(i’ll put a real title here later, i promise)

Not, "this social rule makes no sense!" But like an anthropologist, "I wonder how this rule came to be and what people are getting out of it?"

Not, "that's bad grammar!" But like a linguist, "What actually is happening when we say 'me too,' how did the accusative come to be used there?"

Not, "ugh, small talk" but "ooh, phatic communication! What is the real communication taking place and how do they know?"

You are transported back in time and into the body of a young noblewoman in the 1400s. Your parents have married you off to an awful, abusive, rapist husband whom literally no one else would marry despite him being very high nobility because he's that terrible. You successfully produce a baby boy and then plan to murder this man for the good of everyone and yourself. Here is the question: do you think you could murder him in a way that is undetectable to the historical people around you? Note: they aren't stupid, you are the prime suspect as the battered wife AND you can't just say poison. Where are you going to buy poison? Do you know anything about poison actually? NO GOOGLING! You were sent back without a plan!

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

Dracula

No worries! If I run out of time you’ll just stop hearing from me haha

original post for reference

It’s true that I’m religious and that that’s in the background of my beliefs about this, but the argument I gave is not strictly religious. The religious argument is “your life does not belong to you, it belongs to God and you are the steward of it”. (It’s not my favorite argument, in fact, because it treats life as a possession.) My argument is more like:

The worth of a human life is intrinsic [because it is given by God].

Suffering is an evil but it does not reduce the person to less than a person [and by the mercy of God can mysteriously be the means of grace].

Dependence is not an evil, [as all living creatures are by nature dependent on God].

With these three premises, taking one’s own life is morally impermissible simply because it is the taking of a life. Your life does not have less value if it’s yours, and the loss of your life would be no less tragic if you’re the one who ended it. Suicide is wrong for the same reason murder is. Even if you disagree with the religious background, to make assisted suicide permissible I think you would still have to disagree with the main body of at least one of those three bullet points. You would have to say “the worth of a human life is dependent on a person’s abilities and when those abilities are absent or reduced their life is worth less”, or “suffering does make a person to be less than a person, a person in great pain is reduced to the level of an animal”, or “dependence is undignified and evil and we are justified in taking extreme steps to avoid becoming dependent and avoid wasting resources on those who are”, or some other version of one of those. 

You have to reject one of the three bullet points because what you mentioned about suicide being a “freedom” is not enough to make a judgment about whether it should be considered permissible or not. Thought experiment: a person is kidnapped by a Batman villain and injected with a paralytic and a slow-acting poison, so that they cannot escape and they know they are going to die. They’re in horrible pain and they’re afraid. And the villain comes up and puts a button in their hand and says “The last freedom you have is this choice: if you press the button you can poison Gotham’s water supply!” Poisoning the water supply doesn’t save them. It’s not a trolley problem, a choice between poisoning the water supply and killing Batman. It’s just press the button or do nothing. The button IS their last freedom. But that doesn’t mean the choice to poison the water supply would somehow be more legitimate, let alone laudatory, than if they made that choice in other circumstances. All choices are free. That’s what make them choices. It doesn’t mean they are by virtue of that good or moral choices. Sometimes it’s better to make no choice, rather than a bad choice. 

So when you say “it’s their last freedom”, behind that is the assumption that it’s their last freedom to make a good choice, one that isn’t like poisoning Gotham. And so one of my premises would have to be false. And you are welcome to believe one of my premises is false! But I think when you wipe out those unconditional premises, limiting whose life has worth and what kind of life is worth living, you start down that treacherous slippery slope which is so deadly for vulnerable communities. I’m going to mention again the idea that certain options exert pressure as soon as they exist: society doesn’t have to work too hard to actually help people when it could funnel them towards suicide instead. And so once assisted suicide is thinkable, life for disabled, mentally ill, elderly, and poor people gets worse. (The United Nations agrees with me: article 10 paragraph 19b)

And if you make freedom itself the condition for life’s value, i.e. “a person’s life has value if they freely confer that value on it”, the danger doesn’t disappear. How do we know the difference between a person who has with full freedom decided to stop valuing their life and a person who is so mentally unwell that they should be considered unable to freely consent? If you’re going through a rough patch and you start to have trouble seeing the value in yourself, does your value immediately disappear? How quickly can a medical professional sign off on your death? That same day? The next? And are we saying, then, that people only have value when they’re able to exercise freedom? What about mentally disabled people who need a lot of support and whose autonomy is limited? There is an extremely thin line between the principle of a person going to the doctor and saying “I have freely decided my life has no value” and the doctor assessing them and agreeing that they have the mental fitness to make that free choice, and the principle of a doctor looking at a person (with advanced dementia, intellectual disability, etc) and assessing that they don’t have the mental fitness to choose to give their life value.

As modern people we are obsessed with autonomy, and terrified of not having control, but in reality, most people have quite limited control. Obviously it’s an admirable goal to restructure society so that the poor and marginalized are less trapped by their circumstances, but we should also be really, really careful about making being-in-control the ultimate value—because it confers more value upon the powerful and leeches it away from the poor and marginalized. Bad enough that they don’t have a ton of choices! Now their humanity is somehow less because of that? Their lack of autonomy shouldn’t make them disposable.