Arthur wrote:
> Against the documentary or against the idea of assisted suicide?
Not against either one. People should be able to check out if they're
unbearably miserable or facing an unbearable future. Of course,
numerous problems arise in practice for DIY suicide: Failure, failure
with permanent incapacitation, other people hurt directly or
indirectly in a rescue attempts, messy detritus, emotional problems for
friends & family etc. Assisted suicide has the salient problem of
determining in some convincing and defensible way that death is the
subject's uncoerced, compos mentis intention.
Not "against" Pratchett's documentary. He's making a serious attempt
to come to grips with the prospect of becoming demented, disabled or
both. In his monologues, his assistant is visibly distressed. They
arrange with a family to attend and film the assisted death (in
Switzerland) of a man who is facing a future he regarded as
intolerable. [1]
The video is just unsettling, distressing, depressing. An organized,
kindly, professional but rather bureaucratic system succeeds in making
some of the DIY problems go away. But not all of them.
- Mike
[1] More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett:_Choosing_to_Die
I don't know where you can get the video. My son has it on a DVD.
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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