Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/24/find-comfort-in-choosing-your-own-death.html
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There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door. And so on… One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, “Certainly, honey.” And he said, “I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here.” “What’s that?” she said, strapping him in. "What in hell are people for?”
-God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
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Is it wrong to think that people will want to have an option to die by Best Sex Ever? Assisted of course.
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Death by Snu Snu!
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I’d prefer to find comfort in choosing my own life. Where can I go for that?
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
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If you find comfort in the darkest sarcasm, more power to you!
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It’s the only thing that has never let me down.
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“Outsider artist” Achilles Rizzoli, who trained as an architectural draftsman, designed a temple of euthanasia for his imaginary city;
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Killed in a Supermodel Avalanche. (Homer Simpson?)
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What are the Youth-in-Asia up to now?
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Death is something that human society does not do well, and we’re going to have to do some serious rethinking of how we deal with the end of life if we want to avoid the type of death that everyone says they don’t want- painful, undignified and isolated.
Sadly, the one part of life that individual human autonomy has never conquered is its end.
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If I was definitely going to die anyway, landing on Donald Trump from a great height would be okay.
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Unless both involved parties die at the exact same time, that’s some supremely SELFISH shit when you think about it - the other person starts out fucking a live, willing partner, and ends up psychologically traumatized because it turned into necrophilia.
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Considering that this is the BBC I’m surprised that nobody has brought up that NSFW scene from Monty Python and the Meaning of Life where the condemned man chooses his own means of execution.
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Is drawing and quartering still on the menu?
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Suicide is not difficult to manage for most people - I have known several people who committed suicide because they had a fatal illness, and they acted before the disease prevented them from killing themselves. They would have lived longer if there had been a legal way to indicate the conditions under which they wanted to die - loss of mobility, loss of the ability to speak, whatever.
If you make it legal, painless and easy, that prevents a lonely and possibly painful and hard death. As long as you make sure that the decision is their own decision, a person’s motivations for dying are not important to anyone else. It’s not your life. You’ll never really understand what it is like to be them. You may or may not approve of the motivation if you’re told what it is - but it’s not your business.
My own dad, dying from cancer in a hospital, cursed the nurses and the doctors for keeping him alive every time he woke up again. The painkillers they gave him caused awful nightmares, so he was always either in constant, intense pain or battling monsters in his head, and if there had been any legal way to let him die quietly, I would have helped him do that - instead, he was forced, by law, into several weeks of horror before he died. Compared to my dad’s death, Jesus’s was a piece of cake.
There is no moral justification for torturing people like that in the name of religion, and when you strip down all the justifications for refusing early deaths to those who want them, they are always founded on religious dogma, prettied up with talk of “ethics” and “nature”. No, it is religion-based torture.
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This issue is so often phrased wrong. It is not about the right to die but about the duty to suffer!
If you think no person has a duty to suffer and you can’t offer any alternative to suffering then why make euthanasia illegal? And if you object to euthanasia should you not focus your efforts in better (mental) healthcare and support?
People that object to euthanasia so often sidestep or completely ignore actual incurable suffering. It is a harsh and nasty reality but a reality it is. Even the best healthcare can only reduce suffering to a degree and prevent death for a few more years but suffering and death WILL happen.
(BTW, the same argument goes for abortion. Very few people that argue against it can give you a good (ie. based in reality) explanation why they think people have abortions. If you object to abortion why not make your society more secure for the pregnant so less people will make that choice?)
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