Or 21 if you read the book...

I don't like to correct people on their grammar but it's not really "le'audience" in that sense. On dira plutôt "l'auditoire" aujourd’hui. <rather one says "auditoire">

With that said, you have a strange way of dealing with your unease at the suffering of others. People that are old or sick or deformed might be miserable at times yet still wish to live. There may be better ways to ameliorate their situation than murder. The most bizarre thing though seems to be your view of convicts. You apparently want them to suffer, but when they suffer so much that it actually makes you uncomfortable with the idea, instead of suggesting that perhaps they should be made to suffer less you suggest that they be killed. From what you've written here it seems that the only feelings you're considering are your own.

If we are also looking at a "time to kill", so to speak, I would add that self-defense is also acceptable.  If someone or something is a fatal threat, then I have the right to keep myself alive.  Whether that is another human, another animal, or another object.  Everyone has the right to preserve their own life, and if that requires killing, then I find that to be an adequate reason.

Gauche, I think the OP was looking at it from the perspective of the person wanting to die rather than the person wanting to kill another, but I think your point is well taken.  It becomes more difficult when the person is suffering (or appears suffering), and yet has no way to communicate the suffering.  How can we tell, for example, if a child of 6 months is suffering from their terminal disease?  How can we tell how much suffering is taking place when someone has stage 5 Alzheimers?  For me, the question isn't whether someone who wishes to die should be allowed to die, but should we also decide "via proxy" when we see someone who *appears* to be in suffering?

People in those situations may suffer immensely. I think it's more a question of whether you want to take an active role in their demise when they haven't requested it. In a situation where someone is in a vegetative state why not err on the side of caution? Who knows, maybe in the near future technology will allow the person to communicate in some limited way or they may even be rehabilitated. I saw this article on BBC 2 days ago:

Doctors communicate with vegetative state patient

Never. Or, rather, it is irrelevant.

"Mercy" is a Judeo-Christian construct which has no place in nature.

I would kill to eat and/or to preserve myself. Period.

It violates my principle of integrity to kill someone just because they're having a bad time.

If someone wants to kill themselves but aren't able to; well, tough shit.

I woke up totally dead today. Thank goodness for coffee.

Too bad for them, eh? There are several countries and a few US states that allow it. Apparently Texas has a limited law allowing removal of futile life-support, as I'm sure you're probably already aware. Pretty meagre, but at least it's something.

Oregon has a death with dignity law.  You must have only six months to live as verified by two different doctors.  You must be certified as not being depressed by those two doctors.  You are given a prescription and instructions for taking the pills so as to have a death that won't upset your relatives.  You may either fill the prescription or not - most people who ask for it don't fill it.  Even fewer actually take it.  The theory is that what is important is having some choice and control over your own demise.  Most people are afraid of the pain and lack of control.  Many find that it isn't as bad as they thought it might be.

Note, this is NOT euthanasia, but instead, assisted suicide.  There is no provision in the law for people who are not mentally competent - grandma may be 102 with Alzheimer's and she may continue to live for another 10 years.  She is not eligible for the prescription since she is not at home mentally.

I support the law and so does most of Oregon.  The initiative has been on the ballot twice - and voted in both times with comfortable margins.

Prison - the point of prison is to punish though I don't think it works as a deterrent.  Some prisons have decent rehabilitation programs that actually work, but they are the exception, not the rule.  Is it better to kill people rather than just lock them up until they die naturally?  I don't think so.  Look at the number of people who claimed innocence and had it verified with the recent DNA testing available.  Just one innocent person put to death is one too many.  I would rather be alive with a small chance of freedom than dead - if I were ever in prison. 

My opinion might change if we were discussing prisons in places where torture and starvation were sanctioned by the state where the prison was located.  NB: I am well aware that in some places in the US, torture is perpetrated on the inmates by the staff.  Generally, this is not sanctioned by the governing body.  And Guantanamo is a disgrace and tarnishes our honor.  But I don't have control there, either.

Infants.  In the long ago, infants with defects were put out.  A thousand years or more ago (roughly), an infant that was not going to be able to pull their own weight in the community as an adult was taking resources from another infant who would grow up to be productive.  And so they were put out to die.  This makes sense for those times.  But most places in the world are not like that anymore.

I believe that it is the family's choice.  Their choice to abort or not.  Their choice to attempt extreme medical measures or not.  Their choice for older children and adults as well as elders.  Not my choice.  Not society's choice.  Again, please note, this does not mean that I think it is okay to allow death through neglect.  If you have made an attempt to save their life, and all has failed, and death is inevitable, how you meet that death is not my business.  Each case is unique.  One answer does not fit all.

I actually find myself fond of the existing laws for euthenaisia...mandatory counseling, terminal illness confirmed by two docs and you're good to go.

However, if an ambulatory person wants to kill themselves it isn't like you can stop them.

Usually I think suicide is a bad idea, but if a person is really in a hopeless situation I support it.  Although I would say life is sacred, I don't mean that in the way most people do...I just think it is important to treat life as if it were sacred, for the good of humanity.

Also, car exhaust has a very poor success rate.  From my research, the best way to kill yourself is with a nitrogen filled suicide bag.  Pass out in seconds, no stress, pain or panic since your lungs still think they are working, death is by anoxia so as long as no-one 'saves' you within the first few minutes it is not reversible.

The mercy of Death

I watched the process several times as relatives came to  the end, some suddenly and others after tremendous suffering and anguish.

As a scientist I am naturally curious, Two things become apparent the first is the doomed individual and second is the behavior of the witnesses.

To give some perspective I am a victim of MS.

Psychologically people are prepared for death of loved ones with a number of beliefs that make the process less stressful, these beliefs are irrational and illogical but they serve to ameliorate the pain of loss or leaving.

No death is dignified and the use of the two words together is meaningless. No suffering has a purpose , but then the only porpose of life is to reproduce or serve as dinner for another entity, I guess for a male Black Widow it is both in that order.

People invent versions of reality to satisfytheir desires. If my MS was more than my wife could bear she wished to be relieved of the burden, she watched over a period of years as I steadily lost weight and lingered at the edge of life.  She would mercifully bring me a cup of coffee in the morning and check for signs of life. In the beginning she would actually inquire as to how i FELT, over time she left as soon as she saw any sign of life. Before the end of our life she would simply strike or shake my shoulder. I don't beleive she ever stayed long enough to hear my thanking her.

I survived remarkably, and recovered some strength. The damage ws done however, I understood that she had entered a psychological arena expecting one morning to find a corpse, and she hd even prepared the state of mind of a greiving widow. My children were drawn into the same psychological process.

My recovery upset all expectations. But rather than happiness in my family, I was faced with one hostile accusation after another about being insane, mentally abusive cruel and vindictative. My daughter refused to call me Dad and just called me YOU , my wife refused to use my name when addressing me.

She refused to answer questions, or she would simply say I already answered that and you don't deserve a repetition. My wife would not bring me food and she called in a Public Home care service. Her duties to her husband had ended when she had prepared herself for my death. My revival was a mistake.

When she talked to me it was abusive and hostile, dismissive, the sentnce structure was bizarre. I would ask who she was talking to since her responses had no connection with my words. Month after month whenever I spoke I had the mysterious impression that there was an invisible entity in the room with us. She could not recognize me as the same human being prior to my illness. She kept insisting I seek psychological counselling I went and enjoyed it for a time she refused. When in the same room with a councillor she would fabricate a story of my enormous cruelty and her long suffering trying to aid me. She struggled to get the counsellors sympathy while I became infuriated at the ease with which she could deny every actual event. She claimed I asked for legal seperation, she informed the entire family of my abuses, there is paper work showing that she in fact requested and paid for the legal work and furthermore actually devised a method to have it apply retroactively. The psychological process that my wife and family underwent were so strange and hurtful that i was often very depressed and physically compromised. The MS got worse. But this time I managed to get an old friend to come in and see me occasionally and bring me food. I was virtually isolated and over and over again I would remark that my family had annihilated and rewritten my entire life .

She would declare anything I said as being a lie, I was a liar, I had no right to speak on my perspective . I did not have any right to exist or to even promote my on view of reality.  I tried to be rational and was ever frustrated being frail and frightened I also became angry. She threatened my business she hid my papers she kept my banking papers, she hid my mail. She demanded I sign cheques aggressively and attacked me whenever I wanted clarification or an explanation.

Now two things happened here, I survived a near death crises that dragged out over years. My wife and family were transformed according to some psychological imperative. I was a scientist and a witness to all, and though very ill and frail still curious. My son left the business after explaining that I had abandoned him and my daughter was running away to the South Pacific. Once all the children were gone my wife had no more witnesses to cury favour or sympathy. She became unmitigatingly hostile. Then she would run the water and obssesively wash dishes while I tried to speak. If I left the room she would begin singing to herself la de dah de lah.

I live alone  now and write occasionally to inform others that there are many perspectives of any phenomenon. I had the bad luck to crawl out of my grave and dare to try and reclaim my old life. I was the undead in the beloved's clothing. The dead are not allowed to speak or exist on their behalf.

The survivors have inherited a meme that enbles them to perform atrocious acts without awareness or regrets.

I have been a witness to the death of others and seen my own mind go through parts of the process.
I was horrified to hear myself proclaim that my mother's sufferring ws more thaan i could endure aand actually wished that this was her last night. In fact it was only hours into the morning she died in bed. The death angels of the palliative care ward were well prepared and very efficient.

My misery and decline began that night, My families horrible journey into irrationality started even earlier.

We are social animals well prepared to accept the deaths of others with devious memes of rationalization that protect somewhat our fragile minds.

Society accepts this reality and tries to deny its existance. Rarely does a human being return from the grip of death as I did to explain what i witnessed. I am not looking for sympathy but understanding. God was mentioned so often during death that it seemed he had just left the room and i had missed him in the hallway.

The truth is we are mostly very well prepared to create fictional realities about death. We use words and slogans to make ourselves feel good in a dreadful situation. It is still legal to abandon children in the streets of Brazil. We have the gift of murder when we are born. We have the right memes to accept atrocities and call them mercies. we are all angel makers.

Life is horrible when we see behind the illusions of our beliefs. Perhaps the quest of a rational world is just too frightful a mission.

I thought my situation special and I was indignant that after all my accomplishments that I should be treated so badly by my family and the society I defended.

It turns out that my misfortune is typical of how people die, those we look to for support simply abandon us and reinvent reality to shore up a fragile psyche. Most of us will die miserably because we will have our loved ones prepare it as their only easy solution. We die at the hands of others when they have had enough of us. Depression may be an integral mechanism allowing the strong to dispatch the weak but we have many other tools at our disposal such as denial and fictionalization and narcissism.

If I could speak for the dead having almost been amoung them for years, I would say we are not capable of rational thought because then we would have to accept responsibilty for our actions. We need gods and scapegoats to clense our minds. I ws eventually driven out of my home and forced to survive in isolation still dealing with MS.

Friends kept me alive by giving me some hope.  Friendship may not make death any easier but it does open the door to small delights from time to time. And I do not have to descend into a new form of madness to protect me from another.

My father survived the second world war and witnessed cloe hnd the atrocities of eastern Europe as a German soldier translator. His horror stories of travesties may have shaped my world view. He survived madness only to suffer for decades from the memories and they in turn were passed on to all his sons. He lived long enough to watch himself die slowly with the assistance of the Angels of Mercy. My mother later on her death bed expressed great regret for what she had done as he suffered.

My observaation is that the psychological devices we employ to protect us from the atrocities we commit ultimtely fails and we will contend with them late in life or witness our children reenact the same crimes. The minds of most normal humans are unprepared for the realization of what they have done or allowed to be done. I think in an odd way the psycopaths are the best evolved to deal with the reality of human existance.. The imaginary short term benifits of convenience will cost us our sanity in the end. It is a bad bargain to attempt to pass the blame to another, such as God or the soon to depart.

I have apologized to everyone in my family for living longer than they were willing to tolerate, psychologists think it is the result of MS but my opion is that I saw something that no human being should ever acknowledge and I failed to cope appropriately.

Yes I have invited death, and failed I now asked for aid and it was refused due to beuracractic protocol.

I write this letter of response because I feel I should warn people that the consequences of irrational behavior are just more dreadful than anyone can imagine. It is not worth the effort to try and save yourself at the expense of others.

I have come to accept that death is a better alternative than the madness of irrational beliefs. It is a grim reality and a hard learned lesson.

Trying to return to life is impossibly difficult once the living have condemned you.

Women are in some ways more guilty than men, they have inherited the power to dispose of unwanted individuals and for much of history men have accepted their power or denied its existance. Infanticide , abandonment, abortion,  mercy killings have all seemed to be defined differently at different times.

Women's rights issues are confused at times, but women inherit the psychological attributes required to dispose of life as well as create it. Underlying that belief structure is a need to enforce that power legally. The fact is ormal women are all functionally capable of committing atrocities and blaming or denying the consequences. Normal men blindly accepted that power, a few even tried to usurp it for themselves. The laws of men are an infringement of the rights of women to control who lives and who dies. When males discovered warfare the balance of power shifted. Now males became a deadly threat, rape was all about a lack of control for women. Patriarchies served the reproductive iterests of males and the population exploded world wide. Technology benefited humanity but shifted power away from women's domain. Inspite of the massive scale of warfare human populations exploded world wide.

Males inherited much of the genetic material from mothers, so they also began to demonstrate wanton disregard for life and excelled at it. For much of hominid evolution females directed evolution, now the consequence may have been that it backfired. Subserviant males grew too large and powerful to control. We may be all human beings but our agendas are so different thaat we might as well be enemies. The more of us the more we have to slaughter and we can not seem to keep up to the rate of increase.

I contend that we are biologically and culturally gifted with the ability to murder without regrets. Womens rights are legitimate at many levels but the dark under belly is the right of women to decide who lives and who dies and when. The dark side of feminism is to control life. Perhaps this instinct  or drive is common place among men as well. Clearly the sins of evolution are shared equally.  I argue here that the true nature of humanity is psycopathy in a blue dress. It must be careful never to reveal itself, exposed psycopaths have crossed the line. The clever ones mange to define Normality. Hence the great struggle over politically correct phraseology, arguments over whether or not abandonment is equal to murder. Is abortion equal to murder. Perhaps only men are capable of murder? Women are different. Equality has been a difficult process all along.

Many older men argued that no one in their right mind would give away so much power simply to become a man's equal. With equality many men asked why the women could get away with murder as long as they fabricated sympathy by accusing the dead of unprovable acts. Or in my case just ask what the difference is between homicide and abortion and then the bizarre arguments reminiscent of early Catholic trinity debates arises. It is not human, it is not alive, it is not sentient, the very definition of humanity had to be challenged simply to grant women the right to abort. I argued that I was prepared to let abortion be a non prosecutable act, but I was unwilling to accept the feminist argument that the fetus was not huma. If not human then what, a dog, a cat a fish, a rock, please tell me what it was exactly not what it was not.

Back to mercy killing and the connection to human atrocities. The Nazis declassified the Jews as being sub human and therefore the disposal of Jews ws no longer a criminal offence.

Earlier I discussed the transformation that my wife and family underwent as my death appeared imminent. My revival was unexpected and served to illuminate the transformation. My wife struggled to find a means to justify my disposal the Nazis had the same issue. The feminists have their own issue. The psycological solution is to rewrite reality, to change the order of events and the meaning of words and ideas. The methods may vary slightly but the aims are identical , how to dispose of the unwanted life of a burdensome individual.

The first step is to acknowledge the goal and construct a reasonable reality that can gaurantee the outcome. Reason used to facilitate an impulse as Bertrand Russell stated prior to WW1 and again WWII.  The effort of the feminist movement to change the meaning of language is preparation for the acts to follow. Women have lost much power to males and they wish to reverse their fortunes and many men will oblige them aas ever before to curry favour. Men are not anywhere as united and organized as the female beleives. They will succeed at an enormous cost. The entire society will descend into a nightmare of indifference and accusation. New Orleans and Katrina were the first major example of an entire society willing to turn a blind eye to the abandonment of many individuals just as society tolerated infanticide. Haiti is our current scent of what is to come, the Sisby leader is a classic psycopath that crossed the line and got nabbed. The dupes in tow might use stupidity as defense but I hope they fail. That was the same defense the Nazi collaborators used.

People already mutter that the earthquake was a good thing for Haiti, the words preceed the true crimes, the rationalization that the export of children is a good thing, Sisby is dangerous like the recent events in Australia acknowledging the crimes committed by Britain and Australia exporting alledged orphans to colonies. Some day even nations have to come to grips with collaboration with the Silsby's of the world and pay the true costs.

Even still after the price is paid the crimial act of reinventing reality to set the stage for a crime is never acknowledged. The propensity never decines and the ATROCITIES CONTINUE UNDIMINISHED .

The Nuremberg trials never disclosed the true nature of genocide and inhumanity , it did not have the will to look behind the delusions and deceits. It was mislead by the Jewish specifics and degenerated into meaningless diversion into discussion about the exact number and reparations payments etc. The Nuremberg trials were ended too soon. There was much to discover. My father witnessed the failures of hunanity first hand it was more complex and worse than anything imagined. The Holocaust deniers are functional psycopaths looking to rewrite reality. The polite writers of history are timid colloborators or servile puppets.

The return from my grave was accidental, the survivors of concentration camps likewise were accidents. Many simply survived because there was not enough time or gas left to hide the evidence.

The issue of mercy killing is not about the right or wrong of it but why we think the word Mercy makes any difference to the outcome. We use the word Mercy to decieve ourselves and that is the real horror behind being human. We use our inteligence to deceive first ourselves then everybody else.

" It is a good thing the dead can not speak" ever wonder why we even think of creating such a statement why do we need this idea so desperately.

vburach