conec posted:ilmdge posted:but you said their decisions should be respected and people should not intervene
i'm not saying the opposite. if chickeon or his friend really wanted to die, they'd be dead. and if they were dead, the hope is that their ultimate decision would be respected
idk i think when someone winds up in the hospital on life support for a few days that's a pretty good indication they were decently serious about ending it
conec posted:some lives are harder than others. some lives are shit from the start and never become good.
can you guys really not understand this? do you have any idea how terrible life still is for many people who do have access to relatively good community health services?
conec posted:Petrol posted:I agree that we should above all respect individual agency, in all circumstances, including suicide, because community welfare is stupid bull shit
this would be a cogent point if effective community health services were actually available in most cases
What I mean is, the concept of the welfare of the community, and how the desire of an individual to do something (such as commit suicide) should not necessarily override the needs of the community. I sympathise with anyone who suffers and does not have good access to services, I just don't agree with the idea that just because somebody really wants to do something, it's right and must be respected.
Petrol posted:I just don't agree with the idea that just because somebody really wants to do something, it's right and must be respected.
i don't think whether something like this is "right" or not is for anyone to say but considering the unimaginably immense numbers of people who suffer from abuse and destitution with little to no recourse at all, treating it as an unreasonably individualistic desire is going to be off the mark in a gigantic number of cases
for a not insignificant number of people, "the needs of the community" are actually going to be the perpetuation of abuse and destitution, because we live in a prison built by the demiurge and the nazis won
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
that's kinda the entire idea of "mental illness" i thought
yet in the praxis of building socialism it probably makes no sense to do anything except champion those that are battered by the system instead of make excuses for those that didn't have the 'strength' or means to carry on
blinkandwheeze posted:i don't think whether something like this is "right" or not is for anyone to say but considering the unimaginably immense numbers of people who suffer from abuse and destitution with little to no recourse at all, treating it as an unreasonably individualistic desire is going to be off the mark in a gigantic number of cases
I'm simply saying someone wanting to do something doesn't make it right. I'm not arguing the other extreme.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
"accessing community health services" does not sound promising to me
solzhesnitchin posted:conec posted:some lives are harder than others. some lives are shit from the start and never become good.
can you guys really not understand this? do you have any idea how terrible life still is for many people who do have access to relatively good community health services?
theres millions of people trying their best to live in freakin slums in india and they're not all killing themselves. for someone in western society to want to kill themselves there's a strong chance mental illness or depression is involved and in that case i think it's good to try to help that person and not happily abide by their decision.
now IF someone successfully does commit suicide i do agree you shouldnt be all like "wow whast an asshole" about it because obviously they were suffering a great deal and should be pitied.
if the person is already dead then it changes obv
edit: i think graceful death is a different topic and medical issues are also different. im talking about youngish, healthy individuals
conec posted:xipe posted:so if a community is concerned with the mental wellbeing of its members, what kinds of activities should it be doing or solutions should it look at?
"accessing community health services" does not sound promising to meof course not,.. which is why these posts are all so weird. chickeon made sense but this other stuff is all a blur
yeah chickeon's post was good. i was just taking exception to language like "it's a choice", "it's a right", "it should be respected". unqualified, those kinds of statements are too simple.
i know i'm very lucky because i have received excellent care at times and i would be dead otherwise, not through suicide as such, but because i was too ill to look after myself properly. so, i'm not at all trying to make some kind of darwinian argument disguised as moralising.
i recoil from individualist arguments in general, but particularly when it comes to suicide, because if a big part of the problem is that people are disconnected from one another, we shouldn't reinforce individualism and deemphasise community. it's easy to scoff at talk of community when society is so obviously broken, but there's little to gain from being defeatist, is there? to argue that the dead person's decision to end their life should be respected is basically nihilistic. it may have been a rational choice for them in their circumstances - okay, but so what?? society is awful, many suffer abuse and cannot access services - yes, clearly, but what does it mean to say people should be allowed to kill themselves without criticism? what end does that serve?
Petrol posted:i was just taking exception to language like "it's a choice", "it's a right", "it should be respected". unqualified, those kinds of statements are too simple.
i think equal exception should be taken to language like "community" and "connection" because this is equally reductive - what community? what connections, and to whom? every social space on earth is necessarily striated and structured in dominance. developing and enforcing community structure is only a virtue insofar as this development is contradistinctive towards systemic violence and exclusion, that is, development towards emancipatory ends
i don't think privileging the sanctity and unity of the community in order to silence, erase and ignore the real conditions of suffering communities can perpetuate is a negligible phenomenon. given this, i don't think you can have it both ways - this language, unqualified, is equally as empty as discussions regarding choice and right
Petrol posted:because if a big part of the problem is that people are disconnected from one another, we shouldn't reinforce individualism and deemphasise community.
i think the popular notion of those in the west that tend towards suicide is that of the existentially troubled isolated male but at least in the united states, women attempt suicide at something like twice the rate of men. i believe women are actually more likely to be entrenched in community as opposed to exterior to it (particularly considering that community networks are in most cases necessarily built on the exploitation of the caring labour of women)
considering that the material conditions that victimise women, the systemisation of violence and abuse, tend to actually rely on social bonds - we all know that it is more likely for a woman to be assaulted by someone she is familiar with as opposed to a stranger - any conversation that talks about community or social bonds without examining the content and context of what these social bonds are is futile at best and damaging at worst
Petrol posted:it may have been a rational choice for them in their circumstances - okay, but so what??
i think the "so what" here is that by articulating a rational choice in the face of material circumstances as an expression of defeatism or nihilism, you're actually reintroducing individual agency into the equation - if we treat suicide as an action to be criticised you are directing the focus of this investigation towards highlighting the wrongness of individual actions, it "kicks up dust" towards the vulnerable as opposed to the systems that create the vulnerable
you can articulate suicide in terms of defeatism and nihilism - but so what? what at all do we have gain from pointing to the failures of those unable to live with suffering? even if we were to rid ourselves of the instinct to remove ourselves from the conditions where we are overwhelmingly vulnerable, it's meaningless unless we are able to direct ourselves against the conditions that create this vulnerability in the first place
if, on the other hand, you treat suicide as entirely a rational response to material conditions beyond their control (which i think it certainly is) you orient the focus to the conditions which cause suicide, which is i think the only really productive path
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
blinkandwheeze posted:i think equal exception should be taken to language like "community" and "connection" because this is equally reductive - what community? what connections, and to whom? every social space on earth is necessarily striated and structured in dominance. developing and enforcing community structure is only a virtue insofar as this development is contradistinctive towards systemic violence and exclusion, that is, development towards emancipatory ends
i don't think privileging the sanctity and unity of the community in order to silence, erase and ignore the real conditions of suffering communities can perpetuate is a negligible phenomenon. given this, i don't think you can have it both ways - this language, unqualified, is equally as empty as discussions regarding choice and right
i take your point. i was promoting the idea of community specifically in ideological opposition to individualism, and also in the context of a discussion about what is essentially an underclass of people, many abused and without access to services and resources. i hoped that it would be strongly implied what i meant by community in this context, but yes, i am suggesting something with true emancipatory potential.
blinkandwheeze posted:Petrol posted:it may have been a rational choice for them in their circumstances - okay, but so what??
i think the "so what" here is that by articulating a rational choice in the face of material circumstances as an expression of defeatism or nihilism, you're actually reintroducing individual agency into the equation - if we treat suicide as an action to be criticised you are direction the focus of this investigation towards whether the individual was wrong in their actions, it "kicks up dust" towards the vulnerable
if, on the other hand, you treat suicide as entirely a rational response to material conditions beyond their control (which i think it certainly is) you orient the focus to the conditions which cause suicide, which is i think the only really productive path
i strongly disagree with the notion that critiquing suicide "kicks up dust" or "punches down" or anything like that. i reject the idea that it distracts from, or prevents, discussion of the conditions which cause suicide, as though there can be only one conversation, one focus.
what critiquing suicide CAN do is reject romanticising of the act, reject cultural reinforcement of those feelings of utter helplessness and detachment that could lead others to the same conclusion when there might actually be an alternative that's not immediately apparent to them.
discipline posted:I've had several friends end their own lives early and it's pretty much the bottom of the barrel for bourgeois reactionary behavior.
i will tell that to the quarter million indian pesticide drinkers
Petrol posted:i hoped that it would be strongly implied what i meant by community in this context, but yes, i am suggesting something with true emancipatory potential.
but the problem here is that we don't have the communities we want, we are saddled with the communities that we have. for the overwhelming number of people on this earth, communities with emancipatory potential do not exist. they can exist, but the problem here is that you need a plurality of people to form a community. how do you realise the plurality when those around you either ignore your suffering or directly benefit from it?
i understand that you are making an ideological argument against conceptual individualism and for the emancipatory community here, i just don't see where this leads beyond circularity and tautological sentiments that emancipatory communities are emancipatory - i obviously agree with you, i just don't think it's saying much of anything. i think it's more productive to talk about why these communities don't exist
Petrol posted:i strongly disagree with the notion that critiquing suicide "kicks up dust" or "punches down" or anything like that. i reject the idea that it distracts from, or prevents, discussion of the conditions which cause suicide, as though there can be only one conversation, one focus.
that problem here isn't necessarily that you can't focus on one thing, but you are explicitly re-introducing individual agency and choice into a conversation that is ostensibly directed against the emphasis on individual agency and choice. i think doing so is just as meaningless as making any other argument that privileges these categories
discipline posted:I've had several friends end their own lives early and it's pretty much the bottom of the barrel for bourgeois reactionary behavior.
rates of suicide attempts are higher in racial, gendered and sexual minorities and are negatively correlated with income. what gain can be made from attributing "bottom of barrel" bourgeois reactionary behaviour to those who are most victimised by bourgeois reaction
