domain:drrollergator.substack.com
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4m ago
One can jump off a bridge instantly on a whim, and of the people who have done it and survived many said they regretted it instantly.
Probably because jumping off a bridge is awesome; it's the largest adrenaline rush I've had bar none including skydiving. Seems likely to (at least temporarily) break a suicidal mindset right there. I doubt the APA would approve bungi jumping even as an experimental therapy though.
Both of my neighbors are doctors and both are on their 2nd marriages with younger women they met at work. The surgeon had a huge new sprawling estate built to house not only his current wife and 4 young children, but also his 3 adult children from his first marriage who refuse to move out. His house actually has separate living rooms, kitchen, garages etc for both 'halves' of his family.
edit - neither are nurses. While it is common for doctors to "trade up" to younger women, the doctors and nurses I've spoken with (my wife, sister in law, and nephew are all nurses), say doctor/nurse affairs seldom lead to long term relationships as they all kind of hate doctors generally, as a class of people, and nurses personalities are often not pliant enough for the doctor's liking. Instead both of my neighbors married admin staff of some sort, one was an insurance liaison at the hospital, the other worked in patient intake.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10m ago
I would say that in my own life, 5% of deaths "could have been timed better" sounds about right. Not necessarily a case of some exotic terminal illness, but cascading old age concerns. There's a clear point of no return, I could see someone pulling the trigger on it.
cjet79
10m ago
But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates.
That was what I said above. I never disputed that guns increase suicides.
Tractatus
15m ago
"The doctors did the right thing in helping a 29 year old woman with depression kill herself" is quite literally the slippery slope. That's what we're talking about when we call something a slippery slope, that social norms will change so radically, and people will just be all "actually, that's a good thing we changed that!"
Throwaway05
17m ago
To be clear I am specifically talking about the evidence based way in which increased access to firearms increases suicides. I do not support restricting gun rights in the general population on this grounds, but it is still a real problem.
You can acknowledge that guns have an impact on suicides and say this is not a reason to restrict rights.
At the close of the hearing, the suppression court granted the motion to suppress the statements Stevens-Reddy made after he invoked his right to counsel. It found that his invocation of the right to counsel was clear and unequivocal; his words after Detective Gallagher told him his attorney would be unavailable were equivocal; and his interaction with detectives after he asked for an attorney and was not re-Mirandized “may have been voluntary, but it certainly was not knowing and it was not an intelligent waiver. ”
Too retarded to understand his rights, courts give him a mulligan anyways. So many things I could say. Ah well.
Eliza
24m ago
Most of these claims arise in the rare periods of lucidity that bless/curse the severely demented. You get a few good minutes or hours to realize how your brain is rotting, often before your body has, and you realize how awful things have become. Then you slide back into the vague half-life of semi-consciousness, and I hope your mind is choosing to devote its last dregs of cognition to happier memories, instead of the living hell you currently dwell in.
I sometimes think that our approach to euthanasia is stymied by fundamental incompatibilities and contradictions with post-enlightenment principles. We highly prize autonomy and regard as foundational the need for consent. But the ones most in need of euthanasia are those who have declined to the point they no longer meaningfully can consent. And I find it somewhat cruel to imagine a person struggling with a terminal illness or other severe mental or physical suffering, being additionally burdened with having to take the sole decision of if and when to end their life. What a huge question to have to grapple with at the lowest point in your life.
I think there is a serious and tragic problem here; but we lack a suitable cultural programming to adequately solve it. Our focus on preservation of life to the exclusion of all else creates outcomes where people spend months or years existing, suffering, without hope of recovery. An insistence on the inviolable importance of consent means many of those who arguably need it most cannot access euthanasia under any system we could invent. And a belief that any such avenue must be systematized and accountable will create a system overloaded with bureaucracy, hoops to jump through and people covering their asses at every turn in case they go to jail. None of it will be the best interests of the patient.
Jiro
26m ago
As people have pointed out, the crime rate of people who legally carry is extremely low. Your scary scenarios do not describe reality.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
27m ago
My impression is that Hawaiian nationalism is only for indigenous Hawaiians, who are <20% of the population - in other words Hawaii isn't plausibly a nation with its current demographics.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
33m ago
I agree that the Confederacy could have been a nation-state if it had successfully seceded, but it didn't, and I don't see a separate nation there in 2025 - the whole point of the "Red Tribe" meme is that the White South now sees its own grievances against the DamnYankees as a part of a broader small-town vs big-city and periphery vs core rebellion against a corrupt establishment. To its supporters, that rebellion speaks for, and deserves the support of, all patriotic Americans. It doesn't want a separate country, it wants to fix the one that exists.
Jiro
36m ago
Come on. You've never heard of literacy tests and grandfather clauses used to keep black people from voting?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
41m ago
But I don't just give it a prompt! 80% of the text is mine, at the absolute bare minimum. I'd say 90% is closer to the average. That is me attempting to estimate raw words, the bulk of the 10% is alternative phrasing.
My usual practice is to write a draft, which I would normally consider feature complete. I feed it into several models at the same time, and ask them to act as an editor.
(If this was Pre-LLM era, I would probably be continously updating the post for hours. I still do, but the need to fix typos and grammatical inconsistencies is decreased by me being a better writer in general, and of course, the LLMs. All I'm doing is frontloading the work)
I also, simultaneously, feed them into a more powerful reasoning model such as o3 or Gemini 2.5 Pro for the purposes of noting any flaws in reasoning. They are very good at finding reasoning flaws, less so at catching errors in citations. Still worth using.
I then carefully compare the differences between my raw output and what they suggest. Is there a particular angle they consider insightful? I might elaborate on that. Would this turn of phrase be an improvement over what I originally wrote?
Those are targeted, bounded changes. They are minimal changes. They don't even save me any time, in fact, the whole process probably takes more time than just letting it rip. If I was just uncriticially ripping off an LLM, the it would be a miracle if every link in the previous post worked, let alone said what I claim they said.
Does this dilute my authorial voice? To a degree, yes, but I personally prefer (90% SMH and 10% half a dozen different LLMs) to pure SMH, and certainly better than any individual LLM.
I consider this a very different kettle of fish to people who simply type in a claim into ChatGPT and ask it to justify it to save themselves the hassle of having to write or think. self_made_human is the real value add. The LLMs are a team of very cheap but absent-minded editors and research interns who occasionally have something of minor interest to add.
Why do you think I bothered to show that I have independently come up with all the thoughts and opinions expressed in this essay? I literally did all of that years ago, and in some cases, I forgot I had done the exact same thing. I could have easily just copied most of that and gotten the bulk of the essay out of it.
At the end of the day, my anger is mostly directed at the lazy slobs who shovel out actual slop and ruin the reputation of a perfectly good tool. At the end of the day, it is your perogative to downweight my effort-posts because a coterie of LLMs helped me dissect and polish them. I am disappointed, but I suppose I understand.
Ioper
43m ago
It sound tiny to me. The median lifespan is like 83, presumably some percent of these people want help dying.
hydroacetylene
44m ago
The 2nd amendment as written requires a physical fitness test to own a gun.
Grant_us_eyes
45m ago
People seem to trip over the Constitution a fair bit, operating under the assumption that it somehow developed in a vacuum. But if you look at the political science of the time, no, there was a lot of robust discussion involving all points of the Constitution, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers being just a small part of a larger landscape.
Several politicians of the time make no bones about how the 2nd should be interpreted - that all the terrible implements of the soldier and warfare should belong to all the citizens, barring a few government officials.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
I think Swiss gun ownership is referring to privately held guns, not state militia armories.
hydroacetylene
48m ago
This is not 1955. Both left and right wing Americans would do well to remember that.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
50m ago
I'm not necessarily pro suicide, but I think the idea that pursuing bureaucratic rather than kinetic means to suicide indicates a lack of seriousness is backwards.
One can jump off a bridge instantly on a whim, and of the people who have done it and survived many said they regretted it instantly.
Where euthanasia has a 100% success rate, and requires serious intent over an extended period of time.
Interesting idea for an RCT: Some portion of euthanasia subjects are head faked, put under anesthesia, then when they wake up you ask them if they regretted their decision. If they still want to die you kill them on the second try.
hydroacetylene
53m ago
Britain is not in the EU. It was the biggest British news story of the 2010’s.
magicalkittycat
54m ago
It's not really possible to know too well, Trump just shits out words and claims at random. But decent chance it's real and he just said it was because he was briefed quite recently. Would also explain the pivot on Russia if he thought they were losers for such a drastic ratio.
But even if he was making it up and it was lower, even half with 7:1 ratio would still be fantastic.
anti_dan
1hr ago
If your behavior is indistinguishable on the exterior from the actions of a cackling demon? Yes
If she wants to kill herself that's one thing. She didn't need assistance. She was young and healthy and could've just hung herself, or jumped off a tall building, or in front of a train. The fact that she couldn't muster up the will to do this, honestly makes me question how suicidal she really was in the first place. After all, thousands of people in the Netherlands do this every year. But unlike the bedridden elderly people that are usually taken as an example in these cases, she certainly always had the option.
What I really think we shouldn't be doing as a society is validating or normalizing such a decision. That is not about the details her specific case, but about the example that's set for others. It doesn't even matter if her mental suffering truly were unbearable in some manner. Ultimately only she knows her inner mental state. To an outside observer, she was young and healthy, and she had people who cared about her. (We should all be so lucky!) And we're going to just kill her on request? That shouldn't be normal. It's what's observed from the outside that sets the norm.
More specifically, I would say that those Texans who see themselves as a nation would include most of Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico in that separate nationhood. Maybe parts of Louisiana, Colorado, Arkansas as well- but definitely not all or even most. Alaskans would not have this idea of honorary Alaskan-ness for anyone else. Assimilating requires moving to Alaska.
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