Assisted suicide - thought?

Yes, but hardly unexpected. U.S. courts are reluctant to give permission to pull the plug on a patient who has been in a persistent vegetative state for so long that the statistical likelihood of ever regaining consciousness is comparable to aviating pigs. To allow the termination of life support to a patient who is conscious, communicative, and could easily remain that way for decades... no way are they going to do that.

It's assisted suicide, which is only legal in Oregon. And the only way that law survived federal scrutiny was to include a provision that it was only applicable to Oregon residents. They didn't want Oregon to become a destination for "suicide tourism." I don't know how many years it takes to establish legal residency in Oregon. And I don't know if it would be possible for Tony to be transported there.

Switzerland allows it, but that's a long flight.

 

The poor fellow finally died without help.

 

Even though much of the West is crawling out from under the dead weight of Christianity, its rules are still unconsciously influencing us. Apparently somewhere along the way Christians were told by their imaginary god that life and death is his business, not theirs. So if somebody wants to die he has to wait for the god to make the decision.

Of course this is inconsistent with the almost universal premise among Christians that they have both a right and a duty to kill other people if they are interfering with the metastasis of Christianity across the planet.

This would be amusing if it weren't so horrible. The only life a person should be empowered to make decisions about is his own. Each of us should be free to kill himself if he wants to, but not to kill anybody else. Christianity, once again, has everything backwards.

 

There's one going on right now. Some members are irate that the Norwegian mass murderer wasn't even sentenced to life imprisonment, much less execution. I keep pointing out that even a mass murderer probably has a mother, father, spouse, children, pastor, coach, scoutmaster, friends, and/or other people who tried to make him a good person and failed. When you kill him you bring inconsolable grief to those people, and they don't deserve it. Furthermore, you're teaching the guy's sons that violence is an acceptable way to resolve a dispute. Most of the world's feuds were started by sons avenging the death of their father. Who wants to live in a country with angry orphaned boys running around looking for the bastards who killed their daddy, believing that their culture condones revenge killing? If you're not sure, spend a few weeks in Albania or Afghanistan.

I find it unsurprising that virtually all of the pro-death penalty arguments are dripping with anger. Angry people must not be allowed to make policy, because anger makes us irrational. The same is true of bereaved people.

When you so clearly reduce the arguments to their basics, they are obviously derived from the moral code of the Abrahamic religions. Only God is allowed to decide when it's our time to die, no matter how much pain we're in. But with one exception: If we're really, really angry, then we get to make war on the people who made us angry and attempt to kill all of them. So long as we can make a case that we are for God and they are against him, God will support our cause.

Once a war has been going on for more than a day or two, it becomes nothing more than the soldiers of each country practicing "capital punishment" on the soldiers of the other country for the people they killed yesterday. So when we reduce this to a case of one person having committed murder, God surely would approve us of killing him too.

Yes, God went to that anger management class and sent the First Hippie down to teach us about love and peace, but it didn't work. I'm an atheist and I'm fairly certain that Jesus was not a real person, but I still weep for him. It's all just too sad.

 

They know that, so "expect" isn't exactly the right word. More like "demand." One fellow even said the Norwegians were a disgrace to their Viking ancestors, who killed, raped and pillaged with abandon. I told him that apparently some people manage to become more civilized than their ancestors, while others don't.

We're all descended from cavemen, after all. Reexamination of fossils using modern instruments has discovered that the majority of adults in the Paleolithic Era died by violence. In other words, more humans were killed by other humans than by all other causes combined. Some of us are proud to have evolved beyond that.

As for "enough time in prison," the maximum sentence in Mexico is 20 years. Of course twenty years in a Mexican prison probably feels like a lot longer.

Anyway, if we were a people who were reluctant to take a life even as punishment for a vile crime, and even as retribution for the sins of an entire nation (i.e., "war"), then I could understand a matching reluctance to assist a person who seeks his own death as an end to physical or emotional suffering.

But ironically, today the Swiss, one of the most peaceful peoples on earth, are the ones who allow assisted suicide even for non-residents.

 

Sorry, the word has too many meanings to find the specific one you refer to.

Homo sapiens is qualitatively different from all other mammals in so many important ways that my bias is justified. Most of them derive from our uniquely large forebrain, which gives us the unique ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior--wholesale. (At least unique in degree. Some of our companion species such as dogs and parrots can act against their instincts but only to a minor extent and only once we teach them.) The history of humans since the first Paradigm Shift from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farmers has been one long saga of overcoming our instincts and developing new ways of dealing with nature. Typically that involves transcending nature and building an environment more suitable to ourselves.

No thanks. I'm proud of who we've become, not to mention deliriously happy about it.

My ability to hear professionally composed and performed music 24/7 is, by itself, more than enough compensation for "giving up" the lifestyle of the lower animals. Since I don't enjoy camping or hunting, and furthermore because I have an incredibly satisfying job as a writer (my favorite activity), that life without language is of no interest at all.

Good for you. It's always good to question everything. But I would clarify your terminology. What you're regarding as evolution is not evolution, and that's not a trivial point. The Neolithic Revolution occurred only a few hundred generations ago, and that is not long enough for our DNA to evolve for compatibility with the Neolithic lifestyle, much less the lifestyle of the subsequent Paradigm Shifts: civilization, bronze, iron, industry and electronics.

Each of us has a caveman inside, and we spend considerable effort keeping him placated so he doesn't take control and go all Paleolithic on us. This is arguably the most important of all the dynamics that define us, and therefore I think it should be kept in mind at all times. We have not evolved to be civilized creatures. We are simply overriding our instincts with reasoned and learned behavior because we've made a rational decision that this life is better than the old one.

As I have often pointed out, this is not true of our dearest companions, our dogs. They've had thousands of generations to evolve and they have done so. Even though they are a subspecies of wolf, they are considerably different in psychology: more gregarious, less competitive for leadership, comfortable among strangers even of other species, scavengers instead of hunters (with the smaller brain this lower-protein diet requires), and more fun-loving (adult dogs behave like baby wolves). They have adapted to civilization all the way down to their DNA. We have not.

The Swiss are smart enough and in the loop enough to know that the second derivative of population went negative around 1980 and that the first derivative will do so around the end of this century. I would suspect that they have already moved beyond the population problem (which appears to be solvable by continuing to make communication cheaper and faster so people who live under despots can organize and overthrow them, at which point they'll discover that there's plenty of food, medicine and other resources now that they can actually get their hands on it rather than seeing it commandeered and sold on the black market) and have begun working on a dire problem that humanity hasn't faced in tens of thousands of years: a shrinking population.

Every economic model since Adam Smith assumes without comment that its engine of prosperity is an ever-growing population. Somebody has to figure out the next model.

 

You're on the wrong website, lady.