A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan.

[Nevilledog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/12/world/asia/japan-elderly-mass-suicide.html

No paywall
https://archive.is/2ZJKj

His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic.

In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.

“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.

Last year, when asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Dr. Narita graphically described to a group of assembled students a scene from “Midsommar,” a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff.

“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” Dr. Narita told the questioner as he assiduously scribbled notes. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”

At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future,” he said in one interview, will “come up in discussion.”

*snip*

[LiberalFighter]

1. Start with himself?

[hlthe2b]

2. Exactly... One less proponent for mass genocide.

Gee, Yale, aren't you proud to be associated with THAT? Maybe at least post a PR distancing yourself, ya think?

[Oneironaut]

13. People have no problem with telling other people to die.

When it’s them, they suddenly become the exception. lol

It’s the same with chicken hawks. “Go to war and die for me, while I sit comfortably at home.”

[Jilly_in_VA]

16. +1

He can start right there.

[Demovictory9]

19. +2

[Gidney N Cloyd]

3. He's got to be doing a Jonathon Swift thing here.

[ProfessorGAC]

5. Thought The Same

Sounds like a satiric approach to initiate problem solving.

[appalachiablue]

4. Euthanasia, I can't believe this in the 21st c. Go for it professor!

[cbabe]

6. The Madness of Crowds: Louise Penny

After the pandemic, the deluge.

Instead of letting oldsters die alone in nursing homes, why not help them along first. Plus keeping them alive is too expensive. Ditto for unfit Downs children. Etc.

How grieving citizenry are manipulated and exploited into believing and taking action.

[no_hypocrisy]

7. Soylent Green

Logan’s Run

[Hugh_Lebowski]

11. I don't know if we'll live to see it ...

But Logan's Run is gonna happen when fossil fuels start to significantly run out. Not at 30 yo like in that movie, but something like it.

They are literally what physically allows society to be generous in the way we are in this regard.

It's not the money we put into SS and Medicare, it's available high EROEI energy supplies. Money is made-up shit. Energy is not.

[Silent3]

8. Sounds like a Republican plan for replacing Social Security

When you're at the opposite end of the age spectrum from being the most precious form of life -- an embryo -- why not?

[Irish_Dem]

10. If there is no SS or Medicare, older people will die, yes.

That is the plan.

[pandr32]

12. +1

[Irish_Dem]

9. Wasn't there a Star Trek episode along these lines?

The Enterprise came across a planet where at a certain age, people had to kill themselves?

If you didn't do it, there was great shame on the family.

[edbermac]

20. ST:TNG Half a Life

That planet’s culture decreed that their people would end their life at age 60. David Ogden Steirs played the particular character who had reached that age.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

[Irish_Dem]

21. Yes that is the one. Troi falls in love with him.

But the love is doomed as Steirs cannot cross his family or culture for Troi.
And he dies.

[musette_sf]

14. Texas is way ahead of this dude

[Mr.Bill]

15. After seeing the politicians turned out by Yale,

I would recommend mass suicide for Yale professors.

[Meowmee]

22. 😹

[obamanut2012]

17. I think he is doing A Jonathon Swift

[yorkster]

18. Hope Zeke Emmanuel doesn't hear about this...

[Uncle Joe]

23. This guy should watch Logan's Run, next thing your know people that are 30 are considered too old

and the movie was an improvement over the book wherein the age of kissing it all goodbye was 21

Logan's Run is a 1976 American science fiction action film[5] directed by Michael Anderson and starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, Richard Jordan, Roscoe Lee Browne, Farrah Fawcett, and Peter Ustinov. The screenplay by David Zelag Goodman is based on the 1967 novel Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. It depicts a utopian future society on the surface, revealed as a dystopia where the population and the consumption of resources are maintained in equilibrium by killing everyone who reaches the age of 30. The story follows the actions of Logan 5, a "Sandman" who has terminated others who have attempted to escape death and is now faced with termination himself.

Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film uses only the novel's two basic premises: that everyone must die at a set age, and that Logan and his companion Jessica attempt to escape while being chased by another Sandman named Francis. After aborted attempts to adapt the novel, story changes were made, including raising the age of "last day" from 21 to 30 and introducing the idea of "Carrousel" [sic] for eliminating 30-year-olds. Its filming was marked by special-effects challenges in depicting Carrousel and innovative use of holograms and wide-angle lenses.

(snip)


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)

It's like the Republicans trying to kill social security in any way shape form they can, can't sunset it just raise the retirement age to whatever and Jake Tapper Inc. will just nod along!

Thanks for the thread Nevilledog

[Meowmee]

24. How is he a professor at Yale

This is all I need to know.

“In his day job, Dr. Narita conducts technical research of computerized algorithms used in education and health care policy. But as a regular presence across numerous internet platforms and on television in Japan, he has grown increasingly popular, appearing on magazine covers, comedy shows and in an advertisement for energy drinks. He has even spawned an imitator on TikTok.
He often appears with Gen X rabble-rousers like Hiroyuki Nishimura, a celebrity entrepreneur and owner of 4chan, the online message board where some of the internet’s most toxic ideas bloom, and Takafumi Horie, a trash-talking entrepreneur who once went to prison for securities fraud.”

https://archive.is/2ZJKj