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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I know some people here are concerned with national demographic shifts, but there's a larger and more esoteric question. Epistemic status: Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey.

If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.

At some point the lines of human population, possible food/power/water resources and our technological advancement will intersect. Could be ten billion, could be a hundred billion, could be much more, but without FTL travel, we get there someday. The obvious answer is to have less people, and there's any number of horrific ways to achieve that, and one painless one. Given our assumption, and further assuming that we want to do this the most moral way possible, zero population growth is the way to go. We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale. Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much. This brings us to the issue that the demographics of the world change over time, so when this event takes place will have a huge impact on what sort of humans are represented in this hypothetically fixed future population. There will be a lot more africans in ten years than there are now, and fewer europeans, but in a hundred years, or a thousand? Who knows? If the decision is outside the next few decades, it's very hard to say what the population trend lines will be. People tend to slow production as they develop economically, so the whole thing may be solved organically.

This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?

Bonus question: Do you feel strongly enough about the moral correctness of your current socio-political unit to want the decision? Every day the resources get less and the people more. Someone will make the call at some point. If we defer, someone else makes it. We have our own concerns, but the Chinese have different ones, and the Russians still different ones to that. Or some future superpower nation (or group of nations) not yet in existence. Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time? Or do we act as soon as is possible because we think we're the best possible people to do the moral calculus? And can we trust anyone who thinks that?

I believe your final question is the best one, and the answer is, "no, we cannot."

The tragedy of politics is that anyone who "wants the ball" in terms of decision-making is almost by definition morally incapable of a good one.

Someone who can wield power responsibly and is willing to do so is not quite a unicorn, though rare enough. As to the problem generally, the Federalist Papers are the best answer I know of, offhand. Decentralize and split power finely, set ambition against ambition, recognize inefficiency as your ally, etc. None of them are the "one weird trick" that solves corruptibility, but there are several partial hacks that keep a lid on things, if maintained.

I find the arguments against moral obligations towards non-existing persons convincing, so I embrace whatever solution is best for the people of today.

Why the focus on FTL? Post-energy scarcity via technological advancement seems possible / more likely than FTL. There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.

If the focus by technological advanced societies was on food, healthcare, water and strong borders for themselves rather than feeding the world wouldn't this sort itself through natural consequences? Aren't we already acting via various international aid and development programs? Would stopping these also be acting?

Is there evidence for people getting better over time? Better in what sense?

I want my in-group to decide and act as soon as possible in their own interests.

The available negentropy of the universe still places fundamental limits on the number of humans that can exist. Even with absolute control over all the matter in humanity's lightcone, the accelerating expansion of the universe ensures that we will only ever have access to a finite amount of matter-energy. Even if we run everyone's consciousness is maximally efficient simulations, the total number of subjective-human-experience-years that can exist is not infinite, and eventually the malthusian condition emerges back.

If correct, this raises the ceiling but does not remove it. FWIW, I don't know if this decision will ever get made, or need to be made. It's an interesting framework for thought experiment though.

I want my in-group to decide and act as soon as possible in their own interests.

This is probably the "correct" or most common real answer. The question then: Is your ingroup big and powerful enough to swing that? And are they (not you) smart enough to know what their interests actually are?

I agree with you, but my answers to the subsequent questions must be negative.

There are a lot resources available in the solar system, no FTL required.

Compared to how many resources we're using now? Sure. With foreseeable technology we might eventually comfortably support quintillions of people in the solar system, maybe sextillions, at a high standard of living. The resource usage of Earth circa 2022 would be negligible by comparison.

Compared to how many resources we could use if we continued to increase population at 1%/year, as we did for most of the last century? Compute 1.01^3000. The solar system would be full, sextillions of spots all taken, in a few millennia. At that point non-FTL interstellar flight doesn't really relieve the pressure; a light cone's volume only grows as a cubic function of time.

Even FTL is a red herring here. FTL to the rest of the galaxy would only buy us a few millennia after the solar system is "full"; to the rest of the universe would buy a few millennia after the Milky Way is full. Packing people into some kind of computronium rather than meat for efficiency's sake might buy a few more millennia still? Got any more ideas? There's only so many millennia of exponential growth that we could buy before we hit limits to growth for the rest of the life of the universe (or we start shortening that life by burning negentropy even faster than it's currently being wasted). Productive new technology is amazing stuff, but it's hard to get more amazing than an arbitrarily large exponent. Fingers crossed for us to find some productive new thermodynamics loopholes too.

Or maybe it's silly to worry about theoretical limits with literally astronomical error bars. Maybe we'll get to post-scarcity anyway, due to population peaking rather than technology keeping up indefinitely with growth, simply because of the demographic transition finally reaching its last stragglers. "Everybody stop having too many kids despite the lack of any serious pressure stopping us" doesn't seem at all like an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy to me, but that hasn't prevented it from becoming amazingly popular so far.

Even FTL is a red herring here. FTL to the rest of the galaxy would only buy us a few millennia after the solar system is "full"; to the rest of the universe would buy a few millennia after the Milky Way is full.

No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.

The size of the entire universe is unknown (because we can't see it), but it's presumed to be much larger. Some estimates are large enough that exponential growth is no real issue - particularly the "infinite" and "10^10^10^122" numbers (in the latter case, time is a bigger problem than space).

No, you're thinking of the observable universe - that from which light has reached us.

I was; I appreciate the correction.

There are so many things we still don't understand about the universe; I think it's virtually guaranteed that a black swan fundamentally changes our understanding of technology and how the future will progress.

That's one possible future. I expect that there will never be a post-scarcity world, as humans are pretty good at creating scarcity. But that could be wrong, and only time can tell.

The global total fertility rate was 2.4 in 2019, and has been falling since. The global replacement rate (ie. the number of babies needed to maintain the population as is - if the fertility rate is above that the population is destined to grow, if it's below it's destined to fall) was estimated as 2.3 at the same time, slightly higher than the usual 2.1 rate mentioned in these discussions since it accounts for increased baby mortality in Third World countries. As such, it's very possible that the global TFR is below replacement rate already - which would mean that we are destined to have a global population peak in the coming decades, unless the fertility rates reverse themselves.

This is a possible future, of many. I hope it goes this way.

If fertility rates remain sub-replacement forever, that's an X-risk. I doubt this will actually happen, though.

It's fairly plausible that we'll solve aging in the next century. Statistically people will still eventually die of other causes, but if you assume an average lifespan 20x what it currently is (ballpark based on accidental death rate, probably conservative since this will likely decline), then holding TFR constant the population will nonetheless be 20x as large.

And probably lifetime TFR will be substantially higher if people have centuries in which to have children. Have a 30 year career, then spend 20 family-focused years raising two kids, then 'retire' for 20 years… then do it all over again! That's a TFR of ~22 if you repeat this over a 1600 year lifespan. And that assumes people don't decide to have larger families given artificial wombs, robot childcare, and lots more material wealth.

Have you read Karlin's Age of Malthusian Industrialism? The argument is essentially that, absent a singularity, there'll be a demographic explosion as culture selects for those who reproduce quickly, with genes doing the same on a deeper level.

I'm familiar with this general argument, but it bears mentioning that this reproductive selection effect is not yet in sight, even though many Western countries have been hovering around or under the replacement rate for decades, if not a good part of a century.

That 2.4 also included a Chinese figure of 1.7 which is far above the true figure of 1.2-1.3 and would lower the global TFR by 0.1. Also worth mentioning that African fertility is terribly measured and could be off by a very large margin, especially recently where mobile internet penetration has increased from essentially zero to a third of the population.

We could very easily be below replacement now with no end in sight.

Do you have a source for that China claim?

I find the general claims that Chinese population is overcounted by some 200 million (ie. it's 1.2 billion, not the currently stated 1.4 billion) plausible, and suspect that many other countries overcount their populations as well, particularly the African ones where population statistics are basically often more guesstimates than hard numbers and the various regional administrators have an impetus to make higher than lower guesstimates to get more funding from the central government. I wouldn't be surprised if the global population was, perhaps, 500 million lower than currently given, or even more.

Even without FTL travel, there is enough energy and material being produced in our current solar system to support an unimaginable number of humans. The Dyson sphere gets built incrementally. You just keep building new permanent space habitations ( each could support 50,000 to 1 million people) that get sent into close orbit around the sun, with an array of solar panels running at 100X the efficiency you get running solar panels on earth. Each of the habitations would have enough energy to both make its world a utopian human experience and allow for building new habitations for the colony's children. In the far future, human life will be primarily non-terrestrial, and visitors from the habitations will come on vacation to Earth and marvel at how people put up with blizzards and mosquitos and rain and other hazards of planetary life. What happens when the Dyson sphere is complete and the solar system has reached capacity of quadrillions people? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it...

Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.

Also, there is not reason you couldn't send out colonies to other solar systems even without FTL travel. The colony ships would just need to be self-sustaining habitations that would house many generations of people.

The issue with this is that without FTL there's a limit to what we can reach due to the expansion of the universe, so we're likely stuck in our local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction holds things together.

Note that the universe doesn't expand at any fixed speed but at a speed per unit of distance, which we normally measure in kilometers per second per megaparsec (one megaparsec is about 3.26 million light years). If the expansion rate is 70 km/s/Mpc, that means, on average, an object that’s 10 Mpc away should expand away at 700 km/s; one that’s 200 Mpc away should recede at 14,000 km/s; and one that’s 5,000 Mpc away should appear to be moving away at 350,000 km/s.

An analogy that's often offered up to illustrate the expansion of the universe would be the balloon analogy, where coins are placed all over a balloon then the balloon is inflated to show that every coin will be moving away from all other coins at a rate proportional to how far away they are (note that you'll be ignoring the interior of the balloon here, this "balloon" universe is represented by the surface). The balloon analogy isn't a perfect one, since the balloon is a 2D universe and is curved whereas our universe obviously isn't 2D and also is flat, but it helps illustrate the concept. What this means is that there's some distant event horizon of sorts beyond which everything will be receding from us at a rate that means we won't ever be able to reach it.

This basically ensures that only a finite portion of the matter and energy that exists in the universe will be available to us, and eventually we'll be reaching some kind of limit assuming no Great Filter scenarios rear their head before then. Improvements in technology can only really take us so far, because eventually there'll be no more increments of efficiency to squeeze out of what we have (it seems reasonable that there will eventually be some sort of sheer physical limit we'll bump up against).

Ultimately, this pushes the problem very far down the line, but doesn't at all eradicate it.

Is it not the case that, once we start moving towards those distant objects (in say a colony ship), the expansion behind us compensates for a growing portion of that total expansion? It's my understanding that there IS an inflection point as you describe, but we haven't reached it yet.

Perhaps "Save the Universe" is the ultimate point of the simulation we built ourselves. Seems fitting.

The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur.

Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance.

The issue with this is that without FTL there's a limit to what we can reach due to the expansion of the universe, so we're likely stuck in our local group of galaxies, where gravitational attraction holds things together.

Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.

Obviously, exponential growth will still hit the "reachable universe" eventually though.

Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.

Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.

Yes, the reachable universe at the moment isn't only the Local Group. However the size of our reachable universe is premised on the assumption that we leave today, and at the speed of light. What's currently in our reachable universe is a very generous estimate as to what we can practically reach.

In retrospect the way I phrased it was probably misleading - the statement that we might be restricted to the Local Group was my extrapolation of what in practice might be our limit, incorporating my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light) as well as the difficulty of keeping a crew alive and the ship working when going at these speeds.

Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.

Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.

EDIT: added more

my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light)

Laser sail/Bussard brake. Antimatter ramjet. (The Bussard idea doesn't work as far as we know, because of the scoop's drag and the difficulties getting p-p fusion to happen in a scramjet throat, but it works as a brake - or injecting antimatter into a scramjet throat would certainly get it to burn.) Baryon number nonconservation does also seem allowed, which implies that non-antimatter-based total conversion engines could be possible. There is, indeed, trouble with keeping a ship intact in the intergalactic void given the cosmic rays, relatively-relativistic dust, and lack of new material to replace that blown off - but that's mostly an issue of building a bigger ship.

Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.

General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious. And there are some plausible answers to the time-travel problem (there's a hypothesis that attempting to convert a wormhole into a time machine would collapse it, for instance). Whether FTL's possible is an open question.

General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious.

Okay now I'm getting into things I'm not too certain on (obviously IANAP), but from what I understand apparent FTL that entails the warping of spacetime is one of these things that we're not 100% sure is impossible but does pose a lot of problems. Apart from the whole "closed timelike curve" problem that these apparent FTL methods seem to create (which, granted, as you noted one can try to resolve through all kinds of difficult-to-verify chronology protection conjectures), there's also the fact that both Alcubierre drives and traversable wormholes alike require unobtainum exotic matter that at best isn't impossible but there's no evidence for its existence and at worst violates an energy condition.

So they're not exactly impossible per se, but there's reasons to believe they probably are.

Clarke's First Law is a decent heuristic, and there's no clear no-go theorem (Earnshaw's theorem is the obvious example of a theorem with a lot of important loopholes). I recall reading about somebody trying to build an Alcubierre metric using the Casimir effect, though I'm not sure how it turned out and that's well beyond my own paygrade.

Overall I'd say it's in the "maybe" category; I'm leery of saying it can be done, but at least as leery of saying the opposite.

Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

There is also the possibility of inorganic life forms, such as beings that exist as computational consciousness and need far fewer resources and space compared to flesh and blood humans. Probably the bigger concern is social programs being run dry and inflation as a result, than the constraints imposed by the physical limits of the universe

The reason I broke those categories out was that I believe the physical, practical and politically possible numbers are all wildly different.

There's a game-theoretical aspect here. Any group can boost its future influence by breeding faster (defection, essentially). Any group that is strong enough can gather more resources for its own population, denying them to others. The political limits will be hit first in this scenario. Look how we howl about five dollar-per-gallon gas, and imagine if we were being put on strict calorie restriction to conserve resources for poorer areas. Hell, if the "poorer areas" were the nearest major city you'd see civil unrest. When the Hutus find out they're getting restricted more than the Tutsis (or vice versa), how is that gonna play out?

I feel like, when you're talking about quadrillions of beings, our existing reasoning breaks down. That is assuming race is still going to be relevant post-singularity, which is at least highly questionable. I think skin color is going to go the way of rare dyes, where rarity used to signal social standing, but now that anyone can trivially have any dye in near any number, it's relegated entirely to aesthetic preference. - What else is there? IQ? Personal choice. Conscientiousness? Personal choice. Neuroticism? Habits? All, all, editable.

In the future, there will be a million times more white-people descendants, a million times more black-people descendants. There will be cross-blending, customization, randomization, de novo species. There will be telepaths, hiveminds, superintelligences, copyclans, and weirder things that we cannot even imagine now. I don't have an answer for you - but I'll eat my hat if the predominant moral question as we approach the physical Malthusian limit will be one of race.

Maybe! I hope so, as the best thing we can say about human progress is that we get to fail at a higher level of problem.

Then again, ingroup bias is strong, especially under threat.

Right, I think more like...

We have this picture. And it has a bunch of colored blobs on it. There's pink blobs, and brown blobs, and yellow blobs, and red blobs. What I'm saying is that we're about to open this picture in MSPaint and go absolutely hog wild on it for a billion years. It's not that ingroup bias isn't strong, it's that I doubt that there will be recognizeable racial ingroups even a century after the Singularity.

Whenever I feel existential dread or depression based on the inevitability of increasing entropy putting a cap on the ability of humans, or anyone else, to expand and thrive in the universe, I do find it helpful to read The Last Question by Asimov. Even with our current understanding of physics being accurate, there's the tantalizing possibility that there are further phenomena that we could eventually uncover that gives us a lot more to explore and discover and possibly escape that final fate.

Failing FTL travel, there is a maximum number of humans that are physically, practically, and politically possible to keep alive, and we don't know what those numbers are until we hit them.

That's maybe a bit misleading, since we could likely establish some kind of upper bound which we believe we absolutely CANNOT cross, and then reason backwards from that towards a 'safe zone' of population.

I'm fairly convinced that the upper limit for earth alone, if we assume tech advances continue and we manage to learn to tolerate each other enough to not do a genocide or two (LOL) is around 1 Trillion People.

We are more limited by the rate at which we can grow than the absolute, final number we could maintain.

I also don't know what the hell the demographics would look like since the introduction of genetic engineering, affordable human cloning, artificial wombs, and cybernetics means you can't really reason about what the world looks like beyond these techs since they have fat-tailed impacts. And I'm leaving out AGI because... duh.

I do think that the trope of humanity trending towards becoming a 'single' race which is just a mixture of all the current races due to interbreeding is silly along several dimensions at once.

This brings us to the questions, if it happens and isn't solved organically: How long do we "hold the door" for more people at the cost of the resources available to each? Does the shifting demographic composition play any role in your decision? Should we aim for maximum diversity? Maximum resources per person? Maximum people?

I'm going to punt on this by saying "it'd be nice if we could give people the freedom to make their own choices within the above-discussed framework." That is, once we know the constraints, to make up some arbitrary ones "don't exceed 1 trillion people total, no single person's genetic children should be more than 5% of the total population, don't go under X% rate of genetic diversity, and do not increase the population more than 5 billion in a given year," let people choose when to have kids based on whatever conditions they find themselves in, at whatever time they find appropriate." THE FREE MARKET WILL FIX IT!

Will this mean that the future will be dominated by the hyper-fertile? Almost certainly yes. That's been the case since, I dunno, the genesis of life itself?

But if we're working off of the assumption that we'll never actually get off-world colonization, may as well let people enjoy earth as best they can according to their own utility functions rather than trying to forcibly optimize everything towards some particular metric or metrics and use top-down authority to push us there. Coase theorem tends to imply that given sufficiently low transaction costs/respect for private property rights then we can avoid tragedy of the commons and bargain away externalities, whether those be excess people, too little or too much diversity, or misallocated resources per person.

If we instead assume that we WILL eventually make it out of the planet and out of the solar system, then we're going to have a LOOOOOT of time to think about this problem and maybe solve for it, so this is genuinely a problem for our descendants, and our main goal now should be to NOT DIE so we are able to actually have such descendants.

TL;DR:

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

Now we're stacking assumptions, which is always a bad idea. If we accept these two basic propositions: No FTL leading to someone someday having to stop people from breeding too much.

I don't think we do. Family planning exists, and I think people will make calculations on a per-family basis as to how many kids they can support. It won't be easy or super accurate, but people do it regardless even now.

In other words, the problem may very well take care of itself, though not perfectly.

Remember Scott's post about how 2100 "isn't a real year"? You're making that mistake, times a thousand. The question of "based on physics, how many consciousnesses can our civilization support" has almost nothing to do with our current existence; any answer, and any pressing need to answer, is way beyond the future event horizon where the world will be unrecognizable to us.

What you're doing now is the equivalent of ancient tribes sitting by their campfire, taking a break from their stories about how the Moon Goddess hides from the Sun God, to talk about how the Fed should optimally set interest rates to avoid a recession. It's beyond pointless.

What you're doing now is the equivalent of ancient tribes sitting by their campfire, taking a break from their stories about how the Moon Goddess hides from the Sun God, to talk about how the Fed should optimally set interest rates to avoid a recession. It's beyond pointless.

To be fair, this is approximately the same criticism I have of the AI panickers -- as though MIRI or its ilk ever had a prayer of solving Friendly AI, and as though delaying "AI capabilities" research would do anything other than give us more time to hang ourselves on some unrelated catastrophe while the hardware overhang grows.

If we assume that our current state of understanding the physical laws of the universe are mostly correct (especially with the feasibility of FTL space travel), it seems to me that in the medium to long term, Malthusian limits are a foregone conclusion.

The problem with this is that the population most likely to comply with rational limits are the high-IQ types who you would want to reproduce, while low-IQ types are more likely to carelessly continue to reproduce, so you will end up with a population even more heavily titled toward a low-IQ population that is less likely to come up with effective technological solutions to population growth and other potential crises. Instead, we need to encourage high IQ people to reproduce more in the hopes that it will blunt or harness the effects of low-IQ reproduction.

At least in Finland, the fertility rates have for some time been higher among the well-educated than those with a lower level of education. IIRC same applies to other Nordic countries.

Are you talking about after we've tiled our light-cone with maximally efficient computronium filled with maximally flourishing post-human sentiences, or are you imagining primates flying through space in little metal spaceships and running out of water on the moons of Jupiter?

Whenever people on Reddit or its progeny (as I now must qualify) lament about the inevitable malthusian limits that physical reality will impose on us, and then attempt to extrapolate back to our current condition, I am always flummoxed by their lack of imagination about the progress of technology even within the laws of physical reality as we understand them. I have no doubt that your concerns will be consigned to the same dustbin of history as Peak Oil theorists, the original malthusians, and foretellers of the Great Horse Manure Crisis.

That's all a distinct possibility, and yet I got the answer I feared. Of all the responses to my query, only one person answered the basic question in a hypothetical scenario, and that very vaguely.

This whole thread is people arguing that the assumptions are wrong, rather than using the assumptions to think about the implications.

Yes, Malthus has been wrong 100% of the time so far. Maybe he'll be wrong forever. But, if someday he isn't, this intellectual performance doesn't make me optimistic about the ability of anyone to solve the issue. People can't even accept the parameters of a thought experiment for the purpose of arguing on the internet.

What relevance to our present circumstances does the eventual malthusian constraint of the mass-energy of our light cone after it has been converted to computronium possibly have? I guess that is the root of my confusion. I agree that "numbers so mind-bogglingly large that it's difficult in practice to distinguish them from infinity" are in fact distinguishable from infinity, but the magnitude is such that I have difficulty understanding how the distinction might have any practical relevance to the minuscule handful of billions of people who exist today, enfleshed and earthbound as we are.

I also think there's a real chance that supercluster-spanning superintelligence may well find a way through the constraint into true infinity. It's hard to estimate odds that there will ultimately be found a loophole in our physical laws, but there seem to be at least a few speculative leads even today, and it would be an act of great hubris to predict the ultimate limitations of a superintelligence whose superiority in intelligence and capability is many orders of magnitude greater above human beings today than we, today, are above ants or amoebas. So the first paragraph is applicable only in the dismal case that no such loophole can be found.

We don't have to kill anyone or stop fighting disease and starvation, we just have to limit everyone to two kids at a global scale.

What on earth makes you think you can achieve the second clause while still having the first be true?

Do we put the decision off as long as possible because people are getting better over time?

No, because there is no global "we" that is capable of making and enforcing that decision for non-terrible reasons in non-terrible ways.

No FTL travel, does not imply not getting a vast a mount of resources from space. It doesn't even imply no expansion to other star systems (although obviously it makes such expansion slower and more difficult, and any colonies set up in other star systems will be more isolated and have to be more self-sufficient).

Also even without resources from space, you could have fusion, and other new sources or improved sources of energy.

And in terms of population, projections in to the future can and often have been wrong, but we may be facing more of a problem going forward from declining population (mostly from people choosing not to have children, or to have fewer children, or to put off having children until later and then not having as many child bearing years left), rather than overpopulation for the world. Its possible the world won't hit 10 billion. Its reasonably likely it won't hit 20bil. Such numbers should be quite supportable with technological advances and continued economic growth.

In "holy shit" culture war moments, Kanye has lashed out at (((us))) on Twitter. He came out of the gate swinging by stating that:

... when I wake up I'm going death [sic] con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda

Please note that Kanye is using double-spaces instead of periods for some reason.

This comes shortly after he was pictured wearing a White Lives Matter shirt, and shortly before he asked rhetorically

Who you think created cancel culture?

As always, the reaction is worse than the action, and causes the story to explode. In response to accusations that Jews control the media and invented cancel culture, Jewish organizations have loudly declared that such accusations are anti-semitic and inherently untrue, and then demanded Kanye be cancelled. The irony appears lost on them. To the surprise of I'm sure absolutely no one, Kanye was quickly locked out of his twitter account.

Social media reactions have been mixed, to say the least. /pol/ has apparently decided that Kanye is one step removed from goose stepping his way down the isle at the Grammys, and is almost /theirguy/. Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam n****r so I'm going to stop short of saying that Kanye has struck a blow for unity within the racist community.

/r/Kanye, which is dedicated to exactly what you think, is in full melt-down mode understandably.

I really don't have anything else to add to this monumental pile of flaming garbage. There is no redeeming anything buried here. Only more decay and hatred seeping into public spaces. I leave you with only this thought that has been said by far smarter men than I. Twitter delenda est.

The reaction looks disproportionate, he only shifted to DEFCON 3, taking out his communication infrastructure, should result in a DEFCON 1 response from Ye.

Can't it be both anti-semetic and true? Truth is often anti-semetic, and racist and misogynist and misanthrorpic, etc.

Perhaps he’s hit 1 now, but we can’t tell due to the lack of infrastructure?

This is smart, because he couldn't remember if 1 or 5 was the most severe, so he hedged his bets.

In my view, truth may be uncomfortable (and often is), but it is never racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, etc. Racism et al. isn't bad simply for being hateful, but also for being false.

Many people claim that unequal outcomes in math education is the result of systemic racism, because all individuals having an inherent equal ability is truth.

Suggesting mathematic ability is distributed unequally amongst cohorts that align with ancestral origin is to many racist despite it providing a demonstrably better description of reality.

Many people claim that unequal outcomes in math education is the result of systemic racism, because all individuals having an inherent equal ability is truth.

Many people believe stupid things. Even granting the cases where the belief is honest, truth remains regardless of belief.

Suggesting mathematic ability is distributed unequally amongst cohorts that align with ancestral origin is to many racist despite it providing a demonstrably better description of reality.

Yes, "racism" is often applied with wild abandon far beyond what is, in my view, its proper use case. Though in your specific example, I suspect the real issue is ignorance of the facts in most cases.

Yes truth remains regardless of belief. I've not found a reliable way to prevent or stop people from believing stupid things. Often it seems we send PMC youth to university to be indoctrinated in belief of stupid things.

It's because truth remains regardless, truth can be racist and sexist and etc. Those aren't rebuttals against the nature of truth only a conflict with the objectors concept of the nature of reality.

Right now my model of Kanye's antics is that he's Bipolar (which helps explain his tendency to spit out tons of new artistic works at once then go silent for a while) and is very inconsistent in taking medications, so he will have these periodic times where he's manic and just spewing absolute insane rhetoric which he only half-believes at best, but nobody is going to actually stop him from spewing it, and who can tell if its just part of an act anyway?

Nothing in the current kerfuffle contradicts this model, so I'm not updating on this.

My only note is that if Kanye is dealing with mental illness then it might be best if social media companies were openly showing some compassion here and couched things as trying to protect his mental health rather than silence him on behalf of any group.

Nothing in the current kerfuffle contradicts this model, so I'm not updating on this.

I can throw in another data point.

Which is that the...flirting with antisemitism and antisemitic figures that is well-known in the rap world and, arguably, beyond just that part of African-American culture.

Ice Cube used to hang out with antisemitic Nation of Islam types. Nick Cannon had a kerfuffle not too long ago where -notably- his anti-white racism was given a pass but he got in trouble for his statements about Jews*. IIRC black Women's March leaders had trouble with Jewish women and supported Farrakhan of the NOI. Other prominent figures like Kendrick also had links to black Hebrew Israelites in their music despite Hebrew Israelites being antisemitic appropriators.

Kanye himself has associated himself with Farrakhan, who pops up throughout hip hop and these stories like a bad penny.. Seriously, he seems to have links to everyone and gets defended by huge rappers more than any comparable white figure.

So we probably still should err a bit on the side of "Kanye is kind of unstable and has a track record of stirring shit up so who knows?" but I'm also more inclined to believe that Kanye actually believes this shit and is also unstable and surrounded by enough sycophants to not understand that this is the one rail you don't touch.

* A lot of these situations seem to be shocking only insofar as liberal Jews expect to not be treated like other white people in anti-white rhetoric. Another reason to not believe that it's just impossible for Kanye to believe: they already believe it about most other white folk, why not Jews?

Which is that the...flirting with antisemitism and antisemitic figures that is well-known in the rap world and, arguably, beyond just that part of African-American culture.

but I'm also more inclined to believe that Kanye actually believes this shit and is also unstable and surrounded by enough sycophants to not understand that this is the one rail you don't touch.

A cursory Google search shows me that Kanye has collaborated with one Noah Goldstein on no less than 5 projects in the past 12 years, so he can't be THAT Antisemitic. Or at least, wasn't prior to 2018.

Or Goldstein was one of the good ones :)

My experience is that bizarre(in the truly strange sense, not in the ‘why are the Nazis black now’ sense) antisemitic conspiracy theories are widespread in the black community and Kanye has a pretty good chance of hearing these things from respected community figures.

Yeah, I'm mostly a spectator but I remember growing up there were endless Illuminati conspiracy theories around rappers.

Which prompted Cyhi the Prynce's concise rebuttal: "what makes you think Illuminati would ever let some niggas in?"

Freddie deBoer's take on it.

I don't have anything useful to say about this... I don't think Kanye is a mentally stable human being, but I'm not sure many humans at that level of fame can be stable. Existing on that scale is so far outside the ancestral environment that I suspect brain stuff just gets weird.

What immediately struck me about this case was how clearly it feeds Kanye's argument. When saying "the Jews are shutting down everyone who disagrees with their agenda" gets you shut down by organizations substantially owned and/or operated by Jews, like, what--you think he's gonna conclude "oh, I must be mistaken?" This is on the same rhetorical playground as the well-trod "canceling conservatives just gets them bigger book deals, 'left media bias' is obviously a myth."

I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic. The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable. But I can imagine being a black person whose community openly expresses frustration at whites or Asians or Hispanics "keeping me down"--in such an environment, why wouldn't a statistically wealthy, powerful group of phenotypically white people be permitted targets of the same basic criticism?

It also seems related to stuff like this. Armed black militants demanding reparations and a closed border seems like evidence that some blacks, at least, have decided that they don't want to be pawns for either "Left" or "Right" politics. Not sure that works out for them, in a two-party left-right coalition environment... but maybe?

And yeah. Twitter delenda est.

I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic.

It may not be anti-Semitic but it's not weird to me that she got suspended for this.

She committed two cardinal sins in idpol-land, where victimhood is status:

  1. "It’s not about race. It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”. She tried to remove the specificity of the Holocaust. Just as you can't just say "all lives matter" you can't take away the fact that Jews specifically suffered this, anymore than you can make slavery about "man's humanity to man". That is too vague and doesn't saddle one group with the responsibility to pay the debt.

  2. “But these are two white groups of people!”. She placed Jews in the camp of other white people, which is anathema to liberal Jews who jealously guard their right to secede from whiteness and enter the victim camp when it gets a bit uncomfortable (including when they make it uncomfortable).

I also personally think that her comments are just silly and historically illiterate (the Nazis attributed a specific place to Jews in their ideology). But I don't think that's why it was so outrageous.

Whoopi Goldberg was totally in the right - after the definitions of race and racism were adjusted to make sure that it was impossible to be racist against white people, "the holocaust wasn't about race" is actually correct.

The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable.

Is it really remarkable? It's super old and to me seems to have gone down over time. Decades ago you had articles like these: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html

Summary of above:

  • Everyone believes Jewish suffering is heroic, black suffering is of their own fault, so the negro envies the jew

  • Jewish suffering is decoupled from their success in America, opposite to blacks

  • Jewish people don't behave sufficiently differently from other white christians to be excepted from black anger

Armed black militants demanding reparations and a closed border seems like evidence that some blacks, at least, have decided that they don't want to be pawns for either "Left" or "Right" politics.

The article contains a quote suggesting that they're not gonna start voting R--perhaps they feel like they can just demand their Democratic representatives to give them what they ask for?

Interesting development, if it goes anywhere beyond this one incident.

Please note that Kanye is using double-spaces instead of periods for some reason.

On my phone that does insert a full stop.

Who you think created cancel culture?

As ever, right sentiment, wrong target. As a slight aside, I had been meaning to ask something like this for a while now, but I often don't wonder if most people who have a problem with Jews just have a problem with the fact that they're allowed to practice healthy, normal in-group bias, and their own group isn't?

On my phone that does insert a full stop.

Yeah, I suspect Kanye just didn't think about it because double spacing for periods exists in texting.

I'm not Jewish, I'm Catholic. I have to be honest, though, I'm a bit jealous of the Jews. At least they're willing to defend themselves.

Is what Kanye said threatening at all? No. Was he calling for "death" to anybody? No, he misspelled "DEFCON". But the reaction is predictable. Everybody regardless of how much /r/atheism posting they have done in that past immediately coming to condemn him for saying something critical.

Jews encourage their kids to learn Hebrew. They assign a cultural importance to their history. They encourage people to marry within their culture.

These are good things, or at least good things if you care about the continuation of Jewish culture. I wish that the Catholics could take a lesson from them and start teaching Latin again, start acting like they control a majority of the supreme court, and start self advocating. Build Cathedrals because you're the Catholics and you can and you have a 2000 year history of doing so.

I actually like Kanye West. I think he's completely manic, but...I think that is the basis of his artistic genius (and I do think he is an artistic genius). I also really like the jews. This whole thing has a weird timbre to me because it's groups/people I like supposedly fighting each other but doing so by acting out the thing that makes me like both of them. Interesting.

n****r

Just say nigger, man. We aren't in reddit any more.

There's really not much to go off on here. Kanye is one step removed from believing in lizard men at this point. People melting down at what he says for the uninterested observer is entertainment.

Maybe he censors the word because he finds it personally distasteful or objectionable.

What is gained by saying it?

[EDIT] - No seriously, what's the argument here? Doing things simply because someone told you not to is childish. The idea that liberty can be secured by rejecting all norms was tested to destruction, and it did not actually work at scale. The taboo exists whether you like it or not, and flouting it provides no benefit that I can see. The word is actually garbage.

I don't actually want you or anyone else banned for mentioning it. I'm not going to, though, because I don't see the point, and I'll make the argument against mentioning because I think it's a sound one on the merits.

The taboo exists whether you like it or not, and flouting it provides no benefit that I can see.

I don't think that's quite true. Taboos are not objective facts, they are a social consensus. Your argument that an individual alone cannot move social consensus is true enough, but many individuals acting in concert certainly can. Likewise, while it is true that in any given election, your individual vote probably doesn't determine the outcome, it does not follow that all voting is pointless. Taboos can be destroyed, it this is normally done by a small group violating it and not being punished, then more and more, until there is no clear social consensus and the taboo is gone. What objection could you have to that, other than that the taboo is taboo, which is circular?

I miss the 2005-2012 inter-regime period where you could say almost whatever you wanted without the inquisitors showing up

I share your disdain for the word nigger. It is an ugly word used by witches and edgelords. I type it out because I am even more annoyed by the utter annihilation of the use-mention distinction and the American resurgence of believe in magic words of power.

This is exactly my reason for mentioning the word.

I won't call anyone a nigger but refusing to type out that word is just playing by their arbitrary rules that assigns magic power to a string of letters. Why should I follow an irrational and nonsensical custom?

Why should I follow an irrational and nonsensical custom?

As mentioned above, you may want to consider it when posting here specifically because we are supposed to write as if people who think that way are reading and we WANT them to read. So while your argument has merit, it should be balanced against the other norms, customs and preferences that are encouraged here.

If your argument hinges on using the word itself then that is probably fine. If the same argument can be made while censoring it, then we probably should.

If I am making an argument about blasphemy, then I can blaspheme, but I should be aware that Catholics might be reading and that I want them to read, so that I should be careful exactly how I do so and give it due consideration, no matter if I think their position is magical or irrational.

Gessler can be defied. In extremity, Gessler can be shot. That is the difference, in my view.

Rationalists seem to have this idea that things should make sense, that reason should prevail. I see this as a failing. Human reason is flawed and limited, and the structures built upon it are riddled with flaws. "This doesn't make sense to me" isn't actually proof that the thing in question is broken. Life is full of small indignities, frustrations and compromises, some of which can be fought, most of which have to be merely accepted. If there were an actual benefit to mentioning the word, I'd retract my argument. I don't see one, because I think mentioning it has downsides, and I don't see any actual upsides.

Fighting linguistic taboos led us to where we are now, and I think it's pretty questionable whether it was ever going to lead anywhere else. Words have power, and that power is well-described, like it or not, by the term "magical". Sure, it's all social consensus. But it's actually a consensus, and it's vastly beyond the ability of individuals or small groups or even large ones to change.

If I tell you I'm emptying the ocean with a teaspoon, it's not actually more rational to offer me a backhoe, or even bagger-288. Like, it's not actually a question of scoop size; none of this is at all how the ocean works: water seeks low points, evaporation and rainfall, this isn't going to work. So too with the question at hand.

Concur on the witch density. Time to get on our arguing pants.

So can the pearl-clutchers.

I don't think they can; I mean, there's no individual person, it's a massively-distributed network representing the top 60-70% of power, wealth and influence across both tribes. I think the social consensus is too strong, and the benefit sufficiently hypothetical, that it's simply a bad choice. I agree that bullies should be defied. I do not think beating their knuckles with my nose is the way to do it.

There is no chance that using the word in question will damage the taboo against it. Nor will larger-scale attempts to damage the taboo be seen as a positive action. Nor will making a fight of it actually undermine the power of the bullies in any way. They can do this; pretending they can't isn't resistance, it's stupidity. They are not imposing a rule arbitrarily, but rather exploiting a rule that came about for good reasons: Slavery, Jim Crow, the actual legacy of actual racism. That reality is where they're getting most of the power in this instance. It's a kill-zone, so why walk into it?

If they said it's bad to spray-paint swastikas on synagogues or wear white sheets and pointy hoods in public, is it "giving in" to not do those things either? I mean, it's just shapes and clothes, right?

If there were an actual benefit to mentioning the word, I'd retract my argument. I don't see one, because I think mentioning it has downsides, and I don't see any actual upsides.

I generally agree with your position here, but I'd argue for one particular exception: when making a precise argument that fuzzed mentioning will muddy, and in particular, when quoting someone else for accuracy. If you're going to attribute a string in quotes to someone else, be clear and exact in what was said.

I may have missed a valid explanation somewhere along the line, but how are we defining "witches", exactly?

Witches in this community's context are racists, sexists, bigots, etc. The kind of people who really do want the freedom to publicly declare their hatred for others.

You have to remember that this entire space is descended from SSC, which was very much a light-blue space in a deep-blue sea. There, people shared a clear view that bigotry was evil and its servants were likewise. Hence, they are witches.

Witches in this community's context are include racists, sexists, bigots, etc. The kind of people who really do want the freedom to publicly declare their hatred for others.

Witches in this community's context are just people with whom members of the blue tribe are embarrassed to be associated, which is a much larger set than you describe. The ur-example is people who want the freedom to publicly declare their love for others rather than their hatred...

What is gained by saying it?

Nothing is gained or lost by saying it.

The frame of the arguments as a whole are lost by not saying it in a mention context. You are arguing inside of the frame of those who see no distinction between use and mention. And in my eyes not respecting that distinction is witch behavior. Just a witch from a different school of the Dark Arts than the one you are scared of.

Nothing is gained or lost by saying it.

Others differ, and judge accordingly. I want to talk to those others about matters of import, and that is going to be difficult enough with the opinions I actually hold. Why make it harder by violating taboos for no actual benefit? I'm here to have conversations with people I disagree with. Those conversations actually benefit me. Misspelling "naggers" does not.

To a first approximation, everyone has taboos. I can accept that some rare, uncanny individuals are sufficiently... outlier... that they honestly don't, but this seems more like a disability than a superpower from where I'm sitting. It doesn't enable conversation in any way that I see. It doesn't gain knowledge or grow understanding. Those are the things I'm here for, so I'm going to argue that it's a net-negative, and self-censoring, while a bit silly, is still the superior play. Some might see this as abdication to Blue dominance. I think that is silly, and is more an appeal to magical words than any self-censorship argument ever could be.

It's not brave. It doesn't make a point. no one's impressed. We've all heard the arguments for and against for decades. I'm quite comfortable predicting that the mods here aren't going to ban mentions, so there's no inherent slippery slope argument greater than the implicit one from attempting communication across a steadily-widening tribal divide. All there is is what you want to do, and why.

What is gained by censoring it? It's just letters arranged in a particular order, they can't hurt you. Treating words as though there mere utterance (even when just mentioning them) somehow causes harm is quasi-religious and stupid.

A counter point would be that we are supposed to write as if everyone is reading and we WANT them to read and take part. Given the term in question it is likely some people reading are likely to be upset or offended by it. If it is necessary to be used specifically for the post in question that should probably take precedence, but if everyone knows what you mean using the censored version, then that is a consideration worth thinking about also.

People who do not believe in the use/mention distinction are still people that we want to read here because they are a subset of everyone.

What's the limiting principle for this? Lots of people can be upset or offended by all sorts of things.

What if I find it offensive and upsetting when people censor words instead of spelling them out?

Then f**k you.

You're trying to be too clever by half. Yes, I get what you're doing here, and it's still not the kind of post we are going to tolerate.

That is why I said it is a balance not a mandate. Having said that I suspect there are many more people offended by that particular slur than by writing the asterisks in n****r. From the POV of the point of this space, things that are inflammatory and the like are generally defined by the mods to be the big culture war clashes and that would seem to be a pretty obvious one.

At the end of the day we should be considering the best way to make our argument in the most palatable way we can. For me that is the most important point of this space.

There isn't one. That reality will probably kill this forum long-term, as values-drift makes it completely impossible to communicate effectively across the tribal divide. Some people here regret that reality, and are trying to forestall it as long as possible. Of the actions taken to postpone that eventual tragedy, the one we're discussing here is quite minor.

This is not an arbitrary taboo someone thought up yesterday. It's one of the three or four most deeply cemented taboos our society has.

Words convey meaning, and that meaning cannot be arbitrarily restricted by the person speaking them. When you give a particular selection of letters you're committing yourself not only to the valence you hold, but to the valence everyone who sees them holds for them. Yes, this can and has been weaponized. Yes, that's reasonable grounds for concern. At the same time, we take our opposites as they are, not as we might wish them to be.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221010112542/https://www.androidpolice.com/google-assistant-racial-slur-bleep/

This article popped up on the last android tech news site I still use(d). Someone complained that they could get google-assistant to say the n-word. When we've reached this point, yes, there's something to be gained from reminding people that it's just letters, it has no etymological connection with "niggardly," and entire songs use it as their sole lyric (and performers use it to fuck with fans), and it does not in fact cause people's ears to bleed or small animals to die when spoken.

I don't have to think peoples' ears bleed or small animals die to not use the word in question. I just have to think that it's an ugly word, and that people on the other side are going to take it's use as evidence that they should stop engaging here. And if I'm going to convince people that they should stop engaging here, by God, it's going to be by expressing my actual opinions and values in a calm, thoughtful, well-supported manner backed by a boatload of data, not because of five letters that people keep getting all weird over.

It's not that something is gained by saying it, so much as something is lost by giving the word so much power that we don't even respect the use/mention distinction. I think it's deeply unhealthy to treat the word as some sort of magical incantation that causes harm no matter the context. As such, I agree that we should seek to preserve the use/mention distinction as regards "nigger", or any other obscenities for that matter - not because it's a gain, but because being neurotic about the word is a loss.

It's not that something is gained by saying it, so much as something is lost by giving the word so much power that we don't even respect the use/mention distinction.

I agree that the collapse of the use/mention distinction does in fact cost us all something. I agree that it is silly to treat a word like it blights the lives of anyone who hears it. But the taboo didn't start here, and it won't end here. Mentioning it here in the ghetto doesn't make things any better out there, and it does actually have costs. You may believe that people put off by the word need to grow up, and that if that's the straw on the camel's back that results in them leaving then it's on them. And maybe you're even right. But I actually come here to talk to those people, and if they leave this place is useless to me. The conversations we have here burn a lot of charity, and so increasing the efficiency of that burn is useful. If they're going to be driven out of here, I'd rather they get driven out by a well-supported, evidence-based argument about the actual realities of, say, racial conflict, not by people proving to themselves that they can still type five specific letters without being smote by a vengeful deity.

flouting it provides no benefit that I can see.

I'm sure you're familiar with the recent popular quote:

Thinking about this in the frame of politics is wrong. This is theological. We’re smashing an idol and daring it to strike us down. If it cannot, it is a weak idol. Forbidding the word that begins with the letter between M and O is one of our enemies’ mightiest idols.

Smash their idols. Deface their idols.

Maybe paraphrasing a little there. The big unaddressed challenge is defanging the idol before you desecrate it...

Whose quote is that?

It looks like Jordan Peterson went on a Nietzsche kick while coaching a kritik.

I'm all for smashing idols, if it can be done effectively. You are not going to smash the hard-R idol, because it is a pure-tungsten idol the size of the moon.

On the other hand, this forum is not designed for idol-smashing. The purpose of this space is to discuss the culture war, not wage it. I appreciate that any claim that an action is waging the culture war can generate a mirrored claim that the demand for that action to be restricted is waging the culture war. I submit that in many cases, it's not actually hard to tell which is which if one examines the issue in good faith. The taboo in question is near-universal, and while one tribe has most of the dissenters, they are still rare even within that tribe.

This space is for trading arguments across the tribal divide. Effective, multi-polar internet discussion forums are extremely rare, and this one works because we insist on moderating the form of our speech, while maximizing bandwidth for content. We absolutely taboo words here, and not just scary racist words but any word at all if doing so results in a better discussion. This is not a space for performative "you don't like this word so I'm gonna say it more".

Just say nigger, man. We aren't in reddit any more.

I'd rather not. Besides my own personal distaste for the word, in the interest of not becoming a community of 10,000 witches I'd rather we kept and enforced some societal norms that serve to keep witches out. Among those is a reluctance to use words that serve no purpose other than to shock the conscience. Nothing is gained by saying nigger, whereas demonstrating a community value towards not saying that or other slurs helps to maintain our desire to optimize for light over heat.

I think degradation of the use/mention distinction is unhelpful with regard to “speak clearly”, hence at odds with the purpose of this forum.

I think it is perverse to suggest that obfuscating language is optimising for light.

What changes if you say "n-word" over nigger? We know what you mean, and anyone who doesn't can be have it explained.

MonkeyWithAMachinegun isn't telling you it's optimizing for light, their point is that it serves to keep out the people who aren't interested in productive debate.

But that's not what it does, it doesn't keep out the people who aren't interested in productive debate, it simply declares this topic as out of bounds for debate. "it's cool you're thinking about it, but we have already decided it's not on." "ps the fact that you disagree with me on this tells me that you don't belong here - we're optimising for light, so you can fuck off!"

Truth is light. There is never ever ever a reason to alter a quote, or published work, and the last decade has proven this is no slippery slope, once we started censoring nigger out of quotes and published works, it wasn't long before we were burning books and rewriting history.

If we want to optimise for light - which was definitely part of monkey's point, if not the crux, we should tell people the truth - words have exactly as much power as you give them.

There's no truth being hidden, the mapping from "n-word" or n****r or whatever variant you want is fairly clear - the person means nigger, but just isn't comfortably saying it.

It would be one thing if Monkey said something like "Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam racist stuff". This is vague and doesn't tell us what is actually being said. But I'm not sure what truth you think is being hidden by refusing to write the word out. The word continues to exist, people continue to encounter it, and they come to bear the same mapping eventually.

I do agree that Monkey views the refusal to use it as both optimizing for light and keeping out the undesirables. I re-read the comment.

"You are a nigger" and """he said "nigger" """ are a layer of reference apart.

I don't see any issue at not USING the word, but not MENTIONING is playing by the rules of the people who don't respect the use/mention distinction.

Imo the message is clear "We are level headed enough around here to not piss our pants at the mention of a word".

Just say nigger, man. We aren't in reddit any more.

I think it's improper ask this, and I don't mind the word myself at all. The point was clear, it avoided the silly 'x-word' construct, too much casual use would probably not be beneficial to the forum.

So here's the deal: you're allowed to use the word (in appropriate use/mention contexts), and other people are allowed to not type it out if they're not comfortable doing that. Clear?

As long as I get to assume that when you say "the N-word" you're referring to N*tflix.

Yes and?

Im not allowed to question his discomfort as silliness?

Don't be a jerk about it. If someone types "n*****" and you feel like it's your personal cause to tell people to write "nigger," that's being a jerk. We aren't banning words, but that doesn't mean we want people casually slinging slurs around just to flex. This isn't that kind of board and never has been, on or off reddit.

Honestly, as stupid as it seems, it’s probably best for people in certain careers or social situations to never have those particular semantic synapses fire. The consequences for misspeaking are too bad. If I had a public sector job I would probably refrain from even mentally pronouncing the syllables.

The thing I find interesting (and which Freddie DeBoer has commented on extensively) is the vicious denials that mental illness can in any way be considered a factor when an obviously crazy person starts spouting crazy shit.

The mantra now is "mental illness doesn't do that," but mental illness clearly can make people say and do things they wouldn't if their illness was under control. That doesn't mean Kanye isn't genuinely an antisemite, and we can't know for certain he's having a BPD episode when he tweets stuff like this, but it's clearly another culture war angle. If Kanye started spouting rants about how black people should kill all whites, I suspect the same people outraged now would say "You have to understand that he is mentally ill and his words shouldn't be taken at face value; I hope he gets the help that he needs."

I mean, ‘Jews control the world for (insert nefarious purpose here)’ and ‘Jews aren’t real Jews because black people are instead’ are both beliefs that may be false, but they’re factual beliefs that are expounded by many not-obviously crazy people, so it doesn’t seem like you have to be mentally I’ll to believe them.

One doesn't need to be crazy to believe that some leftist journo guy is a sexual abuser, but that doesn't mean a crazy person can't have that as a crazy-induced/influenced belief. See, for example, Freddie's really bad craziness episode.

And the argument "The CIA/NSA are malicious and spying on everyone" are often expounded by sane people, but "The CIA/NSA put a camera in my bagel" isn't, and "death con 3" seems more the latter than kevin macdonald or ron unz

"death con 3" seems more the latter than kevin macdonald or ron unz

I do not like this argument, it seems to be a middle class view of the world which insists verbal or written errors like death con 3 demonstrate flawed thinking - except when they happen to a middle class person, then they are usually just brushed off as an amusing mistake. "Reverend blue jeans", "curve your enthusiasm" "all intensive purposes" - are these signs of a troubled mind?

Edit: Def con 1 through 5 in common parlance means a full mobilisation of the government's forces, usually against a threat, possibly even resulting in nuclear war. It is a five alarm fire, the rhetorical equivalent of this. In the world of rapping, def means cool, fly, streets ahead. Why would a rapper think the US government is using the word def to refer to a potential nuclear threat and not death, the likely result of a potential nuclear threat?

Sort of true, but not making verbal or textual errors, whether spelling, grammar, or just strangely constructed sentences, are very correlated with being at least moderately intelligent. But yes, good points can be made with poor spelling, and one should still pay attention to those when they exist.

I was just using 'death con 3' as a somewhat funny stand-in for the general incoherence of kanye's statement.

verbal or textual errors, whether spelling, grammar, or just strangely constructed sentences, are very correlated with being at least moderately intelligent.

People make those errors because they are smart?

To me the way some people - especially on social media - tend to focus on screwed up words celebrities have uttered strikes me as similar to someone on reddit dismissing an argument because the arguer spelled a word incorrectly. A way to avoid dealing with the substance of the argument. You didn't mean it that way, and I'm sorry I implied you did, but you have to admit the way you worded it looks similar to "lol he said death con 3, he is as crazy as someone who thinks the cia is bugging their bagel".

I made an edit and fucked it up, I meant people who are smart make fewer errors.

When focused on celebrities it's dumb yeah, but anything focused on celebrities is dumb. But if you're talking to someone in the SSC comments vs someone who's a normal person on facebook, the former makes many, many fewer errors in spelling or sentence construction than the latter.

I'm sorry I implied you did,

oh it doesn't matter at all in that sense, please do imply anything disparaging or demeaning so long as it's correct!

Yeah it is correlated with intelligence - and sanity - but I think the correlation is centred on repeated errors. How many albums has Kanye written now? Albums jam packed with some of the best wordplay this side of the 20th century no less. I know I am predisposed to think well of him, but I think it's more likely this was one of those situations where someone uses a term they have heard but not used before, and fucks it up because they misunderstood some part of it.

Outstanding response to my apology btw, high fives all round.

More comments

"Death con 3" seems deliberate and funny to me. The man clearly has a knack for language, and I think it's more likely this is deliberate.

Sure, but Kanye West is known to be mentally ill, and when he rants about Jews, it's pretty incoherent and crazy-sounding. I'm not saying you have to be crazy to believe this stuff, or that Kanye only believes it because he's crazy, but his specific behaviors do map to someone having bipolar episodes. Which neither excuses nor explains everything he does, but I was pointing out how the current bluecheck party line is basically "No, he's just a bad person, do not even suggest that mental illness might be a factor."

If Kanye started spouting rants about how black people should kill all whites, I suspect the same people outraged now would say "You have to understand that he is mentally ill and his words shouldn't be taken at face value; I hope he gets the help that he needs."

I don't think this is quite right; mental illness wouldn't have to be invoked as an excuse/justification at all. The justification would simply be that this is the righteous anger of a black man born in a White Supremacist society that has oppressed him throughout his life. Sure, he may appear a little overenthusiastic in his quest for justice, but it is not our place to judge the way an oppressed person reacts against his oppressors.

At least, that's my belief based on how I've seen chants like "kill all men," "kill all whites," "kill all cis" supported throughout the years.

His behavior is suggestive of bipolar disorder. There are similarities to Elon musk in this regard, like making grandiose or outlandish statements or stunts (such as Elon's Twitter purchase) and then walking back on them as the dust settles. It's possible they have the same disorder and these acts are part of the manic phase.

Elon didn't walk back his twitter purchase out of bipolarity, he did it because his net worth crashed when the tech stocks did. No mental illness required as an explanation.

In my opinion.

and then demanded Kanye be cancelled

How does the linked tweet demand Kanye be cancelled?

It does do by calling him, ”deeply troubling, dangerous, and antisemitic, period."

At this point I take claims about danger to be implicit calls to cancellation.

I don’t think that makes for a workable definition of cancellation. There has to be a difference from mere criticism; it would be ridiculous to say Kanye’s original comments were cancelling Jews.

I haven't read all the source material here, but I would draw the line between criticising actions ("his comments are deeply troubling") and people ("he is deeply troubling"), where the latter implicitly denies the capacity for sincere repentance that the former leaves open.

Dangerous is flat out lie. And also a mainstay of progressive vocabulary.

The was married to a Kardashian and didn't kill her. He is not dangerous he is a saint.

Kanye, like JK Rowling and Elon Musk, are one of a handful of individuals who seem too big to be cancelled. All of these stunts and the predictable media pearl clutching only boosts his brand and attention as evidenced by social metrics , such as like and comments, on his tweets. Hardly anyone is actually genuinely offended by these tweets or the white lives matter shirt; it's just performance outrage or operant conditioning .

We'll see. I could see this be the start of Kanye's downfall. That said, there is only so far that even celebrities seem to fall. Jake Logan Paul still exists (I think) and they still play MJ on satellite radio.

Kanye, like JK Rowling and Elon Musk, are one of a handful of individuals who seem too big to be cancelled.

It's not a handful of individuals, it's just that the average case never gets noticed.

There are smaller e-celebs like Youtubers, Twitter artists, etc. who do immoral things and then just ride the backlash out, though not necessarily with confidence. The rise of tools that allow these people to control who might influence their audience (Twitter allowing you to control who can respond, Youtube allowing you to remove comments or filter by default) took away the already weakened ability for people to spread negative information about an e-celeb.

I really wouldn't say that people can't spread negative information about e-celebs. You may be saying that "the average case never gets noticed" because these things sometimes do rely on the overall notoriety/notability of a given person or group. For example, I used to, and still do witness the emanations/echoes of drama from fanbases and circles I've never even heard of before (whether that be Friday Night Funkin' mod makers, smaller VTubers I don't follow, or even up-and-coming breakcore artists following in the footsteps of Sewerslvt).

There may be something to the idea of "too small to cancel," if that's what you're getting at, but I don't think that's typically the case. If anything, as per the Streisand Effect, a person trying to curtail the spread of negative information or downplay the severity of allegations can really only ever inflame its spread--or at least, make it more juicy for commentators hungry for clicks. Turning off comments, blocking people, etc., these all only come off as bad optics at best, and confirmation of suspicions at worst.

There are a few who have managed to keep on trucking, to some extent (JonTron still makes videos and his politics don't seem to factor into them, and Bunny_GIF still streams like normal and probably still has some of her long-time fans), but there's probably way more who have either quit or have changed their cultural output considerably.

No, it's not that. The information does get spread, but people just...forget. The internet moves fast and contains tools for allowing e-celebs to staunch the flow of harmful information to any followers, new or old.

This, combined with how the internet creates bubbles around each creator that aren't matched irl, means that the people we want most dearly to hear the information (the genuine supporters) are less likely, perhaps incapable of, hearing it. The people who hear the criticisms and the people who watch the e-celeb can easily become 2 separate groups.

That's a valid way of looking at it, but I think you're also forgetting about growth. If a video about drama you started gets ranked high enough on the YT algorithm, that's it, your growth is probably over with, because that's the first thing YouTube's search and recommendations will push people towards.

Growth is important until it isn't. With even a small audience who are willing to pay (and if you get enough followers before you hit drama, you'll probably get this group) or watch ads for you, you can continue on even as your growth is non-existent.

Moreover, Youtube doesn't automatically push drama/controversy videos. By and large, you get the videos you want to watch. Try searching for your favorite creator and see if you get any drama/controversy videos in the top 10 or 20. It's only when you specify you want those videos that you get them.

So the ADL is getting skewered for their usual practice: denouncing people who, uh, defame Jews.

“Hey, this is a bad thing, especially since millions listen to him.”

What were they supposed to say? By throwing their hat in the ring, they’re “proving” his point, never mind the complete lack of calls to action. If they held back, then you have a public figure doing his thing, erasure of norms, and all the usual stuff they nominally exist to oppose.

I’d actually expect worse—staying quiet here would invite the same sort of accusations that the ACLU gets. “You had one job!” The usual suspects here would be griping about how the wokes have even captured the ADL.

It reminds me of calls for Donald Trump to disavow white supremacists. He recognized that the criticism would swing the same whether he accepted the premise or denied all wrongdoing.

What were they supposed to say?

They could have said, "We are taking this opportunity to announce we are shutting down our organization and donating our assets to more deserving charitable organizations."

Now, why would they possibly do that?

To do the work of dismantling their privilege

We must love each other, show affection for each other and unite together in condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence. We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty that bring us together as Americans.

Racism is evil and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs including the KKK, neo Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.

We are a nation founded on the truth, that all of us are created equal. We are equal in the eyes of our creator, we are equal under the law and we are equal under our Constitution.

I don't recognise that quote, who said that?

Given the context it shouldn't be surprising to be Donald J. Trump.

What were they supposed to say? By throwing their hat in the ring, they’re “proving” his point, never mind the complete lack of calls to action. If they held back, then you have a public figure doing his thing, erasure of norms, and all the usual stuff they nominally exist to oppose.

For obvious reasons, Jews are highly sensitive to being accused of conspiratorially controlling others. So they don't want that sort of talk being mainstreamed.

The problem is that they can't stop people from perceiving a prevalence of Jews in some parts of the nation and its institutions. The right thing to do would be to argue that anyone who thinks they've seen the Jews act this way is mistaken and provide the reasoning why, but that's an exhausting prospect - I don't blame anyone for not being willing to do it. But institutions should maybe be held to a higher standard.

So, they've defaulted to declaring that no one is allowed to say it and equated all words about the topic to a metaphorical Nazi McCarthy talking about lists of Jewish infiltrators.

They could pivot, I suppose, but that would require admitting that someone can talk about Jewish influence without being a deliberate agent or useful idiot for the anti-semites.

It reminds me of calls for Donald Trump to disavow white supremacists. He recognized that the criticism would swing the same whether he accepted the premise or denied all wrongdoing.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RGrHF-su9v8 President Trump Condemning White Supremacy Compilation

When black people stray from the path of MLK and into Malcolm X, Farrakhan, and the Nation of Islam, they typically start blaming Jews, rather than 'white' people. The ability for gentiles to distinguish gentile white people from American Jews is basically an cognitohazard for black people. Once they see that roughly half of 'white' people in Hollywood, the media, in the top universities, are Jews, they start to wonder about their own oppression. If Jews, making up roughly 2% of the population, can be so visibly represented, but blacks, who make up 13%, aren't, then is it really the 'white' man, who is also underrepresented, really oppressing them?

Imagine if 30% or more of Hollywood actors, journalists, academics, were Muslims. Or Native Americans. Or gay (though it do feel like that sometimes, lol).

And despite gentile whites being underrepresented in basically all the 'elite' positions (other than politics), the push for diversity comes not at a reduction of Jewish overrepresentation, but by continuing to whittle away at the representation of gentile whites. And gentile white representation is being largely relegated to the white LGBT community.

So it is easy to see how some black people (and white people) get drawn into Jewish conspiracies. And really, if you're fighting for 'equity', that's the group you're going to have to wrestle with.

Anecdotally the white skilled trade class(mostly high IQ but inconsistently or poorly educated) seems really into antisemitic conspiracies at least to the extent of considering it politically incorrect to publicly disagree with them. And they don't have much cultural similarity with blacks, but have similar circumstances in a way.

Please note that Kanye is using double-spaces instead of periods for some reason.

Some phones autocorrect double spaces to period+space. He probably switched to one that didn't do that, and didn't proofread before posting.

The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.

What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."

But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."

What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.

Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.

The onion has always seemed like the last gasp of 2000’s liberalism- generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever. But ymmv.

In recent years being a "2000s liberal" who is "generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever" has been increasingly labeled as right-wing or "right-adjacent" (e.g. Dave Chappelle). The fact that the Onion is able to occupy that space without getting tarred for it is a good sign, I think. Progressive friends of mine who have previously denounced people like Dave Chappelle and who opposed the Musk purchase of Twitter on the grounds that it would result in too much free speech are now sharing this Onion amicus with approval. I've seen literally no criticism of the brief from anyone. It feels like a subtle, yet tangible, vibe shift on free speech.

I think it's an insight most common among comedians that stifling constraints on the breadth of speech hits comedy first and hardest--after all, everyone's most sensitive when it's their own ox being gored. Jerry Seinfeld has been commenting for a few years now that you can't do comedy on college campuses any more. It's good to see that The Onion is showing a higher allegiance to the craft of comedy than their internal political inclinations, at least in this instance.

I'm not sure, I'd lean more towards your optimism being unwarranted. The Onion has fallen far and fast in terms of being an even-handed satire site. The Bablyon Bee and it's solid 6/10 performance should never have been allowed to enter the market at all, much less succeed as much as it has. The only reason it's done so is because the Onion has completely retreated from almost any critique of leftism.

This is what surprised me about the brief. If a "transgressive" comedian like Dave Chapelle or Matt Stone and Trey Parker had filed this amicus brief I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Onion has obediently toed the party line for quite some time. And the party line has been hostile to full-throated defenses of free speech. The fact that a politically correct institution is defending free speech with no disclaimers is a positive sign.

I don't want to beat the horse too hard but.... I would stop very short of this being a full-throated defense of free speech. It's extremely close to what The Onion does in that this guy ran a parody account. And he's parodying a police department, an organization many writers at The Onion would doubtless have called to be defunded in 2020.

While Mr. Novak's page was overall pretty neutral, it still had a leftist tinge (though it's been hard to find great screengrabs etc.)

All I'm saying is that leftist institutions are very capable of crying "Free Speech" when it suits them, that's not a different behavior than anything we've seen the past 12 years.

I take your point, but can you think of any examples in the past couple of years of a politically correct organization putting out a statement defending free speech without some kind of caveat like "...but that doesn't mean freedom from consequences" or "...but we also acknowledge that free speech has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression." I can't think of any examples besides this one. I certainly can't think of any other examples that included a statement like "the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant."

Have you seen Babylon Bee's video satire "Californians move to Texas"? I had to pause the video at several points because I was laughing so hard. It's become a serial now. Here, enjoy it for yourself.

I actually do think the Bee is funnier than The Onion in average. There's a lot of good stuff there and they switch hit plenty, but I do miss bush-era Onion.

At this point, I think a lot of people miss Bush-era anything cultural. Or, at least, I do. (Consider the "Wake up, bro, it's 2006/7/8/9" meme.)

Alternative take: the left really does defend free speech when government is the one being mean.

On the other hand, I remember the Obama-era IRS persecuting the Tea Party. Can't seem to remember anyone on the left complaining.

How so, exactly?

The Tea Party was a grassroots movement that coalesced mostly in response to the economic crisis in 2008 and the US gov't response of bailouts to various entities. It grew over the course of 2009 and 2010 on a general platform of no new taxes and debt/deficit/spending reduction (originally an American Revolution reference, TEA became "Taxed Enough Already"). Probably best known for its opposition to Obamacare, and a significant contributor to the Republican wave election of 2010. At the time, it was practically unique in being a right-aligned popular protest movement (and, famously, known for leaving its protest sites cleaner than when the protesters arrived). While members of the movement had individual political views that were broadly conservative-ish, the movement as a whole was strictly focused on taxation and fiscal responsibility issues--it did not have a social policy platform.

In any case, if you're going to go from public rallies in parks to any sort of real political impact, you need organization and fundraising with an eye to electing friendly candidates for office. That means setting up 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s with the IRS. With Lois Lerner on point, the IRS went to work trying to choke off the movement financially, by a combination of sitting on applications without movement for months at a time, making periodic records demands that escalated to ludicrous levels of invasiveness, leaking donor information to hostile third-parties, etc.

The Tea Party didn't last much longer, though a couple of the orgs created acquired grifters and continued on, zombie-fashion, for another year or two after 2010. A lot of the original support for Trump's candidacy in 2015-2016 came from veterans of the Tea Party who were less inclined to politeness the second time around.

In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html

This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.

I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not sure. I would guess the cocktail is different—I didn’t see anything about potassium for animals—but I don’t think I can confirm without a lot of bleak reading.

For fairness’ sake, I have seen both yes and no argued for human pain. By all accounts it seems to beat electrocution.

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

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

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

I think they just want to oppose executions with any and every legal argument they can make without risking their lawyers' law licenses. It just happens that changing the status quo increases the surface area for legal challenge.

They don't. They want less executions total. The problem is that the tug-of-war can result in bizarre things on the ground as what gets done is what's easiest to defend (rather than what is best).

That said, IIRC there are some places that have stopped using LI entirely because the anti-execution lobby managed to get literally every pharmaceutical manufacturer to cease selling to prisons. It's not solely a "status quo is god" thing.

I'm not really sold on the DP in first-world countries myself, at least as a coercive measure. Lifers should definitely get the option, though.

They seem to be painless. Speaking for fairly direct personal experience, you're essentially put to sleep, and then your heart stops. Direct witness reported seeing no distress (witness to Canadian euthanasia administrant).

As I understand the arguments, lethal injection is only painful and unreliable when used for executions. When the same chemical is used for good lethal injections a moral-ionic bond flips and makes it painless and humane.

Once I started noticing things like this, it became impossible to stop.

I don't understand why we suck so much at killing people in humane and dignified ways.

Why the fuck are we messing with chemicals and gas and electricity and whatever random stupid things when firing squads have existed for centuries and are reliable, quick, inexpensive and painless?

Is it because people want a more presentable corpse? Do people hate martial aesthetics? Is it too much fun coming up with new ways of executing people using the latest gizmos of science?

Some effect similar to the euphemism treadmill, perhaps? No matter what method you use, that method will steadily lose favour due to it being associated with killing, so you keep inventing new ones to shed the old emotional baggage.

Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.

Honestly I'm confused why a bolt gun or some sort of pneumatic guillotine isn't used. Latter is literally impossible to fuck up if you put enough PSI behind a heavy enough blade.

Sure, from the moment you cut the head it's irreversible (maybe technically not quite, given cryonics...).

As a subject, I'd prefer something that disintegrates the actual neural network than letting it die from blood loss.

Firing squads are messy and easy to screw up. The guillotine is quick and reliable, but even messier.

Firing squads are more troublesome than you’d expect.

To avoid disfigurement due to multiple shots to the head, the shooters are typically instructed to aim at the heart, sometimes aided by a paper or cloth target.

We abhor a mess, and anything that can be perceived as undignified. There’s also an impact on the executioner(s). We want the criminal gone, but we’d prefer not to do it.

Why the fuck are we messing with chemicals and gas and electricity and whatever random stupid things when firing squads have existed for centuries and are reliable, quick, inexpensive and painless?

Are you sure death (ceasing to exist) is swift-enough following a bullet in the brain? Frankly, I'd feel more comfortable speeding up to 200km/h and hitting a tree.

I've come to view the physical pain of suicide as a feature rather than a bug due to its deterrent effect. You have to really, really want it, and I think that's a good thing. But ODing on fentanyl seems... well, not fun, but better than most other methods.

If we're taking for granted it can be done outside I'm not sure what exactly the difference between the top and bottom of this slope is.

When a society does not have medically-assisted euthanasia, the implied goals of the society are to improve people's situations so that they don't want to kill themselves. The goal will not succeed for everyone. But there's less of a, "Don't like it? Then quit" attitude.

Countries with ubiquitous medically-assisted euthanasia seem to have determined that in a lot of situations people should just quit instead of receive support or help. For example in Canada people are being euthanized because they are disabled and are not receiving the financial support they need, or they are unable to see loved ones due to Covid precautions. Patients have recorded hospital staff pushing assisted-suicide against their express wishes.

These people might be making the rational best decision for themselves at the individual level, but society might be failing them overall. When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.

When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.

Doesn't that require assuming that society doesn't prefer trying to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems? I doubt anyone who favors euthanasia in these circumstances is any less eager to find nonlethal solutions than people who oppose euthanasia.

This is intuitively correct. The kind of personality that goes into the helping professions are generally not indifferent go f*** yourself types.

Well they're not at first.

Do you know many nurses, firefighters, medical practitioners, etc? There's definitely a lot that do it for altruistic reasons, but you'll also find a lot of people who become extremely jaded and detached. And probably by necessity, as seing people hurt all day can destroy your mind if you don't put some barriers up.

But were it true that the care takers are always the caring people manifest, we wouldn't have so many instances of neglect and malpractice.

I understand there are some aesthetic issues, especially with the actual transition from no-euthanasia to yes-euthanasia but I can't imagine that if we had always had it as an option that we'd seriously considered rescinding the option. Hospital staff pushing it is a whole other thing, I would certainly not want it incentivized in any way. Nature and society have always failed people and always will, we have to organize what we can around that possibility. The OP isn't an example of something society seems able to fix, despite much effort we cannot reverse this person's trauma, I think we should try but I also think we should try developing FTL travel and cold fusion but support other sources of transportation and energy production in the meantime.

For example in Canada people are being euthanized because they are disabled and are not receiving the financial support they need,

This is sorta misleading .From what i gather from the article, Canada's healthcare system is so bad that a handful of people are choosing euthaniza, not that they are being killed against their will or to save costs. It shows how despite how much people complain about healthcare costs in the US, which is an understandable complaint, things could still be so much worse.

In countries without Euthanasia, people being denied access to medical treatment leads to dissent, disagreement and debate over policy, and potentially, the policy being changed in future. Seemingly, in countries with Euthanasia, it (at least in this example) leads to suicides. Not all pressure valves are good. Euthanasia permitting greater misrule as angry people instead become dead people is a plausible problem.

I think our current governments would euthanise a lot more than just the elderly if they could.

In some ways it's a higher lift to jump through the bureaucratic hoops to get the state to sanction your death, in some ways it's a higher to off yourself personally. But you don't have a principal-agent problem if you're the one killing yourself. Besides, that option can't be legislated away. Not sure how I'd feel if it could.

The thing is, depression is often a result of thinking too much. The more you think about reality, the more depressed you get, because reality is extremely depressing, we are a convolution of dust floating forever through an uncaring and unending universe of chaotic stupidity, hurting others and being hurt simply by existing. Or maybe it's a result of thinking more than usual, but not quite enough to be happy about your situation. Either way, it's generally not stupid people who get depressed, exceptions like me set aside, and so while I definitely think everyone should be allowed to choose how they live (or don't) their lives, I think promoting that idea is the absolute dumbest thing we could do about it. Attempts at suicide maybe don't need to be punished, but they should certainly not be state sanctioned - not for the person who attempted it, but for everyone else yearning for an end to the misery circus.

I agree with you (except for the parts where you imply that reality is unbearably dismal). It seems like a lot of people conceive of suicide as a rational decision that one makes when the expected value of future pain exceeds the expected value of future pleasure. If that were true, suicides wouldn't spike in response to a suicide being reported and made salient by the popular press (the Werther Effect).

Suicide certainly involves some degree of ennui or internal torment, in the trivial sense that no one would kill themselves if everything is absolutely awesome, but every normal life involves plenty of ennui and internal torment.

More common as a cause is people spending too much time contemplating suicide, thinking through the mechanics of it, and elaborating philosophical justifications for it. I think people talk themselves into it, and that doing so is a more proximate cause of suicide than the absolute degree of anguish they are experiencing. I think it's literally a memetic hazard.

And having the state procure the suicide validates that choice, makes it more salient, makes it part of the marketplace of respectable choices that individuals make.

its not necessarily about the state though, it should be allowed for a private business to offer, even suggest, euthanasia to people. if more people end up killing themselves than otherwise would, its not a problem because there was no coercion involved, and you can not determine for other people what is good for them, because pleasure and pain can not be measured.

She tried committing suicide twice and failed. Suicide isn't difficult. A couple helium balloons and she'd have had a painless death. Maybe she wasn't intelligent enough to use google? Maybe she wasn't rational enough? Or.. maybe she was crying out for help, but kept getting the wrong answer. Maybe, deep down inside, she hoped that the 'official' route would have some actual pushback. We'll never know.

I have a strong suspicion that this woman is dead because we live in a society where we put victims on a pedestal. She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide. This likely happened when someone pushed back on her just a bit. And then she got more and more attention, and it became a shield. For awhile. But how long can you really put up with someone like that? So she does it again. And eventually she's led down this path, having been rewarded every step of the way for being a victim. Maybe she saw this as the ultimate reward. The pinnacle of victimhood.

Who knows, I'm probably wrong.

Or.. maybe she was crying out for help,

What does this term mean? Is it intended to attribute any form of intent to her actions, as if 'some part of' her wants to be put into psychiatric care or weekly therapy? The rest seems to imply so. But what does that mean? Doesn't it make much more sense to say - she's just messed up and acting rather incoherently for various reasons, alienation from modern life, no coherent will or desire, etc, so even in 'committing suicide' she has no particular reason to actually kill herself but appear like it.

Like, can someone actually make an argument that the average suicidal person is, in any sense, doing a 'cry for help'? Why would that be true?

Or does it just mean 'she is doing a bad thing, and therefore we should help her, metaphorically'? In which case, what's the point of calling it a 'cry for help'?

Clearly her dying was dumb, and the people who 'assisted it' were dumb to do so, but she doesn't need to be, in some claimed sense, "actually seeking for inpatient psychiatric care, really, she's consenting i can just intuit it", but rather just doing something dumb.

She became a burden. And she could recognize this. But she's basically been trained to see victimhood as a way to get attention. So she does a cry for help and has a lame attempt at suicide

This is where people usually go "what? you're saying she committed suicide because she wanted attention? that's cruel" when I've seen others make my point above in the past. And it's a terrible argument, something can seem mean and be true, but ... is it true? Attempting suicide 'for attention' can happen in some sense, but filing the paperwork for state-assisted euthanasia seems like a remarkably bad way of getting attention. As does suicide in general, honestly.

She was a legitimate victim, and that led to heaps of attention and sympathy and pity from people around her. They likely did everything for her. Her PTSD became an excuse for everything. Soon people got tired of feeding into her victimhood. She became a burden. And she could recognize this.

But presumably during all of this, she had a job, friends, activities other than the PTSD thing, where he was getting 'attention' of sorts. What happened to those? If she lost them due to the PTSD, then ... maybe the suicide was related to what caused that and not seeking attention. And if not, then how does on get to a position where one attempts suicide for attention but still has other stuff going on in life? It makes sense if there are other primary causes, but not like this.

Even if 'cry for help' just means 'she wanted friends and attention and the only way she could get that was to commit suicide', that doesn't really seem plausible, and makes even less sense when 'help' just means therapy/hospitalization. But 'wanted friends and attention' doesn't make sense as a significant explanation for most suicides (noting the obvious selection bias, everyone I know of who's committed suicide had lots of friends and regularly talked with many), so...

Suicide isn't difficult

Neither is basic bodybuilding/fitness, and yet many people fail to do it even when they express a desire to be fit. Concluding, by some "revealed preference" sophistry, that they don't "actually" want to be fit is stupid in my very humble opinion. They want to be fit. They simply don't have the willpower to follow through. Those are different things.

Suicide takes less than 1 second of action, and zero persistence through pain or discomfort. It is closer to watching tv than bodybuilding. If you told me you badly wanted to watch tv, but a tv was in the other room and you simply lacked the will to walk in there and turn it on I absolutely would question the depth of your desire to watch tv.

But she knew the path she was on was going to lead to hear death. At least in Canada, they ask you again before giving the final lethal injection, warning you there is no going back after it.

It seems she did successfully commit suicide, and in a way with a lot less terror than jumping off a bridge. Maybe (seriously) we should make people face that terror before they commit suicide (is that what you're proposing? "Show you really want it -- cut your hand off to prove it."), but I don't think so, personally.

Seems a fitting illustration of my earlier comment that mentioned the recurring theme of suicidality of leftism and endless, unquestioning affirmation. If you would affirm and aid a teenage girl in cutting her breasts off, why not aid her in committing suicide? Who is to say her desire is invalid? She is just speaking her truth.

In discussing transgenderism in teenage girls, such as in Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, analogies to other forms of self mutilation like cutting and anorexia are frequently brought up. To those (such as myself) that question gender affirming care, there is the fear that we are effectively engaging in cutting-affirming care. I can easily imagine a future with suicide-affirming “care” for teenagers being the logical endpoint. I can even imagine the arguments like “They are going to commit suicide anyway, you might as well make it legal and as painless as possible” (see: abortion and drug arguments)

Who knows, we could live long enough to see the full inversion: if we don't let her commit suicide, she might go trans!

Maybe that seems far-fetched, but we're already transing the gay kids. The LGBTQIA+++ revolution eventually eats its own. Only a matter of time till we add a D for death-inclined or something and tell the trans to check their privilege.

Well, easily 99%+ of liberals, leftists, etc I'm aware of don't endorse voluntary suicide, and vehemently oppose it at that. It hurts them! They also dislike anorexia, cutting, etc.

Does “voluntary suicide” have a different meaning than euthanasia in your mind? Because euthanasia is becoming legal thanks to liberal support in much of the western world fast. Even if most normie liberals would probably feel emotionally uncomfortable with this specific case of a young healthy female (homosapien brains are wired to protect and cherish this exact group of people after all), they wouldn’t be able to come up with a legal and philosophical framework that actually disallowed even this specific instance.

If your deeply ingrained philosophical beliefs in liberalism keep ending up in outcomes that makes you uncomfortable emotionally in a human level but you can’t act against the situation due to the said belief, then the philosophical belief (ie liberalism) is the direct cause here and should be examined.

a young healthy female

She was not healthy. She had severe PTSD. A panel of doctors concluded that it was untreatable and severe enough that suicide is a reasonable choice.

If she wasn't mentally healthy, how can she consent to kill herself?

Or did the doctors decide for her? That's even worse. We're getting into Aktion T4 territory here.

It's amazing the way this blew past all the worst dystopian fantasies of the alarmists in only a few years.

Nobody thought it would be this bad, and now nobody cares. Talk about a summary of this whole century so far.

I mean some people were predicting it, most of them religious. This decade has humbled the atheist in me. They clearly knew something that I did not.

It is uncanny how right even the strawmen were.

How right were the strawmen? Taking the linked graphic way too seriously, I think it's clear that the strawman is supposed to be an assertion of a causal relationship, right? Not just the bare "if X then Y", which is vacuously true if Y is something guaranteed to happen eventually, like a plague, or teachers being dumb.

My scoring would be:

  • Various plagues. Partial credit here: it's possible that modern acceptance of gay (relationships/marriage/whatever) exacerbated Monkeypox. (The counterargument is that removing stigma allows Public Health Inc to intervene more effectively. And also that the continent on which Monkeypox is most prevalent is... not famously accepting of gay anything.) There's nothing resembling a causal relationship with COVID though, and since that one's the main reason "plagues" are on our minds these days, only partial credit. Also I'm being generous by interpreting "plague" literally and ignoring the "locusts and frogs" thing.

  • The terrorists will win. Trying to be charitable, our (U.S.) horrid withdrawal from Kabul was a "win" for the terrorists. I'm not clever enough to construct a causal path from gay marriage to that, though. No points.

  • Third world war. Again being charitable, we have an elevated risk of a third world war today. I can think of possible causal paths, but none that I can unironically believe, so no points here either.

  • Schools will begin to teach... First, I have to be extremely charitable in ignoring the obvious ways in which the statement "schools are teaching..." is at best grotesquely misleading. I think the sensible reading of this strawman is not "married gay people will force schools to..." but rather a sort of slippery slope. I think it's true that there's a slope there, and it was slippery, but it's also true that once we hit the "parents don't have the right to a say in what their kids are taught" level, it became an excellent electoral strategy to run against this stuff. We're not falling into a trough of unbounded stupidity. Nevertheless it is the case that legalizing gay marriage probably made this broad category of thing common, so yes, partial credit here too.

In summary: not very right. With this amount of stretching, I can give any terrible theory partial credit. Par for the course for strawmen, but let's not give credit where it ain't due.

I must say I find more telling the way you feel the need to refute a strawman than the content of the argument.

I mean look at your response.

One is a "yes, but you're not thinking of it for the right reasons". Given mindreading is void of content, this reduces to yes.

Two is weirdly overlooking how the US spent large amounts of ressources trying to convince Afghans to adopt Californian morality, gay acceptance very much included. Which was never going to work and made any collaboration a purely mercenary affair that collapsed as fast as you would expect. I could go on about this and how the Americans suck at imperialism compared to the Brits (and weirdly failed in Afghanistan for very similar reasons).

Three is certainly dubious, unless you fix the strawman and change gay marriage for "cede more terrain to progressive politics" and then it's unambiguous that the insane zeal for Ukraine as the new current thing is not coming from nowhere. But strictly speaking it hasn't happened and wouldn't happen because of that.

Four is the really outrageous one, since the strawman formulation, despite being a very strong claim to make, is literally true and accurate, and all you find to spin it is "yes but some people still oppose it" which frankly is ridiculous.

Overall, for something literally created to deform and discredit conservative arguments, I think that's a impressively good score. I wouldn't start betting money on reverse-progressive-memes, but it certainly bolsters the thesis that the conservatives of yore were at least directionnally accurate.

Well, now I feel bad. My initial reply was dishonest, in that I did not accurately represent my thoughts on the matter. I attempted to construct a maximally charitable interpretation, as well as blindly accept almost-certainly-false factual claims. I wanted the comment to be "fun". In light of your reply---certainly not in the same spirit!---I regret this. Let me attempt to rectify the mistake, being both more honest and more literal:

The first is plainly false. There have not been plagues; there's been a plague (involving no frogs or locusts!). The transmission of that plague (COVID) is not facilitated by anything related to gay marriage. There's been one other disease, of minor import, whose origins lie before the introduction of gay marriage, and in a continent that contains exactly one country to have legalized same-sex marriage (out of 54). The effects of this disease have been minimal in the U.S.; it less qualifies as a "plague" than the common cold. (That was the point of my comment that you asserted was "mind-reading", by the way: that monkeypox is not actually a thing to deserve the name "plague", it only seems that way because the media is going through some sort of perverse "pandemic withdrawal". Thanks for that particularly uncharitable interpretation.)

The second is likewise absurd. Gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. several years after it became obvious that American ventures in the middle east were an enormous, largely unnecessary, resource sink. "Terrorist victories caused gay marriage" is more likely to be a defensible position here.

The third... shit, I already used the word "absurd". Let's go with "risible" this time around. WWIII hasn't happened. The zeal for Ukraine is shared by many countries that don't share the U.S.'s laws on same-sex relationships. For instance, Ukraine. Less glibly, say, Italy. Moreover, the assertion of a general pattern "left wins -> left becomes more active" (relevant both here and for the next point) is probably untrue. The greatest expression of leftist zeal in recent times came after a loss (2016), not a win.

The fourth is just an obvious M&B (which makes it the best claim so far!). The motte is "we managed to find O(1) instances of teachers doing bad things" (at least one of whom got sent to jail for it). The bailey is "this is happening at a large fraction of schools". This particular M&B is enabled by the standard linguistic ambiguity in sentences of the form "[broad class of things without quantifier] [predicate]". This isn't even an interesting M&B.

The best that can be said about these arguments is that, among the obviously untrue claims, they contain claims that are less obviously untrue, and even occasionally claims that have not yet been decisively proven untrue.


Look, none of this is surprising or interesting. An absurd strawman argument turned out to be low-quality: who could have guessed! As you hinted, nothing said here could affect an underlying debate over the consequences of legalizing SSM. But suggesting, for rhetorical effect, that "even the strawman was right", isn't going to lead to truth unless there's a non-deranged argument that the strawman was actually right. At best, you have to abandon the claim in a hurry when called on it; more often, you end up doing what you just did, and attempting to defend claims like "gay marriage caused WWIII".

I kinda want to dig on (4) because I think your view of the situation is not accurate and the promotion of promiscuity and alternative sexual identities isn't at all dog bites man but very much institutional.

But I'll agree with you that this whole frame is a waste of our time unless we go back to discussing actual non broken arguments instead of evaluating how terrible they have to be and still be accurate to be meaningful.

Two is weirdly overlooking how the US spent large amounts of ressources trying to convince Afghans to adopt Californian morality, gay acceptance very much included.

How much did they spend? I don't think the Americans ever tried to make Afghanistan into a progressive utopia. They just wanted a more-or-less stable country with a more-or-less functional government that didn't host terrorists.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan – that's the US-backed government, not the Taliban – had a constitution stating that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam". I don't recall the US ever asking them even to make a secular constitution, let alone legalize same-sex marriage.

Agree. Plagues: happen every hundred years at least for all of human history, covid was a very minor plague in comparison, monkeypox too, both were much better than AIDS or smallpox. Terrorists: terrorist have been winning for much of the past hundred years, again, no change. Third world war: ... these have also been constantly happening for the past hundred years, not causal. Schools teach: I don't think explicit homosexual sex is taught in any significant number of american schools.

Healthcare-assisted euthanasia is a poor example of right- ideas being correct, anyway. For starters, it's very uncommon, and even moreso for people who don't have terminal diseases / are old. And - innocent, weak people die all the time because of the state, says leftists. "people should have to work to make food" is reactionary tinged. Is it bad when a homeless person starves because the state didn't give them housing and welfare? What about when someone dies of some rare cancer "because" the state didn't give them the $500k experimental treatment? And those happen way, way more! It's not a very close comparison, but the much higher frequency of the latter, and the fact that in both cases, the end is 'innocent exploited person dies'...

Whereas something like low TFR, casual sex above having children, pointless simulacra consumer media culture, slave morality and last man, those are large-scale claims about society that every person is claimed to personally experience, and are thus much more important.

Largely agreed. I could still be swayed on euthanasia worries; I'm not sure why, but somehow it seems particularly bad to kill somebody and call it kindness. I haven't thought about it carefully enough to have proper thoughts though.

What does "last man" refer to? Not familiar with the phrase.

Nietzche's last man.

Seeking comfort, simple pleasure, comfort, and above all avoiding suffering.

"The last man's first appearance is in "Zarathustra's Prologue". According to Nietzsche, the last man is the goal that modern society and Western civilization have apparently set for themselves. After having unsuccessfully attempted to get the populace to accept the Übermensch as the goal of society, Zarathustra confronts them with a goal so disgusting that he assumes that it will revolt them – a culture which seeks only passive comfort and routine, avoiding everything that could potentially bring risk, pain, or disappointment.[1] Zarathustra fails in this attempt, and instead of repelling and manipulating the populace into pursuing the goal of the Übermensch, the populace take Zarathustra literally and choose the "disgusting" goal of becoming the last men. This decision leaves Zarathustra disheartened and disappointed."

covid was a very minor plague in comparison

As an actual disease, sure. In terms of economic, lifestyle and cultural consequences I'd argue it got inflated into one of the biggest ever

"people should have to work to make food" is reactionary tinged.

"He who does not work, neither shall he eat." -- Stalin. Also Lenin (Vladimir, not John). Incorporated into the Soviet Constitution, for what that was worth. Real reactionary, that bunch.

(it's from 2 Thessalonians; maybe that makes it reactionary regardless of its later uses?)

"It's not going to suck itself"

The worst dystopian fantasy is something akin to Aktion T4.

This is shitty but it's no Aktion T4.

Wait, why is this (particularly) bad?

First, under normal conditions, I don’t know who would have a better claim to knowing if her life was worth living. Of course, wanting to die is not normal, and the fact she expressed that at all is decent license to distrust her evaluation.

Assume she was wrong, and that she was due for a miraculous recovery in June, followed by a life of bliss. What level of responsibility do we owe to get her there? A positive good which can only be achieved through outside intervention strikes me not as obligatory, but supererogatory.

The balance is only further towards allowing euthanasia if we grant that she might have been right or not recovered. So long as she wasn’t pressured into it, I don’t see how this is worse than a more traditional suicide.

why

Life is sacred and any normalization of death as a process of society is evil.

"Oh but maybe it's okay this time". Maybe it is, but once the exception goes through the system, once it's institutionalized that killing is maybe okay in any circumstance that isn't extremely rigorously defined, horror awaits. If anything is a slippery slope worth protecting ourselves against, killing people is. We should know this from experience by now.

supererogatory

The very idea is nonsense or at best the description of nonsensical ethical frameworks. It is your duty to do good.

Assuming you're not religious, what does scared mean to you in this context?

There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.

But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.

There's plenty on nonreligious metaphysical reasons to value existence. Chiefly that you can't value things if you don't exist.

But in more utilitarian terms, any undermining of the value of life make you a possible victim. It could be me or my loved ones being gauded into suicide, and I want society to be constructed on a way that makes that unlikely enough.

Rejecting the value of individual's freedom to die also makes you a possible victim.

MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), also known as Miguel, is the earliest executable image of a human brain

In 2049 it became known that MMAcevedo was being widely shared and experimented upon without Acevedo's permission. Acevedo's attempts to curtail this proliferation had the opposite of the intended effect. A series of landmark U.S. court decisions found that Acevedo did not have the right to control how his brain image was used, with the result that MMAcevedo is now by far the most widely distributed, frequently copied, and closely analysed human brain image.

Acevedo died from coronary heart failure in 2073 at the age of 62. It is estimated that copies of MMAcevedo have lived a combined total of more than 152,000,000,000 subjective years in emulation. If illicit, modified copies of MMAcevedo are counted, this figure increases by an order of magnitude.

MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.


As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour.

MMAcevedo's demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload's cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary. This reduces the necessary computational load required in fast-forwarding the upload through a cooperation protocol, with the result that the MMAcevedo duty cycle is typically 99.4% on suitable workloads, a mark unmatched by all but a few other known uploads.

In current times, MMAcevedo still finds extensive use in research, including, increasingly, historical and linguistics research. In industry, MMAcevedo is generally considered to be obsolete, due to its inappropriate skill set, demanding operational requirements and age. Despite this, MMAcevedo is still extremely popular for tasks of all kinds, due to its free availability, agreeable demeanour and well-understood behaviour. It is estimated that between 6,500,000 and 10,000,000 instances of MMAcevedo are running at any given moment in time.

Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.

You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.

Does future you have any children in this scenario?

If you don't have to live for your future self, to whom you owe the most out of anyone, why would you have to live for future children?

I don't agree with the premise of any temporal snapshot raising to the level of identity anyways when it's intrinsically transient in my opinion.

But glossing over the metaphysics, if we're speaking in terms of obligation and duty, whether we're part of the great chain of being in real terms or not seems important.

People endure all sorts of suffering for their kids, real or imagined.

The median human life for most of history probably included at least, in total, the equivalent of a week of awful torture, tbh. And they, in turn, would describe the life of a wild animal, not dissimilar to a far ancestor, as torture.

I should hope that the median human life does not involve begging for death! Intensity and locality of suffering has its own quality.

I actually agree with your hypothetical, but choosing to kill yourself or choosing not to stop a fellow prisoner from killing himself is very different from society validating your choice and killing you itself.

If this girl had slit her own wrists in the bathtub or whatever, I think many of us would view it as a tragedy but none of us would view it as an outrage. The fact that the state did it is a necessary component of the fact pattern.

Also -- being tortured in a Russian prison is much worse than being mentally ill. Being under the physical control of another intelligent adversary intent on maximizing your suffering is an exotic state, morally, and I think your analogy trades on that exoticism in order to reach the conclusion that you want. If someone broke a bone and had to go through a week of painful recovery -- equally painful to the Russian torture -- but was expected to be fine after that, then I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances, even if we would sympathize with the suicidal tortured prisoner.

I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances

I'm not sure if I do. Though of course, if this is the only option on offer, we-as-society should figure out a way to do better.

As someone who leans libertarian I people should be allowed to end their lives but the story is disturbing and sad though. A waste of life.

Let's suppose for a moment that this is a completely rational decision (a whole question in itself which the Liberal framework is ill equipped to deal with).

It's clear that the right to destroy one's own inalienable property exists. But Liberalism is silent on what the good life is, so you can't really use it to evaluate whether killing yourself is a good idea or not.

Best you can say seems to be against this particular scheme, as institutionalizing death means one more possible avenue of control. After all the libertarian answer is already provided by cheap and widely available means of suicide.

I don't see why it being rational has anything to do with it. Preferring Mahler to Brahms, or Elvis to either is not a rational choice, but I'm free to listen to whichever I irrationally prefer provided I'm not blasting it so loudly I'm causing a nuisance to my neighbors.

I'm not using reason to mean intelligence or careful reasoning here, but sanity.

I also lean libertarian and I am against euthanasia.

The society and the state simply cannot be trusted these matters, and the added convenience of legalised euthanasia isn’t worth their involvement. There are going to be all kinds of ugly things from states covering up murders, to vulnerable people being pressured towards it by shrinks or activists or whoever else who profits from this.

If someone really wants to end their life they should procure a gun and do it themselves.

I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task, and only to the extent of their actual physical inability. For example, quadriplegics who can still move their heads get a setup where they get a button that they can press that will inject them with lethal drugs, people who have enough motor control to inject themselves could have the drug delivered to their beds, so that they can pull it into syringe and inject themselves, and people who are “just” depressed, but otherwise physically fine, get no help whatsoever.

I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it, and if they can’t bring themselves to do it, this strongly suggests that the person is not actually fully into this. The person in question has, allegedly, two prior suicide attempts. Normally, most suicide attempts from young women are just performative attempts at getting attention, so they are not meant to succeed, but here it is more likely to have just been ineptness at getting things done, given that you do not sign on a professional to do the job done if it’s just performative. Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.

This way, while healthy young people killing themselves will still be a tragedy, at least nobody will be complicit in this. Euthanizing healthy young people due to “mental health trauma” seems akin to me to deciding that giving heroin addicts as much heroin as they want is actually a perfectly good solution to the problem of heroin addiction, or, at even more basic level, giving a child a candy any time they ask for one. Indulging someone else’s wishes is not always good for them, and killing a healthy young person is definitely a central example. We should inculcate virtues, instead of maximizing expressed utility functions.

Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.

I have to assume the chosen method included all 3 of these. It has the additional burden on another pair of hands, true, but it would satisfy those criteria.

You’re missing the entire point. If she simply killed herself, we wouldn’t be discussing it here. Instead, she said that she want to be killed, the system ground its gears, approved her killing, and as a result someone killed her. This is fundamentally different, because it affirms her choice and, in fact, means that people are complicit in the tragedy. That’s the opposite of virtuous.

I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it

Jeez, call me old fashioned but I think we should stop them, involuntarily commit them and treat their mental illness.

Have you read Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay? When your remaining lifespan is expected negative value, suicide is sane.

The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd. I'm entirely supportive of assisted suicide for the terminally ill and those with untreatable severe chronic pain, but this ain't it.

Which just goes to show that all slopes are slippery, the center cannot hold, etc, etc.

Barbers can cut your hair but we don't let them chop off your limbs, it's legal to eat pork but not legal to eat human flesh, etc. Not all slopes are slippery.

Give it a few years...

The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd.

There are people who assert that suicide is always wrong. I think this argument is "haggling over the price."

Ok, you win. Suicide should be forbidden under all circumstances, because otherwise people will use any exception you grant, to argue for allowing young adults and teenagers to kill themselves.

Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.

I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn, I'm saying there's two different arguments here. And for that matter, this argument still implies the line - presumably you would not say something like "people wil use any exception to argue for allowing decrepit Alzheimers patients to kill themselves." So your line is still there; you cannot construct a principled argument by saying "otherwise, the unprincipled line would be violated."

Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.

Please do. It would a lot more honest conversation than assuring people this totally isn't a slippery slope, and that the exception should be allowed out of compassion.

I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn

"Haggling over the price" implies that the principle is invalid. I reject that view

So your line is already implied

No, it just implies one case is worse than the other, but both are over the line.

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I remember when liberals accused George W. Bush of haggling over the price because he favored the death penalty but not abortion. Of course you'll probably consider that a principled distinction, but price-haggling always feels principled when it's our team, doesn't it?

No I don't, there's nothing wrong with price-haggling. You'll just use different arguments for it.

I think the kid with PTSD and the decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee are comparable. You think they're qualitatively different. Fine, make your case, or at least describe it with more detail than "beyond absurd". At least specify some sort of metric.You can't just construct reference classes by appeal to absurdity.

Some people think that eating meat is always wrong. If you think it's okay to eat pork but not to eat human flesh, are you "haggling over the price"? I'm not sure what purpose your comment serves.

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The process and values involved in that 'treatment' are awful though. If you take someone borderline suicidal and put them in temporary-jail with a bunch of differently insane people - maybe they even become friends, as in the OP - is that really going to help? Pair that with the frequent overuse of antipsychotics. And the life-denying nature of most of the 'therapy' treatments - convincing someone that, actually, self-care via burgers and 'live, laugh, love' is the true purpose in life to avert suicide isn't that much better when the person was, in part, depressed due to the initial (true) hollowness of that.

(Obviously, the person who euthanized themselves in the OP didn't have anything resembling a good reason to do so. But grandparent's suggestion that 'if you want to kill yourself, just do it' has some merit - one's instinctive desire not to is just evolutionary knowledge of how useful & powerful life is, and abandoning that should require understanding and confronting that personally, at least)

The process and values involved in that 'treatment' are awful though. If you take someone borderline suicidal and put them in temporary-jail with a bunch of differently insane people - maybe they even become friends, as in the OP - is that really going to help?

Yes, of course it's going to help when the alternative is just to watch them finish dying in the first place.

I am not suicidal, but I would definitely kill myself over being subjected to involuntary confinement and medication by the current medical system, unless I agreed with their understanding of what was wrong with me and what they planned to do about it. The casual cruelty that happens in environments like that is worse than I imagined, and once I saw it for myself, the necessity of escaping that fate at all costs became very clear. To be completely dehumanized is a fate worse than death.

Well the idea is that they'd prevent you from killing yourself while you were committed, and once you were released, you'd no longer face that dilemma.

If we know how to treat it - surely. If the treatment is "put them on hard drugs to make them a functional vegetable" - maybe not. Some old fashioned solutions are out of fashion for a reason. I agree that we should try hard, but there should be a limit of how hard. I have a feeling in this case the limit hasn't been reached, but it should exist. There should be an exit, just not to be used outside of most dire circumstances.

I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task

What about the people who have to clean up the bodies?

Yeah, everyone gets to keep their hands clean if that person who jumped from a skyscraper did it w/o any help, but now we've got possibly traumatized pedestrians who just saw a body smush itself into the ground and a pile of flesh, blood, and guts to clean off the streets. Assisted suicide avoids those and doesn't make as much of a mess.

If you were anti-suicide, I would get your view, because minimizing the cost of a suicide from the public eye actively harms your goal, but you're not anti-suicide.

I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Killing yourself gruesomely in public is deplorable, same as defecating in public. We manage to have people avoid doing the latter, we can also have them avoid the former. Just because you want to kill yourself doesn’t mean that you’re released from all societal expectations as to your behavior. For example, a mother of small children killing herself to escape from her psychological or mental issues is despicable: you are expected to provide for your children without shirking the responsibility.

That I allow people killing themselves doesn’t mean I condone that decision in every circumstance. My view is rather (and this is also a response to /u/VelveteenAmbush) that suicide is in some situations not a sign of mental illness, but instead a quite reasonable decision given the circumstances. If a 20-something girl tries to off herself as a result of “psychological trauma”, yeah, I think she most likely should be involuntarily committed. However, keeping elderly, sickly and suffering people alive despite their wishes is pointless and disrespectful.

I don't think people are defecating in the streets over their trauma. In any case, my point stands - making it so that suicide attemptors must do everything themselves means that most are probably going to undergo messy deaths. Even in the case of ODing on drugs and alcohol or whatever leaves a body to be discovered, and who knows how long that takes. If you allowed people to go to, for example, a euthanasia clinic, you ensure that we know about it ASAP and that there's no rotting body left for someone to unfortunately chance upon.

Frankly, I don’t find this whole angle of “who sees the body” to be very interesting. It is highly unlikely that this will affect my thinking about the issue in any significant manner. Finding someone’s body is normal, if not exactly everyday part of human existence. I don’t think that the issue of dealing with dead bodies should be the driving factor in the matter.

I don't think this is a good topic to discuss because there is no objective way to look at things. You value human life very highly, I value a reduction in suffering as higher. This is all subjective opinion, you can't quantify either of those 2 things in a scientific way.

So any possible arguments are going to exist merely to manipulate observers into this or that camp.

What even is this comment? The vast majority of the things we discuss in this forum have no objective answer. That’s what makes them interesting, and why they are able to sustain extensive conversation. If there was an objective way to look at things, you could just look it up and there wouldn’t be much to discuss. It seems like your comment is a fully-general argument against most of what this community is all about.

Eh, agree-disagree. It could be that many things have objective answers that are just very hard to figure out. I think a lot of people arguing here act under the premise that they can convince people, which only works if they're right and others are wrong.

I've been a silent part of this forum (and its predecessor) from pretty much its inception. And up to this point, I just saw it as a funny comedy kind of thing. "Haha, what will the silly clowns in the US do next?", "Oh, that black rapper said what about the jews?" etc.

But this is not comedy. This is something involving real people. I've been living under the weight of suicidal depression for the past 15 years. This girl? That could have been me. It could have been my sister. There is a non-zero number of people who have been forcefully put into insane asylums. And that decision, to put someone into a room with nothing to do for years or decades (torture imo) or euthanasia is mostly decided by this kind of discussion. An entirely subjective discussion based on nothing concrete that will impact real people in real and horrible ways.

You're familiar with the witch trials, right? This is that level of discussion, with that level of consequences. I don't want to be a part of this.

At a certain level, everything is political, and everything political has real-world consequences. That you thought culture war was just silly entertainment about clowns in the US until it became about something that touches you personally says more about you than about how "real" this particular issue is compared to anything else. Someone could just as easily say about discussions of HBD or Holocaust denial or homelessness or crime and law enforcement or immigration or trans issues or Presidential elections or gun control or drug addiction: "Hey man, this is serious, this involves real people, you shouldn't be talking about this like it's just an entirely subjective discussion when it will impact real people in real and horrible ways!"

I think most people here see things like the chilling effects of speech, involvement in wars, trans issues, etc, etc, as things that aren't comedy and involve real people. I appreciate that when it's you it feels different, that discussing your issue as opposed to a faraway one feels real and horrible.

Still, 'an entirely subjective discussion based on nothing concrete that will impact real people in real and horrible ways' is far more far-reaching than you'd think, and there are large numbers of people who have their lives impacted by issues that seem like silly culture-war bullshit. I'm sorry it's causing you misery, and for what it's worth I hope you don't feel compelled to keep answering if it's going to cause you pain.

The post you are replying to did note that things could have changed i.e. it is not obvious that this action reduced suffering.

Just a test: If it were a young man rather than a young woman, would you also be this strongly revolted?

(Matter of fact, I had a sort of similar case in my circle of acquaintances, with no legal euthanasia. He wound up successfully self-terminating after two failed attempts, and the social circle consensus seemed to be that it was sad how hard psychiatry had failed him but the act was ultimately utility-maximising. But then, he had actually befriended a female mirror image of the same age during one of his involuntary commitments, and people were very reluctant to inform her about his success lest it encourage her to do the same.)

I would be. I mean, some illnesses can be intolerable, and gender has nothing to do with it, but I still feel very hard to believe nothing could be done to fix it, given the circumstances as described (no physical injury, youth, etc.) and can't shake the feeling that somehow this outcome is too normalized for comfort. Maybe it wasn't fixable, and maybe there was really nothing to be done, but somehow the tone of all messages feels like it's some normal, maybe even good outcome and not a terrible failure. I don't think it should feel normal.

I would be for all the reasons /u/Tophattingson outlined above. We essentially went through the same moral reasoning over the years.

So...a vague sense that it would be abused, plus a burning passion to talk about lockdownism?

That's incredibly uncharitable. My read is more like:

  1. Assisted euthanasia was agitated for to give the terminally-ill a release from their pain, and to stop the medical system from torturing octogenarians to keep them breathing. In an astonishingly short period of time, we now have a twentysomething-year-old killing herself in Belgium as well as the Canadian medical system offering suicide to a traumatized veteran. (I'm no "thank you for your service"-guy, but I see something truly appalling about doing that to a man who offered himself up to his nation's military.)

  2. Public health authorities have proven themselves so consistently late and/or wrong about nearly everything over the past three years that it is now extremely hard to have any trust in any sort of public-facing expert.

Don't forget that they were also offering it to his kids, who would presumably be traumatized by their father's death. That was the part that truly had American British and Canadian Veterans organizations all up in arms.

The moment it was used for non-terminally I’ll patients, it stopped being vague.

To quote 'A man for all seasons', 'Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!'

I feel like doing a minor victory lap, gruesome as it is, as I was one of those whom viewed euthanasia permissible, but the last thing I want is to have state-sponsored euthanasia in place. (And, yes, before you ask, I've yet to square that hole as to allow for such a thing. The world isn't perfect, sadly.)

Every time I see this advocated or hearing for Op's scenario, I can't help but envision myself at 75 going in for a minor medical procedure only to have the working professional suggest I commit state-sponsored self-die. I'd rather just skip that entire possibly, thanks.

Every time I see this advocated or hearing for Op's scenario, I can't help but envision myself at 75 going in for a minor medical procedure only to have the working professional suggest I commit state-sponsored self-die

Can you expand on this? I don't really have any problem with this, I'd say no.

I can just wordlessly point at the utilization that medical euthanasia has gotten in Canada, as I feel that encapsulates the best example of 'this is what could happen.'

And, yes, my reply would be along the lines of 'Tell you what, Doc, you first, then I'll consider it.'

Flippant commentary aside, I don't want the above scenario to come to the fore because I believe, in order for us to get to this point, several things have gone horribly wrong. I don't want the option to be on the table to begin with. I don't want a scenario where I'm incommunicado for whatever reason, and the doctor kindly suggests to my family and/or next of kin 'Well, we could do this...'

I'm sure I could paint what-ifs till the day was over, and still not realize the worst of what could occur. Personally, I'd just rather nip the matter in the bud and make sure it could never happen to start.

FWIW, a good friend had a relative do this in Canada, and while painful, it seemed to be a comparatively "positive" experience. They were terminally ill with cancer, however. I still consider a good thing they didn't need to suffer longer than they chose to.

Canada is unique among countries that have legalized euthanasia in permitting doctors to bring up the possibility to patients who haven't even mentioned it. In other countries, the patient must bring it up first, unprompted.

In other words, this particular failure mode is trivially preventable.

What are you testing for? It's natural to be more protective of women. Call it "women are wonderful", "white knight" or whatever, we subconsciously know that the well-being and safety of the (young) women of our tribe/community is crucial for its continued existence, via childbirth and raising families.

This doesn't mean that young men checking out isn't a tragedy. But it's different.

I think most people who support euthanasia have an ideal case in mind: the person is not going to survive much longer, they're in constant, terrible pain, and so it's a mercy to allow them to end their lives.

This is similar to animal euthanasia. If a dog's existence consists entirely of only suffering, most people seem to think it's a mercy to end its life, even if we have no way to know if that's what the dog wants.

However, to euthanize a dog who isn't in that state, and hasn't shown itself to be irredeemably dangerous, seems monstrous to most people. Imagine a person who has grown bored of their dog and so kills it.

This seems much closer to the bored-of-my-dog case than the life-is-endless-suffering case.

I have to wonder if this woman would be alive had she been exposed to different ways of thinking about adversity rather than to be medicated so heavily that she complained she couldn't feel anything anymore. It seems the doctors had nothing else to offer her.

What would it take to convince you that she was actually in constant, terrible pain?

It was only two years of alleged mental agony. That's barely enough time to even consider different ways of thinking. The doctors must not have been trying.

After all, there's just no way to ask what the dog wants.

What would it take to convince you

How about her successfully killing herself on her own, for starters?

I mean, didn't she? She used the best tool available. I mean I have great methods in my nightstand, but I'd guess most depressed teenagers in Belgium don't. How does having/lacking the brains or wherewithal to tie knots or acquire pills indicate suffering or lack thereof?

Because if you make something easier, it requires less willpower to do it. I presume @Westerly meant that it would take the greater willpower of following through without easy mode.

I mean, didn't she?

No she didn't. The Belgian medical establishment killed her.

That's not a grammatical or agency distinction we would make in ordinary conversation. I just bought a really nice refrigerator at Home Depot because it was 80% off, but it's too big for the space in our cabinets. So I'll just widen the space by a few inches to make it fit. Except I'm not going to do it myself, because I'm not a cabinetmaker, I'm going to get my friend who is a talented cabinetmaker to come and do it on Saturday. Because he can shrink the offending cabinet by an inch rather than just ripping it out sloppily, which is what I'd have the skill to do. Only a prick trying to make some kind of weird point would object to me saying "I widened the space to make the new fridge fit;" and only an autistic philosophy major would question if I "really" wanted the fridge to begin with if I wasn't willing to go buy a trim nailer and do it myself.

The best method for me to widen the cabinet space isn't a trim nailer and a miter saw, it's another person with professional skills and tools suitable to do a proper job. The best way for her to kill herself wasn't rope or pills, both of which fail or get messy or have various other problems, but to contact and hire professionals who will get the job done cleanly and completely.

Of course, the next objection will be something like "Life is sacred, it's not a fridge, you can't apply the same grammatical or agency standards." But that's just political correctness, no different from feminist claims that "consent" in sexual encounters means something different from "consent" in every other aspect of your life every single day, such that under certain feminist definitions I've probably only consented to like three or four things in my entire life. It's smuggling in contested positions by redefining common-sense terminology.

Most people (and the law) consider it meaningfully different to use a nail gun on a cabinet as opposed to a person. Yes, you can describe "killing a person" and "remodeling a cabinet" as both "tasks that may be more efficiently performed by an expert," but I don't think it takes "political correctness" to say that collapsing the two acts elides an important distinction.

But the argument being made above by /u/westerly here isn't that there is a distinction between homicide and carpentry, it's that failing to do something personally indicates a lack of willingness to do it. That's clearly false in most other usages. It's an attempt to smuggle in the conclusion, that life is sacred and assisted suicide is wrong, by assuming that assisted suicide isn't a method of suicide. In every other case contacting an expert to perform a task properly is as or more indicative of serious desire to perform a task properly than is doing it yourself.

Elsewhere in the thread it's pointed out that many suicide attempts are "cries for attention." But if you were looking for attention you wouldn't contact an expert with a 100% success rate at killing you, you'd pick a method with a lower chance of actually killing you. Which is all of them, really. To my knowledge Euthanasia has never failed to kill someone, while I've heard of methods as "certain" as a shotgun failing and leaving the would-be suicide with half a face. Nothing indicates more seriousness than getting an expert involved who will never fail to kill you once they get started.

To stick with the analogy, I take on little DIY projects for fun as much as to use the thing I'm making afterward, and I'm not too serious about them. When I'm serious about getting something done for use reasons, I contact a professional.

What would it take to convince you that she was actually in constant, terrible pain?

I suppose I'd like to see physiological evidence to corroborate that she was in terrible pain. Like -- actual pain, not just unhappy, per the actual dictionary definition: "physical suffering or discomfort caused by illness or injury."

Physical pain and psychological suffering activate the same brain pathways. Suffering is just one thing with many different flavors. The distinction you're going carries no moral weight.

She was an adult, 23 years old. She was not some nonsentient dog that society grew tired of and discarded with no thought to her desires. I find her decision uncomprehensible, but it was her decision.

, but it was her decision.

Why does this mean anything?

It carefully directs your gaze away from the affirmative decisions everyone else made to assist in killing her, by placing all of the responsibility on the girl herself. Certainly, she made a decision. But so did everyone else involved, and those decisions have independent moral weight.

Who do you think owns your life? Who gets to decide what you do with it?

I can't imagine this argument being persuasive to any but the most extreme libertarian -- the type who thinks that recreational fentanyl, consensual incest and consensual cannibalism should be legal. If that's you, then yeah, you're internally consistent, and I'm not sure what better argument to make against your position other than that your theory permits such self-evidently depraved outcomes as legalizing fentanyl, incest, cannibalism, and the killing of depressed but otherwise healthy 23-year-olds.

recreational fentanyl, consensual incest and consensual cannibalism should be legal

Fentanyl use creates danger for others, heterosexual Incest can have large externalities, I'm indifferent to consensual cannibalism and incest that can't lead to procreation. I don't think I'd want to spend time with anyone who does any of those practices but the second and third one are famously difficult to rationally support taboos. I'm also not an extreme libertarian or even really call myself a libertarian despite liberty being one of my more sensitive political intuitions. I'm perfectly happy to have a large functional state so long as it doesn't do tyranny.

All of these decisions lead to large externalities. If you are willing to infer a state interest in preventing fentanyl use but not suicide, then I think you are just wrestling your putative libertarian framework to fit your object level support for suicide.

People will not try to steal my car radio because society accepts their right to end their life. If you think there are actual material externalities to this then make that case, don't just declare it so.

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As much as suicide does agonize the family you left behind (most of the time) I'll push back on it being like hardcore drug addiction/incest/blahblahblah.

  • There are reduced and finite externalities. First, you stop being a direct burden on anyone else on the day of your death, and then eventually your loss fades into the background for those who cared about you. Compare that with the unrelenting toll a fentanyl addict takes on everyone around them.

  • As /u/DaseIndustriesLtd put it: The state is "not entitled to deny people their exit rights". This isn't just a libertarian fantasy principle. The ability to opt out of existence should be table stakes for most moralities. Nobody would begrudge someone being trapped in an inescapable room and being raped day in and day out for committing suicide. Your personal line will be different from almost anyone else's.

Should we discourage suicide? Of course. 2 years of treatment seems about right to me in terms of a support system putting up a fight with the individual and making the barrier to entry sufficiently high. The bulk of these responses seem to be that she was too young and could have gotten better. Sure, maybe. But that's the individual's decision and judgment, and 23 is old enough to be a mostly formed person.

I find the arguments against Euthanasia because COVID has exposed the average government's ability and willingness to coerce suicide far more convincing than "Suicide is Wrong"

First, you stop being a direct burden on anyone else on the day of your death

I've been personally burdened by the natural deaths of two family members, who had done adequate planning as far as wills and such, but there's still a lot of things that have to be taken care of. I've also observed another family that devolved into petty fighting among siblings over a meager inheritance.

Even a person with no possessions and no next of kin will burden some government worker with their remains unless they die in such a way that a body can't be recovered.

You're sidestepping my point a bit here - finishing up an estate or filing some paperwork is still a task with a specified end date. Compare this to maintaining a family member's drug habit, consistent depression, or financial irresponsibility.

The point is that ceasing to exist has a clearly defined limit on what negative costs you're imposing on the world around you. If suicide therefore doesn't cost anyone else something past a certain point, it's an inalienable right you should retain at all times.

If she's not mentally healthy, it's not "the individual's decision and judgment", because the mental illness impairs her judgment.

The state is "not entitled to deny people their exit rights". This isn't just a libertarian fantasy principle. The ability to opt out of existence should be table stakes for most moralities. Nobody would begrudge someone being trapped in an inescapable room and being raped day in and day out for committing suicide. Your personal line will be different from almost anyone else's.

This is a libertarian fantasy principle. I agree with permitting euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, living with untreatable chronic pain, or severely disabled (e.g. paraplegia and quadraplegia), but extending these edge cases to "anyone who wants to die" is a really fringe libertarian belief. Suicide is possible as a solo act, and the transgressive barrier implicit in the solo act is a useful check on people who would otherwise make the decision too lightly. If we reach a point where suicide is no longer possible as a solo act (quadraplegics, or some sort of post-singularity future where an uploaded mind would require admin access to delete itself) then all of this changes, but as long as people can slit their own wrists in the bathtub, the state and the medical system have no business trying to make it a more desirable option than it already is.

the transgressive barrier implicit in the solo act is a useful check on people who would otherwise make the decision too lightly

To reiterate, I sympathize with the argument that the government can and will encourage suicide, before eventually forcing it. There's so many signals pointing to this - whether it's the inevitable implosion of welfare state pension systems or climate change hysterics that overemphasize individual carbon footprints. From a practical perspective, I have radically altered my priors on state-controlled euthanasia being a "Good Idea".

(quadraplegics, or some sort of post-singularity future where an uploaded mind would require admin access to delete itself)

How are we far from this with modern medicine? People exist in vegetative states for years, bankrupting their families or costing hospitals and insurers millions.

as long as people can slit their own wrists in the bathtub

I think this isn't charitable enough to those who do want to commit suicide. I haven't checked metrics on who regrets committing it vs not, and I do believe that there has to be some barrier to entry. But it's not easy to do far simpler things like dig road rash out of my own skin or cut away lesions. There's a reason why so many people thought it was amazing when that guy sawed off his leg to escape being trapped by a boulder. I do believe that you can absolutely want to commit suicide in a real way but fumble the execution.

I mean, one person suggested black powder pistols? C'mon. I would want to have an extremely high sense of certainty that I wouldn't be signing myself up for even more excruciating pain with whatever method I chose to kill myself. The appeal of having someone ensure this happens correctly I think is natural.

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Why do we stop suicide attempts?

I'm just a horrified atheist in the style of @Tophattingson, but I believe the religious traditions' answer to that is "God". God has a plan for you, and you don't get to duck out of that plan just because you're feeling wretched. Or if you prefer sci-fi, I remember being moved by Col. Graff's line in Ender's Game: "Human beings are free except when humanity needs them."

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Is there a morality external to yourself at all? I don't see how an externally sourced morality jives with total self ownership.

Self ownership is the basis of morality, if you don't freely choose to do something it isn't in the moral plane at all, it's just mechanical motion.

If she owned her life she would have taken it herself. Shanti De Corte did not kill herself the doctor did and while you can argue that he was "preventing further suffering" or "just following orders" but forgive me if those justifications ring a bit hollow.

Oh come now, "Just following orders" given to you by the person you're purportedly harming is not meaningfully similar to carrying out violence against people who have no sayin the orders, that allusion is ridiculous.

Being old enough to remember the original debate back in the late 00s / early 10s, and given how quickly the Euthanasia advocates have transitioned from "You're overreacting, this will only ever be used by the bedridden elderly and terminally ill." to "Why shouldn't we kill a depressed but otherwise healthy 23 year old?" I don't find the allusion "ridiculous" at all.

If depression is sufficient reason to for a doctor to recommend euthanasia, and for a medical board to conclude that, yes this person's death will be a positive benefit to society, why not any other form of disability or mental illness?.

2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.

The way euthanasia has broadened runs disturbingly parallel to the way trans and abortion slid down their respective slopes. Legal euthanasia was legislated on the back of activism asking that terminally-ill old people be allowed a dignified release from unbearable suffering, while they still had their ability to consent. Trans activism used sympathetic cases of deeply dysphoric individuals whose transition alleviated life-long suffering. Abortion activists spoke of desperate young rape victims needing a safe, legal, and rare option for a truly horrible situation.

And now we have young people committing suicide with government blessing, as well as Canada's health system telling a veteran "maybe you should KYS"; irreversible medications, surgeries, and everything you see on LibsOfTikTok pushed with very little care or safeguards; and up-to-birth or even partial-birth abortions. "Oh, that's just the slippery slope fallacy" no longer cuts it with me - I need to see the left make a credible commitment to a limiting principle before I even think about supporting their next cause.

Yeah, I also get annoyed by faux-intellectual references to "the slippery-slope fallacy," as though slippery-slope arguments were categorically fallacious. They are not. Some slippery-slope arguments are well-formed; others are poorly formed. The difference is whether you can describe a causal mechanism where an earlier decision makes one fork of a later decision more likely, and there are many such.

For a comprehensive investigation of slippery-slope arguments, Eugene Volokh wrote this paper.

Using the most sympathetic case in arguments isn't a new tactic, it's older than dirt.

The opposite side of this coin is called "salami tactics".

I'd argue that suicide prohibition and lockdownism are actually quite similar: they both severely curtail individual rights in the name of preventing social harm; they both a contrast themselves against a cruel, stony-hearted, libertarian alternative ('letting Grandma die'); they're both fairly easy to circumvent in isolation, but very difficult to oppose in an organised way. I suspect the fury you feel against the total, arbitrary, capricious power of the medical/state establishment would be very familiar to suicidal people who have been involuntarily committed.

But perhaps this is tangential to your point; truly legal suicide is far from the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia. Still, I'd be surprised if anyone petitioning the Belgian state for euthanasia wouldn't have saved themselves the bother if equivalent means were freely available to them.

Legal suicide indeed isn't the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia.

I see the combination of government being strong enough to engage in systematic torture of the population, as evidenced by lockdowns, and also offering euthanasia to be a uniquely dangerous combination of circumstances. At it's most extreme, consider the practice of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union. Dissidents were classed as mentally ill, with the nonsense-diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". This didn't progress to outright euthanasia as e.g the Nazis did, but if there's no pre-existing barriers to euthanasia, like there is now in places like Canada, it's very easy to see that progression. All this hypothetical government need do to kill a bunch of dissidents is make their lives unliveable with restrictions (such as targeting the unvaccinated with vaccine mandates) cause them severe unhappiness via the circumstances, misdiagnose that as depression rather than the normal affect towards the circumstances, and off them.

This is personal, too. My very vehement disagreement with lockdowns lead some now-former family members (as in, I distanced myself from them in response to this) to falsely accuse me of mental illness because I refused to provide information to a track and trace scheme. I see a concerningly short path from the government legalizing euthanasia to them trying to use it to find some reason to murder people like me.

I wonder how bad her Tinnitus or hearing loss were. I might consider euthanasia if I ended up totally deaf or blind.

Really bad tinnitus is much worse than being just deaf. It's being deaf with infernal ringing going in your ears every moment you're awake and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. People have killed themselves over it.

Is there any progress on treatment actually? I've heard they were some minor successes with CBT for it.

I think it's mostly accepted that there is surprisingly little correlation between severity of tinnitus and its resultant psychological suffering. (Oddly, there is a good correlation between severity and degree of hearing loss. Weird, huh, unless, of course, I am just remembering facts that don't exist, which sometimes happens). So it is not surprising that while there are no drugs or viable candidates that treat tinnitus specifically, general psychopharmacological treatments do help, as well as, as you mentioned, coping strategies etc. Why some (most) people seem not to be particularly bothered by the ringing that drives others to madness, I don't know.

There are many attempts at translational pharmacology (because we have a massive pharmacopoeia, a general understanding of the mechanisms of most drugs, and it is so cheap and safe) and my understanding is that there are lots of drugs that offer very small percentages of patients apparent benefits. Are these all patients of the same type, or is it like antidepressants where trying multiple drugs barely better than placebo additively works pretty well?

Anecdotally, I know someone who swears by Lyrica for it, though it was prescribed for sciatica. I took a few pills during a nasty backache and had no effects at all until maybe four hours later I found myself lost in my own literal backyard, so I can see how it might do the trick in a pinch ...

I suppose the second best investment option for (or from the POV of) sufferers would be for general hearing restoration treatments.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/scheduled-to-die-the-rise-of-canadas

In Canada, they're suiciding people for being blinded in one eye, or just poor. Kids too.

In October 2020, a report stated that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million. Canada will expand the pool to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.”

Am I wrong to think there's just something fundamentally different and more sinister about euthanising someone due to mental rather than physical defects?

It might not be entirely rational - there probably are people who suffer immensely due to mental trauma who actually would be better off ending their lives - but it just feels different. I think what bothers me about it is that it's easy to separate physical disabilities from character flaws, I mean there really is no relation at all, being physically weak has nothing to do with weakness of character.* But it's a lot harder to separate a mental illness from somebody's personality and who they are as a person - if being a sociopath means you're an asshole, okay maybe it's not your fault you're a sociopath but you're still an asshole when you get down to it. I'm still going to judge you for acting like one, and likewise I'll give you credit for exhibiting positive traits associated with sociopathy like bravery. That might be an offensive way to think about mental conditions but I really don't think anyone can claim they're truly able to fully separate the disorder from the person.

So to euthanise somebody for a mental condition comes off to me like you're saying there's something fundamentally wrong with who they are to such an extent that they're better off dead. It feels like a value judgement in a way that euthanising somebody so they don't have to suffer through the final few months of cancer doesn't. It doesn't sit right with me. I mean, the Nazis described mentally ill people they considered unworthy of life as "empty shells of human beings." If you euthanise someone for say, clinical depression, even if you have their consent aren't you basically agreeing that that's what they are?

*Well there are cases in which a person might be injured and become disabled because of a character flaw, or might develop a character flaw because of a physical disability, but you know what I mean. Being in a wheelchair doesn't really say anything about who you are, whereas if you're autistic that's an integral part of your personality.

Am I wrong to think there's just something fundamentally different and more sinister about euthanising someone due to mental rather than physical defects?

It is probably those decades where doctors would shove a hook behind the eyes and swirl it around as a standard cure for anxiety being not too far behind us that is causing such discomfort.

It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/08/canadas-euthanasia-polices-under-scrutiny-as-reports-surface-of-euthanizing-a-man-for-hearing-loss/

I'm generally very supportive of a person's right to do what they want with themselves, including ending their own life. But when I see state-run medical establishment nonchalantly offering it left and right, or according to other reports even strongly suggesting it, it just doesn't feel right. It definitely doesn't feel like "only the most extreme cases".

Some people are suicidal, and this is a nicer and more dignified way to commit suicide. It's easy to support this on generic libertarian or even (trans)humanist grounds; the state and society are, ideally, not entitled to deny people their exit rights.

What's more unpleasant about the situation is that this libertarianism is very skewed by what one could call «Cheems mindset» or perhaps medical ethics. We don't have a legally enshrined freedom of form and being: we have only freedom of diminution, freedom to make yourself something lesser or avoid some medically recognized pain at some cost, rather than modify arbitrarily.

You can get feminizing hormones and antiandrogens much, much easier than you can get T (unless you're an FtM trans with «dysphoria») and HGH. You can get euthanasia but not euphoretics and not any serious research into cognitive enhancement. Some claims to the pressing need to change are recognized and affirmed; others are laughed out of the room (imagine incels petitioning for state-mandated masculinization treatment).

It shows that this isn't really about freedom, but rather about some blind and selective idea of compassion. The sort that's grounded in the notion of humanity which doesn't seek to grow, only to stop suffering. It's not the sort of humanity I want to live together with; hopefully there'll be an answer superior to the euthanasia booth.

This was a triumph.

I'm making a note here:

huge success.

It's hard to overstate

My satisfaction.

Aperture Science.

We do what we must

Because we can.

For the good of all of us.

Except the ones who are dead.

But there's no sense crying

Over every mistake.

You just keep on trying

Till you run out of cake.

And the Science gets done.

And you make a neat gun.

For the people who are

Still alive.

You're on an Internet message board sneering at people for posting on an Internet message board?

This is a low effort retort that contributes nothing.

Yep, my mind immediately jumped to the Trans comparison as well on this one. I think that the medical powers that be have shown over the last few years that they're just not really fit for purpose in terms of properly spelling out the issues at play. I think it's probably a matter of "doing what is best for society", as deemed by elites.

It's worth saying on the T point- there was a video doing the rounds of a 21 year old F2M man speaking to camera about how they were too far gone (too androgenised) to consider detransitioning. Besides the mastectomy (which is actually sort of reversible, same as breast cancer patients), the T had led to insane male pattern baldness (Norwood 5 or so) for a 21 year old. And I suppose the tragedy of the situation was that you think Testosterone->some kind of Adonis, in the eyes of what would have been a teenage girl who felt out of place, but the reality was a small, bald little man-child who wouldn't register as a 4/10 on the attractiveness scale.

Obviously T for Cismen will be different (different starting points), and baldness isn't that big a deal if you're improving muscularity etc. but it was just an example of how this constant fuckery with our bodies usually doesn't match up to expectations, and as someone more used to seeing detransitioning/side effects/unfortunate results of M2F individuals, this was quite sad.

All pretty off topic on Euthanasia I guess, beyond the general principle of "we should try much harder to stop people doing irreversible things to themselves, and we should try harder the more years of life they have left to live (or not) with the consequences".

If we viewed hormone supplementation for men as a worthy goal, presumably we'd make progress on converting manlets to Adonises while minimizing the risk of them ending up as balder manlets. SARMs seem like a promising avenue, selectively increasing muscle mass and bone density but possibly avoiding hair loss and testicular side effects of traditional anabolic steroids. I've little doubt that a fraction of the medical experimentation that has gone into converting penises into ersatz vaginas and vice versa could do wonders to advance our ability to guide natural sexual dimorphism more carefully along its natural path.

This comment is an excellent demonstration that the claims from the anti-trans side of this or that being "natural" or "unnatural", and therefore objectively right or wrong, are just an attempt to rationalize their own completely subjective aesthetic preferences. How do you not see the absurdity in claiming that giving trans people actually natural hormones – ones that actual humans actually have, in nature – is wrong and denying biology, etc., while giving people with body dysmorphia (who are, like trans people, unsatisfied with their "natural" bodies) chemicals that have never existed outside a lab, and are functionally unlike any natural substance, is just "guiding" their body "along its natural path"?

Trans people wouldn't need to be given hormones if they were making them naturally.

The hormones they're being given at least exist naturally in humans. All humans have both estrogen and testosterone. It's just the levels of each being altered in trans people. This is apparently unnatural. But giving people synthetic chemicals that don't exist anywhere in nature is apparently "natural". This is absurd.

Both are unnatural. 'Something is natural' is a pretty shitty argument in general. Gravity is natural too, jumping off a cliff isn't healthy.

How do you not see the absurdity in claiming that giving trans people actually natural hormones – ones that actual humans actually have, in nature – is wrong and denying biology, etc.

I don't think I ever actually claimed that.

while giving people with body dysmorphia (who are, like trans people, unsatisfied with their "natural" bodies) chemicals that have never existed outside a lab, and are functionally unlike any natural substance, is just "guiding" their body "along its natural path"?

Because it is. Wanting to be a more perfectly realized version of the path that nature set you on is normal and even healthy. Wanting to be the other sex is at least severely maladaptive.

arent both behaviors maximally natural just as any behavior, because we and everything we can interact with exists within nature? how do you define natural such that taking gender transition hormones is unnatural while taking hormones as a male to become stronger and more masculine is natural?

No, I don't agree with a definition of natural in which everything that occurs in our universe qualifies equally. But no, I also don't want to go down a rabbithole arguing semantics with you.

but the reality was a small, bald little man-child who wouldn't register as a 4/10 on the attractiveness scale.

Oh man. Wait till they hit 30.

I recently saw this comic posted on a far-left site of a person holding a photo of a young femboy catgirl making a cute face, while looking at the same person at 30, bearded and drinking at the bar in a rumpled jacket and tie, still with the cat ears and tail. Wish I still had the link.

They transitioned from cat to lynx, that's all.

Some people are suicidal, and this is a nicer and more dignified way to commit suicide.

I object to the assumption that making suicide "nicer" is a good thing.

I really don't understand the near-unanimous outrage here. Does no one believe the suffering from a psychiatric condition can be so terrible as to make the person want to die?

Another comment interpreted her two suicide attempts as calls for help or attention. If this were true, would she not have stopped short of actually killing herself in the end?

If euthanasia had been illegal, she would have just committed suicide with a different method – I mean, she clearly wanted to die – and it would have been a brief sentence or two in an article about the terrorist attack. "Shanti De Corte, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was set to testify, but committed suicide after suffering from PTSD following the bombing. She is regarded as the 33rd victim of the attack." or something to that effect.

But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.

And there are others who attempted again and were successful.

Why does everyone here think they know better than the woman herself, a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor, all of whom must have known far more about the case than was shared in this one news article?

know better than the woman herself, a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor,

The woman has been, factually, mentally unwell, so it's not hard to understand why one may think they "know better". If we allow the idea that psychiatric illnesses exist, and some of them may move persons to an action which is not to their best interests, and it is possible to fix these conditions and they should be fixed - which is, admittedly, not an obvious proposition and is fraught with edge cases, but if we still allow it - then the reason for such thinking becomes clear. As for "a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor", unfortunately, many of us observed, some more recently than others, as public figures and medical professionals acted out of considerations other than the best of their patients and the pure factual truth, and there is no reason to assume it could not happen again. Of course, it's not easy to conclusively prove that's what happened in each particular case, but there's nothing outrageous in assuming it might have happened, and "the doctor knows best" not always works, and "government employee knows best" works even less frequently.

I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree, then.

In my view, a panel of doctors, plus a public prosecutor who reviews possible abuses, is sufficient in terms of scrutiny.

Yes, people entrusted with power are sometimes malicious or incompetent, but this argument can be directed at virtually every institution in existence. Unless you have actual evidence of abuse, my priors are firmly on the side of trusting that the people who are familiar with the details and whose job it is to review these cases (and who have years of experience in doing this) have made the right decision.

but this argument can be directed at virtually every institution in existence.

And it should be. If you see something, say something. If something the institution does looks wrong for you, your responsibility, if you ever want to have good (or at least better) institutions, is not to say "well, they are the institutions, they know best" but apply scrutiny to what they do. That's the only way to make sure any institutions work at all for us, and not for their own sake. If you ignore all the evidence of institutional failures, contenting yourself with "well, they have years of experience, surely it's ok somehow in some way unknown to me, just trust the experts and everything will be ok" - nothing will be ok, because there's no motivation for the institutions to serve you - you abdicated all your claims on that.

My point is that, in the absence of actual evidence of institutional failures, we should assume they're working properly. "Something looks wrong" is not evidence. If something does look wrong to someone, they can investigate. Maybe they'll find evidence of wrongdoing, but if they don't find anything after a reasonably thorough investigation, the matter should be dropped. "Something looks wrong" is unfalsifiable.

There's evidence of euthanasia being over-promoted by the same doctors who are supposed to be guardians of it, I posted it on this thread and so did others. So there's definitely not "the absence of actual evidence of institutional failures", quite the contrary.

If something does look wrong to someone, they can investigate.

Not really. Only if someone is a DA or similar person in power, and they have motivation to intervene for some reason. Otherwise, there won't be any investigation at all, let alone "reasonably thorough" one.

"Something looks wrong" is unfalsifiable.

We're not talking here about scientific paper and abstract scientific pursuits, where "we still don't know whether theory X is true or not" is an OK outcome and in general we're fine with waiting for conclusive evidence one way or another. When we're talking about killing people, "you can't scientifically prove there's something wrong here, therefore we're fine to assume it's ok and not knowing one way or another is completely OK too" shouldn't be the bar it has to clear. It should be much, much higher than that. If something looks wrong, there should be an overwhelming and obvious proof it's not, and "if something were wrong, somebody would investigate it" shouldn't cut it too. When we're talking about irreversible actions of this magnitude, we can't approach it in the same way as we manager parking tickets - "this officer has been issuing tickets for 20 years, so if you can't conclusively prove she was wrong, we assume it's ok". We have to erect a higher bar on this.

There's evidence of euthanasia being over-promoted by the same doctors who are supposed to be guardians of it, I posted it on this thread and so did others.

I assume this is the comment to which you are referring. It talks about Canada. As I have noted elsewhere in the thread:

Canada is unique among countries that have legalized euthanasia in permitting doctors to bring up the possibility to patients who haven't even mentioned it. In other countries, the patient must bring it up first, unprompted.

In other words, this particular failure mode is trivially preventable.

And as far I know, this is true for Belgium.

Not really. Only if someone is a DA or similar person in power, and they have motivation to intervene for some reason. Otherwise, there won't be any investigation at all, let alone "reasonably thorough" one.

It is my understanding that in continental European legal systems, public prosecutors don't have any discretion in choosing whether or not to prosecute a certain crime, as American DAs do. Hence, the prosecutor must have investigated the case thoroughly enough to conclude that no crime took place. As I said, this seems like enough scrutiny. If you added, say, an ombudsman who reviews the prosecutor's actions, and they concluded that the prosecutor had done nothing wrong, you could just say the ombudsman is in on it. And this can go on indefinitely, which is why I said the claim was unfalsifiable.

Oh and, I forgot to mention: according to the article, in addition to the panel of doctors and the prosecutor, the woman was "supported by her friends and family" in making the decision. I agree that we have to have a high bar for cases like this; I just think the bar was met in this case.

Public prosecutors do in fact have considerable discretion here in what cases they choose to prosecute. Possibly the most obvious example of this being the decriminalised (but not quite legal) status of cannabis in the Netherlands.

Well said! I think the fact that the victim is so young is a big part of it.

Euthanasia is illegal in Germany, and so people need to go to Switzerland to do it, and it's pretty awful for everyone involved. They still do it. Some really want to, and I have trouble imagining something more that should be your right to decide over than your own death, if you want it (and considerable effort has been made to ensure it's not a passing desire).

If she's mentally unwell, then she's deficiently in no shape to make life or death decisions.

I'm not sure this applies in this situation. It would be different if she had a serious bipolar swing and decided to do this on a whim - instead, we have a clear trail of where her issues began, sufficient evidence to suggest that she's indeed suffering from a severe mental illness, and plenty of time for her to change her mind. Stripping freedoms away from people with mental illness seems like a step backward regardless.

It took some time for me to figure out what bothers me most about this. And it's the smell of cold dispassionate bureaucracy, lawyers, signatures, stamps, database entries. I imagine it was some nurse who administered the lethal injection, passed down the bureaucratic chain of command.

Euthanasia may be sometimes the less bad option, when someone cannot live a life of dignity any more. But it's still a tragedy and the person who puts someone out of their unbearable misery should still feel conflicted. Belgians managed to make this clinical and indirect, decision by committee, hiding behind each other. Instead, the chief bioethicist should have personally injected the poison.

Somehow our modern view of life is that it's merely a vessel for positive emotions and fun. If it doesn't deliver that, then it should be tossed aside. That one's life's purpose is one's own quality of life (and that on the short term, too). That's not the only way to view it. One can also see life as duty, towards a community, towards higher purposes. In this sense, she was wrong to ask for euthanasia as she had the potential ability to do good things in the future.

That life is good is an axiom, I can't argue for it rationally. Not a particular life, but life overall. It's not a statement that everyone's life is enjoyable, it's that life is valued. Other things are downstream from that. It may even be seen as the thing that breaks the symmetry of the antonym pair of good and evil, good is the one which is life affirming, which comes from life and points to life. It's deeper than rationality or religion. It's pre-numerate, it's not about perverse extremes of shutting up and multiplying. It is to be felt and then modulated by the intellect, to see how it works out for a particular situation.

The climate alarmists seem to still have an incling towards this when Greta complains that CO2 producers will ruin the lives of our children. But sooner or later the antinatalist strand will take primacy and the misanthropy will become clearer. "Climate anxiety" is already a thing. Apparently (as mentioned in a motte post) some young adults now even skip work based on their climate anxiety episodes. How long before we hear that euthanasia is a good way to deal with one's climate anxiety? It reduces the carbon footprint after all. If you're white, you also make more space for BIPOC.

Who actually killed this poor girl? The fact that her death was through euthanasia decouples her death from its actual cause, and I think it is important to re-link the two. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and killed instantly, I would say that ISIS killed her. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and bled out a week later, I would say that ISIS killed her. If the girl had been struck by shrapnel and lived, but the shrapnel couldn't be removed and five years later, she dies from shrapnel migrating to her vital organs, would I say that ISIS killed her? Probably. What if she was not struck by shrapnel, suffered for five years and died by her government's hand? Did ISIS still kill her?

Or, you could push the responsibility back the other way, drawing on an idea I saw back on Reddit (posted by @KulakRevolt, maybe?) about the monopoly on violence: if the state claims the monopoly on violence, then it becomes responsible for all violence that it allows to happen within its borders, whether through neglect or incompetence. Under this view, the government killed her by allowing ISIS to perform terror attacks within its borders.

Now I think I've just set up one of those bell curve memes, and I don't know which segment I agree with.

In this case, it's not complicated: the person who killed her was the doctor or nurse who administered the lethal injection.

Now, that person could claim that he wasn't acting in his personal capacity, but as a representative of a larger system providing a service--"just following orders," you might say--and therefore responsibility ought to be shared more broadly, and I agree! Everyone else involved was a co-conspirator with some level of culpability, but this sharing of responsibility is not zero-sum--it communicates without dilution.

I'll give the pro-choice crowd credit for logical consistency, if we accept that there's nothing wrong with killing a feotus or infant on a whim, and that euthanizing the elderly is just good economic sense I don't see how anyone could object to killing a traumatized 23 year old in the name of preventing future suffering.