This thread has made me realize that while I was watching the hearings on it purely for comedy aspect, there were actually people out there being like, “Yeah that makes sense.”

Love it when the government takes away our stuff. Please, take away more of our stuff. Love me that security theater.

If you don’t like the app, just don’t use it. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with data security and everything to do with other social media companies lobbying to eliminate a competitor, using anti-China sentiment and fear-mongering as a justification. It’s all about the money.

So, looking for the wildest claims from the middle of the cold war and trying to pass them off as fact?

If you look at the estimates the article actually uses:

By the end of 1940, the population of the Gulag camps amounted to 1.5 million.[13]

According to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953.[4] According to other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of which more than 465,000 were political prisoners.[22][23] Between the years 1934 to 1953, 20% to 40% of the Gulag population in each given year were released.[24][25]

Your number is several times higher than the highest estimate used outside of the historiography section (in case anyone reading is unfamiliar with the term, historiography is the study of how our understanding of history has changed over time, and so includes references to claims that have now been widely discredited).

The word “privatization” originates with describing the economic policy of Nazi Germany

he’s only giving you things you say with your friends inside of your living room, the only difference is he’s got the balls to say it in front of you all and don’t have to sugar coat it at all.

Things like what, exactly? We must be hanging out in different living rooms.

It did start back up though. And we don’t know if further research could bring the costs down. I’m not proposing it as a magic bullet, just as one potential way to get nighttime coverage.

There’s some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.

I’m not talking about changes over time, talking about things I’ve seen recently on here regarding Russia’s current status, in response to news stories and comments discussing the danger of escalation going nuclear.

Shroedinger’s Russian nuclear arsenal. When there’s a story about risking escalation, libs tell me it’s fine because Russia doesn’t have the money to maintain its nukes, so it’d only be a “limited” nuclear exchange. When this story comes out, the libs tell me that Russia has a much larger and better maintained nuclear stockpile, so it’s only necessary for the US to spend more on it to catch up. It’s sort of the same way that Russia simultaneously is on the verge of defeat, yet also has the intention and capability to conquer all of Europe, like Hitler, if we don’t stop him here.

The enemy is both strong and weak, and you never know which one it’s gonna be.

The New York Crimes is a garbage propaganda rag. They don’t deserve a red cent from anyone after pushing their transphobic agenda, (and responding to widespread criticism by publishing an article defending JK Rowling) or after they blatantly lied and published a fake news story about Hamas conducting mass rape in an attempt to sway public opinion to be in favor of Israel’s genocide. If you have a NYT subscription, you are paying people to lie to you.

You can go to archive.is and put in the url of a news story you want to read in the second box and it will usually let you bypass the paywall.

Fuck off. The only reason I didn’t block you was to give you a chance to realize you said something incredibly fucked up and apologize. Your attitude is a perfect example of why I’m opposed to this garbage and has only served to validate my position, which I now am more convinced of than ever. Blocked.

You moved the goalpost by going from “we should ban assisted suicide” to “we should make suicide harder (instead of actually doing something against the root causes)”.

My position from the start has been that assisted suicide, if it is to be allowed at all, should only be allowed for people with incurable physical pain. You can find multiple different comments of me saying that in this thread.

I’m glad that you “went trough the same and turned out fine”, but most people that bring up that argument have not turned out fine.

Wow. Thank you so much for telling me you think that suicide is the only answer to my problems. That’s a very reasonable and normal thing to say to someone you’ve never met.

Showing your real colors. You people just want people with mental illness to kill themselves so we’ll be out of your hair. Go fuck yourself, asshole.

Completely writing off whatever progress I’ve made while knowing precisely jack shit about my journey. What the fuck is wrong with you to think that’s ok?

I have, actually, and that’s why I feel as strongly about this as I do. If I didn’t believe what I’ve said, I’d have most likely killed myself. I’m alive today for the hope that someday things could get better and for the knowledge that my death wouldn’t fix anything.

The goalposts have not moved a single inch.

They’ll do it anyways, so why not make it less horrible for them?

I disagree with that. Will they do it anyway? There is evidence that putting up simple barriers to suicide (such as guardrails on a bridge) is effective at reducing suicide, while having a method of suicide readily available (such as a gun) can increase risks of suicide. Suicide is often an impulsive and irrational decision.

If some percentage of people would be deterred from suicide by the inconvenience of doing it themselves, and some percentage of that group would go on to recover enough to lead happy lives, wouldn’t that at least potentially be a good enough reason to restrict it?

But to answer your previous question, yes. We do let people suffer until society changes. Because I believe that it is better to endure the suffering and injustice caused by society than to look for an easy escape that doesn’t actually solve the problem, at least for anyone else. If I see suffering, is the proper solution to rip out my eyes? No. That’s incredibly misdirected, but that’s the logic of suicide. Rather than seeking to address the actual problem, it’s directing violence towards one’s own ability to sense and perceive the world around them. It is the ultimate form of “out of sight, out of mind,” taking it so far that you eliminate your own mind for having the audacity to report to you about unpleasantness. Addressing the underlying cause is what’s important, the pain is merely a symptom, which exists for the reason of telling us something’s wrong.

There are exceptions to that generalization. It is possible that the real source of the problem is within one’s body, that it’s causing incurable and unbearable physical pain. In those cases, I think it’s acceptable - but no further.

I wrote out some of my reasons here.

In short, it’s difficult to evaluate how much of a person’s psychological pain is innate and inherent to them and how much of it is caused by broader social factors. Even if every treatment option is exhausted, therapists can’t change society. I’m concerned that social changes for the sake of accommodation will get more difficult if assisted suicide becomes seen as an adequate solution.

Assisted suicide is fundamentally the same thing as non-assisted suicide, the only difference is that it makes less of mess. But the person is still gone and it’s every bit as tragic. Changing norms about suicide wouldn’t address the actual problems, it would only make the problems less visible and easier to ignore. If we’re going to change something, we should instead work to improve the conditions people are living in. Suicide is not the answer.

There are valid reasons to restrict certain actions or substances even if someone gives informed consent. While bodily autonomy is a right, it isn’t absolute to the point of outweighing all other rights and all practical considerations (no right is absolute). For any given right, whether it’s bodily autonomy, free speech, etc, there are valid reasons why limitations may be placed on it, and it isn’t valid to lump all of those reasons together with bullshit reasons people might want to restrict it. It would be like saying that people who don’t want it to be legal to shout “fire” in a theater are just like people who want to ban criticism of the government.

I don’t believe that they are different sides of the same coin. I see very little in common between the two.

From my perspective, it would be like saying opposition to war or the death penalty is just like being opposed to abortion, because anti-choice people claim to value life.

Well, I was trying to push it in a political direction because I don’t like my beliefs being compared to anti-abortionists based on vibes and appearances. It’s necessary to engage more critically with the issue to demonstrate that any apparent similarities are just superficial.

There is no objective division between political and non-political. This is a question about government policy on which people are divided, so to me it’s inherently a political issue.

Your objection to my position, which is that you claim it’s contrary to bodily autonomy.

Of course I’m against taking bodily autonomy as an absolute principle, because no rights are absolute. However, the way you’ve defined it, “absolute bodily autonomy” still allows you to be barred from doing something if a doctor decides you’re not informed enough, or if it would mean compelling someone to assist you. That isn’t what absolute means to me, but I’m willing to accept your definition. But by that definition, opposition to assisted suicide is comparable with “absolute bodily autonomy.” So your claim that I don’t support bodily autonomy is baseless.

I don’t see what the confusion is. If absolute bodily autonomy can’t compel people to act, then assisted suicide, which by definition involves another person’s assistance, isn’t covered by bodily autonomy.

Ok great, then people can commit suicide at home but that doesn’t compel anyone to act to assist them. Looks like my stance is fully consistent with bodily autonomy and your objection is meaningless.