I've thought a lot about suicide and near death experiences

Well said. We are going to die. Why prolong life if it's painful?

I'm not complaining that graham declined to reply to me further. It's the fact that he created a strawman argument based on a distortion and declared victory in the argument on that basis, as well as the usual argument that the suffering of the unfortunate is unimportant and only happy people matter.



Following me is not the only explanation for your responding to that post; but certainly the most likely, given that you don't usually post on that forum and hadn't responded to the other threads on there. And no, it's not harassment, I'm just pointing out your hypocrisy in the fact that you defended the cowardly actions of the Muslim guy in reporting someone to the police for sending him emails. To refresh your memory, this is the case to which I'm referring:

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tim-burton-radio-host-tell-mama-jailed-racist-islamophobic-fiyaz-mughal-a7707256.html


And with regards to 'safe space', this forum has an in-built 'safe space' function, which I do not use. Therefore it cannot be alleged that I am seeking a safe space. I don't object to being called "demented", I'm merely pointing out your hypocrisy for the fact that you have condemned other people for name calling, even going so far as saving the excerpts and quoting them for several months after the fact.

But the state does not have any evidence to suggest that the person would regret the suicide should they complete it. And if something is a 'right', then why must it be carried out in private? It's only a 'right' in the same sense that homosexual intercourse is a 'right' in Saudi Arabia. Usually if you're going to force someone not to do something, you would be able to explain how it would either a) cause someone else to be deprived of their rights; or b) the individual themselves would likely regret the action for a long time afterwards. And even reason b) is questionable. With a well-planned suicide, there is no reason to believe that either a) or b) can be supported, regardless of whether the individual announces their intentions to anyone else ahead of time, or whether they are unable to get the time alone in order to complete the suicide without discovery.

If someone has made certain preparations for a quick and painless death, why should they not be able to go and visit their friends and loved ones to say goodbye and explain that when they go home they are going to administer themselves a medicine which will kill them peacefully and painlessly? What would likely happen in that scenario (unless the individual was blessed to have only friends and family members who were extremely progressively minded and irreligious) is that someone would alert the police, they would raid the person's home, remove the Nembutal and take the person into custody. In what sense, then, does the person have the 'right' to take the Nembutal. You're also ignoring the many people who do not or cannot live independently and therefore do not have enough time alone or the resources to complete a suicide without being discovered in time.



Jumping in front of a train is a scenario in which the suicide may traumatise innocent people and inconvenience many more. The reason why people do it anyway is because they do not have right of access to a means of suicide which is painless, guaranteed and will not leave a gruesome scene for someone else to have to clean up. It's people like you who have so little regard for the suffering of others that desperate people end up finding a way out which causes a great deal of collateral damage in terms of psychological trauma to other people and inconvenience to many. And yet you can't come up with one tangible negative consequence of committing suicide for the individual; you can only resort to gesturing towards abstract and metaphysical reasons why people shouldn't be facilitated in doing so (life is precious and therefore must be preserved by force, even at the cost of terrible suffering).




Going back to my first example of the individual with the well planned Nembutal suicide, who wants to say goodbye to their friends and family before they go. Explain how such an individual would be exhibiting signs of 'derangement', if they wanted to make the suicide less of a shock for the people closest to them, and try to explain to those people why they've made the decision to die.



Controversial and highly contested in the same way that the claims of monotheistic religions are incredibly controversial and highly contested. Just because a lot of people disagree with the evidence/logic, does not mean that the evidence or logic is answerable. And there is absolutely no comic irony in my stance, because in order to do what you've suggested (i.e. opt out of what determinism compels me to do, which is to argue that free will does not exist), then I would need to have the very free will that I assert does not exist.

Anyone who resorts to straw man arguments and then refusing to acknowledge that they've addressed a point was not made is covering up for the weakness of their argument. Also, declaring victory in a debate based on subjective arguments (and ones that are based on a strawman at that) is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I don't think that you would allow such tactics to pass without any comment, but yet you expect me not to have posted again on that thread and just accept that graham had "won" the argument and that it was OK to change my wording.

That "silly argument" is exactly the one you keep making when you emphasise how "most people" are having a "blast". This statement is highly dubious in and of itself to anyone who keeps abreast of international news; but in any case, it is impossible to avoid the inference that the suffering of the minority (as you perceive it) is a price worth paying.

Someone sending you unwanted emails is something that is very easy to address without the involvement of law enforcement. You block the offending email address, or refrain from reading the emails. Thus, you've created your own safe space with the minimum of fuss and effort. Moreover, since the communications are private, nobody but the sender of the emails will think that you are being evasive and therefore there is no compulsion to respond in order to defend oneself against libel, or merely save face. Therefore, it is a lesser offence than posting unwanted responses on a public message board, where one may feel compelled to defend oneself against libelous statements and not appear evasive.

That would be an action taken without the consent of the person being killed, though. There's good reason to safeguard a person's rights not to be assaulted without their consent - it helps to create a climate where people are not concerned about being maliciously attacked. Also, the loved ones of the person being killed would be rightly aggrieved if the person was killed without any warrant, whereas if the person died by assisted suicide, they would likely feel aggrieved but would not be justified in believing that they had a right to force that person to live for their sake.



It can be inflicted upon a failed suicide and the state is able to aggressively prevent suicide by removing or limiting access to the means for suicide. Such as building suicide barriers on bridges, making it illegal to access Nembutal, they can ban businesses from selling other household substances which can be used as part of a suicide, such as Lime Sulphur (which can be mixed with hydrochloric acid to create Sulphur Dioxide in what's known as a detergent suicide). They can force entry to your home and ransack the place if you are suspected of owning the means to commit suicide. This has happened on a number of occasions to people who have ordered Nembutal from abroad, telling nobody of their intentions. So on and so forth. Even though suicide is not illegal, it is certainly the farthest thing from being a protected right. It currently exists in kind of a grey area, wherein it is not de jure a crime, but is mandated by law to be prevented where possible.



How is it 'empathy' when you are trapping them in a situation which you know is causing them grievous suffering and which has no guarantee of being remedied in any other way? How was the British legal system being 'empathetic' in forcing Tony Nicklinson to die by starvation, after a long and ill fated legal battle to legalise the right to die?

www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/aug/22/tony-nicklinson-die-not-forgotten



Some people would prefer the chance to say goodbye to someone they love, rather than have their suicide come as a shock. But that's really rather beside the point. The point would be that the police would have the power to force entry to the person's home, confiscate the Nembutal and take the person into custody. Not that such action would always have been prompted by the tip off from a loved one. There have been numerous cases in which the authorities have somehow found out that an individual possesses Nembutal, resulting in the person's home being raided and them taken into custody. Please explain how that state of affairs is remotely consistent with suicide being deemed a 'right' of any kind? Please explain what the moral justification for such an action would be?

Nembutal is the most peaceful and painless way of dying. It's up there with an exit bag combined with Nitrogen or Helium, but is more failsafe, added to the fact that Helium canister manufacturers are now adding lung irritants or mixing the Helium with Oxygen in order to prevent their canisters being used in a suicide. A Nitrogen canister is very difficult to come across unless you are a professional in an industry which uses Nitrogen.



They have very limited options if they are not living independently, and non-existent options short of starvation if they are paralysed (and even this may be denied to them if the carers force feed them to keep them alive). Paralysed people are not considered eligible for assistance to die in most jurisdictions which have 'right to die' laws on the books. Those laws typically serve only those with a prognosis of 6 months or less to live. And of course, by the time that they've cleared all of the legal hurdles, they're probably fairly close to the end of that period anyway; or for all the stress that the process causes they may be just as well waiting out the last months and hoping that it doesn't get drawn out longer than what the doctors predicted. The laws on the books in the US states which allow assisted dying, as well as the pusillanimous travesty of a law that Canada passed last year are virtually useless.



People would not go to the risk of spending several hundred dollars and the risk of being caught to import Nembutal from overseas if there were many trivially easy ways of dying. And these are people who are hard-core suicide aficionados who are paying for Nembutal from the far-east; not people who have barely formed a coherent thought on the matter of suicide.

And like I've mentioned above, people should have the right to consent to what you're going to do to them, even if it kills them without them realising what's happening. But what is crucial to realise is that the family peacefully gassed to death in their sleep are not in fact victims; the victims are those who are left alive and who would feel wronged by that death. Whilst those same people may feel wronged if their loved ones are taken by assisted suicide; that speaks against their own lack of compassion and their own sense of entitlement, and is in no way an indictment of a right to die.




Well, people are going to tend to mourn a suicide anyway, and by telling them of your plans beforehand you spare them the shock and get the chance to explain your reasoning in person. But that really is beside the point.



The conscious veto thing does not salvage free will in the sense that you believe it to. They're still reacting to another cause which intervenes to inhibit the effect of the primary cause. You should read the comments on that article you posted; particularly the ones by george.ortega. Free will is as well supported by evidence as transubstantiation.



There is no futility in the effort, as I've already explained. I'm not expending any extra effort above and beyond what I'm caused to expend; and the result of my efforts will not be naught; it will be whatever it is predetermined to be.

I didn't claim to be harassed, I was drawing parallels between 'harassment' that you've condemned and the way that you treat others on this forum. You are known to be little more than an insult troll in the way of your contributions.



The 'rephrasing' of my comment completely changed the meaning. For example, non-existence can be a "state of affairs" (as per my actual quote), but a non existent society cannot be a "society", and therefore the analogy of "the cleanest house is one that doesn't exist" is not apt. That is dishonest and mendacious tactics that you would barely would have expected from Ada.

And if you weren't happy with how I summarised yours and graham's position on antinatalism, at least I gave the right of reply and will defend my particular way of expressing it. In the case of bringing children into the world, we don't know who is going to fall into the trapdoor and who isn't (although many will have the odds stacked against them from the start), but we do know that there is going to be a devastating amount of collateral damage, and it isn't going to be distributed equally. Yourself and @graham blithely brush this off by saying that it's fine for this to happen to people who didn't consent to those risks, because it's made up for by the fact that other people will enjoy their life. Therefore the suffering of the people who are unfortunate isn't being given due attention, and you're effectively rubbing salt into the wounds of those people by describing all the joy that they will never experience that makes it 'worth' the toll on them. You cannot determine how much suffering someone else should have to endure for the sake of your pleasure, as you and graham were doing. That is the absolute height of hubris. And then to make it worse, you want to limit people to having to take full responsibility to provide for their own suicide; and if they can't figure it out or don't have the right access, then that's just tough, they'll just have to suffer for however long medical science can force them to stay alive.

Also you haven't once explained why 'the dead don't care' is not valid. You've just compared scenarios where the person has requested death and has gone to their death relieved and thankful to be unburdened of their suffering, with cases of people being maliciously murdered.




Where in the article did it state anything about stalking and sending unwanted packages by mail? I re-read it just to make sure.