pm_me_your_innie

I have a drink before my DnD sessions as it loosens me up and brings me out of my shell a bit. I imagine that could be called strategic drinking.

As long as you're not relying on alcohol just to get through the day, and you can function well in your life without it, there's nothing wrong with having a drink before a tough conversation.

Humans have been using alcohol as a social lubricant for thousands of years. That doesn't make it safe, but it's also not a great evil, in moderation.

Ha. Tell me you don't read much without telling me you don't read much.

Language is a bit more complicated than primary school telling you "an" goes before vowels and "a" goes before consonants. It's about the sounds made not the letters, and H goes both ways regularly.

An honest man vs a hateful one.

And you can have vowels with "a" too!: a uniform, a useful idiot, etc.

Merriam-Webster specifically calls out "historic" as going both ways depending on the speaker.

Your "gotcha" got you.

This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the work of history is done.

Historians don't just read something, believe what it says, then say "that's history, job done".

They tease from a source glimpses of the past.

Each document or artifact provides information, and meta information, that can be used to give us a fuller picture of the past, whether the writer was telling the truth (whose truth?), writing known falsehoods, writing fiction, etc.

No historian believes The Lord of the Rings is true, but if looked at through the lens of history it could be a valuable historical artifact. The Lord of the Rings could teach one about things like: the state of literature and publishing in the mid-twentieth century, cultural attitudes towards war, religion, and industrialization, linguistic fluency among the population, the writer's education level, social standing, and personal attitudes, etc.

You don't exclude a source because it may have a bias, or known falsehoods, or missing information, etc.; you account for those in your study of the source and piece together what we can know despite those issues.

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Man, that is a blast from the past.

A body that would otherwise survive (at least for the near future) and we are artificially ending it.

Just because the body can keep going doesn't mean it's a worthwhile life. Imagine yourself lying in a hospital, conscious but unable to move, unable to speak coherently, unable to even control your bowels. Add unending pain to the mix. What life is that? You would condemn a person in that state to perpetual torture just because ending their suffering "feels wrong" to you? Forcing that person to continue living if they don't want to feels a lot more wrong to me.

2. people who are depressed or in some sort of chronic pain who otherwise could live a full life

These are medical problems that should obviously be treated medically as a first resort. But a lot of those situations have no solution and a full life is not possible. Chronic pain, even when it wont kill you, is incredibly damaging to the psyche and limiting to one's quality of life. Depression isn't just someone feeling sad - it's a physiological condition that there might be no recovering from. If someone (in cooperation with medical professionals) determines that there will never be a significant improvement to their quality of life, who are you to tell them they can't end it?

To me, it feels like we’re throwing away their human dignity in the name of individualism.

Dying with dignity is the main goal of medically assisted death. There is no dignity in living months or years wishing, pleading, praying for death but not dying, or worse: being kept alive against your will.

But I think human life is something sacred and that we all have a duty to ourselves and to each other to live for as long as we can.

Why does length even come into it? This may be an argument from absurdity, but imagine someone born with such a debilitating birth defect that the only way to keep them alive beyond a few minutes is by putting them in a machine that keeps them alive. They have a fully functioning brain but are fully encased in this machine and only experience darkness and pain. At what point does their life become meaningful? 50 years? 80? If doctors can keep them alive for 2000 years, is that life better or worse than if they died after 6 minutes?

What I am getting at is that the length of the life has very little to do with its quality. And when it comes to medically assisted dying, almost nothing to do with it as people have to be over 18 with demonstrably low quality of life.

I’m scared that this will eventually de-stigmatize suicide.

Why is that a problem? Like, our first priority should be providing good healthcare (and that includes mental healthcare), but if someone doesn't want to live anymore, why is it anyone's business but their own? That sounds to me like the most important of human freedoms. Being kept alive against one's will seems like the most horrible, criminal, torture.

We call it “self-assisted euthanasia” but this is essentially legalizing companies to assist in suicides.

And what do companies have to do with it? Companies don't come into it at all in MAID.

I've been doing this and it has been helpful.

The main reason I tried it was that my snoring was bothering my wife and it only happened when I was breathing through my mouth. I also had my dental hygienist comment that I must be a "mouth breather" when I'm sleeping, despite not being one while I'm awake.

I use a Breath Right strip on my nose, and the tape I use only keeps my mouth from opening involuntary. I could open my mouth easily if I tried, so I'm not really worried about suffocating or anything like that.

It felt a bit weird at first but it has definitely curtailed the snoring, so my wife likes it. Maybe it's not for everyone, and some of the stories people tell about it seem pretty woo-woo, but it does what I need it to do with little trouble.

This is just so wrong. English dictionaries are descriptive: they describe how the language is being used.

In 1961 people like you threw a fit that "ain't" was added to Webster's, despite its first known use over 200 years earlier.

English has no ultimate arbiter of "proper" use; it changes as people use it and dictionaries are a reference for how it is being used, not how it ought to be used.

Language is a living, changing thing. It doesn't matter how many grammar nazis oppose the changes, if enough people start using a word or phrase in a different way, that becomes the "right" way to use the word/phrase. "Nice" used to mean foolish, "meat" once meant food in general, and in my lifetime "gay" went from "happy" to "homosexual".

If you can't accept that language changes, you're gonna have a bad time.

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