Category: [Uncategorized]

This is not actually a future I’d given any thought to, to be honest, but I wouldn’t necessarily say no to it.

Swiss Government Says Assisted Suicide Capsule Does Not Meet Safety Standards

I mean… if you want the most mirth-inducing headline of the day, this is almost certainly it, but the Swiss government isn’t laughing:

Killing yourself is not known to be a particularly safe or well-regulated practice but in Switzerland, it’s legal, under certain conditions. Unfortunately, people who want to end their lives via medically-induced suicide near the snowy Alps have to do it the right way. Creators of a euthanasia vessel learned that the hard way this week when the first known use of the device ended in multiple arrests and claims from government officials that it had violated government safety regulations.
The Sarco pod—a 3D-printed capsule that releases nitrous gas at the click of a button—is the creation of a group calling itself The Last Resort. The group, which claims to be made up of “a small international collective of human rights advocates (with a law, science, medicine and healthcare background),” says its mission is to “diversify (and improve) the assisted dying process in Switzerland.” The Sarco pod is designed to put its occupant to sleep in a matter of seconds via the nitrous gas. The gas then swiftly lowers the oxygen levels in the pod until the person expires. The whole process is said to take a matter of minutes. […]
The Sarco pod was originally given legal approval for public use in Switzerland way back in 2021, but since then controversy has dogged the device. It was used for the first time on Monday, when an American woman reportedly ended her own life in a rural area near the German border. The Last Resort announced the death in a short post on its website, and Nitschke said via social media that the woman’s death had been “an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest.”
While that may be true, the first use of the device seems to have been a total disaster for everybody else involved. As of Monday, multiple people have been arrested in connection to the woman’s death The Guardian reports, noting that a local prosecutor’s office had “opened an investigation into suspected incitement and aiding and abetting of suicide.” It isn’t yet totally clear who was arrested.

Slightly puzzled by the aiding and abetting bit if suicide is legal in die Schweiz, unless doing it this particular way is the problem. I don’t know. The safety regulations thing feels a bit odd too; if the whole purpose of the device is that it kills you, I’m not sure how you regulate it to be safe. How do you test if it’s unsafe? (And for that matter, how do you prove it works?) The thing that strikes me, though, is that Phil Nitschke invented this thing in 2017 but it’s taken until now for someone to actually use it. I don’t know what if anything that indicates, other than that people aren’t rushing to use it…

Know that feeling well, my feathered friend. God could make it an open book test, but I know the book he’d make us open…

You know how they say there’s a story behind every sign like this? I’m still unsure about whether or not I want to know what this was about…

If the penis had been real, would that have made a difference?

Spotted this on Tumblr recently:

I have developed a sort of love/hate relationship with it, or perhaps not so much the picture itself as what it represents… cos on the face of it, it really is piss funny and fills me with delight, but good Christ I hate the word “unalive”. I see it used quite often on Youtube and on Tumblr, and I know there are reasons—particularly related to The Algorithm—why people use it, but I still hate it. I know there’s a school of thought that the modern west is a lot less comfortable with the concept of death than it used to be, and that might well be the case, though I think society at large can only go so goth before it just gets silly; I mean, I tend to think about death (particularly mine) fairly often but that’s because, you know, disability, health, a life-changing illness that will probably shorten my existence in this vale of tears. all that gives me a certain perspective. Most people don’t need to think about death; it might come for us all but not all of us really need to worry about that.

But the very word “unalive” certainly serves as evidence for that theory about how uncomfortable we are with the idea of death; so much so that some of us can’t even bear the idea of the mere word and we have to make do with this bullshit that Orwell would’ve shake his head at sadly. It’s not even “political correctness gone mad”, it’s just… silly. And so, however hilarious the meme is (and it is, obviously), I still find myself kind of galled a bit by it… cos that’s me and what I’m like, I suppose.

As I may have said before, I can be very easily amused by small things, such as this, which has me in hysterics.