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Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

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Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#191
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Euthanasia is killing somebody out of "mercy." It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed. It is definitely a step beyond physician-assisted suicide, and the two should not be confused or used interchangeably, though both are morally repugnant.

Either your country is handling assisted suicides in a terrible way, or you don't really know what you're talking about, as rude as that makes me sound. Especially "It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed" is absolutely, 100% false.

I'm not talking about laws. I'm talking about the meaning of words. What is it called if a doctor kills somebody out of "mercy," but without explicit consent? An increasing morphine drip that suppresses vital function allowing them to "go peacefully in their sleep" just a bit sooner than would have happened otherwise. This happens all the time.

That's called euthanasia, not physician-assisted suicide. And if we can't acknowledge the difference, we are opening ourselves up to allowing what I described because we already allowed "euthanasia," when in fact what we really allowed was PA-suicide. The fact that both are murder in a moral sense doesn't change the necessity of distinguishing between them.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going against legal abortion yields more illegal abortions. Going against legal alcohol yields more illegal alcohol. Going against legal X yields more illegal X. Same concept, going against legal suicide (euthanasia) yields more suicides. Sure overall the number of suicides might go down , maybe even very noticeable, but the quality of care would suffer tremendously. I'm not arguing on suicide vs suicide, but on the…

There are so many things wrong with this reasoning, it's kind of hard to know where to start: 1. Take 'Going against legal X yields more illegal X': This is a meaningless statement. For example, going against legal murder yields more illegal murder. It is a non-statement, tautological. 2. Take a revised and more debatable statement: 'Going against legal X yields more X' (much rarer, but possible, for example cocaine…

Probably the strongest form of the "going against legal X leads to illegal X" is that "if society doesn't address the causes that make people want X and just makes it a criminal offence, we'll still see a lot of X, plus we'll have a lot of folks in prison".

For example with murder we have many cases of vigilantism, the cause was a broken police/justice system.

Every kind of substance crime? War on Substances! And it's a total failure.

"Tough on X" ("enforcement") sounds good, but our whole history is about how tough never really works. (Law and order, machismo, denying and ignoring real causes, and putting on a big show about the effect, those are the magic ingredients to totalitarianism.)

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going against legal abortion yields more illegal abortions. Going against legal alcohol yields more illegal alcohol. Going against legal X yields more illegal X. Same concept, going against legal suicide (euthanasia) yields more suicides. Sure overall the number of suicides might go down , maybe even very noticeable, but the quality of care would suffer tremendously. I'm not arguing on suicide vs suicide, but on the…

There are so many things wrong with this reasoning, it's kind of hard to know where to start: 1. Take 'Going against legal X yields more illegal X': This is a meaningless statement. For example, going against legal murder yields more illegal murder. It is a non-statement, tautological. 2. Take a revised and more debatable statement: 'Going against legal X yields more X' (much rarer, but possible, for example cocaine…

Yes, it is in a vacuum. But in the discussed case, if you penalize posting only about the ilegal version, then an assymetry is created where going against X (and thus inciting illegal X) gets filtered through a censor lens where you only see "inciting illegal X".

Anyway I'm not saying I agree, just that this could be the reasoning behind saying that the tweet promoted harmful suicides.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think essays like "A Modest Proposal" are likely to be misunderstood?

I've literally seen people use the term 'modest proposal' in a non-satirical way missing the point. Also see how Jean Carroll has been described as a misandrist when she invoked the same phrase. And also see the difficulty that the 'abolish the police' movement have gotten into explaining that they don't literally mean abolish, especially since some of them do literally mean that, so you get really stuck trying to ex…

... some people do really support abolishing the police. And those people are also likely to go and protest. Sure, the bigger moderate masses picked up the slogan, but it started with that radical message.

Plus on a realpolitik level it doesn't really matter what the slogan is. Really. See how tha ACA was turned into Obamacare and death panels. Yes, independents initially might be confused, yes a dumb slogan doesn't help, but fundamentally if the political and social will is there, the slogan does not really matter.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#195
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, 1922 Coke advertising used women in a swimsuit, that’s about as sexualized as a Miley Cyrus video relative to the time period. If anything their very consistent in targeting various segments over time. That said, US social norms get more and less restrictive over time. Dueling for example used to be perfectly legal as was harsh physical punishment for children. What we think of as progress is arguably just incr…

>> 1922 Coke advertising used women in a swimsuit There was far more sexualized content available in the 20s. A girl in a 20s-style 'swimming costume' was the the advertiser acceptable limit at the time for mass media. A Miley Cyrus video would be the sort of content available at 1920s peep shows in bad neighborhoods, content from which advertisers then stay far away. Today they readily endorse it.

Those peep shows where closer to strip joints/late night cable than Miley Cyrus. Full frontal nudity etc.

She’s a little past prime time TV, but hardly porn.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I have since then always arrived to the conclusion that Facebook cannot interpret irony, satire, sarcasm and reflection. Sarcasm has to be the least effective possible way to communicate anything, anywhere. You are absolutely begging to be misinterpreted or misunderstood, either legitimately or even deliberately. And you can't really defend yourself because 'it was sarcasm' won't cut it as a defence with many p…

Do you think essays like "A Modest Proposal" are likely to be misunderstood?

Comedians do shows, they have a persona, an act, and they do their bits embedded into a context. If someone just randomly shouts Nazi ideology into the void, especially at a time when that void is very ticklish, it's not unheard of that the void silences the shouter.

(Is this good? No of course not, it's a very sad state of affairs that somehow constructive de-escalatory discourse is not incentivized on these platforms, and preaching to the choir, virtue signalling, trolling and so and so are.)

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#197

Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable? The popularity of this view makes me wish more people read Kafka. A future tyranny might end up not being Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, but a kafkesque nightmare where people are lost in a world of AI giving out absurd punishments. [1] Kafka's book The Castle [2] is essentially about this, although I think his aph…

> Why does it matter if the flagging is automatic? Does that somehow make it more acceptable?

Since the action (for “encouraging or promoting suicide”, bizarrely) was upheld on human review, whether the flagging was automatic or not is obviously irrelevant.

Clearly, this action is unwarranted and the Bishop should be entitled to a full refund of monies paid to Twitter for the privilege of having messages distributed on the platform, at a minimum from the point of the unjustified ban.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#198
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either your country is handling assisted suicides in a terrible way, or you don't really know what you're talking about, as rude as that makes me sound. Especially "It does not require the agreement or desire of the person being killed" is absolutely, 100% false.

I'm not talking about laws. I'm talking about the meaning of words. What is it called if a doctor kills somebody out of "mercy," but without explicit consent? An increasing morphine drip that suppresses vital function allowing them to "go peacefully in their sleep" just a bit sooner than would have happened otherwise. This happens all the time. That's called euthanasia, not physician-assisted suicide. And if we can't…

> What is it called if a doctor kills somebody out of "mercy," but without explicit consent?

That's murder.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Catholic dogma may be out of date, but I'd suppose it goes as such: Euthanasia is de-facto suicide, and suicide is a mortal sin. Such sins may damn a soul to eternal punishment in Hell. Suffering at such intensity for eternity is much worse than the suffering at the end of one's life. QED, euthanasia is bad. I'm certain that I'm butchering this. Also, to be clear, I am NOT advocating one way or the other on this r…

As always, the CCC is at your disposal: https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s... (yuck, needs a UI makeover) The crux of it is that suicide rejects the gift of life "Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We…

That’s great, and no one is telling Catholics they can’t suffer if they want to.

The problem is Catholics are telling others to suffer. Ironically, in the US, it’s under the banner of the “small government” and “freedom” party.

Re: Twitter locks out Irish Bishop after he criticized euthanasia

#200
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize the network effect right? You mean that a bunch of your friends is on one platform, and a bunch of others on another platform, and your family on still another one. But then you have to be on all platforms, so this means everyone else also needs to be on all platforms. So how exactly do you see this working when reality pushes everyone to use a single platform? because you know, it's a social network.

1) My family is on Facebook. I am not. ;-) It's already the case that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for example have different "crowds", though there's some overlap. 2) Somehow humanity survived without these networks pre-2007ish. 3) I have no problem with the existence of many smaller special-interest social networks. Those are manageable, and we had them before the rise of the BigCos. The problem is with the exi…

Your point 1 contradicts your monopoly theory.

Your point 2 says you really want to join the Amish.

You mean smaller platforms like Parler or 4chan?

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