The Euthanasia That Wasn’t • Hacker News Board

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#101

Post by ajross » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:07 PM UTC

drilldrive wrote: post #47

ajross wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this not euthanasia ? Why the hell not ? Because it's a suicide. We already have a word for what happens to people who die after refusing food. In fact the only reason the word "euthanasia" is being considered at all is because before she died she ended up in an end of life clinic that also provided assisted death services to other patients. This is exactly like accusing someone of having had an abortion because…

Hmm, a miscarriage is not an intentional act, whereas there is intention in this case. It is moreso analagous to someone at planned parenthood not authorizing an abortion but providing either direct or indirect assistance for the woman to perform the abortion herself.

I'm sorry, what on earth is "indirect assistance" to someone refusing to eat?

What people seem to be conflating here is the idea of involuntary care and "euthanasia". It's true that sometimes courts will allow doctor's to force-feed patients through an IV. For various reasons (I'm no expert on Danish medical law) that didn't happen here. And that is a controversial area of medical ethics and worth discussing calmly and rationally.

But to freak out, shriek on social media and HN, and call this "euthanasia" is straight up ridiculous spin. And the ONLY reason this story even has legs is because of the facility. If this happened in a hospital it would be a routine tragedy and not a political flytrap for right wing moralists.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#102

Post by pankajdoharey » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:13 PM UTC

bingoman wrote: post #100

Youth in Asia is progressive and modern, what it isn't is highly political. It is a subservient youth in Asia among both autocratic regimes like china as well as Democracies like India, Japan or Thailand. Youth isn't very politically vocal, on the contrary it is quite subservient in my view.

Excuse me you dumb bitch it is Euth-an-asia not Youth-in-asia! Go Figure and fuck yourself.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#103

Post by bubblewrap » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:20 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #34

baddox wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality The trouble is when this idea becomes circular, e.g. "anyone who would choose to kill themselves even though their life doesn't seem that bad to me must be in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality." In other words, to apply your proposal would require determining whether someone is "in the temporary throes of delu…

Most of the time it's not very hard to figure out if a suicidal impulse is temporary, though. As a basic filter, ask several times over the course of a week and see if they're consistent.

A week??? You can't be serious.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#104

Post by Bakary » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

AstralStorm wrote: post #61

wayoutthere wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two minds of this as best exemplified by Camus and Sartre. A core tenet of existentialism is that we are always free to make choices, even if we cannot always control our circumstances. We’re still responsible for making choices — even choosing to not choose. Sartre was a believer in absolute freedom, and that suicide was a choice among many others that a person could make (and indeed, Sartre eventually did…

And what does Camus say you should do when your freedom is curtailed in unacceptable ways? (Note: way beyond social contract.)

Camus generally argued that you ought to rebel against the absurdity of your condition by choosing to keep on with it.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#105

Post by gnode » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

mlang23 wrote: post #98

Everyone should have the right to terminate their life. We kill animals that lived with us as pets because we dont want to see them suffer, but we refuse to do anything and have someone starve themselves to death just because... well, I will never get it.

While I am a strong exponent of individual freedom, I think people should be to some extent protected from making decisions which are against their own interest, especially when their decisions are permanent and pathologically affected. In some cases, I think it can be rightly determined death is in someone's interest, such as incurable suffering. Anxiety and depression, while often severely painful, are frequently possible to recover from.

We tend to euthanize animals when we can't justify the expenditure of treating them. We generally view fellow humans as having an inherent right to our best efforts to help them, rather than in terms of their value to us.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#106

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:23 PM UTC

Veen wrote: post #93

DoreenMichele wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also do freelance writing for pay. That is currently the majority of my earned income. And the internet would like me know I'm immoral and ruining the internet for doing that kind of work. See this recent comment by me in reply to those accusations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20035958 Twenty years ago when I was homeschooling, I could find all kinds of high quality free goodies online to support that. It…

If you regularly write comments like this, I can understand why you don't find Hacker News a useful networking opportunity. It's not Tumblr.

I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board. It's only 100 names long, but HN has been around more than a decade, so a lot more than 100 people have spent time on it.

That means that less than one percent of the top ranks is openly female. This is consistent with the gender ratio suggested by this old poll:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309

For comparison, 17 percent of the CEOs in the US are female. HN cannot even begin to compete with that lousy statistic.

So the evidence suggests I'm some kind of amazing Wunderkind, breaking the glass ceiling and doing what no other woman can do. I'm still dirt poor. Meanwhile, some male members of the leader board are self made millionaires, in part due to their participation here.

I repeat: There is always some new BS reason to dismiss me. And it is exactly that: BS.

Sexism is very much alive and well on HN.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#107

Post by not_a_cop75 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:31 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

cm2012 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your happy but very drunk friend wanted to tapdance on the edge of a tall building, would you restrain them if necessary? Or if someone high on shrooms was trying to drink bleach? A suicidal mind is often one caught in the temporary throes of delusion and irrationality, even if it comes from internal wiring going haywire instead of external substances. Preventing someone from killing themselves is in their best in…

There are many people for whom life is a living hell with no hope of escape other than to end it. Insisting they live amounts to serving as their warden and torturer. If it isn't someone you are personally willing to take some responsibility for, as you did with your wife, then I think it is wrong to insist they live. I'm quite open about my long history of being suicidal and the various underlying reasons why. Peopl…

I think studies that have used MDMA have suggested that some of these slumps can be corrected sometimes by just a minimal dose. It seems like such a waste not to try something like that, when the cost of taking an individual from cradle to responsible adulthood is fully realized.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#108

Post by alexhutcheson » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:35 PM UTC

anvandare wrote: post #11

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high…

I’d highly recommend reading this piece by a psychiatrist for a (research-based) alternative perspective: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/25/in-defense-of-psych-tr...

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#109

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:57 PM UTC

not_a_cop75 wrote: post #107

DoreenMichele wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many people for whom life is a living hell with no hope of escape other than to end it. Insisting they live amounts to serving as their warden and torturer. If it isn't someone you are personally willing to take some responsibility for, as you did with your wife, then I think it is wrong to insist they live. I'm quite open about my long history of being suicidal and the various underlying reasons why. Peopl…

I think studies that have used MDMA have suggested that some of these slumps can be corrected sometimes by just a minimal dose. It seems like such a waste not to try something like that, when the cost of taking an individual from cradle to responsible adulthood is fully realized.

The girl in the article under discussion was raped by two men at age 14, then mistreated for years by the healthcare system that she turned to for help in the aftermath of that.

I was raped at age 12. It took me two decades to recover, and I got vastly better support than her.

Lots of tape victims seem to never really get over it. Most of the world seems to not know how to heal that kind of trauma.

I cannot imagine that a single dose of a drug has any hope of fixing something like that. If you cannot trust anyone around you because of a long standing track record of mistreatment of you, taking happy pills to make you happy with this horror show sounds like a really bad idea to me, one that would reduce your ability to adequately self advocate in a dangerous social setting.

I also live with an incurable medical condition that is classified as a dread disease because it so negatively impacts your life.

On the upside, I am getting healthier when the entire world says it cannot be done. As my physical health improves, my suicidal tendencies are trending down because I'm not so extremely miserable 24/7.

On the downside, basically the entire world is openly hostile, openly attacks me for talking about that, openly dismisses me as a lunatic who is making that up, openly discriminates against me over that -- for example, I've had moderators on multiple forums tell me I'm the problem when I got attacked in violation of the rules and I got thrown off instead of the people attacking me -- and on and on. That alone is enough to make things look pretty damn hopeless.

There is no winning here.

And that's for someone miraculously getting well when that's supposed to be impossible. If I actually was facing the steady gruesome decline my condition is supposed to cause where life is horrible torture today and you can count on things just getting steadily worse for all of your tomorrows, I would have killed myself ages ago. There is no fucking way I would fight to survive with such a prognosis.

Many people need solutions for torturous health issues or torturous social problems rooted in the bad behavior of other people. For such people, seeking to tweak their brain chemistry like they are the problem that needs to be fixed is part of the problem.

Re: The Euthanasia That Wasn’t

#110

Post by mlang23 » Thu, Jun 06, 2019, 1:58 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #64

lotu wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think that techies who constantly complain about crap documentation would realize quality writing is not free. (Best of luck BTW)

Thank you. It's especially crazy making because my writing sometimes spends time on the front page of HN, but I'm still talked at like a leech who is trying to "panhandle the internet," a thing someone (on a different forum, not here) literally accused me of for trying to monetize my websites while homeless. Like if you are poor enough, working for a living is not allowable and your work can't have value and you are…

Does that explain why I am not allow to foolow the original link with Lynx? 403 forbidden. Now I am guessing I am hitting a sort of paywall that refuses to cooperate with plain text browsers?