Post a controversial opinion

yeah, but that thread is all the way over there, it's too hard!

alcholics are not bad people (unless they are psychopaths or suffer from affluenza)

is that controversial? i thought that was conventional wisdom in 2015

the disease theory of alcoholism

quite a few have the disease in my family, you could accuse some of them of being selfish people or wayward parents, but not bad people. The worst person I know irl is a psychopath who pretended to be a recovering alcoholic, just so he could garner sympathy and pull in a vulnerable woman to his ghastly sphere of control and domestic violence. Now he is out of prison again, he is up to his usual MO.

I personally don't like the "disease" theory of addiction. from what ive read, and seen, addictions are patterns of behavior that some people are congenitally predisposed to, or develop as a reaction to childhood neglect, or trauma (in childhood or later), or some combination of predisposition and neglect/trauma.

i don't take issue with the aspect of the disease theory that seeks to minimize the role of personal choice or agency in addiction.

but "disease" doesn't seem right to me. on a societal level I really think we should mainly look at addiction as a developmental disorder arising from unsatisfactory care in childhood.

that's very Freudian

also not v accurate ime

I don't think it's Freudian, im not looking at it from a psychoanalysis/subconscious sort of lens.

Assuming the root of a problem is based in unsatisfactory childhood care isn't Freudian?

Assisted suicide should be a human right after 30.

xp. I believe that childhood trauma and neglect has an influence on the actual physical development of the brain. I don't think that you have to ascribe to Freudian ideas, or even consider them at all, to think that this might affect later-life behavior.

ah that makes sense

psychopaths have path right in the name

Assisted suicide should be a human right after 30.

― black metal is emo for vikings (monster mash), Friday, December 18, 2015 11:35 PM (Yesterday)

Not good enough. Over the age of 18, you should be able to request this, and it should be seen as a normal process in society.

What I don't understand is why the fuck most humans want to force people to keep living even when they clearly don't want to.

If it was really easy to access assisted suicide I think a number of people I'm close to, who don't currently want to die, would be dead. So I'm a little ambivalent about offering it so readily for people who are able-bodied.

I agree that it's someone's right to put an end to their life whenever they wish.

I had been scared to post my most actually controversial opinion: I'm still working out what I think of this but it seems deeply problematic and discriminatory to permit assisted suicide only in cases of a "grievous and irremediable medical condition". I feel like it should either be legal for all mentally competent adults or illegal for all mentally competent adults.

Agreed, and it should be the former imo

Xp. Might be a Charter challenge in that. Section 15(1). Not sure if Bev Mc CJC and the gang would be into it.

alcoholism isnt a disease

tell that to your liver

My partner almost tells me she wants to die every day, usually at some point when she is having a shit time. She doesn't really want to die, she just gets depressed about living in a broken body (she has a pretty nasty rare form of MS). Talk of making assisted suicide easier is not a good thing imo. In the long term term it can only lead to easing the path to another T4 program "those not deemed worthy of life".

All of the least painful and most successful methods of suicide are put far, far out of normal people's reach. Widespread assisted suicide would not only help those who seek to end their lives, but mean that the results would be less traumatic for everyone involved - there would be fewer public suicides, loved ones would not have to cope with corpse discovery, you would know that the person involved got to go peacefully, etc etc.

we should mainly look at addiction as a developmental disorder arising from unsatisfactory care in childhood.

hmmm. Adult native americans who encountered alcohol for the first time during initial contact with settlers of European origin very often displayed all the behaviors of acute alcohol addiction very quickly. Does this mean you think they were raised 'unsatisfactorily', and the alcohol-addictive behavior only erupted when the substance became available? Seems like a weird theory to account for that well-attested historic phenomenon.

i think we could do better as a society if it was accepted that everyone would be euthanized by default at 50, maybe 60

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sites/default/files/styles/image_content_width/hash/d0/87/d087984306c3cf4b15300cff4cb89a03.jpg?itok=GsvEcMyH

I don't disagree with the proposition that mentally competent adults can choose suicide. But you will inevitably get into questions of who is mentally competent, who gets to rule on competency, etc. To be flippant, Miracle on 34th Street territory. Someone will test the boundaries, and hard cases make bad law.

To be nonflippant, I have a developmentally disabled child. Most of the time we're focused on Now and its challenges. However, some completely premature, completely non-constructive worries inevitably haunt us. For example: his delays are profound and will probably last into adolescence and possibly into adulthood. At that point, his cognitive and intellectual delays will start to have moral implications. Will he understand dating, sex, or sexual consent? Will he understand voting? Might he try to buy a gun? Will he understand suicide?

If at age 18 he tells me (in sign) that he hates his life and wants to die, do I say yes? If not then, when? 25? 30? If 30, why not 29 or 31?

parents pick the units at birth

What I don't understand is why the fuck most humans want to force people to keep living even when they clearly don't want to.

As far as I can tell, the answer to this is that most people think that wanting to die is an unhealthy cognitive distortion that people can learn to move past and go on to live productive, enjoyable lives. However, many people cease to believe this if the suicidal person in question is disabled or ill. In this case, wanting to die becomes a much more justifiable desire than if someone 'only' lost a job or loved one or just did not enjoy life etc. I have a hard time seeing a justification for this sort of assisted suicide policy that does not value the lives of the disabled differently than the lives of the able-bodied, which I find troubling.

tbf the study of people who were successful in their suicide attempts to determine whether they would make the same choice again has yet to gather any good data

Plenty of people have made multiple attempts tho

Pochettino has taken spurs as far as he can and decay is already settling in

sry puffin that was meant as an xp and you raise an important point in a way that i cannot

a minority, iirc xxp

xp mh that is a very difficult study to control. without looking for any data at all, i would guess that one of the biggest reasons anyone has to forgo committing suicide is that it will hurt people who care about them, but the idea is so taboo that it is unthinkable for most to even have the discussion with said people to try to come to a mutual understanding.

we should mainly look at addiction as a developmental disorder arising from unsatisfactory care in childhood.

hmmm. Adult native americans who encountered alcohol for the first time during initial contact with settlers of European origin very often displayed all the behaviors of acute alcohol addiction very quickly. Does this mean you think they were raised 'unsatisfactorily', and the alcohol-addictive behavior only erupted when the substance became available? Seems like a weird theory to account for that well-attested historic phenomenon.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless)

I said "mainky" because I don't attribute all addicting to those factors just that I believe the widespread public health issue of addiction in our society is greatly / primarily the product of this.

The introduction of alcohol to a society that didn't have it at the same time as a cataclysmic process of colonisation, displacement, and cultural genocide is too sui generis an example to extrapolate from imo

Damn autocorrect

aimless do you have sources for native americans first contact with alcohol

Was wondering about how "well-attested" that was as well.

xp mh that is a very difficult study to control. without looking for any data at all, .
--home organ

um...he was joking

no worries, home organ. Sorry to hit the conversation with more heaviness than was warranted at that time.

Adults with intellectual disabilities (them what used to be called retarded adults) are a gray area precisely because well-intentioned ppl are (quite rightly) trying actively to give them more say in their own affairs. Let them make choices, express preferences, experience consequences, take risks - in a gradual and regulated way.

It's still a long way off, but it's a strong likelihood that we'll face some tough judgment calls about my son's ability to handle a sleepover, summer camp, an unchaperoned date, a college dorm, a job. Those decisions can't be based on his chronological age (currently several years behind) but on an educated guess about what he can handle.

What about when it comes to having sex, signing a lease, getting married, enlisting in the army? I'm all for letting him leave the nest, but I'm not sure when I'd be ready to "let" him to sign up for suicide.

Yeah, you raise valid questions about even my condition of "mentally competent".

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/magazine/the-last-day-of-her-life.html?_r=1

xxxp sry i left off wink emoticon

oh and puffin: i did not mean to imply you expressed too much "heaviness" at all. i truly do not know how to address what you're very generous to discuss.

aimless do you have sources

If you would like scholarly references, then I can't accommodate you, because I am not a scholar. I read whatever interests me, about a book a week, and I've been doing it for decades. I don't keep the texts and I don't take notes. I seek no more than to gratify my curiosity about the world. I've read a variety of source material that include firsthand narratives by whites -- mostly engaged in the fur trade -- who were in early contact with native north americans. but I can't cite them for you chapter and verse.

I had to pull my son out of school today, he saved the worst for the last day of term - he physically assaulted his teacher and became unmanageable. Sometimes I think after I am gone, I dread to think what will become of him in this current set-up, never mind one where voluntary or otherwise liquidation starts becoming the norm.

puffin, you have my sympathies. when your child passes the threshold of legal majority (18) you'll be faced with the thorny decision of whether to seek legal guardianship or conservatorship. in our daughter's case that decision was not in question. it had to be done. so we weren't forced to weigh the delicately balanced opposing sides of that question, as you may need to. good luck.

aimless: please append "i think i read something written by a racist fur trader once but i can't really remember" to your future statements about how "very often" oppressed people "displayed all the behaviors" genocidal colonialist attributed to them.