forgiven for believing that society murdered their little girl.

What we need to do, IMO, is to find alternative ways for girls in this group to try on some new and transgressive identity that does not cause lasting harm. Bring back the goth subculture. Have them try out being a lesbian. Let them practice witchcraft, or voodoo, or satan-worship. Maybe try being a Christian to rebel against particularly new-age parents who can't be shocked by the old ways: have them sneak out to attend church when they're supposed to be at volleyball practice, furtively study a bunch of catechisms, discreetly get baptized, and have their shocking and tearful coming-out announcement to their parents. The trick will be in setting up the subculture and making sure that it all feels properly transgressive. Maybe these Tourettes influencers on Tiktok are the answer to all of these problems, and by boosting their signal we'll be able to crowd out all of the other avenues of harm. But for fuck's sake, don't help them kill themselves.

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Interestingly, Yukio Mishima's suicide(I think what Kulak was referencing) was terribly botched.

Not only did his speech to the garrison at Setagaya go largely unheard (he had a commandant hostage at the SDF barracks in hopes that this would ensure he was given an audience), but his actual seppuku went badly awry.

Of the two of his tatenokai members who served as his kaishakunin (i.e. the grim one tasked with hacking off the head of the suicide after he has disemboweled himself--and I say he because although women did commit ritual suicide, for them the acceptable means was jamming a blade into their throat), managed to actually sever his head.

The first one (Morita) missed, hacking Mishima in the back multiple times, and the other (chibi Koga) had to swing more than once.

An account in more detail can be found in the book The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

  • Your aesthetics are not theirs, nor should your aesthetics shape public policy. Go ahead and beat your chest and use every muscle in your face to produce a sneer of epic proportions, they don't care because they are so depressed that they don't care to the nth degree. Fortunately I have never suffered from suicidal depression but I know enough people who have that I can easily imagine the response to one of them finally taking this step of asking for state assistance, and KulakRevolt sneering at them that they're pathetic pussies. Their response will be, quite simply, "Yes, and?"

This makes a lot of sense. People with major depression probably lack the will/motivation to come up with elaborate ways to end their lives. They want it over quick.

they do often still care about the people they will leave behind, the people who will have to clean up the mess they make, etc., which is often the only small deterrent that does keep them from doing it themselves.)

The line from The Wizard of Lies about a French fund manager who invested with Madoff who carefully positioned a trash can to protect his Persian rug before slitting his wrist at his desk has always stuck with me as somehow admirable.

My weird unorthodox opinion: I think a large-dose 5-meo-dmt trip should be mandatory right before assisted suicide. That drug is basically subjective death in molecular form, and at the right dose it brings you right up there to the stratosphere of sublime meditative states, I personally know of 2 people who were completely cured of suicide ideation from one dose of that stuff. Let them experience Death before death, and see if they want to live after that.

(Warning: not for the faint of heart, ptsd possible for the unprepared and you could choke on your own vomit at extreme doses, this is a last resort in case you really want to die today)

Is this the substance that comes from frogs?

Exactly the one, though nowadays most people use the synthetic form. If you're in Canada here is where to buy cartridges that fit a vape pen.

It seems to me that almost all psychedelics are illegal in Canada, despite the law being weakly enforced.

But how does a clearweb website just sell illegal drugs? Is the law that weakly enforced or I am missing some kind of loophole that makes this totally legal?

I think 5-meo-dmt is so weird and specific that it's technically legal (if not, there are other chemically distinct drugs that are legal but have pretty much the same effects). But that website also sells shrooms pretty easily. Psychedelics are just not a priority for law enforcement, and I never had any problems ordering from them.

I'm hardly an expert, but I think this is the same deal as stuff like Salvia, and the explanation I've heard is that they just aren't "fun". They give very intense altered states of consciousness, but the extremity of the experience and the lack of a pleasurable rush mean that they aren't chemically or psychologically addictive, so they don't get banned. "Ego death in a can" is apparently not the experience most drug abusers are chasing.

Salvia was incredibly fun as a kid. Spending hours afterwards confused if you were a man dreaming that he was a floor tile or a floor tile dreaming that he was a man is character-building.

Disagree to some extent, my highschool friends would get some salvia from time to time, as it was completely legal and sold in gas stations. The first time i tried it was on a balmy friday night before i was to attend the archetypal highschool party. The experience was so intensely unpleasant and extreme that i was left bewildered. I decided i'd rather go home and think about what the fuck just happened rather than go talk to people who didn't know that there is an entire universe of recursive car seats you can get trapped in on the passenger side of my friends camry.

DMT on the other hand is similar but somehow not so uncomfortable or jarring. Salvia is like being shown the truth of some alien universe but any joy or laughter has been edited out, DMT is like seeing beyond the veil in its terrifying and hilarious entirety.

So yeah, salvia was fun as a kid in that its a bonafide hallucinogen with low risk of chemically bad stuff happening, but its also widely regarded as kindof an unfun experience unless the idea of hallucinating is novel enough that you would want to just for the sake of it.

I don’t know anyone that liked salvia, but normal DMT gets high marks. (No pun intended)

I’m not really clear on the difference in the various analogs.

“Suicide should be cooler than this”

"X should be cooler than this" is a summary of Kulak's philosophy right?

I can recall reading "War should be cooler than this," "Cops should be cooler than this," fifteen or so "Healthcare should be cooler than this," "Jobs should be cooler than this," etc.

It's an aesthetic approach to right and wrong.

Deontology is concerned with optimizing the good.

Utilitarianism is concerned with optimizing the pleasurable.

Virtue ethics is concerned with optimizing the beautiful.

.

Deontologists might look at me as evil, Utilitarians might look at me as cruel... but the disgust I feel when looking on their works and what they'd make of themselves, it is a righteous fury on par with any of their calls for crusade or the overturn of "oppressors"

All approaches to right and wrong are aesthetic.

Only when you've already rejected all other forms of external morality.

No even those. You're just deferring it to some authority on what is beautiful like Nature or God. But really to a tradition of what the good life looks like.

Yeah, life is aesthetics. We only interface with the world through sensory inputs, what delights our particular senses is always what wins. If you find God to be compelling and pleasing, by all means, embrace God, but you're fundamentally identical to someone who goes "nah things should just be cool".

they're the same picture

Of course.

You can't justify morality by appealing to morality, so what basis is left beyond aesthetics?

Indeed...It is impossible to get from an is to an ought statement (per Hume). Thus both moral realism / moral relativism / even most forms of moral nihilism are vastly too claims intensive to be correct. Morality as it relates to reality is something we cannot even access at its most basic level...

So everyone is inevitably caving to aesthetics or social pressure when choosing their morality... so what should one do? I'd argue the noblest thing one can do from this position is to at least consciously choose to pick something that's truly beautiful.

But beauty and nobility are the exact same.

You can't get an "X is noble" from "is" statements either. Ditto for beauty except insofar as you think beauty is a social construct and you are optimizing for what is generally considered beautiful by the bulk of people. But, then, I too can choose my morality based on what other people say is moral.

This is to say, all your arguments against conventional morality apply exactly equally as well to your own values of nobility and beauty.

Honestly, none. It's aesthetics all the way down.

I have to confess, a general philosophy of 'If the world is not fair and just, we can at least make it beautiful' is one that has a good amount of appeal.

I have to confess, a general philosophy of 'If the world is not fair and just, we can at least make it beautiful' is one that has a good amount of appeal.

This is one of the appeals of "retvrn" neo-feudalist and neo-reactionary thought.

"If we have to lick the boot for our whole life, why not make it beautiful golden, bejeweled and embroidered nobleman's boot instead of ugly black capitalist's or comissar's one?"

It’s a fig leaf, perhaps.

The most fervent reactionaries are those who argue that it is materially/spiritually superior (ex. Moldbug), or that they will be on the top, (dictators, fundamentalists, race warriors...).

Sure, but what is beautiful? And who gets to decide?

A small example, I love cars. I find joy in driving fun aesthetically pleasing cars, I love seeing them around, I'd love it if more people chose to drive aesthetically pleasing cars rather than generic fish-shaped crossovers. But I'd never want the government to act to make more people drive pretty cars and fewer people drive ugly ones, because their definition of ugly and mine might not agree. I might find my beautiful (in my perception) classic banned, and the roads full of hideous monstrosities. I want freedom of aesthetic, not a requirement of some government's idea of aesthetics.

Inasmuch as that philosophy results in libertarian outcomes (We should all be free to make our lives beautiful) it is great, inasmuch as it results in authoritarian outcomes (The government should restrict people from making choices that I find unaesthetic) it is horrible. Inasmuch as Kulak is saying "Hey if you're gonna kill yourself, jump in a volcano or something" cool beans; inasmuch as he is saying "The government should not offer the option of assisted suicide because that's for pussies" I find it both wrong and incoherent. Wrong because it's not for me to tell someone else how to make their most personal decision, incoherent because if we posit that such a person is useless because they would make this choice then it's in our interest to let them make that choice.

While not directly relevant, there’s a very short story about classic cars and government regulations that I enjoyed called “A Nice Morning

Drive”

http://www.2112.net/powerwindows/transcripts/19731100roadandtrack.htm

Love it.

Whoever's aesthetic values converge most serendipitously with the maintenance of superior firepower, one imagines.

What about the government stopping in pushes that strongly incentivize fish shaped crossovers with fleet fuel efficiency standards and pedestrian safety laws?

Oh I'm full of ideas for how to intervene or stop intervening in the car market. Fleet fuel economy standards are a nightmare. Safety standards are fascism, we should be able to sell cheap tricycles or a modern MGB to consenting adults. I also think additional licensing should be required for any vehicle with more than 200 and again at 300 horsepower, regardless of size.

Speed limits should be eliminated. People convicted of reckless driving offenses should have mandatory mechanical devices installed on their axles that create violent noise and vibration above 65mph.

A modern MGB, you get my vote! My first car was a Sprite.

I want to be your friend.

Safety standards are fascism, we should be able to sell cheap tricycles or a modern MGB to consenting adults.

I also think additional licensing should be required for any vehicle with more than 300 horsepower, regardless of size.

These statements seem to fall on opposite sides of the debate.

Not really. Both are in favor of smaller, lighter cars which burn less gas not by virtue of complicated technical tricks but by being small cars with small engines.

If the general class of driver's license only covers up to 200 horsepower, that will stop a lot of soccer mom's from driving Expeditions they can't park properly. You can drive a full size pickup with 180 horsepower, but slowly, most people won't choose to do it. So the only people driving big cars will be those who need them or really love them, eliminating most users who can't drive them well.

Enthusiasts buying sports cars would happily take an extra month of classes and a harder test, hell throw in a track handling test.

Take out big cars and sports cars, and no one needs more than 200 horsepower anyway, and with smaller engines they'll get better gas mileage. 200hp in an Avalon or an Explorer can handle just fine on the highway, just a little slower.

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I agree with you on aesthetics and contempt for the nanny state, but I disagree on what I suppose is a lack of charity in this post. Those who choose to have themselves put to death in such a fashion will, I presume, lack the creativity to come up with solutions to their problems, and/or the energy to solve them even if they knew how to. They are taking the easy way out, the path of least resistance, not necessarily out of some deep psychological submission to father state but because it is the only path that seems at all walkable.

Howard and Hemingway, when life seemed intolerable to them, shot themselves. Did they do so out of some deep commitment to masculine values or because they wanted out, now, and that was the quickest and easiest way? Must we laud them for not asking the state to put them down, or condemn them because they, for all their creative genius, found no more grandiose way to go out? I can condemn them for killing themselves in the first place and depriving me of potential reading material, but hardly for the way they chose to die. Not everyone needs to be Sky King or Mishima, putting on a show. When people decide to die they already pay a high enough price for it; there's no need to hound their memory by complaining of the manner of death they chose for what are probably, in most cases, practical reasons.

Those who choose to have themselves put to death in such a fashion will, I presume, lack the creativity to come up with solutions to their problems, and/or the energy to solve them even if they knew how to.

This seems implausible to me since I would hope that going through approval process for euthanasia should be much more difficult and "energy" requiring process compared to any attempt at suicide. I think that the OP is correct and the biggest obstacle is just that those people are cowards and cannot bring themselves to do it. Apparently that Belgian woman even attempted suicide two times, with many people suggesting that this was scream for help.

I also kind of agree with OPs critique of oppressive progressive state which turns into dystopia in front of our eyes. Apparently compassion with homeless is to provide them with needles, drugs, tents and then picking up their feces or even their dead bodies after they literally shit themselves after some drug induced episode. All people should also offload all their responsibility and agency onto "experts", who can better calculate all the priorities like if you going out for a walk on the beach is not somehow dangerous activity. And if you still have some nagging feeling of being wronged, do not engage with anybody but immediately call your school administrator, HR representative or other designated moral authority certified by Twitter with blue checkmark. These are the only experts equipped to fully incorporate your grievance into the newest and definitely scientific psychohistorical model of how to make society effectively altruistic. And of course you have to accept the result, if you disagree it means you may have been infected with some version of wrongthink so you should follow the advice and go for sensitivity training therapy with certified psychologist. And if you still feel ignored, then you can always work with your assigned psychologist to utilize evidence based life affirming care specialized at ending your suffering with "dignity and compassion" in nearest medical facility.

This seems implausible to me since I would hope that going through approval process for euthanasia should be much more difficult and "energy" requiring process compared to any attempt at suicide.

Quite possibly so, but I think for most people a large amount of paper-pushing is a lower bar for energy investment than physically killing themselves. Especially if they're already used to interacting with the medical bureaucracy, as I imagine most people who would even consider such measures are.

I think we are talking about the same thing except that "physically killing themselves" is in a sense trivial matter of things like swallowing some pills, jumping off the cliff or pushing a trigger. Motorically killing oneself is triviality and almost everybody can do it in some manner comfortable with his "skillset". It of course is psychologically serious act and not everybody is capable of it - OP says that this is cowardice.

Apparently that Belgian woman even attempted suicide two times, with many people suggesting that this was scream for help.

Many people on The Motte, you mean? Because the original article says she was supported in her choice by her family and friends, implying they were already paying attention to her. And if it really was a "scream for help", wouldn't she have stopped short of actually committing suicide in the end?

Did they do so out of some deep commitment to masculine values or because they wanted out, now, and that was the quickest and easiest way?

Or did they do it out of a passing fancy, and would have regretted it had they had the chance? Just yesterday in a morning reverie, I took my razor as I shaved and shaved a patch of my arm hair off, I was sort of wondering what would happen to the long hair of my arms if I did it. Then I instantly thought, wait why the fuck did I do that?

Moreover, shotgun suicide has a surprising failure rate. With the bonus of failure leaving you with half a face and still wanting to kill yourself.

Howard, maybe. He might have gotten over the death of his mother somehow, but I suppose he saw no way to continue at the time.

Hemingway I doubt. His problems seem to have been more permanent.

He might have gotten over the death of his mother somehow,

Given that 100% of people are expected to get over the deaths of their mothers at some point in their lives, I think a fairly talented man would have found a way.

And that's the thing, the story ended with the bang for both those men, so we don't know how things would have gone. Brian Wilson's problems would seem permanent if he had shot himself right after the 1978 Australia tour, instead he stuck it out long enough for John Cusack to play him in the uplifting biopic. If Hemingway didn't kill himself, maybe his story is similar.

Given that many suicide attempt survivors report instant regret, even when they've chosen methods extremely likely to succeed and highly irreversible, I don't think we can assume that methods which are impulsive in nature are indicative of seriousness of intent.

Say what you will about school shooters or suicide bombers... of the columbine shooters or 9/11 hijackers...Their rejection of this life and the world had the grandiosity and horror such a choice deserved. In their pain, rage, hate, and nihilism they at least had the dignity to let out a primal scream in their rejection of life.

I think it's a good thing that more people do not choose to end their lives that way. If you want to go out in a blaze of glory, fine, just don't bring others with you. I think this is why Pinker is right that the media bears some responsibility for mass shootings and other violence, by giving shooters the attention and martyrdom they seek. More suicides and violence means possibly more gun restrictions for law-abiding citizens, as well as lower social trust. All of these impose social social cost. If suicide is inevitable, let's try to keep such externalities to a minimum, imho.

The people commit suicide sticking to their values, and thread OP is mad that they did not commit suicide sticking to his values.

can’t bring themselves to sudoku themselves

I love this typo. Don't you dare correct it.

It's not a typo (probably). It's common in the Internet to use "commiting sudoku" to refer to suicide.

"What about some kind of techno-guillotine suicide booth suspended over a nightclub where the blade is timed to the bass drop?"

Bro wtf? This comment made me lmao.

i legitimately think the idea has crossed more than a few minds before.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SpdWzECPS-E&t=89

Riding high on ecstasy, grinding against a top-tier club thot, and then suddenly a severed head splashes onto the floor next to you. Seems ideal.

I am down for this death cult

Who would not want to go to that night club? The rate of clubbers hooking up would be insane after the first week... think of how horror movies and the adrenaline supper charges dates

I see we have Dark Eldar among our ranks.

Excuse me, we call them Drukari now. "Dark Eldar" is kind of racist. ;-)

So that's why people go clubbing in Tijuana?

New EA cause area?

The @KulakRevolt vs. @2rafa high-adrenaline creative writing competition was not on my bingo card for today.

I share your intuitive revulsion to state-sanctioned suicide of a physically healthy young person. Yet doesn't euthanasia, at least for the non-paraplegic, require you to drink the latter-day hemlock yourself? In which case, does this not require an approximately similar amount of courage as downing a pint of vodka and swallowing a handful of barbiturates? And yet the latter would be acceptable to you, simply because it is not done with the sanction of the healthcare system? I am not sure the difference is truly as great as you profess.

Yet doesn't euthanasia, at least for the non-paraplegic, require you to drink the latter-day hemlock yourself? In which case, does this not require an approximately similar amount of courage as downing a pint of vodka and swallowing a handful of barbiturates?

No. The hospital provides the cocktail, and the hospital bed, and the softly cooing coterie of palliative care nurses. Even if the final act is done voluntarily, it is done having been stripped of its transgressive nature. If you want to kill yourself, you should want it badly enough to break through the transgressive barrier yourself, without the soft susurrations of medical experts gently lowering it to the floor.

In which case, does this not require an approximately similar amount of courage as downing a pint of vodka and swallowing a handful of barbiturates?

I don't think the courage required is even close to on par. The state sanction of it and the medical supply and feel of it lends the imprimatur of normalcy to the whole thing. If there's anything I learned from the fiascos of 2020, it's that for many people, anything outside the sanction of the state is illegitimate and impermissible while anything done by the state is de facto good and accepted.

That's vastly more respectable in a Socrates and hemlock sort of way. My respect for euros has increased.

Mind you of all the horrible venues to go for one last drink...

Suicide usually means either being terminally ill or being severely depressed. I imagine when you're depressed, you don't have the capacity to think about going away in a spectacular way. And if you're terminally ill, you're probably too tired to care.

This is an argument for why we feel disgust at the action but as usual with your posts I feel a disconnect at how you justify state action to prevent disgusting things. Forcing people who have shown themselves unwilling, incapable or unworthy of life by their own admission to endure using the force of the state is likewise disgusting.

I'm not justifying any state action. Indeed I haven't even endorsed withdrawing assisted suicide as an option.

Only stated that we should have a revulsion at it, and regardless of one's opinion on suicide, feel disgust at those who flee into the bosom of the state even as they reject life itself.

It is a death optimized for ugliness, helplessness, and lack of dignity... if I were riddled with cancer and barely able to move I feel revulsion at inviting some infantilizing nurse to be the one who killed me...

Having spent the last year in and out of surgery, and witnessed my grandfather go through the hospice cycle... I cannot think of a more indignant mockery of any life one might have lived or hoped to live...

Say what you will about downing a bottle of pills in the bathtub... at least its a vibe.

You're fixating a lot on the supposed feminineness and infantilization of hospital euthanasia. Would you prefer for a grim-faced man in a suit to take you out behind the shed with a pistol shot to the brainstem?

Anyone else can either do it themselves or volunteer for death by catapult. As ammunition, not target.

Why not (kind of) both?

Yes, that would be better.

A big, hairy, shirtless guy with a black hood and a big ass axe has some historical precedent.

Why were they shirtless anyway?

Then I think your complaint is orthogonal to what you call the libertarian case. The libertarian case is not that it's a good action, it's that the state should not intervene to stop it.

Having spent the last year in and out of surgery, and witnessed my grandfather go through the hospice cycle... I cannot think of a more indignant mockery of any life one might have lived or hoped to live...

It is a death optimized for ugliness, helplessness, and lack of dignity... if I were riddled with cancer and barely able to move I feel revulsion at inviting some infantilizing nurse to be the one who killed me...

I think there are a lot of people in their last months/days of their life who are still convinced they are going to make it. Doctors, family, and patients alike are terrible at estimating how long someone has to live. 6-9 months can be 2 years. 5 weeks can become 5 days, etc. Someone may go to to the hospital for treatment, and then unexpectedly have a complication and die at the hospital. Hospice care is supposed to allow terminal patients to die peacefully in a more dignified manner, but people avail themselves of it too late, so they end up dying at the hospital instead.

I mostly applaud the sentiment! 2 minor points:

  • In a state like France, acquiring a pistol or other very successful means of suicide is more difficult. This woman had apparently failed twice in attempting suicide. While passing out in a state-run hospital doesn't sound sexy, humans survive self-inflicted gunshot wounds and falls from great heights all the time. I may want to commit suicide but not want to risk putting myself in even greater agony.

  • My grandfather, bedridden at the end of his life, asked my dad to help him pull the plug. My dad refused and basically told him he had to do it himself. It took an act of superhuman will for him to pull out his own breathing tube and get it done. While I respect the hell out of him for doing it, I do find it annoying that at his greatest moment of weakness he had to summon up so much strength to get himself over the line.

Last I checked, black powder pistols are Category D firearms in the Fifth Republic, which are not that difficult to get a hold of and given the intended use case, the logistical concerns of feeding them are not relevant.

That's still niche knowledge, on par with knowing the helium trick or how to blow yourself up cleanly with household items.

Most people here think guns are mysterious objects and none of the people who have them care to dispell the notion, for fear of upsetting the equilibrium.

France, acquiring a pistol or other very successful means of suicide is more difficult

Is helium difficult to get in France?

As for the end of life, I think that is what the focus of assisted suicide should be. Terminally ill, old and decrepit, dementia, etc. Hell, I'd be fine with having any person over 75 being able to schedule their suicide one month out, with no sign off from a doctor required, no reason necessary. If I trusted the healthcare system, I'd even say that people who are clearly no longer themselves (far gone dementia patients, for instance) should receive euthanization on a doctor's order, rather than the patient requesting it. If the family doesn't want their grandma euthanized, they can take her home and care for her at their own expense. Unfortunately I don't trust the system to not start euthanizing patients that are 'difficult', rather than ones who need a compassionate end as their brain fails them.

I do think the latter example is fundamentally different from the request of a young, able-bodied person. Assisting someone in removal of life-extending medical treatments can be respectful in a way that I don't see with assisted suicide of someone who is only suffering mentally. I'm curious what take @KulakRevolt would have that sort of situation - someone requesting removal from a breathing apparatus strikes me as someone accepting fate rather than someone that's too much of a pussy to create their own fate.