the right to commit suicide is not a RIGHT! - everyone should understand this!

[A Son of Liberty]

Intervening implies that one knows what it best for the individual about to kill himself. That presumption is the root of all intervention, which is the subversion of individual sovereignty. Either one owns his life, or he does not.

Without putting words in his mouth and for the sake of discussion, I don't think osan would brutally attack a person who implored him to alter his decision; but to physically prevent him from carrying out his decision is to deny him of his right to self-ownership. It is the birth of the state, essentially; and the state is the great evil against humanity. That, I believe, is why osan would be within his rights to attack such an individual.

 

[A Son of Liberty]

I'd rather have daniel alive than dead.

I understand what you're trying to say here, but you have to understand the utter arrogance implicit in such a statement.

Daniel's life was his own, not yours. It wasn't up to you to determine the conditions under which Daniel lived his life.

 

[judejin]

I understand what you're trying to say here, but you have to understand the utter arrogance implicit in such a statement.

Daniel's life was his own, not yours. It wasn't up to you to determine the conditions under which Daniel lived his life.

let's imagin that a beautiful woman who cared about daniel discovered the suicide and saved him. this beautiful woman was also able to turn around his mental state and they got married and lived a happy life hereafter.
it is unfortunate that the real story is only sadness. it's a great pity that such a brave man like daniel chose such a cowardly act in the end. suicide is like surrendering to the enemy. a brave soldier would at least want to take down the enemy with him when he dies. if can't take down the enemy, one should try to fight till the end. if there are braver heroes out there, daniels is not one of them!

 

[judejin]

Intervening implies that one knows what it best for the individual about to kill himself. That presumption is the root of all intervention, which is the subversion of individual sovereignty. Either one owns his life, or he does not.

Without putting words in his mouth and for the sake of discussion, I don't think osan would brutally attack a person who implored him to alter his decision; but to physically prevent him from carrying out his decision is to deny him of his right to self-ownership. It is the birth of the state, essentially; and the state is the great evil against humanity. That, I believe, is why osan would be within his rights to attack such an individual.

let's envision such a scenario, when osan wants to commit suicide, he's fully armed and warns that he doesn't want to be interfered. in this case, i think nobody would intervene. we do have many successful suicides everyday. all i am saying is that the person saved cannot charge the hero for violating his rights. no court will punish the hero. the court will just say to the person saved "you win and go ahead commit suicide again if you wish. but no punishment to the hero. because without him, you'll be dead body already and wouldn't stand here to press charges! case closed!"

 

[osan]

on your planet, suicides are never intervened. bystander just look on and possibly cheer on! that's really what you wish for?

What disingenuous, ineptly crafted bullshit.

Nobody said anything about "never" and "always". Circumstances differ - is this so beyond your ken to grasp? There are times when certain forms of interference may be justifiable. There are times when it may not be. Any time you stick your nose into someone else's business you risk violating any of a number of their inherent rights. Those violations should not be taken lightly, even when the intentions are "good". It is exactly this justification - the greater good - that has gotten the human race so deep in the poo that it now appears it may never slog its way back out. But YOU know better what is good for this one or that one. YOU know suicide is never right, that a man never has a right to end his life. You know NOTHING. Were your beliefs true, why then would the military provide its pilots with poisons and sidearms in the event they faced capture? Was it only for the cynical purpose of preserving its secrets? Or was it precisely because they understand there are fates far and away worse than death?

You should keep your good intentions zipped a bit better. Talking to a jumper is not the same as apprehending them and forcing them off that precipice. Fie upon you if you presume the authority to do so and good on anyone who would beat your brains out for showing such profound disrespect. It is your brand of thought that has turned this world into the nightmare it has become. Feh.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

If I decide it is time to die, do you assume I have arrived at that decision casually? If so, it is the worst assumption you could make. I will speak for nobody else, but as for myself such a decision would be serious as a heart attack. Given this, I would be in no humor for unsolicited third-party interference. I would, in fact, be hostile toward it in the extreme, which is well within the limits of my rightful claims. Therefore, given the obviously grave nature of the decision and the circumstances that almost certainly attend such somber choices, interference is rightly met with absolute intolerance and the retributions exacted would be one's just right.

Retribution in this context is not taken because someone saves the life of another per se, but because they interfered uninvited in an affair of such a gravity that no man is warranted in indulging himself in acts that amount to nothing better than the childishly self-absorbed aggrandizing of his own ego.



They are in perfect harmony. There is no conflict. That you see a conflict indicates misunderstanding on your part and not an error on mine.



That is because you do not understand proper human relations, which encompass the grotesquely ugly as well as the desirably beautiful. You appear to be one of those who refuse or otherwise fail to accept that which you find emotionally disagreeable. Lacking any reasoned basis for the rejection, and being driven by pure emotion, you invariably come to the wrong conclusions, universally reject that which you find "ugly", and appear to believe you are entitled to prohibit others from acting in such ways. This renders you fundamentally no different from those against whom you presume to complain.

One is either free or one is something else.



You have SO missed the point.



Irrelevant to the point under discussion.



Nonsequitur. That aside, depending on the circumstance under which the interference occurred, I am well justified in exacting a price for another's interference in my rightful decisions.



I never stated nor implied any such thing. Your extrapolations are running toward the wild.



You are entitled to your opinion, of course.

I am thoroughly confused right now. You said if someone interfered in your suicide and saved your life, that you would hunt them down and kill them in the most gruesome way imagineable. Now you are saying you never stated nor implied any such thing and I am extrapolating. Which is it?

 

[osan]

I wouldn't judge them. I just don't think that if someone DID grab her they would deserve legal punishment. And I CERTAINLY don't think they'd deserve to be tortured like Osan has stated he thinks...

Where did I write a single word about torturing someone? I was using a bit of literal license to drive home a point. I said I would be gruesome. If you interpret that as directly implying torture then I can only conclude that your language skills are very poor.

Rather, you strike me as a poorly skilled troll. Shame on me for feeding it.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

you're mixing things up. you can certainly commit suicide when nobody is around, but you're not exercising a right. a right is something recognized by law and protected by law. so anyone obstructing your rights is commiting a crime against you. but suicide is something anyone can intervene! thus suicide is not a right! but you can freely commit suicide when nobody is around. hope you get my point!

It helps if you quote the people you are replying to. That way we know what you're talking about.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

I was very specific about the conditions under which I would exact retribution, yet you extrapolated it into a generalized position. FAIL.

If I were dying and in horrible pain and you interfered with my commission of suicide knowing the circumstance, you might pay dearly for it and I would be well within my rights to exact that payment. There, a more explicitly obvious example. Does that make my meaning more accessible to you? If you cannot comprehend "mind your own business" then you are in some very serious straits.

You were not that exact. You didn't mention the "horrible pain" part. Now you are calling it a "payment". Interfering with someone's death may make them an asshole, but it does NOT, under ANY circumstances, give you the right to brutally murder that person. It's still murder, which I would hope you think is a more serious crime than prolonging someone's life who doesn't want to. It doesn't matter what kind of pain you are in.

What I am arguing against is not the "mind your own business part", it's the part where you hunt the person down and brutally murder them for prolonging your life. The person saving your life might very well be an asshole. I'll give you that. Why do you think it's okay to kill that person? Also, do you believe it would be well within your right to take money from the person for doing so?

 

[PaulConventionWV]

You have not been alive long enough to know much of which you speak on such matters. Situations are often nowhere nearing the simplicity with which you express your opinions. Saving someone's life can, under circumstances, be the highest crime imaginable and deserving of freakish punishments. There are fates far and away worse than death.

Just because you have such a bleak view of life, that doesn't mean that saving someone couldn't end up being the right choice. If they are saved, they may later regret ever trying. Saving someone's life is NEVER that bad. I don't care who you are, it does not justify murder. Surely you see that this is the worst crim there is, worse in any case than prolonging someone's life. It doesn't matter what kind of pain you're in, killing someone who doesn't want to be killed is murder.

Even if you wanted to kill someone for saving your life, shouldn't you use an impartial third party to judge the conflict? You don't just go around murdering people. In any case, I have faith that the impartial third party would rule in favor of the saviour and not the self-obsessed idiot who thinks they can just off themselves and then decides to take others down with them if they fail.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

The difference between persons like you and those like myself is simple: I take freedom and sovereignty seriously, which means I accept it in its wholeness, whereas you do not. You reject the non-pretty aspects of freedom and the responsibilities it requires of one. I do not. I take sovereignty seriously. You think you do, but in reality you do not. You accept only that which is minimally agreeable to you. That cannot be justified.

What cannot be justified is murder. I'm sorry, but you're not taking freedom as a whole. You think you are but you are simply making an asshole into a vicious criminal. There is no crime in saving someone's life. If you believe retribution against those who would save someone's life is not only legal but righteous, then you are making a lot of assumptions about the value of life and the nature of the crime. The nature of the crime is never such that the saviour can be rightfull hunted down and brutally and gruesomely murdered as you suggested.

 

[osan]

I am thoroughly confused right now. You said if someone interfered in your suicide and saved your life, that you would hunt them down and kill them in the most gruesome way imagineable. Now you are saying you never stated nor implied any such thing and I am extrapolating. Which is it?

Oh for Jesus' sake. Do I really need to parse fundamental meanings here? Really?

Maybe they are an asshole, but do all assholes really deserve THAT?


I never stated nor implied any such thing. Your extrapolations are running toward the wild.

It was CLEARLY stated that my reaction would be to a very specific circumstance, not a general one.

OK, last time: people who really want to kill themselves almost always succeed. There are, however, those rare occasions where things go "wrong" and someone finds them incapacitated. The natural reaction in most people is to try to save the stricken party - after all, they may not know it is a suicide, right?

Same page so far?

Nothing I wrote could be even remotely taken as meaning such people should be killed or in any way punished for their actions. With me? And yes, this is all in my original response, which you failed to read with CARE, but the implications to these effects are abundantly clear.

Moving along - if someone tries to kill himself and someone else, knowing that person's wishes, tries to intervene beyond a limit (e.g. trying to talk them out of it), has crossed a line that places themselves squarely within the rightful cross-hairs of the person with whom they knowingly interfere in an unwelcome manner. At the lowest conceptual level this is NO different from robbing me at the end of a gun because you are violating my sovereignty. The fact that YOU think someone ought not kill himself for reason X does not place you into a position of authority to take action against that person's fulfillment of the intention. If you think that you do, then you are in no way a liberty-oriented human being, but a pretty slaver. Real liberty has its dark side and to deny this is to deny truth itself.

If you do not see the difference between one naively interfering, which is to say unknowingly butting into another's rightfully intentional business, and doing so with sufficient knowledge that they are acting in contravention of another's explicit wishes and, therefore, their sovereign right to so act, then there is nothing more I can do to help you. I did not state nor imply in any way imaginable to the rational and nominally intelligent adult that anyone should be taken to task for acting on presumptions. I spoke of a very specific circumstance that involved ONLY MYSELF. I very explicitly stated that I spoke for no other human being on the planet. I very explicitly stated that I would never decide to kill myself casually, nor would I ever make a melodrama of such a decision for the sake of getting attention. Having stated this, the reader then is in possession of the essential parameters relating to such a decision and could not claim to have acted naively. The only possible interpretation of his interference would be the knowing assumption of authority to act in contravention of my sovereign right to autodiathesis (self-determination) and that is a sin which, given the circumstance at hand, I would not be disposed to forgive.

Go re-read my original post, only with some care, some application of semantic analysis, and you will see that it is all there. That one fails to take the proper care in reading is not my fault.

Because you are easily qualified as a nominally intelligent adult, I will chalk this up to bad habit or a moment of lapse. We all do it, myself included. But having been corrected, I will find it less forgivable if you come back at this with the same position and tone.

We don't have to agree, but let us not misrepresent each other's positions with such apparently wild abandon. I've not done it to you and I expect the same courtesy in return. We are, after all, supposed to be on the same side here.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

if you are 18 years old, you can think much more consistently than a lot of older people! i like you!

+rep. There have been a lot of people who have lived a very long time and are still just as wrong as they were when they were young. I can think of a few in our government.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

Intervening implies that one knows what it best for the individual about to kill himself. That presumption is the root of all intervention, which is the subversion of individual sovereignty. Either one owns his life, or he does not.

Without putting words in his mouth and for the sake of discussion, I don't think osan would brutally attack a person who implored him to alter his decision; but to physically prevent him from carrying out his decision is to deny him of his right to self-ownership. It is the birth of the state, essentially; and the state is the great evil against humanity. That, I believe, is why osan would be within his rights to attack such an individual.

You are delirious. It does not violate self-ownership to stop someone from committing suicide. If I grab your hand when you are about to touch something that is going to hurt you, did you suddenly lose ownership of yourself, or did I just temporarily make it harder for you to carry out a decision to do something that you might regret? Sometimes people should be stopped, and it has nothing to do with the state.

Since aggression implies harm, the person would not be violating the person's rights by trying to save them. In any case, however, you cannot possibly justify murdering someone for saving your life. It would violate the NAP, whereas trying to prevent someone from killing themselves is simply a conflict of wills. Just because suicide is a grave decision, that does not mean it's ever the right one. If suicide is not a crime, then it is a gross imbalance to turn around and say saving someone from suicide IS a crime. In what freaky, messed up world is it completely legal and perhaps righteous to commit suicide, but saving someone from it makes you deserving of death?

 

[ClydeCoulter]

Some people take the "happy ever after" fairy tales too serious. There's no beautiful princess going to show up and fix a miserable mans life right at the very moment that he can stand no more, that was only a dream that never came true.

 

[judejin]

living opens up all possibilities. death means no second chance. everyone goes thru a lot of trauma. toughen up, don't surrender to the enemy, especially the ultimate enemy, death!

 

[PaulConventionWV]

Oh for Jesus' sake. Do I really need to parse fundamental meanings here? Really?



It was CLEARLY stated that my reaction would be to a very specific circumstance, not a general one.

In your original post, you made no such statement.

OK, last time: people who really want to kill themselves almost always succeed. There are, however, those rare occasions where things go "wrong" and someone finds them incapacitated. The natural reaction in most people is to try to save the stricken party - after all, they may not know it is a suicide, right?

Same page so far?

Nothing I wrote could be even remotely taken as meaning such people should be killed or in any way punished for their actions. With me? And yes, this is all in my original response, which you failed to read with CARE, but the implications to these effects are abundantly clear.

I am looking back at your original comment, and I still see the part about brutally murdering someone. Are you trying to act like you didn't say that? It was not specific at all, either. I'm sorry, but you are not being clear. It's not me, it's you.

Moving along - if someone tries to kill himself and someone else, knowing that person's wishes, tries to intervene beyond a limit (e.g. trying to talk them out of it), has crossed a line that places themselves squarely within the rightful cross-hairs of the person with whom they knowingly interfere in an unwelcome manner. At the lowest conceptual level this is NO different from robbing me at the end of a gun because you are violating my sovereignty. The fact that YOU think someone ought not kill himself for reason X does not place you into a position of authority to take action against that person's fulfillment of the intention. If you think that you do, then you are in no way a liberty-oriented human being, but a pretty slaver. Real liberty has its dark side and to deny this is to deny truth itself.

I don't think your analogy is legitimate. It is not based on sound reasoning. You cannot just compare unwanted suicide prevention to robbery. Apples to oranges, different planets. The two things are so far apart.

If you do not see the difference between one naively interfering, which is to say unknowingly butting into another's rightfully intentional business, and doing so with sufficient knowledge that they are acting in contravention of another's explicit wishes and, therefore, their sovereign right to so act, then there is nothing more I can do to help you.

Who said I needed help? I understand the difference, but nobody can truly know if they actually want to die because nobody knows what death is like. If I stopped you, it would be temporary and non-combative. If you then turned around and killed me, that would be permanent and combative in the worst way possible. There is no way the two crimes can even be compared. If I stopped you from killing yourself, to me I would only be violating your sovereignty in the same way as if I grabbed your hand before touching something that might hurt you. It is a personal conflict, not an abuse of power like if I outlawed your suicide and threw you in a padded room with a straightjacket.

I did not state nor imply in any way imaginable to the rational and nominally intelligent adult that anyone should be taken to task for acting on presumptions.

Fine, but I disagree just the same. Even if the person knows you want to die and stops you, I don't view that any differently. It's a personal conflict, not an abuse of power.

I spoke of a very specific circumstance that involved ONLY MYSELF. I very explicitly stated that I spoke for no other human being on the planet. I very explicitly stated that I would never decide to kill myself casually, nor would I ever make a melodrama of such a decision for the sake of getting attention. Having stated this, the reader then is in possession of the essential parameters relating to such a decision and could not claim to have acted naively. The only possible interpretation of his interference would be the knowing assumption of authority to act in contravention of my sovereign right to autodiathesis (self-determination) and that is a sin which, given the circumstance at hand, I would not be disposed to forgive.

Even if it was only yourself (and again, it was not that specific at all) it's still wrong. Anybody with that kind of reaction needs a new view on life. To treat someone so badly for saving your life is fundamentally flipping every known human principle on its head because it is the exact opposite reaction that is assumed in regards to the NAP and others, but I digress.

Go re-read my original post, only with some care, some application of semantic analysis, and you will see that it is all there. That one fails to take the proper care in reading is not my fault.

In this case, I think it is you who provoked any misunderstanding. I'm sorry, but your original post reads like that of a serial killer, and I don't see any reason why one shouldn't take it that way.

Because you are easily qualified as a nominally intelligent adult, I will chalk this up to bad habit or a moment of lapse. We all do it, myself included. But having been corrected, I will find it less forgivable if you come back at this with the same position and tone.

We don't have to agree, but let us not misrepresent each other's positions with such apparently wild abandon. I've not done it to you and I expect the same courtesy in return. We are, after all, supposed to be on the same side here.

You are so pompous. Get over yourself. You don't get to decide who's an adult and who understands and who isn't and doesn't.

If I misunderstood you, just tell me what you meant. Since you didn't say that, it seems like you still think such retribution against a hero would be justified. If that's a misunderstanding, I'm sorry, but you are not making that clear.

 

[helmuth_hubener]

give me one freaking example, please!?

Full ownership includes alienability. If you own something, you have the right to dispose of it. Sell it. Throw it away in the trash. Donate it to Goodwill.

In merry old England, there were laws making it illegal for the nobles' estates to ever be split up or sold. They had to be passed down, generation to generation in perpetuity. Even if the son that inherits the land wants to sell it, or maybe even has lots of debts and desperately wants to sell it, no-can-do. Out of luck. He has to keep it forever.

That kind of crazy system in land ownership is what you're proposing in life ownership.

You should bear in mind also that a human life generally has a limited shelf life anyway. It, unlike the English estate, cannot generally endure for hundreds or thousands of years. It is fragile. And so much of what we do in it could be considered suicidal. If you do an activity that has a 99% chance of killing you, like going over Niagara Falls, are you committing an offense against... against whom, by the way? Whose rights are violated? Anyway, are you committing an offense against the nebulous ether of anti-suicideness? What if you are not, in fact, committing suicide? What if you think you can make it? Is that not a right? (Assuming you own the falls or get permission, etc., etc.)

What about the man who jumped out of the plane at the edge of space recently for Red Bull? Should he have been arrested and forcibly prevented? He could have easily died.

Or does intent matter? The man going over Niagara to achieve dare-devil supremacy is within his rights, while the man going over just to end it all is not? Their outward actions are identical. If these men's different thoughts change whether it should be illegal or not in your view, is that really legitimate? Do you really believe we should have laws against thinking certain things in your head, even if your outward actions are identical to someone else without the illegal thoughts? It raises practicality questions, too, of course. How will the Thought Police go about their duties? Since they cannot infallibly read minds, it would seem difficult. To commit suicide, one would simply have to claim that one was jumping off the bridge as a thrill-seeker, trying to get a rush.

In short, your conclusions are highly problematic.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

Full ownership includes alienability. If you own something, you have the right to dispose of it. Sell it. Throw it away in the trash. Donate it to Goodwill.

In merry old England, there were laws making it illegal for the nobles' estates to ever be split up or sold. They had to be passed down, generation to generation in perpetuity. Even if the son that inherits the land wants to sell it, or maybe even has lots of debts and desperately wants to sell it, no-can-do. Out of luck. He has to keep it forever.

That kind of crazy system in land ownership is what you're proposing in life ownership.

You should bear in mind also that a human life generally has a limited shelf life anyway. It, unlike the English estate, cannot generally endure for hundreds or thousands of years. It is fragile. And so much of what we do in it could be considered suicidal. If you do an activity that has a 99% chance of killing you, like going over Niagara Falls, are you committing an offense against... against whom, by the way? Whose rights are violated? Anyway, are you committing an offense against the nebulous ether of anti-suicideness? What if you are not, in fact, committing suicide? What if you think you can make it? Is that not a right? (Assuming you own the falls or get permission, etc., etc.)

What about the man who jumped out of the plane at the edge of space recently for Red Bull? Should he have been arrested and forcibly prevented? He could have easily died.

Or does intent matter? The man going over Niagara to achieve dare-devil supremacy is within his rights, while the man going over just to end it all is not? Their outward actions are identical. If these men's different thoughts change whether it should be illegal or not in your view, is that really legitimate? Do you really believe we should have laws against thinking certain things in your head, even if your outward actions are identical to someone else without the illegal thoughts? It raises practicality questions, too, of course. How will the Thought Police go about their duties? Since they cannot infallibly read minds, it would seem difficult. To commit suicide, one would simply have to claim that one was jumping off the bridge as a thrill-seeker, trying to get a rush.

In short, your conclusions are highly problematic.

Is anyone actually arguing that your rights are violated by attempting suicide? Maybe you should consider that before you argue against that viewpoint, or else it serves only to confuse things. I am also fairly confident that nobody expects you to live forever. Just that it's fundamentally wrong for you to make that decision of your own accord.

And again, there is no authority involved here. Nobody is declaring authority over anyone else. This is not a "system". This is a personal conflict in which two people disagree about the value of life. The person expressing their wish to die cannot actually claim that they know what they want since death is unknown to them just as much as anyone else.

Talking about legal vs. illegal only muddies the waters. What I am saying is that it is not a violation of anyone's rights to prevent them from committing suicide, indeed, not enough to justify exacting revenge on the person who might do such a thing.

 

[PaulConventionWV]

Some people take the "happy ever after" fairy tales too serious. There's no beautiful princess going to show up and fix a miserable mans life right at the very moment that he can stand no more, that was only a dream that never came true.

So... THIS is your argument that suicide is okay? Or am I misunderstanding you? Help me out here.