Recent content by FireDragon76

Some people are overly worried. I actually don't think American society is fatally wounded. Trump, is, was, and always will be a grifter. A man of exceeding low character who managed to play the system to his benefit and our collective detriment. When he is imprisoned or dies, alot of this...

There's no point in further debate when your basic premise is wrong. The notion of the individual, the autonomous self, without natural obligations to society, is a fiction of the western European Enlightenment that has extended into the present.

The premise itself you are operating from, that the liberal, western notion of the self is universal and beyond deconstruction, is wrong.

The evidence that SSRI's are little more than placebos is fairly robust: Kirsch I, Deacon BJ, Huedo-Medina TB, Scoboria A, Moore TJ, Johnson BT. Initial severity and antidepressant benefits: a meta-analysis of data submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. PLoS Med. 2008;5(2):e45.

The evidence for the efficacy of SSRI's against depression is exceedingly weak, embarassingly so, even. Most studies involve heavily massaged data. There are drugs that actually are more than sugar pills, like psychedelics or dissociatives, but their apparrent efficacy is due to increased...

This is a very stupid and foolish view of human nature. Most cultures have understood that human beings are by nature social and communal. I agree with them. Even our sense of self is a creation of the society in which we live.

I had to go to the Social Security office yesterday and sit around for a few hours, waiting, so I didn't do any exercise. I used my vibration plate for about ten minutes and I did some Indian club swings for about another ten minutes, plus some yoga. I'll probably go for a walk this morning...

The problem with the government promoting suicide as a "treatment" for mental illness, is that this effectively promoting suicide contagion. If people see suicide as a simple or normative response to suffering, they will be more likely to commit suicide themselves...

Suffering is part of life. Valuing ending suffering as more important than life is nihilistic. I mean, why not go a step further and end the human race? Then there's no potential for any human being to suffer ever again. I find it especially objectionable that this woman isn't terminally ill.

Individual humans are rational and social creatures. Society isn't obligated to assist people ending their lives.

We are discussing humans and human ethics. Other creatures don't participate in that human community in a relevant manner.

I don't see RFK's love of kooky conspiracy theories gaining much traction among Democrats and most Independents. It sounds more like the sort of thing that is found among the QAnon crowd.

I mean, of course, society in the abstract. Surely, we can talk about abstract concepts? This is not a slippery slope argument. It is an argument from deontology and virtue. Society and individuals perpetuate themselves and flourish by seeking out and promoting life-affirming values as...

Society is under no obligations to oblige a mentally ill person's requests to die, and it isn't right to do so if a society wants to preserve itself for long. Without upholding the value of life, life ceases to have meaning.

I think this is due to the reigning zeitgeist being one of a reductive view of the human person, as a deterministic machine. Human beings have resources within themselves to be far more resilient, than such a worldview gives credit.