domain:drrollergator.substack.com
ArmedTooHeavily
3hr ago
Absolutely seconded. Mental coherency is, fundamentally, what makes a person a person, what makes one oneself. Getting out while the getting is good and you are still you is right and honorable.
ArmedTooHeavily
3hr ago
Despite all of this about 1/5 of the patients regularly asked me to help kill them. They were in more or less constant pain despite pain management, increasingly felt that the help the got was degrading and their minds were rapidly slipping.
Is 1/5 an exaggeration or (to quote black hawk down) a no-bullshit exception?
My mind immediately goes to "this is another reason why you should never, ever let anyone disarm you." Horrifying.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
You can see that, but only really around government buildings of significant importance (I've almost never seen armed cops outside London). Don't seem to recall seeing them at transit stations, the police there were chill and mostly concerned with shooing away the homeless. And believe me, I've been to a lot of stations this month.
Browser
3hr ago
Saw The Lychee Road last night and enjoyed it a lot. The ending drags a tad but it's a solid bureaucracy thriller and I'd give it an 8 or so
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
3hr ago
And I'm saying that someone who is violent and drugged up is significantly more lethal with a gun than without one.
And the way American police are trained reflects this. American police treat a random violent drugged up person as an immediate lethal threat because of the high probability that they are concealed carrying. Non-American police don't. This is a large part of why American police shoot so many more people (of varying degrees of innocence) than non-American police.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3hr ago
Okay so, talking to the worst people in the world all day? Yeah I could see that driving me to drink. I'd probably have to just start treating people like holograms to protect my sanity after awhile
What did you think criminal defense would be like?
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
3hr ago
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.
Private handgun ownership in Canada and Switzerland is not high. Essentially all the excess "gun deaths" (suicides and homicides) in the US are handgun deaths.
I agree this doesn't answer the question of "Why don't other countries with large-scale private long gun ownership see more media-friendly spree killings?" But if you care about body count, the reason why US gun culture is more lethal than Canadian or Swiss gun culture is the type of gun.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
The standard justification for criminalizing suicide is not to punish the survivor, assuming they survive. It is, or at least I've heard it claimed, so that the police have a legal pretext to intervene or break down the door and stop them.
Europe isn't a country. Talking about stuff that Europe is doing is like talking about how Americans love Samba dancing, mate tea and poutine.
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.
Surely more credible? Making it easy and legal for your citizens to own guns includes making it easy and legal for sub-populations (you mean black people right? You can just say that here) to get hold of them too.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
I must try so very hard to not get nerd-sniped again into an argument about convenient household or pharmaceutical techniques to kill people quickly and easily.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
Have you heard of three branches of government:
- The legislature
- The executive
- The judiciary
They teach that factoid in the US, the UK, and even in India. Some parts of the government exist to exert checks and balances on the others. The judiciary doesn't cease to be part of a functional government because that's rhetorically convenient.
phailyoor
4hr ago
You might assume they only try to interview patients who survived the procedure. Though that also would imply the procedure was botched extremely badly.
Browser
4hr ago
Yeah but the medical doctor who's likely spending significantly more time in the company of the hospiced and hospice-adjacent probably has a better bead on this than a layperson.
Can't remember the Scottpost but the stats on medical professionals opting out of end of life interventional care at a highly elevated rate are likely relevant here.
Children are often nigh-unkillable
"...and believe me, folks, I've tried." :P
I take your point. My intuitions could be wrong. But I think also 'assisted dying' was marketed as being for much more specific freak cases where people have an absolutely certain and very short life expectancy, and were in horrible pain that could not be alleviated through even strong pain medication. I would be willing to bet that if you raised the figure of "5% of all deaths" before this stuff was legalised you would be dismissed as a scaremonger if anti- and if pro- you would be taken aside and given a stern talk about staying on-message.
Browser
4hr ago
Yeah people massively underestimate how good modern medicine is at prolonging that last 6 months to a year now. My father who's in good shape for mid seventies now had successfully-treated skin cancer a few years ago and some of the people he and I saw clinging to life whilst visiting oncology were medical miracles.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
I think Gaza is in the reference class of "A government which is willing to commit genocide and has access to tanks and bombing planes can defeat an insurgency regardless of however many small arms the insurgents have."
All these years of Israel genociding the Palestinians, and yet there's more of them than ever.
Browser
4hr ago
Especially these days when the medical apparatus is increasingly good at keeping people alive when they probably shouldn't be
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
Really? Okay? What if I say 5% is massive, or not massive? You can make the same fuss either way. There are people who are categorically against the euthanasia of even a single person, and people who think that every human should be euthanized. What do you have to say to them?
Do you have an intuitive or even an intellectual understanding of how miserable the average death is? Did you remind yourself that euthanasia is meant to replace that inevitable, often painful and undignified death, with one that doesn't draw out the inevitable and lets people go out on their own terms?
Please, if you accuse me of being miscalibrated, then produce your own ISO calibrated standards. I remain in earnest anticipation, and until then, this is probably the queerest objection in the thread.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band - I'm Gonna Booglarize You, Baby (1972)
During their 1972 European Tour, Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band appeared on the German TV show Beat Club. This song is quite the performance, even by Captain Beefheart standards. Some of the other tracks took multiple takes for various reasons, but they nailed this one. It sounds like chaos until the 3 guitarists and the drummer hit the groove. I would make some of Beefheart's vocalizations my text notification on my phone if I were more tech-inclined.
2rafa
4hr ago
I was surprised by someone I work with occasionally who I know only by their very ambiguous first name. For years I had assumed they were some kind of Southeast Asian in terms of descent, they could have been Indonesian or something. They have a half English, half American accent and grew up between the two countries but are originally American by citizenship.
Today we spoke about ourselves for the first time and I found out their parents were from a South American country, with a very Hispanic last name. They were and are just indigenous. I guess I have encountered so few ‘pure’ native Americans that the combination of tan skin and Asian features just fit immediately to SEA in my mind.
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
4hr ago
The origin of the meme "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" is that various WW2-era generals (of whom Montgomery was the first to go on the record in 1962) thought that Allied assistance to China in WW2 had been a mistake - presumably because Chiang and Mao preferred to use the aid to fight each other and not the Japanese.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
4hr ago
· Edited 4hr ago
Re. hanging, I did a deep dive into the biomechanics of hanging on a morbid curiosity kick a while back. My conclusion was that (to not put too fine a point to it) it's possible to set things up such that only a relatively painless blood choke is applied and conciousness is lost in 8-10 seconds, but the standard method of hanging puts much more pressure on the trachea and inconsistent pressure on the carotid arteries, causing a far more painful and likely drawn-out death.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
Far more illnesses become terminal when you're old and frail. A flu you might walk off becomes fatal pneumonia. A mild UTI or stomach upset in the young becomes the cause of septic shock. A scratch becomes cellulitis and gangrene, becoming too weak to toss and turn becomes suppurating bed sores.
Children are often nigh-unkillable. The elderly are the exact opposite, it's a goddamn miracle life expectancies are where they're at.
Maybe something around 0.1% is your intuition for how many people are in such a state right now. It is closer, in terms of magnitude. The issue is when you lack firm intuitions for how that stacks up over the longterm, at least over a year. I probably tend to overestimate the figure that dies miserable deaths, because the peaceful desths at home don't come to me. I am, however, aware of that bias and try to account for it. It remains to be seen how successful that is, but I see 5% as fine.
Or at least I-10 after the Navajo Nation blockaded I-40 from Gallup to Flagstaff.
More options
Context Copy link