Anything Else

I usually do not believe in isms like liberalism or socialism or capitalism; or rather I should say I go by "makes-sense-ism".

Since after talking about suicide in my blog post the other day, I have come to change my opinion a little bit. The liberal stand on suicide seems to be "its my body, and I should be free to do anything with it, including ending it, as long as its not affecting others" or in other words "right to live implicitly means right to not live, like right to speech implies right to stay silent".

Lets see what makes-sense-ism say about this issue. First of all, its not suicide whose legality we are really talking about, its attempted suicide, so the liberal argument is kind of null and void. If someone is dead, it really doesn't matter if he committed a crime or not. Well not really, in old England for example, one used to lose his/her nobility if they committed suicide. Similarly they would not get normal funeral, the family may not get insurance benefits or other benefits from governments [though that would be punishing the wrong person]. But so is not the case in India, and few other countries countries with suicide laws, and suicide effectively can be considered beyond legal consequences.

Now lets consider "(failed) attempt to commit suicide", liberals and conservatives differ here. Liberals seems to imply that since nobody but the person who tried to commit suicide,  is getting hurt in the process, it should really not be a crime. Right to live argument can not be really invoked here, but victimless crime can be, sort of. Conservatives, where as, seems to imply that its societies roll to protect every life, even from the person themselves, and thus society should do everything in their capacity to deter them from hurting themselves.

Liberals are wrong. This is not a victimless crime. State resources are precious, emergency medical treatment, police investigation, that can be better utilized for someone really needy(who did not bring this to themselves) and there is kins' emotional distress, and possibly financial too. This line of reasoning takes us close to conservative point of view, strong penalty seems to be warranted to deter people from committing suicide (and failing). Following this reasoning a lot of countries adopted suicide laws with penalties for attempted suicide.

But conservatives are wrong too (but not for obvious reasons) (and a most of the countries did retract this law). The first argument that comes in mind after reading the above is: deterrence does not really work in this case, as you can not deter someone by scaring them about failure of what they are doing, as they are not aiming for failure anyways. You can not scare someone about going to some room, when they are not planning to go to that room in first place. Deterrence argument should be out of window. But not really, someone might say, this still is better than nothing, they will keep this in the back of their mind, and they would still consider the chance of failure and its consequences, and will be deterred a little bit.

How do we resolve this? Or is it the valid conclusion? In the spirit of "strong opinions, weakly held", my current opinion on this seems to be something like this: what really matters is if we consider the problem as a black box, without caring about what is right and wrong, and should be-s and should not not be-s, and focus on just rational conclusions and numbers to guide us. Let see what numbers would be affected, and which way we should try to move them. Sounds cold, but here is how the numbers play: since state has to provide medical treatment and police investigation anyways, penalty or no penalty is not making any difference in the amount of money spent by state. In fact jail costs, and so does judicial proceedings leading to it, so making it a crime is bad from economy point of view.

The other number, which is probably a little more significant is number of lives lost/gained. If 500 people are dying today per unit time, and a new bill is passed, and the ultimate consequence of it is 600 people dying per unit time, everything else remaining equal, the law is bad, and if only 400 dies, then its good, this much we can say without knowing what the law states. So how will number of deaths be effected by this law? Think from the point of view of the person who just tried to kill themselves but failed. They probably cut themselves, and after hours they realize they are not going to die, and its just too painful, or may be they popped some pills and all they got is nausea and uncontrolled vomiting. Lets consider the failed attempts where the victim/culprit is suffering and need help, and they are faced with the question of calling it quits (may be just for now) and requesting help. [I am claiming that in the other case; wherein either the person is not suffering from any pain, or is still determined to die and is not planning to quit despite the pain or they have passed out or in so much pain to not be able to think; the number of deaths will depend on factors other than this law, and thus can be ignored from this discussion]. Now the suffering fellow is thinking, if suicide is a crime, and if he calls medical attention, he/she will be reported and charged, and jailed ultimately, and this will just add up to the misery that forced them to commit suicide in the first place. I guess the essence of my argument is: this law will not deter them from trying to commit suicide, this will deter them from calling for help when they fail. They will try all possible avenues, self treatment, reaching out to friends who may not be qualified enough, or contacting "legally liberal with a fee" doctors, and calling regular emergency numbers would really be the last resort that the victim/culprit would be mulling over. If nothing else this will waste precious amount of time (they would be sitting thinking/hoping/telling themselves that if they just waited a little more, the pain will go down, or may be they will pass out) that might end up being too costly given the emergency nature of the situation. If there was no fear of prosecution, the victim/culprit would just call for help as soon as they realize its even a little bit more painful than they expected.

Recapping, suicide attempt laws increase the cost to state (judicial and correction facilities), and increase the number of deaths (due to improper or delayed medical attention), without reaping any benefits, and therefore does not make sense (to me at least, if you differ, speak up!), and therefore should be abolished from India, one of the few countries that still has such laws.

PS: What about planning to commit suicide, should it be legal? To me this is too much of a thought crime situation,  where would one draw the line, when someone gets a gun? or when they confess to a friend that they are having such feelings? Shrink is what they need, not courts. 

Start here.

An editorial about it in NYTimes. This is my problem with isms, they are good starting points, they are good guides, but the moment they start getting precedence over "this makes sense taking every thing known into account"-ism, they become part of the problem rather than the solution.

PS: Good thing NYTimes has dropped their paywall.  

Bigger is just something you have to live with in Java. Growth is a fact of life. Java is like a variant of the game of Tetris in which none of the pieces can fill gaps created by the other pieces, so all you can do is pile them up endlessly.

Interesting article on code size.

Came across "Are We Free To Be Foolish?" By Shruti Rajagopalan (Via Me). Read that first. 

While I am still have not thought and read enough on the issues of prostitution and drugs, I feel I can talk about why suicide, in my opinion, is punishable. First of all, suicide itself is not a crime(dead people don't get sued), its attempted suicide which is, and that should be punishable, because well, state is spending resource on you. Off hand, state has no way of finding out if the fellow suffocating to death was planning to kill himself or is a poor victim who needs protection, if they did, probably the right thing for state to do is to let them die, but state has to rush them to emergency rooms and provide treatment. It costs. Then state has to investigate if its really a suicide attempt or someone tried to kill him. It costs too. And this happens to not be a victim less crime, the family of the attempter are the victims (tho they might pretend to think otherwise due to the presence of an incredibly sensitive son of a b*tch, how might try to kill himself again). 

Probably the ideal punishment for this crime should be capital, why should state spend further by housing the person in a jail, when they themselves thing they are worthless, and wanted to die, after this is ideal win win situation. But out of its immense charitable nature, state decided not to kill, and let him live. State be praised.

Actually I just got a thought about prostitution, and I do not know of its morality, and frankly morality has very little to do with state actions, rightly so, state usually picks practicality and smartness consideration over moral ones when acting. In prostitution, there are various "acts", and they cost different amounts of money. If it were to be legal, in the heat of passion, some business disputes may arise, and feminist liberation army would be on the head of the state if state considered this as a merely business/civil dispute. The only system of prostitution that can be practically be legal is "fixed price, pre-approved and prepaid prostitution". Because this system allows for extreme brutalities(who is there to say where to draw the line?) I guess its okay for state to call it illegal and save itself from human right issues. Other option is to make rape legal too, but that too seems to have some tiny human right issues somewhere that I can't think of at the moment. :-)

In short, in my opinion, in the ideal world, prostitution and suicide should be illegal, thanks to the wisdom of our government for not listing to this whiny... people. And this has nothing to do with morality bullshit that Shruti is claiming. How about drugs? Not thought enough. 

Lets talk about the third set of laws, that she claims are made because state thinks the citizens are stupid. 

Helmet law: State has to bear the cost of treatment, traffic police, ambulance, emergency rooms, then all kinds of CAT scans are heavily subsidized at every level from government hospitals to exemption of service and sales tax on part to levies on import and so on. This and all kind of person safety laws should be removed the day it became okay for the government to let people die on streets. If you expect quick treatment, be prepared to wear the helmet. And don't tell me you can always pay for your treatment later on, as when you are fu*king lying in the pool of your blood, state has to decide to take you in or not, state has to take the risk of taking in even those who can not pay. They have to hedge the bets. It has to be either no one or everyone whom the state will have to invest in, and thus its logical that state demands everyone to wear the helmet. BTW if you are so proud of paying it up, and liberty, no one is asking you to wear the helmet, it just costs Rs 200/- for every ride you take without helmet. State will love you, trust me. 

Street food: State is subsidizing health care at every level, medicine, paying doctors, hospitals, tax exemptions etc. Anything that increase this cost, state has the right to make a law against. Sure the rich can pay for their health, but the only way state can make sure that only rich can shop on street food shops is by putting a constable on each of those shops kicking out poor bastards away. It would have been good to live in that "ideal" world, but we don't, and state is completely right in doing what they are doing here. 

Hand-pulled rickshaw: She claims the reason is dignity, but let me tell you a few facts about economics. Rich pay the taxes. They get to use roads more than the poor. Rickshaws are cheap. They take up space. They do not help the rich. They congest the roads. Throw them out. We did. This was definetely not a moral or paternal decision :-). 

Labor laws vs individual contracts: We have huge backlog of court cases in India. Contract is bullshit unless it is upheld and enforced by a court when in dispute. Labor laws reduce the number of cases, and forms a system in which the average case is kind of ok for the poors. Moral and Paternalistic? Please! Practical? May be.

Dance Bars: Desperate filthy people. Girls out of money, doing things to earn it. Alcohol. Late night. Ripe for prostitution? Hell yes. See, making prostitution illegal is bullshit unless state enforces it. State does not have resources to sit 2 constables in each such bar (even then who is there to watch that they would not get bribed) and make sure that prostitution is not happening. Its not even a question of dance bars, if for example there is a street where late in the night girls come and stand, and its known that few of them get taken home for a charge, its entirely practical thing for state to send police petrol to kick any woman standing on that road late in the night. It has nothing to do with dignity. State has finite resources. Terrorists are not sleeping. We can not observe every single interaction to decide if its prostitution going on or not. You just look for patterns, and remove them all together. Smart utilization of resources it is called. Politicians sell this in the name of "protecting the dignity" but only the naivest of us are supposed to buy such arguments.

Bhopal case:

The victims and citizens of Bhopal were not allowed to sue the company who took away the lives and health of their families and the prosperity of their city because the state felt that “ambulance chasers” would take away most of their compensation in legal fees.

Bullshit. For your kind information the case involved was in 100s of millions of dollars. UC India, if entirely liquidated, would not yield even 10 million dollars. Its pointless to sue them. You had to sue Uniion Carbide in US. And victims and citizens simply can not do that. Where is the question of allowing or not allowing anyone? State did not deny any right, victims could have, and did sue UC India. As part of settlement with Union Carbide (US), India waived all cases against UC-India, and this is obvious double jeopardy understanding (you don't sue twice for the same crime). Did India manage the best settlement? Probably no, probably yes, people like her (lawyers) are supposed to give their opinion about how much settlement would have been right, but the thing is, it was way beyond what the victims would have got on their own (by suing UC-India). State did a favor. Talk about thankless jobs!

In conclusion:

Do we have the right to take risks that only affect us? Do we have the freedom to live our lives as we choose after weighing the risks, even if we are being foolish according to the government? And if part of freedom is the freedom to be a fool, are we free?

We sure do. You can do many adventure sport. You can perform any risky medical procedure. But as long as you say "oh we will take risk as much as we want, but if something goes wrong, please come up and save us", as long as we put an obligation on the state to protect us from the consequences arising from those risks, the state has the right to demand some lack of foolishnes on your part.