28-Year-Old Dutch Woman to Legally End Her Life in May.
A Dutch woman has decided to legally end her life citing her struggles with crippling depression and autism, according to a report. Zoraya ter Beek, a 28-year-old physically healthy, who lives in a small village in the Netherlands near the German border, is slated to be euthanised in May, according to the New York Post (NYP).
The Dutch woman said she decided to be euthanised after her doctors told her nothing more could be done to improve her condition.
Didn’t we use to try to prevent people who were depressed from committing suicide?
The World has turned into a Monty Python skit.
Having those thoughts is understandable, what’s not is acting on them. The goal is to remove the conditions and factors that make the person have those thoughts, rather than having the person stop living altogether.
People have different reasons for becoming communists and socialists because their material conditions vary. So if we are to develop class consciousnesses, we have to change our tactics. If we want a bourgeoise person to become a class traitor, it wouldn’t make sense to appeal to their sense of financial struggle because they’ve never experienced it.
The only promise is change, a different world. We can’t promise it will be different, the “promise” of communism has always been the overthrow of capitalism, of the current order of things, and the power to build something else. Lenin and the Bolsheviks promised “peace, land and bread” because that’s what the people wanted.
The point is to empower people so they think they can do something for themselves. Committing suicide is the opposite of that. Suicide is the resolution of contradictions in capitalism’s favour.
No capitalist healthcare system is able to alter life conditions. A doctor can’t exactly prescribe a raise or a paid vacation. Ofcourse under socialism this may change but as of now a medically assisted suicide is better than forcing someone to suffer alone which is the only other option capitalism would provide.
There is a difference between adapting to different people’s personal conditions to make effective arguments and deception.
You can say goals, however you know for a fact that capitalism isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Socialism is still a historical epoch away.
You should empower people to think for themselves, not to be cogs on a new machine. Blindly being cogs is why the USSR got screwed so fast after Stalin left. Leadership became unresponsive and this caused the populace to distrust the government overtime leading to the re-emergence of capitalism later.
Neither can an electrician, but they aren’t offering to electrocute a person to death as an alternative.
It is better to struggle against the system that put one in such a position than accept medically assisted suicide.
No, I most certainly don’t know that for a fact. Capitalism is very unstable. During covid, the economy ground to a halt and capitalists were afraid the whole economic system might collapse, which is why they forced governments to pay people anyway even if they weren’t working, something unheard of pre-covid. Every few years there’s a recession/risk of depression. We’re very close to a world war.
“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”
Epochs are labels we use in retrospect to delineate and talk about periods in the past. We cannot use an “epoch” to measure time in the future.
Suicide is the cessation of thinking, by definition.
Better to fight than accept death certainly but death should always be an option on the table for those who are done fighting. Every soldier retires eventually.
Unstable on the scale of nations means within 100 years or so. So sure, potentially within our lifetimes capitalism will go away but its fair to say it won’t be within 10 years. Why? Because socialism is still wildly unpopular. We at least need people to be willing to accept our presence in daily life but even that isn’t gonna happen. If a communist revolution took over the government a good 75% of my country would be fully counter revolutionary, maybe 20% neutral, and the rest would view it as an improvement (not necessarily support, but at least think its a better direction than the past, less than 1% would actually support the new government). It’ll take a century shoved into a week before people here actually fight. Maybe your country is closer to revolution and if so I’m happy for you and hope it succeeds.
Sure, but if they chose to enter that state on their own volition I see no reason to inhibit them.
We have no way of knowing that.
Yeah, now.
“During a revolution, millions and tens of millions of people learn in a week more than they do in a year of ordinary, somnolent life. For at the time of a sharp turn in the life of an entire people it becomes particularly clear what aims the various classes of the people are pursuing, what strength they possess, and what methods they use.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/06.htm
People can change their minds rather quickly.
In the American revolution, 1/3 of the people wanted it, 1/3 were against it and 1/3 didn’t care either way. At least that’s what I remember reading in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. You don’t need 100% (or the majority) of the people to be on our side at the start of the revolution.