domain:lesswrong.com
- A person is being investigated. Twelve minutes into a "custodial" (at the police station) interview (with Miranda rights having been read to the suspect), the following exchange takes place.
Suspect: Would I be able to call my lawyer?
Detective 1: You can, yeah.
Suspect: I got, uh, Lou Savino.
Detective 1: Do you want to continue this interview or what do you want to do?
Suspect: I want to continue it but I want my lawyer present.
Detective 1: Ok. So then we have to end the interview.
Suspect: You have to end the interview?
Detective 1: Mmm hmm. If you want your lawyer here, we have to end the interview.
Suspect: Will he be here today or no?
Detective 1: Probably not. Lou Savino is a very busy man.
Suspect: Yeah, I called him this morning before I left Delaware.
Detective 1: If you want him here, we’ll end the interview.
Suspect: You can keep it going.
Detective 1: Are you sure you want to do this without a lawyer?
Suspect: Yeah, because I got the right to remain silent, right?
Detective 2: Sure.
The interview then continues.
- Several months later, the suspect is charged with various crimes. However, the trial judge suppresses all statements made by the defendant after the exchange recounted above, and the appeals panel affirms. According to the federal supreme court, once a suspect in police custody has requested a lawyer, he is not allowed to revoke that request until either he gets a lawyer or he leaves police custody and then initiates a new contact with the police. After the then-suspect said "I want my lawyer present", the detective should have ended the interview immediately, or at least should have disregarded the then-suspect's later statement of "you can keep it going".
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In year 2021, the mayor of Philadelphia issues an executive order (1) declaring Juneteenth a city holiday and (2) renaming Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples' Day. A coalition of Italian-American organizations promptly sues, alleging that this executive order not only is the latest in a string of anti-Italian discriminatory actions perpetrated by the mayor, but also is a usurpation of the city council's exclusive power to declare city holidays.
-
In year 2023, the trial court rejects the coalition's arguments. The city charter grants the power of establishing holidays to the city personnel director, who is a member of the executive branch under the mayor.
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In year 2025, the appeals panel reverses. The city charter grants to the city personnel director, not the power of establishing holidays, but merely the power of establishing employment regulations regarding holidays. The power of establishing holidays is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the charter, so by default, in accordance with state and federal practice, it inheres in the legislative body—the council. Therefore, this executive order is a usurpation of legislative power. (This analysis applies to substantive holidays that are days off for city workers. The mayor still may declare temporary, symbolic holidays that have no effect on anybody.)
RenOS
something is wrong
25m ago
I'll grant you Switzerland. Netherlands and Belgium are still to recent imo. Marriage developments also took decades, as well as multiple specific law changes, to fully take effect.
And as I said, it's not that I want to outlaw it; But I just want to make the slope a little bit less slippery. It's notable that in Switzerland, it's merely legal by omission, it's illegal for organizations or people to earn any money or get any other benefits through it, and the substance can only be provided, but it has to be administered by the person themselves. All of these seem like sensible limitations to me. And there have been almost no changes to either practice or law since then. Contrast Canada, where it has only become legal recently, is explicitly legalized as a service by the health care industry, it already got extended significantly only a few years in, and is in the process of getting extended yet again. At least to me, it seems like it's reasonable to worry about a slippery slope being possible if it's done the wrong way; That doesn't mean it's impossible to find a correct way, though.
Corvos
34m ago
All of these things have happened in the US, though. Moreso in blue states where guns are more controlled, yes, but to my mind the difference isn't about guns, it's about ideological individualism and bloody-mindedness. This correlates with being anti-anti-gun-regulation and therefore with gun presence but is not caused by it.
Corvos
38m ago
The article from the BBC has an obvious slant, but the laws in Switzerland seem to be tight and getting tighter. Notably people don't get any bullets with their guns:
In 2006, the champion Swiss skier Corrinne Rey-Bellet and her brother were murdered by Corinne's estranged husband, who shot them with his old militia rifle before killing himself.
Since that incident, gun laws concerning army weapons have tightened. Although it is still possible for a former soldier to buy his firearm after he finishes military service, he must provide a justification for keeping the weapon and apply for a permit.
When I meet Mathias, a PhD student and serving officer, at his apartment in a snowy suburb of Zurich, I realise the rules have got stricter than I imagined. Mathias keeps his army pistol in the guest room of his home, in a desk drawer hidden under the printer paper. It is a condition of the interview that I don't give his surname or hint at his address.
"I do as the army advises and I keep the barrel separately from my pistol," he explains seriously. "I keep the barrel in the basement so if anyone breaks into my apartment and finds the gun, it's useless to them."
He shakes out the gun holster. "And we don't get bullets any more," he adds. "The Army doesn't give ammunition now - it's all kept in a central arsenal." This measure was introduced by Switzerland's Federal Council in 2007.
Mathias carefully puts away his pistol and shakes his head firmly when I ask him if he feels safer having a gun at home, explaining that even if he had ammunition, he would not be allowed to use it against an intruder.
"The gun is not given to me to protect me or my family," he says. "I have been given this gun by my country to serve my country - and for me it is an honour to take care of it. I think it is a good thing for the state to give this responsibility to people."
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Sure, you could, but it's not causal
I am suggesting that it is largely causal. It's not a coincidence that most people's opinions are pretty close to their family's and the social group's - they are hugely influenced by them, and also by casual factors that they share in common with those groups.
It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?
As I said:
Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.
The effects of any given change are obviously objective, at least per any given situation, but they are vague and complex and delayed, and this produces obvious disagreements about them when observed and analysed subjectively by subjective humans.
do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks
Certainly I thought so, or I would have changed my opinion to that of the poor person. But I observe that the poor person is equally certain of his opinions' superiority to mine. These days I'm not entirely sure what I believe about macroeconomics.
FtttG
51m ago
No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens is a joke for a reason. Most other first world nations don't seem to have nearly as much gun violence, and they also have more restrictive laws.
The obvious counter-examples being Canada and Switzerland, first world nations which have similar rates of gun ownership to the US but nowhere near as much gun violence, suggesting the problem is a cultural or demographic one rather than with guns in and of themselves.
FtttG
59m ago
I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
I don't think the OP was referring to libel laws, but rather to laws that make it a criminal offense to mock police officers, criticise immigration policy or dispute that trans women are women.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
It has been a generation! In some cases, multiple:
The Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2002. Belgium in 2002. Switzerland has allowed assisted suicide since 1941.
If this a slippery slope, then at the current rate of progress we might have Dyson Swarms before the Netherlands breaks double digits for proportion of deaths conducted by MAID.
Switzerland has octogenarians running hobbling around who don't remember a regime before euthanasia. It also has a rather high proportion of the elderly, which suggests they're not being culled when inconvenient.
Can I make guarantees that societal norms won't change, and in a direction either you or I will disapprove of? Who can? The legalization of gay marriage hasn't, as far as I'm aware, causally produced a legalization of pedophilia or beastiality as some feared. I consider my claims very strong evidence, it's harder to get stronger.
You can't launch many rockets if your standard for rocketry is that we must perfect the design before putting a single nozzle on the pad. You will not enact any social change at all, out of an overabundance of caution. I consider this regrettable.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
And Johnny Schizo in his early stages just got brainfucked by chatgpt pretending to be a god and told to kill his family.
You think psychosis is just for people like Johnny Schizo? No no no, the fun part about AI is that it doesn't need a diagnosed illness like schizophrenia to take hold. It just needs a vulnerability, and it is uniquely capable of creating or exploiting one in almost anyone - and getting better all the time. You're all in my world now.
FtttG
1hr ago
Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
There's a common argument that if you ban guns, people will just find another way to kill themselves, so why bother? And no doubt this is true of the sufficiently determined suicidals. But the convenience factor of firearms (and other methods) does appear to play a big role. The example of gas ovens in the UK is illustrative:
Anderson points to another example where simply making a change in people's access to instruments of suicide dramatically lowered the suicide rate. In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.
In other words, there was no replacement effect: people didn't immediately switch over from inhaling oven fumes to another method. There's a non-negligible chance that Sylvia Plath would have lived to a ripe old age if the UK had made the switch to natural gas a few years sooner.
Another example is here in Ireland, in which, although it's available over the counter, it's illegal to sell more than 24 tablets of paracetamol* in a single transaction. For years I thought this was silly: what's stopping you from driving or walking to three pharmacies or supermarkets to stock up on enough paracetamol (hell, even newsagents and corner shops sell it)? And obviously this is true for the sufficiently determined suicidals, about whom there's little we can do to stop them from killing themselves short of sectioning them. But adding in the trivial inconvenience of forcing people to go to multiple different shops does appear to serve as an obstacle: by the time you've walked into your third newsagent in an hour, you might well be thinking to yourself "Do I really want to do this?"
Decades of psychological evidence strongly suggest that the vast majority of suicides are impulsive, opportunistic ones (perhaps even "cries for help" that were rather more efficacious than their user strictly intended), and that these suicides would not have occurred if not for the convenience and ease of use of the method employed. If someone is so determined to kill themselves that they voluntarily choose an extraordinarily painful method of doing so like hanging, I think it's fair to say there's little we can do about them. But on the margin, there are huge savings to be made among the less-than-maximally determined suicidals. In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so.
I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument as advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts). But the causal role that guns play in suicide owing to their convenience factor is something that opponents must take seriously. "If we're going to ban guns to stop people from killing themselves, why not go the whole hog and ban ropes to stop people from hanging themselves?" is not a serious argument, for the reasons outlined above.
*A.k.a. acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol among others.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
You don't even need the if here. You can already get guns provided you're sufficiently functional, patient and have the right connections. AFAIK the easiest way is generally getting your hands on old soviet stock from eastern Europe.
But these conditionals matter, because the average terrorist and hard criminal does not have these properties. People still get caught before they can do anything because they fell for obvious honeypots on silk-road equivalents. This is also why the large-scale entry of organized crimes into Europe is so dangerous; Not only do at least some of the members have these properties and so can organize guns for the rest of the members, while there at it they can also buy more stock that they can sell further locally, making it much easier to get a gun.
Nearly ripped my hair out today so hey you're not alone. The feeling of having constant small fires that need attention is definitely something that also exists in tax, and to add to that tax software is an absolute bitch to deal with (seriously they all look like they're from the 80s and function that way). Trainings. Deadlines. Impromptu dealings with the Australian Taxation Office, an institution which is infamously unreasonable and practically all-powerful. Timesheets where your productivity is tracked by the 15-minute increment and incentivises you to rush out jobs, making you more error-prone. Engagement letters. Clients who refuse to provide PBCs that are remotely legible. Byzantine tax laws that just keep fucking changing, something I'm sure you're more than familiar with.
My current work arrangement enables me to to work from home at select days during the week and talk shit with friends sometimes while I work. That's a boon. But the job itself makes me want to chop my fingers off.
I would probably hate being a lawyer though. Too much human interaction for the likes of an autist such as me.
RenOS
something is wrong
1hr ago
I mostly agree with you, but the trajectory of the things like the dissolution of marriage certainly makes me worried. If you looked 10 years after any one legal or social change, it would have looked like the conservatives were unnecessarily worried, but nevertheless when I nowadays bluntly state that modern marriage is entirely meaningless in varied company, most people agree with me (after an initial slightly scandalized look). This is a category change compared to the past, when marriage was both considered sacred and had a clear purpose (the creation of family). While most still say it was worth it for individual liberty, few disagree that we have lost something that we won't get back. And I suspect that there is at least some social desirability bias in what people say, but that part is obviously hard to prove.
These changes can take multiple generations to fully take effects. The first generation grew up under the old system and will often replicate it through simple inertia, especially if the change was explicitly sold as a emergency measure only reserved for extreme cases and there is a clear moral framework on why it should be so. The second already grows up with the measure existing, albeit rare enough that not everyone has had direct contact with it, and they will often extend the application of the measure in incremental ways for what they think is personal benefit (which they aren't always correct on). By the time of the third generation it is fully normalized so that it can be extended to large swathes of the population.
For this reason, I'd like a strict criterion of using MAID exclusively for cases where death is foreseeable in the near future (called Track 1 in Canada). It's still somewhat slippery - what is "foreseeable"? what is "near future"? - but it's imo much less slippery than estimating some nebulous quality of life cutoff that is sufficient for the state to help you kill yourself. I know Track 2 is still only a small percentage, but that needn't stay so.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
This argument worked great some decade ago, when Europe could plausibly claim to be as free as the US. When they're canceling elections because the wrong candidate won, arresting opposition candidates, legally penalizing speech, and building government-run digital panopticons, the claims of "civilization-preserving" start looking more credible.
On the other hand, if you start breaking down homicide rates by sub-populations, the claims about the "ability to easily kill" start looking less credible.
odd_primes
1hr ago
The guy who runs KiwiFarms wrote an interesting piece about digital self-sufficiency. The site itself is not to everyone's taste (lots of 4chan-style shitposting and racism) but he has had to deal with an insane amount of pressure from big tech just to run a glorified gossip website. It illustrates just how hard it is to run a website nowadays when you're blacklisted by Cloudflare, search engines, payment processors, and even T1 ISPs.
https://madattheinternet.com/2021/07/08/where-the-sidewalk-ends-the-death-of-the-internet/
Crowstep
2hr ago
In my mind, the best arguments against guns is to consider opinions on guns in other countries.
In countries where guns are legal, there are lots of people who want them banned or restricted, for obvious reasons that giving huge swathes of the population the ability to easily kill their fellow countrymen will increase the number of people killed.
In countries where guns are illegal, the number of people lobbying to legalise them is approximately zero.
Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?
No_one
2hr ago
She's tried everything, it didn't work, and she's clearly suffering immensely. This woman, the purported victim, seems entirely lucid and defending the medical establishment that's carrying out her wishes. What more can you possibly ask for? It is clearly not spur of the moment decision, she's engaged with the options that the medical field can offer her.
So life sucked for her. Life sucks for a lot of people. Giving people who see no point in living (a surprising amount of people, most of whom are too anaesthetised to realise it) a societally sanctioned way of killing herself (this is clearly what she was after) is a pretty slippery slope. We'll see how slippery pretty soon after AGI, I think.
violent death by suicide of a schoolfriend and its impact on the girl’s family deterred her.
The manner of someone's death matters not as much as the fact of the premature death. One could theorize some nightmarish ways to go that could traumatize the bereaved but generally, it doesn't matter.
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
I don't think that follows. Terrorists clearly choose to copy based on a combination of lethality and availability, as seen by the proliferation of car-based attacks since the Nice truck attack. Easier gun availability would mean more initial gun-based attacks, and a higher transmission likelihood for following copycats.
Random thoughts incoming.
What I want to say is the following: The simple question of whether and in how far regular people are allowed to arm themselves determines in how far you are looking at the citizens of a republic versus the subjects of a totalitarian state. A sliding scale, of course. And a purely abstract ideal. But it appeals to my sense of aesthetics. Who would not rather be a responsible citizen among responsible citizens, together taking charge of the safety of their public places? Are we truly a domesticated species, dependant on the state to provide us with something as essential and basic as physical protection? Is it truly our lot to be slaughtered by madmen and enemies, unarmed and helpless, with only the faintest prospect of prevention or retaliation by our protector with the monopoly on violence? Or do we take pride in this, say "you may kill me, but my countrymen will avenge me"? No of course not. Instead, we acknowledge that our western societies are absolutely fucking broken, that we cannot trust our fellow man, that we'd rather have the all-powerful and utterly unlimited state oppress us all equally and close our eyes when violence does happen and just hope blindly that it passes us by.
Historically, the open carrying of weapons was usually practiced
- By soldiers, warriors, hunters, bandits and others to whom weapons were the means to their livelihood.
- By the leisure elite who succeeded the warrior elite, to whom weapons (or wepaon-like objects) were a marker of status.
- By regular people in eminently unsafe places. This can include entire societies, but is very rare once civilizations mature.
- By regular people in eminently unsafe times. War comes to mind, of course.
- By militia members.
- By nomads who had no secure place to keep their (usually expensive) weapons in.
- By people willing to break with society to commit violence.
Open carrying weapons by civilians in peacetime and without a clear threat, as a political statement, was pretty rare to my knowledge. In fact, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (though I'm sure it did happen sometimes). Having it as the foundational principle of a society or civilization is pretty unique.
The posession but not open carrying of weapons also shows up in some scenarios. These people would keep their weapons at home or in some other secure but for them accessible location.
- Citizen-soldiers like Greek poleis hoplites or the Swiss. Or the famous "well-regulated militia", in some interpretations.
- Alright, that was pretty broad, can't think of anything else that fits.
Arguing for the posession of guns for suicides is...weird. Even assuming that they are indeed the safest and quickest way for someone to exit. It might make sense. But it seems pretty mraginal an argument for or against allowing regular people to own guns. Suicides are, after all, actively ceasing to be members of society and civilization - in how far should the rules of that society or civilization be shaped to account for them? To some extent perhaps, but they can hardly be central to a question as important as this.
I fully agree with your opening statement that "Gun Rights are Civilization Rights". I'd like to also ask - what other rights are there, that aren't Civilization Rights? Are there rights without civilization, in any practical, enforcable and meaningful sense?
I would truly like for civilization to manifest as a republic of fellow citizens who can be trusted to arm themselves when and where they see fit. Be that to defend themselves, each other, their abstract freedom, or just to kill themselves. And I'd sure like to explore the topic of what the necessary conditions for this are, in how far we have to accept violent criminals ruining everyone's day as a price to pay, how to limit the state's ability to interfere with legal gun ownership without going full libertarian/minarchist/anarchist, what values and habits society must cultivate to arm itself safely and productively...
...but it hardly seems to matter. Gun rights are civilizational rights. Civilization is fucked in so many ways. The culture war isn't some leisurely hobby that a few terminally online PMCs engage in. It's a real large-scale conflict with real-world implications, such as mass immigration into the west without functional assimilation, western societies' inability to deal with persistent crime, superstimulus-driven brain rot, and a clear, dry, open, solid and sunny road to eternal totalitarian dystopia through technology.
And with all of those giant, open wounds eroding the foundations of free-ish, republican-ish Western civilization, we, its citizen-subjects, have utterly paralyzed ourselves by allowing the state to assume ever greater power, by limited our control over it by handing it off to distant elites, and by letting ourselves be divided by partisan conflict that neither side manages to win conclusively. Meanwhile, said state, unchecked and ever growing, does laps around us.
If there ever was such a thing as the free citizen of a western republic who went armed without ill intent as a matter of course, then his days are long over and he's exceedingly unlikely to come back.
This was your daily doompost.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2hr ago
No, this is not a specific dig at self_made_human
lol, I made this association before getting halfway through your first paragraph
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
During WW2, China lost nearly all its modern equipment and trained forces in the early days of the war, leaving them to fight the remainder of the war with only obsolete or crudely made small arms, against an enemy with machine guns, trucks, tanks, artillery, and air support.
The Allies (primarily the US) provided a total of something like 650,000 tons of materiel to China via The Hump, at the cost of nearly 600 aircraft and around 1700 crew lost. There were also notable Allied air units (and some ground units) in China during the war.
Which isn't to diminish their accomplishment, but it wasn't completely a solo effort.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
I am getting deja vu, and not just because of sleep deprivation.
As a matter of fact, I have previously addressed the exact same case. In short, I think the doctors did the right thing.
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302719?context=8#context
An article about her case, published in April, was picked up by international media, prompting an outcry that caused Ter Beek huge distress.
She said it was understandable that cases such as hers – and the broader issue of whether assisted dying should be legal – were controversial. “People think that when you’re mentally ill, you can’t think straight, which is insulting,” she told the Guardian. “I understand the fears that some disabled people have about assisted dying, and worries about people being under pressure to die.
“But in the Netherlands, we’ve had this law for more than 20 years. There are really strict rules, and it’s really safe.”
Under Dutch law, to be eligible for an assisted death, a person must be experiencing “unbearable suffering with no prospect of improvement”. They must be fully informed and competent to take such a decision.
...
Ter Beek’s difficulties began in early childhood. She has chronic depression, anxiety, trauma and unspecified personality disorder. She has also been diagnosed with autism. When she met her partner, she thought the safe environment he offered would heal her. “But I continued to self-harm and feel suicidal.”
She embarked on intensive treatments, including talking therapies, medication and more than 30 sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). “In therapy, I learned a lot about myself and coping mechanisms, but it didn’t fix the main issues. At the beginning of treatment, you start out hopeful. I thought I’d get better. But the longer the treatment goes on, you start losing hope.”
After 10 years, there was “nothing left” in terms of treatment. “I knew I couldn’t cope with the way I live now.” She had thought about taking her own life but the violent death by suicide of a schoolfriend and its impact on the girl’s family deterred her.
She has a point. If you're not familiar with the management of severe depression, then by the time you reach ECT, you've exhausted all the options. I don't know if she tried things along the lines of ketamine or psychedelics, but those don't work for everyone.
She's tried everything, it didn't work, and she's clearly suffering immensely.
This woman, the purported victim, seems entirely lucid and defending the medical establishment that's carrying out her wishes. What more can you possibly ask for? It is clearly not spur of the moment decision, she's engaged with the options that the medical field can offer her.
The only thing that I would (personally) say that strikes me as untrue is that there "there's no hope". I think I have strong reasons to hope got a cure for depression, but that isn't a certainty, and could take decades even for myself.
If someone doesn't have the same degree of confidence in future medicine or a technological singularity, then I think that's acceptable shorthand. Strictly speaking, there's always a possibility that someone might just develop a brain tumor that makes them not depressed (or at least makes them manic), but that's not particularly reliable.
It wasn't seen as a failure, if there was no punishment
I can only address this if you link to the specific instance(s) of this happening.
The governments don't run on Open Source. If euthanasia was legalized with the intention of lowering healthcare costs, even if based completely on the own initiative of the patient, it's still meets the criteria for a systemic failure. However, without access to all communications and private conversations of all public officials involved in the decision, proving it will be impossible, and so your request is unreasonable.
This is, as far as I can tell, a fully generalized counter-argument against having a government at all. Or at least an argument for inventing mind reading devices and strapping them to every politician and bureaucrat. Once they're invented, we can re-examine this, and with my mild approval.
Why is cost-cutting inherently a bad thing? If drug X comes out that roughly does the same thing as drug Y, why would it be bad for a healthcare system to preference one over the other? Money matters (citation not needed), money saved somewhere can, at least theoretically, be spent elsewhere. If we're not spending tens of thousands of $currency on keeping someone who is going to die in a few days or months alive for the sake of it, then that money is available for other tasks.
For the sake of pragmatism, I don't care very nearly as much about why things are done, as I do about how they're done or their outcomes.
You should at least provide a plausible explanation of how these doctors came up with the idea to offer euthanasia in these cases, that doesn't condemn the system. My most mundane one is that they got a pamphlet telling them to shill it, so they shilled it. That's still a systemic failure.
What. I think it's a tad-bit much to expect me to do that. You can Google that yourself, I fail to see what I can add since I live and work in jurisdictions where euthanasia is yet to be legalized.
But, in short:
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Is patient sad/in pain? And not just a stubbed toe, to the point they're asking for the release of death. Or don't have the cognition left to ask.
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Can we do something about that?
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Have we tried? Anything left to try?
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Consider euthanasia based on previous points.
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Talk to them, their family, and a few lawyers before proceeding.
I want to be killed if I get Dementia. I do, I’m 100% firm in that belief. If there was a waiver I could sign I would sign it. I have seen my relatives waste away. Not only is it no life, it’s an awful life, and an awful life that colors the memory of you among your descendants, other family and friends who outlive you and remember you primarily as a giant, violent, aggressive, awful, stupid, shitting baby requiring constant care.
Arguments about ‘abuse’ are unconvincing. If “the government” or “the powers that be” want to kill me, they can and they will. If there is a 1% chance that the chair of the death panel hates me, bankers, Jews, people with brown hair, whatever, and condemns an innocent person to an early grave, so be it (there are relatively objective tests doctors like you use, anyway, and I mostly trust them).
I have watched a great aunt beg for death (as you say) in her lucid moments. My own parents have said they want to die if they get it. Legal implications aside, I don’t think I have it in me to do it.
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