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Would you say of someone poisoned, "their physical state was not compatible with self preservation"? What if it was just a little poison that a perfectly health
by vertex-four 6y ago
Would you say of someone poisoned, "their physical state was not compatible with self preservation"? What if it was just a little poison that a perfectly healthy person could manage?
Yes, a lot of people are harmed by the same system. Suicide is a particularly visible and obvious case of this; people can and do regularly bat off "N% of people wound up in jail for no reason" or "there's a high incidence of people needing mental healthcare after being accused of crimes" as "the system isn't perfect" and argue over how exactly we know that this was the cause, it's a lot harder to respond the same to "the state did something that they should've never done and this resulted in death". Although tbh you're managing just fine.
- vmception 6y ago> "their physical state was not compatible with self preservation" I say that regarding the action of suicide exclusively, to illuminate the choices involved. Whereas someone poisoned, or someone with a severe allergic reaction to "just a little poison" did not have that choice. The other point of pointing out the choice is that our society clearly has a negative view of suicide, but doesn't consider how random motivational anti-suicide words don't address why people want to kill themselves. As in, perhaps it is a perfectly valid option. So, I say "if we want to prioritize self preservation", because its a big if, suggesting that if we understood it maybe we would come to a different conclusion. I say "not compatible with self preservation", because they might have a perfectly valid choice, and it is accurate that choice doesn't include living or our more familiar self-preservation instinct. I see this cognitive dissonance and misunderstanding all culminated into cases like Aaron Swartz. Where all the energy is directed in the wrong way for the wrong reasons. A college student playing around and getting the attention of an overzealous district attorney? The suicide is a complete non-sequitur and red herring. As a more recent example, a daytrader misunderstanding margin requirements but mostly user experience quirks, Robinhood is a red herring. To me, it is clear that your crusade is to illuminate the equivalence of mental health and physical health. That's a nice crusade too, we are agreeing in the sense that it should be more understood. My crusade is that we may come to conclusions that create a very different view of the choice of suicide: hypothesis to conclusion. Current suicide discussion and research is based around conforming things to a conclusion of suicide avoidance.