Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bosco who wrote (8381)	3/21/1999 7:18:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

Suicide is not necessarily painless, and many attempts are aborted by early intervention. Hanging attempts often result in slow partial strangulation rather than the professional breaking of the neck; poisoning (especially with sleeping pills) takes a long time. Many shooting and wrist-cutting attempts are ineffectively done and people can be saved. I agree that many auto deaths are actually suicides, but it is a close call and one that is seldom made unless there is no alternative explanation, attitudes and insurance being what they are. There are theories of violence that suggest that "simple" primitive societies (as in New Guinea) routinely direct most of their aggression against neighbors. With better police work in larger societies intergroup agression is forbidden and the state directs aggression against outisde enemies or neighbor. In a peaceful, well policed society with family privacy there is nothing one can really do except direct aggression against one's family or oneself. The idea, however, that there is some normal or maximal amount of aggression that has to be directed against somebody as a kind of natural law independently of the society itself I think absurd. One need not go to the Yanomamo to discover differences. In our own cities there are groups with extraordinary aggression and other with very low aggression. Disparity of wealth among self-identificable groups is, I believe, a major cause of externally directed aggression, and systems of belief that blame the individual (or God) for unavoidable existential sin (like Calvinism) yet allow no relief (as auricular confession does) are I believe a major contributor to aggression directed against oneself.