Back in the 1930s it was a fairly widespread and accepted thing among "rational progressives" to be just straight up unconditionally pro-right-to-die P.G. Wodehouse wrote a story joking about this, where a hardcore socialist talks about it so much people think he's suicidal
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
There was some really harsh backlash to this in the postwar era as people fled from "rational progressivism" and its association with eugenics and the Holocaust and religion made a comeback The taboo that encouraging suicide = blood on your hands came back hard
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
People fought bitterly about this because people really believed in the Population Bomb and other people were horrified at the idea of "anti-overpopulation policies" subtly finding ways to try to get rid of "excess" people
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
So like I could say "Remember when suicide booths were a thing in the movie Soylent Green?" but the thing is by the time that movie was made in 1973 they *weren't* a thing They were a dystopian strawman you used to attack people who cared too much about overpopulation
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Whereas back in the "good ol' days" of the '30s you could find people like H.G. Wells just straight up actually making the argument that a utopian society of the future would have free painless taxpayer-funded suicide booths you could just sign up for
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Which ties directly to eugenics, but in a very liberal, voluntary way If you don't want to be alive, why should the rest of us argue with you Let everyone who wants to die be dead, once they're gone it'll just be people who want to be alive, then everyone's happy Simple logic
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The latter half of the 20th century, in my view, was this massive backlash against the highwater mark of being pro-RTD in that era Mental health professionals came out strongly saying that 1) suicidality is by definition psychotic 2) encouraging it is enabling psychosis
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
There never is actually a good reason to kill yourself ("a permanent solution to a temporary problem") and if you act like there is then you're just being a callous monster who wants to wash your hands of other people's pain
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I think this is a really good point I don't think it's a 100% convincing point I noticed that when we had our fight over euthanasia/assisted suicide in the '90s the pro-RTD people had made this huge strategic retreat
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Nowadays if you even say "right to die" *nobody* who says that means "Everyone should have the right to kill themselves without anyone trying to stop them, suicide is the cheapest cure for depression and the one that most honestly respects the patient's wishes"
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"Right to die" now specifically means "right to die in the case of terminal illnesses that are guaranteed to cause death anyway within a certain limited window of time and in that time window guaranteed to cause immense physical suffering"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And like if you argue that that it doesn't mean that the RTD advocates take that as an attack -- the slippery slope argument -- and staunchly deny it And even then, since the heyday of Dr. Kevorkian, they've massively lost ground
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The disability rights movement's consensus right now is openly and passionately against RTD as a concept They argue fiercely that suicide *cannot* be a "rational" decision made dispassionately and personally within the confines of your own head It *always* has a social context
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