Suicide, suicide, sucide...

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Mrs.Lucysnow, Aug 12, 2014.

  1. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

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    Suicide profiling at US border

    A Canadian woman named Ellen Richardson was to fly into the US where she planned to catch a Carribean cruise. At the airport Ms. Richardson was pulled by a border agent and confronted with questions concerning a past suicide attempt. Because of this past attempt she would be unable to cross the border into the US until a doctor approved by US Homeland Security gave her clearance and she would have to hand over her entire medical history. It turns out that under Section 212 of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act suicide is a security risk as she might expose people or property to risk through some random act of self-inflicted mayhem. Now I'm not talking about that 'Allah Akbar' type of suicidal person but that lonely figure behind closed doors; Richardson had taken an overdose of pills some years ago. Needless to say Ms. Richardson wasn't able to take her cruise but she isn't the only one who's been profiled because of a past suicide attempt. Lois Kamenitz, also Canadian, was also stopped and asked to hand over all her past medical records because she too had tried to top herself at one time in her life. Kamenitz however wasn't going to take it lying down and sued the Canadian government for being so stupid as to give a foreign government such personal information, she won the suit for an undisclosed amount of money. http://globalnews.ca/news/1147336/suicide-profiling-at-us-border-investigated/

    It looks as if the American government's police state is doing more than just sifting through Yahoo accounts and looking for terrorists they're also screening out the despondent and miserable. What cheek! I wonder if that means they also ban their own suicidal nationals from boarding an airline or driving over the boarder?

    Meanwhile...

    The Belgian government passed a law that allows children who are of speaking age to request euthanasia if they are terminally ill. Belgium’s Chamber of Representatives voted on February 13 to pass a bill allowing children under 18 to request euthanasia with parental consent. The vote was 86 in favor, 44 opposed, and 12 abstaining. Quite progressive indeed though I don't know how anyone can tell whether a child of six even understands the meaning of their own death enough to request it, they can understand the end of pain not the end of life. There's also the question of whether it can lead to coercion and manipulation by parents as children might state they want to die because their parents can no longer stand to watch them linger on in suffering.


    So while the Belgians welcome a dignified death with open arms the Australians treat it with disdain. An Aussie Doctor named Nitschke has been disbarred because he advocates for Euthanasia and assisted suicide rights. He's no Kevorkian helping people meet their maker, instead he just gives them the information on how they can do it themselves. His big mistake seems to be giving the information to a man of 45 who was neither old or terminally ill. He knew this man was thinking of killing himself (duh! Why else seek out such a doctor?) and the charge seems to be that Dr. Nitschke didn't try to dissuade him. I guess they wanted him to talk nice and hand him over to a psychiatrist. Instead Dr. Nitschke gave him the information and the man successfully used it. Its obvious that whatever information this man obtained from Dr. Nitschke could have been available to him anyway if he searched long enough but it seems the Australian government is gunning for this doctor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwjOvjr5zE&list=PL8Y08TuPAnL5TSIBNLIiSSOnbaC0CGQZO&index=5

    As US border officials bar suicides from entering the country other Western nations are extending it as a human right, still others label it as a "mental health issue" which needs strict intervention.

    I find it amusing that someone who is dying can ask for death to relieve their suffering as long as they're not depressed, as if you can be happy and want to die because of enormous pain, but a depressed person cannot ease their pain & suffering through suicide. However if you try to commit suicide, fail and then tell yourself "hell why not go on living, think I'll take a cruise", you're treated as a criminal for having had a go at it.
     
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    Sounds like a legitimate security risk.
     
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  5. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

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    You must be joking right?
     
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  7. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    I you read this with a deadpan monotone body-snatchers voice, well, it just sounds right.
     
  8. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    Welcome to the Progressive Police State 2.0
     
  9. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

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    I know its really quite bizarre. One woman is wheel chair bound and the other looks like my grandmother. What get's me is their insistence that they hand over their entire medical history. Truly bizarre.
     
  10. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    Actually it makes sense. Due to the inherent inefficiencies of progressive socialism, ANY society would need a lot of rules and will require a lot of spying. This is to restricture/regulate/limit the markets and together with total surveillance make 'modeling' better. Of course, it doesn't work, but whatever.

    These are but a few drips and drops of Police/Surveillance State spillover. It's what people want and have always wanted. Eventually the whole mess collapses. But, that probably isn't happening in our lifetimes.
     
  11. StrangerInAStrangeLand SubQuantum Mechanic Valued Senior Member

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    I think most people don't understand the issues & don't know what they want.

    I wonder when they will prevent people who have attempted suicide marrying, having kids, driving & voting.

    If you are correct, is it good or bad that it won't happen in our lifetime?
     
  12. Michael 歌舞伎 Valued Senior Member

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    Well, firstly I shouldn't have used the word 'collapsed' as that isn't ever going to happen minus an ecological travesty. We have and will continue to normalize. When will enough be enough? For many (most) I'd say never. Which is why revolutions are fought by 3-5% of any population. So, IMO we'll simply become poorer across the next 3-4 decades while simultaneously losing more civil rights and privacy. Which will all seem very normal. What to do about it? I have some peaceful ideas that revolve around logical parenting and alternative forms to education. Work within your community (if you happen to live in one - there's not that many left).

    Here's a recent seminar by Noam Chomsky that you may find it answers your questions better.

    [video=youtube;Qxab6i9Qxyk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxab6i9Qxyk[/video]


    Imagine, 150 years ago, as the industrial revolution was occurring, most Americans took great offense at the very notion of selling labor-hours. It was akin, to them, to slavery. Wage slavery they called it. I personally have no problem with selling labor-hours and feel that in free-markets without nation states and maximal civil liberty, labor would actually be highly paid as most people DO feel intuitively that it's a form of slavery and thus, most people don't like it. Of course, in our highly regulated tax farm, wage slavery is the norm. Not only that, but other ghastly behaviors are the norm (see: 3 week old fetuses being raised in day supervision centers or that Government Schools churning out the labor-hour-cogs [that's us]).

    Chomsky is an anarcho-syndicalist, he does seem to see a role for the use of force (he claims is legitimate) against large groups of human players in markets. Maybe this is true, maybe not. With something akin to a panarchistic environment I think we'd find out the limits to peaceful co-existence.
     
  13. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    No. Someone willing to kill themselves might not have much concern about safety, and they might want to take a few people with them. I mean you don't have a constitutional right to fly on an airplane.
     
  14. Locust Registered Member

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    Chomsky is brilliant man yet he show that he often play for team which he so often criticize. Like when he said about death of JFK: "Who cares who shot him?!
     
  15. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    your attitude is to be frank ignorant, offensive, and down right dangerous. sucides don't think about taking people with them. you basicly condemning depressed people to be abused. I think you need to take a long hard look at your morals... and definitely find some better ones. their is never an excuse for this kind of thuggish intrusions.
     
  16. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    To be honest pjdude... I can see where he's coming from. Someone who is suicidal because of their situation could, in theory, be much more easily manipulated into a suicide bombing or other such action than someone has a "good life" - that despair can be turned to anger at "the world" et al...

    It's a sad thing to be sure... but I can see it being a possibility.

    Granted, it just solidifies my conviction that we, as a species, need to work far harder to nip this kind of depression in the bud and help each other, rather than "turning the cold shoulder"

    DISCLAIMER: My thoughts on this are put here in writing as the thoughts of one who has attempted suicide multiple times in the past... I know how deep my depression was and how complete that despair can be... and the anger that can come with it.
     
  17. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    Well they had already started on screening people on US internal flights for Tuberculosis using MRI (not just X-ray scanners. they check the density of a persons lungs to see if they are damaged to identify disease.) So it was only time until they started screening for other diseases or issues. (To be honest I'm still surprised that it isn't mandatory to have a medical check-up before any flight.)
     
  18. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    yes its theoritically possible but considering what we do know about sucidal people the possibility is remote. there is a reason most sucides take place in private.
     
  19. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    Exactly - it's one more case where we (the US) have gone full-retard / full-paranoid about things
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    We grumble about the Homeland Gestapo in the airports, but that's still a rather minor inconvenience.

    If we were required to have a medical checkup, we'd have to plan our flights a week in advance. Many business passengers don't even know they're going somewhere until the day before. They'd have to learn to use the internet to have their meetings.

    This would cut into the airlines' profits, so it ain't gonna happen.
     
  21. Mrs.Lucysnow Valued Senior Member

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    Well it seems Americans are becoming even more dim as time goes by. Let's think about this for a moment. Profiles of suicide bombers do not indicate people who are actually suicidal, since they usually do not have a history of suicidal despondency and visits to the psych unit. Suicide bombers are religious and political zealots who willingly give up their lives and take that of others for a cause. The profile of the sociopathic or psychotic suicidal murderers tend to take their anger out on their own local communities, they tend not to travel with their mayhem. You say its not a constitutional right to fly on a plane. I can argue by that same logic that you don't have a constitutional right to drive your car, pay to use public transportation or buy a Greyhound bus ticket. What's stopping all of those "suicidal bombers" from targeting those public venues? Nothing. Would it then seem reasonable to you that if those public venues were targeted that people should have to show their past medical history to ride the bus?

    Is that what happened to you? You were so suicidal you wanted to kill yourself while taking the life of others? A middle-aged christian white woman who attempted to take her own life at some point in her life doesn't really fit the profile of someone who would be manipulated into a suicide bombing. I mean after all with all of that gut wrenching pain and self-imposed isolation how would the poor dear find the time to go out and find an underground jihad group to join? And how does it work anyway? Someone could have on their medical records that they had several suicide attempts when they were a teenager. Should they be banned from flying? I mean if they're going to pick on ladies in wheel chairs and old grandmothers.
     
  22. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    I myself attempted suicide, if memory serves, at least half a dozen times. I am ashamed to say that, more than once, I had considered doing something where I could take those of whom I blamed for my depression (school bullies, my alcoholic abusive father, etc) out with me... thankfully, some small rational part of my mind kept me from trying anything like that (and instead simply left me to attempt to harm myself), but I can see where people would be driven to do that.
     
  23. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    8,466
    It ain't often that I am pleased with incompetence. This is one of 'em.

    My design professor, R. Buckminster Fuller was also incompetent when he tried suicide. And, that was another of 'em.

    Thanx for being incompetent and then for being here.
     

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