existentialgoof @existentialgoof

I'm very pro right to die, but I'm not some kind of radical anarcho libertarian who thinks that we can benefit from civilisation without owing anything to anyone. I just think that requiring someone to be born into literal slavery takes the idea of collectivism a little too far for my liking. Especially considering how many opponents of the right to die are extreme collectivists when it comes to the specific issue of suicide, but in any other arena of life, they don't seem to take too kindly to the idea that they have any kind of social responsibility to others which requires constraints on their own personal liberty. I think that if you want to remain alive and benefit from civilisation, then you have an obligation to play your part in maintaining the health of that civilisation - including helping the less fortunate. But given that we never had a choice about coming into existence and signed no contract whereby we consented to all the terms and conditions, we should always retain the right to decide that we want to opt out of the system altogether. Or at least, up until the point where we ourselves have done something to warrant losing that right.

@Michellebudd Things have really reached a pretty pass when even the fundamentalist religious right wingers are woke. Nobody is obligated to restrict their own freedom to choose in order to avoid unintentionally giving offence to others not involved in or affected by the decision.

@NationalistSupe @RichardHanania The good news for you is that those low IQ third world migrants are more likely to be pro life and share your core values.

I disagree that life is something that is any kind of gift or boon. So the entire framing of deserving to live makes no sense to me. Life is an imposition. Sometimes it works out by happy accident that the imposed upon ends up happy with the imposition, but that is not guaranteed. No organism that is aborted suffers from being deprived of life.

@MakenzieMoore19 @TheProperPen @RichardHanania If your mother had chosen to abort, you wouldn't mind though, because you'd never know about it. So that decision couldn't have done wrong by you.

@TheProperPen @RichardHanania I'm an antinatalist. I'm opposed to gambling with anyone's welfare by bringing them into existence. But it's worse when they have a disability (though there are ones much worse than Downs Syndrome) and are guaranteed to be more disadvantaged from the outset.

@GovernorWinslow @TheProperPen @RichardHanania Yes, it would be. Particularly if she made it known prior to losing capacity that she wouldn't want to live with dementia.

It's just your subjective belief that abortion is evil. It's my view that not aborting is evil, because you're bringing a sentient child into an existence where it is going to struggle. The difference between my view and yours is that I can demonstrate that an adverse impact will be experienced by failing to abort. Your view that it would be evil to abort seems to be based on a combination of religious faith and your own irrational, instinctual fear of death.

White people are, on average, less religious than ethnic minority groups, and also more individualistic, as migrant communities tend to be more collectivistic. These are factors which typically make people less likely to die by suicide or assisted dying. Religion and strong community ties are protective factors against suicide.

@JimMooreJourno That article doesn't even mention assisted dying, and seems to take a dim view towards labelling the disabled "vulnerable" and denying them their agency (being able to make ones own decisions being an important part of agency).

Infantilising groups of people by telling them that they can't make their own medical decisions because they are "vulnerable", or that they need to be used as political chess pieces because of systemic issues outside their control is not treating them with respect or dignity. Merely taking away options because they make crab mentality people feel better. You don't advance disability rights by taking away rights. Even if some of the people demanding for those rights to be taken away are themselves disabled.

@TonyMarra_1 @JasonD60 @Tanni_GT Usually slightly higher.

@MariaMCasey @metoffice That would also mean that mid September counts as summer. So I go with 1st June. September is not a summer month.

Suicide prevention should be limited to positive attempts to improve someone's circumstances, to the point where they no longer want to die. If you want to positively help someone, and the help that you have available is effective, then you shouldn't need to go to the next step of applying coercion, even including the coercion of forcing people to worry about the risk of a botched attempt. If your act of "benevolence" requires entrapment, subjugation and infantilisation in order to work; then people (especially the recipients of that treatment) are right to question whether there's really anything benevolent about it at all.

The UK law does de facto prohibit suicide. Most people are pro suicide prevention, but a large part of the reason that there is ostensibly near unanimous agreement on that is the highly effective suppression of any counter argument. Even to the point where, as part of the strategy for trying to pass an "assisted dying" bill, the bill's supporters have to avoid the taboo around suicide by asserting that assisted dying isn't really suicide at all.

The status quo of not allowing people to kill themselves under any circumstances is untenable. Opponents of suicide have done a good job thus far of suppressing the arguments in favour of personal choice. But eventually, people may see through the gaslighting. Societies need to figure this out, because once you stop assuming the axiom that life is sacred and can never be rejected by any rational actor, then people are going to start to notice how unjust and unfair it is to come into an existence in which good and bad fortune are distributed unfairly and inequitably, and then the ones who get unlucky (or feel subjectively that they've drawn the short straw, whether that's justified from the perspective of others or not) are just forced to suffer through their existence for the sake of not rocking the boat. When people start to see existence in those terms, you can't peacefully uphold the status quo.

I think that if they went to the trouble of researching the method online, buying it through a black market supplier, waiting for it to arrive and then correctly followed the instructions, it's probably safe to say that's evidence of an "authentic" wish to die. The survival instinct isn't something that can be trivially overcome on a whim, even when you do have a fast acting, painless and reliable method. It seems really improbable that any significant number of his clients ended up dying without having properly thought it through. The whole process isn't something that can be done as a snap decision. A cooling off period is built into the process of acquiring the substance.

Absolutely. It's a travesty that our societies are so infantilised that anyone even sees a problem with this. Not one of Kenneth Law's clients consented to being born, and every single one of them went out of their way to research methods for ending their life, and bought supplies from him knowing what they wanted to do with it. They were exercising agency in their own choice. They were not "vulnerable" NPCs who were unable of making an autonomous choice for themselves and needed to have the Internet and the entire planet babyproofed in order to keep them safe. Not only the criminal charges, but the entire narrative that has sprung up around this are profoundly insulting to the people who got relief from being able to buy peace of mind - whether or not they actually went ahead to use it. It suggests that the philosophical discussion regarding suicide is a settled matter, and that it can never be a rational choice, therefore society is always justified in depriving people of their liberty in order to stop it. However, rational suicide has always been a contested issue in philosophy, and continues to be, which is why a number of countries have passed or attempted to pass assisted dying laws.