Having the extended family over and the boys would all be playing outside until the street lights came on, and then inside to play whatever game came out. Clay fighter, mortal kombat, donkey kong country etc.
My family would pull straws to see which man would dress up as Santa clause and go door to door on my street to greet kids and give the adults some baileys or whiskey.
Sad to hear a brilliant man decided to take his own life. He seemed increasingly dark on his later takes, and it's a testament to the evils of unrestrained high-IQ and no guard rails.
I would never begrudge someone with a terminal degenerative illness choosing the manner of their exit.
And there are states of mind which, had you ever experienced them, would have you pleading for a swift end to things. You are lucky to have never known them.
Good and evil don't necessarily come into it at all, except for in a judgmental observer's mind. Some people call abortions evil (even if they're terminal, or a result of rape, etc). Yet they feel different when it's their abortion.
Many people felt gay marriage was so evil that it would end society as we know it. Same with cannabis; same with left handedness.
Sometimes suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem; sometimes it's a mercy. What qualifies you to judge someone else's decision and label them evil, without so much as having met them?
However, if such a state didn't drive you to suicide, then you haven't experienced the furthest extent to which such states can drive some one. Try extrapolating: what if that experience of yours had been 10x more intense; 100x; 1,000x.
You don't know the limit of any other human's suffering, and neither do I. Lucky us.
A social network with people who's voices could serve as a check against one's internal mental state of the world around them going out of sync with the real one.
There's the old joke about how several different blind men perceive an elephant differently, but that's not too far off from how we perceive the world around us.
Marshall clearly thought things were getting significantly worse towards the end of his life. What if that perception stemmed from a poorly selected input that was never challenged by any other person's perception of reality?
For example; "There is no point to living after 65" - when there's plenty of 65+ year old people who enjoy life and contribute to the world around them. My grandparents contributed significantly to my existence when they were older than 65. If they'd both passed away at 65, my existence would be far poorer for it.
It's important to have people in our lives that help us keep our perception of reality from spinning off into dark versions that don't accurately represent actual reality.
Was he dark or just trying to be responsible and keep his head out of the sand in the face of massive challenges?
He wrote an essay about people being euthanized after age 63 in order to relieve the environmental strain of the high population. I don't know if he really believed that, but if he did and saw his health and quality of life deteriorating rapidly, then it is possible that he literally was trying to serve as a role model to people of how to be a good citizen and fight climate change.
I personally hope that we don't have to resort to such things as a society. But I believe that resource constraints and climate or other challenges are much more severe than people understand. I hope that we will be able to leverage technology to avoid disaster.
Intelligent people are able to understand and solve problems. That's why they don't ignore them and hope they will go away, like many less intelligent people. Brain might have been demonstrating a "last-resort" but effective solution to these types of global challenges.
I suppose if you dismiss an article out of hand due to the ideology of the author without even seeing what historical facts they claim or their references, they might not be valuable to you.
Should progressive academics declare all CATO papers invalid because they are ideologically misaligned with the institute?
