That's both debatable on a semantic level (is it really suicide if it's assisted?) and not how I intended the use of the term.
What I tried to say is that this option is less traumatic than non-assisted options for ending your existence and comes with less risk of injury to bystanders to boot.
I can't understand why so many people are against someone dying with dignity. This is a form of harm reduction for not just the patient, but also their loved ones, and society in general.
Nobody wants to see their loved ones suffer endlessly or needlessly, and this is also a whole lot less traumatic than people committing suicide. Nobody wants the last memory of their loved ones to be the scene of their (potentially messy) suicide.
And that's not to mention the trauma inflicted on bystanders for some of the more public suicide methods (not to mention that jumping to your death or intentionally walking into/driving into traffic has a decent chance of physically injuring or killing said bystanders).
If this process is undertaken with care and compassion, it's far less likely to be traumatizing to all involved. And it prevents "spur of the moment" decisions, like many successful suicides are.
I am 100% with the women choosing the bear over an unknown man. Most wildlife, including bears, just want to be left alone to do their own thing. You can safely assume that the most likely thing to happen is the bear just does it's own thing and lets you be. An unknown man is a much less predictable entity, and as such should be treated with a lot more suspicion.
Side note for those wanting to be pedantic: Bears vary in their level of habituation and indifference to humans as a result. More habituated bears may associate you with food, and some may even see you as food (depending on species) This will affect their aggression towards you, but as a general rule of thumb it's still safe to assume any random bear would be more inclined to leave you alone or just steal your food than to actively want to harm you.
The one major advantage that Reddit alternatives on the Fediverse have over Reddit still is that nobody owns the platform wholesale. So while that doesn't solve the content issues you're rightfully bringing up, at least we've learned from Reddit's faults by removing the option of unilaterally making platform-level decisions that are undesirable for the end user.
Man, this screams "racial profiling" and "unjustified use of force" and they still want to claim there's no wrongdoing. Seriously, what needs to happen before a police organization goes "Yes, this was excessive and unjustified and we have disciplined the responsible officers" instead of first trying to gaslight the public?
The official count released recently by the Ukrainian government was 31k, vs Russia's totally believable 6k dead on their own side.
I will happily concede both have incentives to misrepresent their casualty numbers but the difference between Ukraine's official death toll and the estimates you see from military analysts have a much smaller discrepancy than the official reported losses and independent analysis on the Russian side.
But hey, you believe what you want to believe. We're all still free to disagree.
Having moved here from Sweden (and having just returned from a trip to Sweden) that 50% number is highly inaccurate when measured against the entire population. Swedes these days find themselves very much in a similar rent/purchase crunch we see in Canada, with most young people struggling to find affordable housing. The generation that owns those cottages and boats are the older Millenials, Gen Xers and Boomers, generally speaking.
And once again the conservatives are showing that they are truly America's enemy at home. Not just through fomenting domestic terrorism and a coup, but also by throwing whatever remains of the US' reputation and reliability for it's allies under the fucking bus.
They have so much blood on their hands by this point I wonder if they simply enjoy being the villains of this story.
Why does every mention or discussion of any annoyance in Windows immediately turn into a "install Linux" thread on here?
Sure, Linux might solve the immediate problem for the affected individual (and probably introduce a bunch of new ones as Linux isn't always as easy to use as advocates try to convince people it is) but it doesn't solve the larger issue - Microsoft needs to be held accountable for horrible design decisions and anti-consumerist practices.
Not everyone can, or will, switch to Linux. No matter how hard people champion that cause. And even if they do, it's a process that will take time. In the immediate, lots of people stand to benefit from Microsoft not pulling this sort of bs, and it's entirely justified to complain about it to make them walk back this decision.
These days, when someone starts appealing to common sense I automatically assume their position is fraught and their other arguments weak. I have yet to encounter one instance of this not being the case. Demagoguery has destroyed whatever was left of common sense.
Having lived in several different countries with both public and private healthcare, I can say with confidence that privatization is the death of a healthcare system.
Health for profit makes everyone's care worse except for the really rich, who still end up paying more under that system than they otherwise would have.
Even something like government reimbursemrnt for privatized healthcare means public health care suffers, as public institutions now have to compete with higher salaries paid by private hospitals, slowly eroding the system from the inside out.
There's no such thing as cheap healthcare, but public systems are a hell of a lot better at keeping it affordable and accessible.
I love how all Germanic languages can pull that stunt. Be it German, Swedish, Dutch, they all have this magic "turn a sentence into a single word" ability.
I know it's a joke, but with the level of scrutiny Germany has attracted for its dark history there's litle chance people wouldn't have heard of it by now ;-)
It's hard not to get both sad and angry when you look at average snowpack numbers over the last two decades. I'm fairly certain gen alpha will be the last to experience the type of winter conditions we've grown to expect as "regular".
As the climate heats up and winter become shorter, less predictable, and more violent due to the unstable polar vortex, we'll come to sorely miss the defining characteristics of it. We can't ignore the cultural impact winter has on lots of places (such as Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, and many places in the US) and I'm quite sure it'll have more than just ecological and employment impacts to these regions.
You'd be surprised how many people don't know the difference between being sore and having pain, but I digress. I never wanted to discuss semantics, just make a jokey comment about trading pain for discomfort.
Forget I mentioned it.
I think there's a non-zero percentage of people that confuse being sore with having unexplained pain.
And there's probably also another group of people that think they can excercise without being sore, given how lots of people exercise tout it as fixing all pain, which might set incorrect expectations.
That's both debatable on a semantic level (is it really suicide if it's assisted?) and not how I intended the use of the term.
What I tried to say is that this option is less traumatic than non-assisted options for ending your existence and comes with less risk of injury to bystanders to boot.