Orlando

Tags

orlando cw, ozy blog post

I am sad about what happened in Orlando. I do not like any situation where people die. And I am intellectually aware that people want people like me to be dead, but I usually don’t have to think about it, and it is sad to be so vividly reminded.

But more than that I am afraid of the consequences of the Orlando shooting.

I am afraid of the consequences for neurodivergent people. I’m afraid of better “access to treatment” that is a euphemism for coercion into treatment. I’m afraid of more stigma against psychotic people and anyone else who’s off-putting enough to get fear rather than pity, which means that neurodivergent people do not get the support we need to have lives worth living.

I am afraid of gun policy that is based not on a sober assessment of the risks and benefits, but on fear of lurid yet rare incidents– gun policy that thinks that we’re dealing with mass shooters instead of suicides. Gun policy needs to be solidly grounded in evidence, not in grief.

I am afraid of more xenophobia against immigrants, since the shooter was himself the child of immigrants. Immigration is a vitally important weapon against global poverty, lifting up many migrants from absolute poverty to first-world poverty within mere weeks. I am worried that this will be taken as another opportunity to tighten the border a little more.

I am afraid for our civil liberties, increasingly lost to the fight against terrorism. More surveillance. More entrapment. More indefinite detention. I am afraid of the slow loss of what makes America America– our freedoms– in the name of allegedly defending them.

I am afraid of war.

I am afraid of the deaths of noncombatants, including children, and other violations of international law involving war.

I am afraid of billions of dollars which could be used on foreign aid or a social safety net or scientific research or anything else that could save many, many more lives than were lost in the Orlando shooting, instead being directed to fight a global war on terror.

I am afraid of discrimination against Muslims, of increased profiling and stigma against them as violent. The violations of civil liberties will disproportionately affect Muslims, and I greatly fear for anyone who is subject to state violence. I don’t have to agree with people to think that they should have rights. That’s the thing about rights. They ought to belong to everyone.

I am afraid of the effects on feminist and pro-LGBT Muslims. A bitter and embattled minority group is significantly less likely to listen to anything that smacks of its enemies. This makes it harder for feminist and pro-LGBT Muslims to make the case that equality is a universal value and a Muslim value– not just a Western value.

It is said that any law named after a dead child is a bad law. The same thing, I think, is true of laws made immediately after a mass shooting. It is natural to mourn, but do not let your grief make you do things that will hurt far more people than were hurt in the shooting. That is a poor way to memorialize the dead.

The Suicide Rate Is Too Low

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ozy blog post, ozy is an obnoxious contrarian, suicide tw

[content warning: did you read the fucking title? Suicidal people, please consider whether it is a good idea for you to read this.]
[epistemic status: I don’t behave as if this were true, but the arguments are reasonable.]
[commenting note: If you wish to comment on this post with earnest recommendations about my mental health, don’t.]

There is a tremendous tragedy in our society today: not enough people have killed themselves.

Naively, one would assume that the individual is best at assessing whether their life is worth living. However, I believe there is a systematic bias in favor of people whose lives are not worth living failing to kill themselves.

First, consider it from an evolutionary perspective. There is considerable selective pressure against committing suicide: if you kill yourself, you won’t have any more children, and you will leave any existing children parentless. Therefore, like most animals, humans have evolved a preference to not kill ourselves, no matter how deeply in pain we are. In my personal experience of attempting suicide, the drive to live live at all costs live prompted by a suicide attempt is one of the strongest and most all-consuming feelings I’ve ever experienced.

However, our society does not leave the evolutionary bias towards life alone, but heightens it. Celebrities routinely discuss how important it is not to kill yourself– from Dan Savage to Lady Gaga to Gerard Way. If you google “suicide”, Google will show you the suicide prevention lifeline; the top results are universally people trying to talk you out of it. Similarly, looking up “suicide” on Tumblr will get you a message about suicide prevention. As a suicidal person, I can attest to the paucity of people who will talk with you openly about your desire to kill yourself without assuming that your desire to die is a cognitive distortion that should be put to bed as quickly as possible.

Information about how to commit suicide is censored to the point of being nigh-unavailable. Books like Final Exit and the Peaceful Pill Handbook are controversial, because how dare anyone give people information that could theoretically cause them to want to die? Similarly, many ‘public health interventions’ consist of nothing more than taking away suicidal people’s ability to control their own destiny. Eliminating coal-burning stoves and thus an effective form of suicide is hailed as saving lives. Today, many advocate for gun control with the same logic.

Of course, any discussion of the social pressure not to commit suicide is incomplete without mentioning the fact that planning for suicide (along with homicidal ideation) is one of the two cases where we consider it acceptable to imprison someone without trial. Fortunately, the crime of saying to a therapist “I wish to kill myself tomorrow, and I have a plan” is only punished by three days’ imprisonment, and such a punishment is trivially easy to avoid, but it speaks to the depth of pressure on the suicidal person not to commit suicide. If I wish to discuss with a trained professional all the options that are on the table– my chance of recovery, my hope for the future, and the prospect that my life will never be worth living– I will never be allowed to do so.

And you’re telling me, looking at all this cultural pressure not to commit suicide, that most people who ought to die do so? Some people report that most suicide attempters are impulsive people who regret it shortly after: of course they are! Anyone who would attempt rational suicide has already been dissuaded by all the people screaming about how rational suicide is wrong wrong wrong and the only moral option is to endure misery until your hopefully early grave.

This pressure not to commit suicide is culturally contingent and not inevitable. As Cicero writes in the De Finibus:

When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart from life. This makes it plain that it is on occasion appropriate for the Wise Man to quit life although he is happy, and also of the Foolish Man to remain in life although he is miserable. For with the Stoics good and evil, as has repeatedly been said already, are a subsequent outgrowth; whereas the primary things of nature, whether favourable or the reverse, fall under the judgment and choice of the Wise Man, and form so to speak the subject-matter, the given material with which wisdom deals. Therefore the reasons both for remaining in life and for departing from it are to be measured entirely by the primary things of nature aforesaid. For the virtuous man is not necessarily retained in life by virtue, and also those who are devoid of virtue need not necessarily seek death. And very often it is appropriate for the Wise Man to abandon life at a moment when he is enjoying supreme happiness, if an opportunity offers for making a timely exit.

Following this wisdom, Stoics like Seneca and Cato the Younger killed themselves when they felt it was time.

Some will say that suicide is a selfish act, because of the grief others experience. But everyone will die (for now). At some point, my loved ones will experience grief at my passing– or I will experience the grief of having outlived them all. To delay– not to prevent– the pain of grief, anti-suicide proponents ask that the rationally suicidal live in misery for decades upon decades. And somehow committing suicide is the selfish act?

I contend that suicide is the only moral form of death. The death of a happy person whose life was fulfilling and who had many friends? Every one a tragedy. A rational decision, made by a calm person, that the future contains more pain than pleasure in expectation and to a high degree of certainty? Never. Many are not sad when the very old die; they think that they lived a full life and that they would not have had many years left anyway. Surely the loved ones of the rationally suicidal can come to think, “at least they did not suffer, and though I miss them very much, I would not like them to have experienced pain so I would be with them.” Such a kind, selfless attitude may provide them much comfort.

There are three groups of people for whom this argument does not apply. First, chronically suicidal people have no doubt extensively assessed the pros and cons of suicide, and I will not dare to suggest that I know better than they do whether they should be alive. Second, suicidality is somewhat acceptable among terminally ill and incurably physically disabled people; the strength of the stigma on suicide is less, making it more likely (although by no means certain) that those people have an accurate assessment of their situation. Third, parents of children under the age of eighteen may cause their children undue trauma through committing suicide, and thus should wait until their children are grown.

However, many healthy, nonsuicidal individuals live lives of quiet desperation; they may do well to realize that suicide is an option for them. They do not have to continue a life of misery.

Stanislav Petrov Day

Tags

ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

In Heaven, there is a club. The most exclusive club in the world.

Their names are not widely known. They have no monuments, no honors, no streets named after them, no parades. Children do not learn about them in school. Their names are less well-recognized than the average sports star.

And yet we owe them our lives.

Vasili Arkhipov, who prevented a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stanislav Petrov, who judged reports of a nuclear attack on Russia to be a false alarm and refused to set off the bomb. Karl Landsteiner, who discovered the existence of blood types. Fritz Haber, the father of chemical warfare, on whose discovery of the Haber-Bosch process half the world depends for its food. Carl Bosch, who transformed Haber’s discovery into a practical way of producing fertilizer. Adolph Hustin, Luis Agote, and Richard Lewisohn, who discovered how to store blood for transfusion. Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution.

They call it the One Billion Club.

Today, take a moment to give thanks to these heroes, without whom we would be dead.

Tags

discworld, ozy blog post

The deacon had drunk water from Brutha’s cupped hands. But there was a switched-off quality about him. He walked, he drank, he breathed. Or something did. His body did. The dark eyes opened, but appeared to be looking at nothing that Brutha could see. There was no sense that anyone was looking out through them. Brutha was certain that if he walked away, Vorbis would sit on the cracked flagstones until he very gently fell over. Vorbis’ body was present, but the whereabouts of his mind was probably not locatable on any normal atlas.

It was just that, here and now and suddenly, Brutha felt so alone that even Vorbis was good company.

“Why do you bother with him? He’s had thousands of people killed!”

“Yes, but perhaps he thought you wanted it.”

“I never said I wanted that.”

“You didn’t care,” said Brutha.

“But I—”

“Shut up!”

Om’s mouth opened in astonishment.

“You could have helped people,” said Brutha. “But all you did was stamp around and roar and try to make people afraid. Like…like a man hitting a donkey with a stick. But people like Vorbis made the stick so good, that’s all the donkey ends up believing in.”

“That could use some work, as a parable,” said Om sourly.

“This is real life I’m talking about!”

“It’s not my fault if people misuse the—”

“It is! It has to be! If you muck up people’s minds just because you want them to believe in you, what they do is all your fault!”

Brutha glared at the tortoise, and then stamped off toward the pile of rubble that dominated one end of the ruined temple. He rummaged around in it.

“What are you looking for?”

“We’ll need to carry water,” said Brutha.

“There won’t be anything,” said Om. “People just left. The land ran out and so did the people. They took everything with them. Why bother to look?”

Brutha ignored him. There was something under the rocks and sand.

“Why worry about Vorbis?” Om whined. “In a hundred years’ time, he’ll be dead anyway. We’ll all be dead.”

Brutha tugged at the piece of curved pottery. It came away, and turned out to be about two-thirds of a wide bowl, broken right across. It had been almost as wide as Brutha’s outstretched arms, but had been too broken for anyone to loot.

It was useful for nothing. But it had once been useful for something. There were embossed figures around its rim. Brutha peered at them, for want of something to distract himself, while Om’s voice droned on in his head.

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it’s not murder if you do it for a god). In the center of the bowl was a larger figure, obviously important, some kind of god they were doing it for…

“What?” he said.

“I said, in a hundred years’ time we’ll all be dead.”

Brutha stared at the figures around the bowl. No one knew who their god was, and they were gone. Lions slept in the holy places and—

—Chilopoda aridius, the common desert centipede, his memory resident library supplied—

—scuttled beneath the altar.

“Yes,” said Brutha. “We will.”

He raised the bowl over his head, and turned. Om ducked into his shell.

“But here—” Brutha gritted his teeth as he staggered under the weight. “And now—”

He threw the bowl. It landed against the altar. Fragments of ancient pottery fountained up, and clattered down again. The echoes boomed around the temple.

“—we are alive!”

Goodbye, Sir Terry Pratchett, 1948-2015