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Terry Pratchett Considers Assisted Suicide
cHALiTO writes "Beloved science fiction and fantasy writer Terry Pratchett has terminal early-onset Alzheimer's. He's determined to have the option of choosing the time and place of his death, rather than enduring the potentially horrific drawn-out death that Alzheimer's sometimes brings. But Britain bans assisted suicide, and Pratchett is campaigning to have the law changed. As part of this, he has visited Switzerland's Dignitas clinic, an assisted suicide facility, with a BBC camera crew, as part of a documentary that will include Britain's first televised suicide. Pratchett took home Dignitas's assisted suicide consent forms."
Try homeopathy
The moral problem is not that Terry Pratchett wants to kill himself. That is between him and God. Assuming that he has finalized his estate, he's welcome to off himself and suffer any consequences that might avail him in the life hereafter.
However, Terry Pratchett is a coward. He doesn't want to commit suicide. He wants someone else to kill him when it gets so bad he can't do it himself. That is the slippery slope that we want to avoid; having other people decide when you are no longer fit to live.
Be a man about it Terry. Take a knife and stab yourself. Get drunk and go swimming in a deep, cold lake. Overdose on pills. Get a shotgun; go in style (to quote Hania Lee). Just don't ask someone else to commit excused murder because you don't have the guts to bother to do the deed yourself.
The real question is: citing wikipedia does not confer intelligence, much less expertise on a subject, and leads to circular reasoning about pointless trivia. Does wikipedia and the internet's ability to confer immediate access to (not necessarily correct) information actually make people dumber?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Unfortunately playing Go is shown to dramatically increase the likelihood of becoming a douche who never shuts up about Go.
This is a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
AIDS, like restless leg and chronic fatigue syndromes, is a myth. And last I checked cancer kills lots and lots of people. Some cancer can be avoided or reduced to a statistical impossibility with good lifestyle choices. Others, like my friends anaplastic astrocytoma, are just shit luck that fucks you in the ass for a month or a year before they kill you (if the chemo and radiation don't first lead to your death). Alzheimer's sucks (got my granddad), but maybe he just had variant CJD from eating tainted meat. Hey, maybe someday a cranky doctor (not a magician, mind you) will just wave some beepy tricoreder thingy in front of you and instantly cure everything. Except baldness. Even Star Trek technology failed on that one.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.