“If you just work hard enough… if you just vote the way we tell you… if you just fight all the wars we start… then one day, all this can be yours too!”
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Chronic depression runs strong on my biological mother’s side of the family. We lost her and two of her brothers at different times, up to the mid-seventies. My uncles were both gun deaths, likely because the guns were handy and convenient for Alabama in the time period. I’m really not sure about now.
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“Falling Down” called it in 1993, but a lot of white males seem to take Michael Douglas characters as heroes by default (see also Gordon Gecko).
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Of course the point went right over their heads.
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It seems like there was someone here who was not in the best mindset and might have been looking for help…
I was in the middle of typing them a private message to give them some hope when I got redirected off the page and it doesn’t look like that users posts as well as some other posts from another Community member are here anymore. I hope boing boing didn’t just conveniently remove something they didn’t want to see…
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Edited because this post was orphaned by well justified moderation.
FWIW, I agree with you that physician assisted suicide should be legal; they’re our lives, we should have a say in how they end.
I think a lot of us here have crawled up out of the depths at some point. I survived my worst moments, sometimes by dumb luck, and things gradually improved, but it took decades. We should have the right to say how our stories end, but the bar should be high. It’s not a decision you get to make twice.
So what would be the correct response to your posts (the ones that are left after moderation at any rate)? You’re in pain, you’ve made that clear; you don’t want our help, that’s clear too. What are you looking for?
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We nearly lost a cousin that way. Luckily (?) the police pulled him over for drunk driving and found he had a gun in the car with him. He said he was on his way somewhere to kill himself. As a convicted felon in possession of a firearm while driving under the influence, it was straight to jail. Beyond jail and court-mandated drug tests, I’m pretty sure no one has ever offered him any help with depression or dependency.
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He was offered help, but what he was really seeking was attention. He was taking this topic as an opportunity to be an edgelord and share his views about the evils of psychiatry and gun control.
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Ah, ok. What with the internet being more fake than real anymore joking aside sometimes I wonder how many things are changed because they are convenient for the people to see them or not see them
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Perhaps.
Or perhaps that person was just seeking some attention, in one of the most desperate ways possible; it’s impossible to know for sure.
Just in case, here’s a repost:
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It was a case of the community flagging a new user as an obvious trolley and energy leech, and either @orenwolf or the system wiping his comments and perhaps his account. That’s not about censorship.
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I’d wonder what American healthcare would be like if the money spent on guns was spent on healthcare instead, but American healthcare is already the most expensive in the western world, so it would probably end up in some looter portfolios.
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I don’t disagree.
We also need to do a better job of eliminating the physical and emotional pain that drives people to suicide, and of removing the stigma attached to seeking help. It’s impossible to tell, but how many of those nearly 20,000 white men who killed themselves sought help first?
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Let’s add in special interests actively set against health care for all, and the idea that mental health doesn’t belong on the checklist.
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I think that movie is a lot more nuanced than people usually think. He’s neither a hero nor a villain, but a confused lost soul, a broken machine spitting out cogs as it winds down. His violence is directed at everything-- minorities, machines, rules, inconveniences, even other white males. I wouldn’t call it a very good movie, but it did get good reviews from critics I usually respect.
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Tell that to all the businesses, customers, and innocent bystanders he terrorized during his ‘little adventure’, along with his ex-wife & child who were rightfully in fear of their own lives and safety.
Sorry, but as ‘tragic’ as he may have been, William ‘D-Fens’ Foster was totally the worst kind of bad guy; one who thinks he’s absolutely right.
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Yes, but you could say that about anyone-- lots of people do the wrong thing for reasons they think are right at the time (a doctor removing a kidney from a patient who came to get some other unrelated operation.) I felt sorry for the victims, but I felt sorry for him too. He’s basically a suicide case who took the long route to his demise.
But that particular character is what we’re discussing right now.
In that story, I only really felt sorry for his ex-wife and child; had he not been stopped, he likely would have killed them too… because his lifelong expectations hadn’t been met. Even though it’s fiction, the story is based in a reality that happens all too often.
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Everyone is the hero of their own story – and the rest of us are just the Wilhelm extras.
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