Reply #33: sad, sad [View All]

[iverglas]

That people with so little knowledge of anything feel so entitled to share it.

People "determined" to commit suicide, firmly resolved and setting out on a quest to find the means. Yup, there are lots of them in the morgue.

Do none of you feel any responsibility to the human species to try to contribute something truthful, meaningful, worthwhile, to the discourse and reflection about us?

Are other people's lives really just instrumentalities to be used so that you can get your own way?

Speculation about these lives and deaths, such as I see here, churns my tummy. It doesn't even qualify as speculation, to be accurate. It's just plain imposition of your ends on them as means to those ends.

The odds are that the man was an alcoholic abuser, and the woman an alcoholic with a history of abuse from childhood. The odds are that their entire relationship, and lives, were marked by violence. The odds are that these deaths were an impulsive act, made possible by the emotions and substances that clouded both their judgments, that made her less able to behave less self-destructively than she probably did, and him less able to repress his violent and abusive impulses ... and made possible by his access to the means with which to act on those impulses and achieve the momentary goal that he had set.

The odds are that "determination" was about the least significant contributing factor in these deaths that you can imagine, that they arose out of the precise opposite of determination: out of reduced and impaired intellectual capacity and impulse control, out of despair, out of rage, out of the easiness, *not* despite the difficulty, of doing what was done.

I know what those odds are because I've actually studied, for pay, these very situations, just for starters. I do think that anyone with a grain of sense, a minimum of curiosity, and a shred of integrity either already knows or could easily determine what those odds are for him/herself.

Of course, I understand how anyone with the sense and curiosity, but not the integrity, might refrain from doing the nanobit of investigation and reflection that it would take to determine that ... because it wouldn't be in his/her own interests, as s/he defines them, to do it.

For that purpose, making up disrespectful fairy tales about other people's lives and about human life in general works much better.

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