Academy Award-winning actor and comedian Robin Williams died Monday in a suspected suicide, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office said. He was 63.
Williams’ career was uneven, a few clunkers amongst some very enjoyable films. I remember his appearances on Johnny Carson as both epic and maniac.
How tragic his exit, and especially sad for his family.
Condolences and prayers for them.
*************************************************
Nobody is happy about this.
Some caller to Levin, who was an extra on Patch Adams, says Williams had problems with huge emotional crashes. He certainly knew how to do manic, too, so maybe bipolar? Who knows.
My depression sux but it’s not so deep that I become actively suicidal, knock on wood. I do know what it’s like to have your own brain betray you such that you can’t think about anything but gloom and doom.
Oddly enough, What Dreams May Come is a performative of how to deal with a depressed person. IIRC, the wife isn’t helped until he just sits with her in her gloomy prison, quiet but supportive. Trying to cheer her up or comfort her only made things worse.
Mental torment isn’t something you want to downplay, and it’s definitely not a matter of lacking “motivation” or urging or whatnot. It’s hard to deal with a depressed person. This shows how “well-meaning people” can make the depressed withdraw because it’s so hard for a depressed person to endure chirpy but clueless people.
Who obviously can’t help you, so why bother?
– Sadly there are things in life that will never be ok. There are also things in life like Robins passing that are almost inevitable. Genius can be a treacherous refuge.
Robin Williams with the Denver Broncos Cheerleaders, 1979.
Sad. Depression is depressing. And top it off with Machado’s other knee blowing out tonight (my guess, he’s done for the season) — this isn’t a happy day.
Well, this sucks.
Think Mork and Mindy was the first comedy I ever watched. Thought that alien dude was pretty weird and funny.
Probably isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but I remember really liking Death to Smoochy.
http://www.hulu.com/mork-and-mindy
Brahms — Ballade, Op. 10, no. 1
Brahms — Ballade, Op. 10, no. 2
Brahms — Ballade, Op. 10, no. 3
Brahms — Ballade, Op. 10, no. 4
Or, wake-style.
His first appearance as Mork, on “Happy Days,” had me completely unglued. Occasionally in subsequent performances — such as with Jonathan Winters — he matched that lightning-in-a-bottle brilliance.
I found his talent for drama arresting at times too. It’s sad that he had to live through the moments in between, when he was just some dude named Robin that everyone expected to be insanely hilarious every waking moment. Nobody can be “on” all the time.
>Brahms — Ballade, Op. 10, no. 2<
chopping heads is faster. west. civ. has got to go. all hail proggtardia!
Raising the tone again newrouter! Well done, ye anti-clown.
I knew Robin tangentially in college. We were in the same theatre department for a semester. He was either manically happy or terribly sad. Frankly, he frightened me a little.
RIP, Robin. Thanks for the laughs.
mr. williams had no one to talk to his whole life. or maybe a trusted someone
to listen.
Here’s the last I saw (heard, actually) of the man. Shows up around the six minute mark.
For some reason I have FauxNewz on, and Shepherd and co-host just gushed about Obama releasing a lengthy statement about William’s death. I will bet that he did not write it, and may not have even read it.
my thinking is he hung in there with what must’ve been a ridiculously exhausting emotional rollercoaster of an existence, the rollercoasterness of which was compounded by the lashings his chosen trade almost invariably inflicts on a psyche, for a whole lot longer than most
The first time he tried to “free ” an egg on Mork and Mindy was one of TVs funniest moments.
I never saw him as genius — some of his schtick wore on me, and Reynolds deserved that Oscar — but when he was on he was great.
I empathize w the mood swings. Although I think if I had millions I’d find a way to be happier, even it was just sitting home watching The Thin Man and knowing I could afford to do that everyday for the rest of ever.
Some of the best bits of Bobcat Goldthwait’s (a friend of Williams) earlier act were about detoxing at his mom’s house. The premise was that it was absurd to do it there with the bridge club hanging out and the doilies and the pie cooling on the window ledge.
Seems to me that it’s even weirder to try and stay sober in a place where all your famous friends are also recovering alcoholics and users who are all relapsing at different times.
Sometimes life does not feel all that sweet, but there are moments that it’s pretty good. One must remember the good moments to get through the bad times.
I know it can be difficult.
There are times one doesn’t know what to say. He made me laugh. He and Jonathon Winters together were priceless at times. I’m sorry the pain was too much. I feel for those he left behind, who will always wonder what more they could have done.
>I think if I had millions I’d find a way to be happier, even it was just sitting home watching The Thin Man <
mr. wiliams seemed like a doer. maybe nocando from his perspective.
This saddened me. Williams was a brilliant comic–not that everything he did was brilliant, mind you–who should be revered among the greatest to take the stage or screen.
Great comedy is, more often than not, pain through a tinted lens; two emotions entwined in a perfect dance of laughter and tears. It’s stunning the number of comedians who through direct action or destructive behavior, cut their time short because pain kept taking the lead.
RIP, Robin. We’ll miss you.
Casting Crowns – All You’ve Ever Wanted
I adopted this as my motto a while back: “pain don’t hurt.” If I think of that while playing Jeff Healey band songs, I usually buck up a bit.
What gets rough with depressive alcoholics is that whole waking up the next day thing. When we say things like you make the world a better place or you have people who love you, that stuff isn’t getting through, especially if they’ve been on a bender. They really don’t see the world like that. Those words don’t register. They’re poison, a burden, diseased, a mistake. Then they’re back to replaying that personal worst moments tape on loop in their head again.
Ehhh, it just fucking sucks.
Shakes the Clown was one of my favorite movies. He played mime Jerry.
It’s sad that he had to live through the moments in between, when he was just some dude named Robin that everyone expected to be insanely hilarious every waking moment. Nobody can be “on” all the time.
This dude says he was, almost compulsively, on all the time. Or at least half the time.
Sounds like he might have been bipolar, which, that beast is second only to schizophrenia on the Worst Mental Illnesses list. We saw his manic phases in his performances, especially the improvisation. His brain would have been spinning at 3500 RPM, against his will, and then he’d have collapsed into a bottomless pit later on, unable even to get out of bed.
I don’t wish bipolar on anyone. The manic phase has you almost delusional, doing things you’d never otherwise do, going off your meds because your lying brain says you don’t need them, running down the street naked because you can’t stop yourself, and otherwise ruining your life, marriage, friendships, career. His was one of the few careers that could support such a manic phase.
Then the depression would have been so deep he couldn’t even bear to be aware of his own existence.
Or so I’ve heard.
Such a mental illness would have carved deep canyons of empathy into his soul, because he’d know what it’s like to loathe your own existence, to not be in control of your life — let alone your mind — and to do things you really wish you hadn’t but couldn’t stop doing for the KLAZY that has gripped you in its merciless talons.
No way am I going to judge the man, even for his politics. Unless you’ve also been betrayed by your own brain, you can’t possibly understand.
>What gets rough with depressive alcoholics is that whole waking up the next day thing.<
yes
Groundhog Day (1993)
One must remember the good moments to get through the bad times.
Doesn’t work. The biochemical imbalance prevents you from getting an endorphin hit from the memory. You can have everything going for you and you just can’t enjoy it.
That makes it worse. “What the hell is wrong with me? Look at all I have and I still feel like shit!”
Which proves what an awful person you are: can’t even be happy when there’s no earthly reason not to be.
Cheers, Charles, same here.
Heh. Watched and re-watched “Hook” a thousand times with my daughter. And Dead Poets Society, but not a thousand times.
https://twitter.com/Blondeone38/status/499024328692736001/photo/1
Don’t knock The Thin Man. Watching Myrna Loy and William Powell banter is like watching brain porn.
I think if I had millions I’d find a way to be happier, even it was just sitting home watching The Thin Man
Again, nothing like that works. Because your brain chemistry is malfunctioning, the only remedy is to rebalance it. Doing happy or serene things has zero effect, or you’d be doing them already instead of being miserable.
Sometimes the meds help and other times they help only to a degree. Bipolar responds to meds sometimes, but it’s really a tough disease to treat, if you can touch it at all.
When you’re injected with sodium pentothol, you can’t use your willpower to not go unconscious. It has its way with you regardless of your desires. When you’re coming out of it, you can’t shake it off no matter how hard you try: it wears off when it wears off.
Same with biochemical brain disorders: we’re all at the mercy of our brain chemistry, and no amount of willpower can change that.
Sucks for his family, especially his daughter who is to celebrate her 25th birthday tomorrow or the next day.
I guess she gets to spend it making funeral arrangements.
Note to self: watch The Thin Man even though you’ve never really much liked Hammett.
everyday in 2014 the united states of america wakes up to an affirmative action clown. medicate now.
People are thinking about the techniques they do themselves to break out of negative feedback loops, di, I’m guessing. Different folks at different points on the spectrum can use these and other methods effectively even if they’d not work for others farther down the line.
>I adopted this as my motto a while back: “pain don’t hurt.”<
me: eff stuff like 100 ft fans and other stuff. be ready for the collapse.
I guess what I mean by that is that most people on the bottom quartile of the serotonin scale develop some behavioral tricks if they’re able to stay functioning. While those tricks won’t work for all they’re somewhat effective for those who aren’t below a certain inflection point.
One upping nr
a href=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byRWqPyL6ug>Cus that’s what this site needs
>: we’re all at the mercy of our brain chemistry<
so the "legal" drug pushers control us?
Cus that’s what this site needs
You either get through them, or you don’t. Seems Robin had one hurdle he couldn’t clear. RIP, Captain.
and Reynolds deserved that Oscar — but when he was on he was great. – See more at:
Conversely, Williams performance in Good Morning Vietnam deserved the award that year over Michael Douglass in Wall Street.
And it was hard not to recce his genius in Alladin.
A star that bright had to burn out eventually. Nanu nanu Mork from Ork.
Without getting into a commenting tit for tat back and forth, I do think di is speaking the truth here, btw.
It’s hard to get out of your own head and imagine living in someone else’s but we can measure these things and the effects we observe are very nicely correlated to the causes posited.
If I was to suck the “feel good” chemicals from your brain you would feel sad. That’s the way it works. If you doubt it you need to submit a better thesis that doesn’t involve a little dude pulling levers in your head like you’re a little kid who believes in puppet magic.
By the way, don’t no one say that correlation doesn’t equal causation, please. That’s just my unfortunately poor phrasing in the second paragraph.
most people on the bottom quartile of the serotonin scale develop some behavioral tricks if they’re able to stay functioning
Except that 99.99% of the time, people talking about depression operate from the assumption that the depressed aren’t doing something right, or just lack some cheering up, or could have pulled themselves out of it somehow.
Only last Wednesday, one of the church people, noticing that I was not functioning well, lent me a stack of motivational CDs. One of those seminars that’s supposed to make you so successful and so wealthy that you can’t even catch your breath.
And all of it with your mind.
There’s a reason I’ve become a recluse with no friends, no phone calls, no social interaction beyond peeps at work: it’s not worth it. I can’t afford to spend 90 minutes instructing my interlocutor on what depression is, convincing them it’s a real disorder that I can’t snap out of, that “saying a little prayer” won’t work when my brain is busted, and if it’s a man, instructing him on how to listen to a woman without making her feel gut-shot. All while in the depths of despair.
So I don’t react well to talk about depression that implies you can work your way out of it by thinking about the good times or watching a good show.
All the voices in my head yell at me 24/7 for not snapping out of it, “you worthless little pile of shit. If you weren’t so worthless, you’d have already fixed this thing by now.”
someday somebody gonna make you wanna turn around and say goodbye
til then baby are you gonna let em hold you down and make you cry
Another way to imagine this is as depression as an anti-cocaine that some people have to live with.
If we can all wrap our minds around the idea of a drug making people feel good even though they just lost their wife, job, and house, then certainly we can also imagine how drugs (or a lack of the proper ones in balance) could make us feel bad even if we had a wife, job, and house.
Can drugs make you feel good for no reason? Can they do so strongly enough that you can’t be reasoned out of such a state?
Same same.
Purely biochemical. Because one’s personal history is a cheap hologram put out by 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion interconnections, each firing a 10-bit data word to some of the others, and most times working quite well. Take away a few billion connections, no problem; but scramble that jelly with enough heroin or coke or booze, you’ll have biochemical burnout. And that’s even before the Alzheimer’s sets in.
It’s a wonder anyone survives a lifetime !
Well, that’s you and my mom, both.
On the plus side, you’re not a giant booze hound and are wicked smart.
I’ve had deep funks that might have qualified as clinical depression, but not recently I don’t think.
The last time I felt depressed I knew that it would pass; knowing it didn’t make me feel better brain-chemistry-wise, but it did give me a glimmer of support intellectually.
I figured out years ago that emotional reactions are hormonal, and that allowed me to bolster the divide between thinking and feeling. And blood chemistry that changes toward feeling bad, can change back.
So I wait it out. And when the funk gets tired of being endured, it goes away.
For me, at least.
Just to be clear here, di, I’m trying to say that I think, in this thread, very nice people with some depressive tendencies are offering some of the ways they combat this themselves.
I’m not saying that people with straight up depression can be helped with cog psych techniques that are effective for less severe problems.
People have this impulse to try and help in the best way that they can think of. It’s a nice thing and a reason to not bomb us from orbit if any alien invaders are listening in.
I swear that I almost linked the suicide hotline number in this thread from that same impulse.
I do hope you’ll appreciate the humor in my calling you my fake internet friend, di. ‘Cause you are.
I’m not suicidal.
I also just ripped some assholes a new asshole over at PJ Media.
You guys aren’t a problem, really. If you were, I’d have stopped hanging out here.
But I’m really ashamed of how some people on the right are reacting to his death. His career wasn’t dominated by politics. He wasn’t Jane Effing Fonda or Alec Baldwin.
His characters weren’t political, either. His movies were deeply human and will age really well.
And the implication that his suicide owed to his politics makes me positively homicidal.
The understanding of depression as a chemical phenomenon has been around since the early 1980s and people still think they’re being Smarter Than Thou by “seeing beyond that touchy-feely stuff.”
I’ve gotcher touchy feelings right here, bub. Come and get it.
for white people, depression can almost always be traced to a pernicious food additive
like gluten
or “flavor”
Ohhh, no, that was just my initial reaction from hearing about Williams. Sorry for the confusion.
What else can you expect from PJMedia? They’re infested with liberaltarians.
Sorry for the confusion.
No prob.
Also, I went off gluten for a week and it did nothing but make me yearn for bread.
So I wait it out. And when the funk gets tired of being endured, it goes away.
That’s actually pretty common, especially when the depression is occasioned by A Bad Event. The shock from the Bad Event disrupts your brain chemistry for a spell — weeks or months or years, depending — and then gets itself back into balance when the emotional stress eases up.
Mild mood disorders run in the family. My brother has SAD, my sister has anxiety problems, and my other sister, well, she’s just weird.
Even in elementary school, I can remember that my fondest wish was to lapse into a coma. Not be dead, just unconscious. Turns out stage-one sleep in front of the TV while football is on is a pretty good substitute.
People suck. At different times, for different reasons and in different ways, we all suck. God didn’t put us here to skate through life without ever getting shat on; He wants us in Heaven, but He puts us here first.
He’s got His reasons we’ll only understand when it’s all over; trying to figure it all out now makes some of us crazy, others stupid, most of us frustrated. And so we suck.
And He loves us anyway.
We might not know the specifics of why we had to go through X, but the general idea is that we’re here to learn the lessons that only pain can teach us.
Heaven doesn’t provide that kind of resistance training.
“McGehee says August 11, 2014 at 11:14 pm”
Amen.
There’s a reason I’ve become a recluse with no friends, no phone calls, no social interaction beyond peeps at work:
You gots your protein peeps. Yeah we’re not perfect but somehow we mesh. Kinda like the island of misfit toys ;-)
And yes, I did wink when I was typing that.
di
for what its worth, I believe part of the problem is that the word “depression” is/has been so over used as to suck all the meaning out of it where it concerns the clinically depressed.
“Oh, damn, I missed out on those concert tickets. I’m really depressed.”
“It’s so depressing that I was passed over for a promotion.”
yadda yadda yadda
People don’t understand that drugs/alcohol didn’t cause Williams harm, they may have been the way he self-medicated.
I think the hardest thing for most depressed people is to feel that they’re not to blame for how they feel. They can know it and believe it and even understand it — doesn’t matter.
I’ve struggled with intense emotional reactions all my life; all the men in my family have had anger issues, for example (I’m the only one who’s never raised a hand in anger to his wife). I honestly believe that Mr. Spock showed me a way to deal with my feelings at just the right time.
(Zachary Quinto’s Spock doesn’t have it…)
Hell, I feel moved to compose one of those damned emoticons myself.
:)
Don’t any of you jerks ever talk about this. Never happened.
I believe so.
“People suck. At different times, for different reasons and in different ways, we all suck”
Thankfully they also shine.
Exceptionally brightly on this site. In fact I owe my sanity (and maybe my life) to the peeps on this site. Spending a year of my life in Iraq, experiencing routine rocket attacks while reading the comments of some piece of shit Senator comparing me and my buddies to the Khmer Rouge or another calling us terrorists marching through Iraqi homes was beyond heartbreaking.
I can’t tell you how much it meant to have allies back home just as pissed as I was but more importantly friends that I could always count on for a laugh (a lot of deep sole restoring laughs).
You gots your protein peeps. Yeah we’re not perfect but somehow we mesh. Kinda like the island of misfit toys ;-)
The fact that I can’t actually smack you guys upside the head (and vice-versa) helps a lot. When I decide to unload on the world, it’s usually on an Insty thread about the role of sex in marriage or something equally volatile.
And yes, the term “depression” suffers from too-broad usage.
Americans (and American Mormons) have a hard time with the idea that something cannot be fixed by thinking the right thoughts or by reading scriptures. I have a hard time of it myself unless I’m defending someone else’s mental illness.
I honestly believe that Mr. Spock showed me a way to deal with my feelings at just the right time.
That avenue seems more available to mens than to wimmins. My brother has been able to “snap out of” his funks cognitively; it seems that he’s able to say to himself: thinking that way was a problem, so I’ll just think this way instead.” Some people can do that.
Me, trying to tell myself I’m not a worthless piece of shit (while in a bad chemical state) is as effective as trying to convince myself I’m the Queen of England or the red stripe in the rainbow: zero believability.
Americans (and American Mormons) have a hard time with the idea that something cannot be fixed by thinking the right thoughts or by reading scriptures. I have a hard time of it myself unless I’m defending someone else’s mental illness.
Just think how blessed you are not to be a scientologist. (ducks head, Whew that was a close one;-)
I’ll tell you something, Danger, I got back into the duties of life partially based on your influence here. And the responsibilities required of me as a grown man brought me back into hanging out with people even though I really had no desire to see anyone at anytime for any reason for quite awhile.
So, right back ‘atcha, buddy.
And, shit, I always have to credit Geoff (our pw Geoff). Same thing.
Gotta keep keepin’ on.
I don’t think my own coping mechanisms apply to anyone but myself, but I thought they might apply to a few other people. I had a girlfriend whose depression ran very deep, and I don’t ever pretend that reminding yourself that life gets better will help everyone.
*
Me, trying to tell myself I’m not a worthless piece of shit (while in a bad chemical state) is as effective as trying to convince myself I’m the Queen of England or the red stripe in the rainbow: zero believability.
Does it help when others express their appreciation of your brilliance? Cus I can do more of that.
Heh, your secret has been out for awhile now, cranky. You’re a good dude.
We’re on to you.
And McG and Serr8d, too.
Y’all are like grizzly bears who’ve been sedated and/or killed. Soft and cuddly.
Great to have you back bh!
“And, shit, I always have to credit Geoff”
Geoff is like the Elvis in the Mojo Nixon song.
Right after Brian Texiera was promoted to headquarters I was writing a little tribute for his family. It was close to 3 am, I was tired and we were flying up to Philly the next morning for his going away but I wanted it to be perfect so I sent a copy to Geoff and miraculously he responded in minutes. I took his suggestions along with Ric Locke’s (who responded the next morning) and finished it in time to present it to his wife and kids.
It may have been the greatest close air support response I’ve ever received.
Elvis is everywhere
I’ll tell you, it’s still a shock to me that Brian and Ric are gone.
This is the way I’m “joking” when I talk about fake internet friends. I don’t have any uncles like this in real life. Doesn’t surprise me that Geoff and Ric came through so well then. Not at all. JD, too. Man.
Yeah bh, I spoke to Ric just a few days before he died. He shared with me how much support he received when word got out that he needed help and let me just say that we run in a very generous crowd.
When he said that he didn’t deserve such generosity I cut him off and said he was wrong. It may have been the only time I could have said that about him.
Ok people,
Tomorrows a new offensive so time to reload.
See ya down range.
That was a real sad thing. I’m still a bit embarrassed how I thought he hadn’t maybe died yet and maybe it wasn’t true that he had passed. Didn’t want it to be true so it wasn’t true.
Tell you what, for all the times that hf has pissed me off and all the times I’ve spoken poorly of him that was probably his finest time period. I remember him being quite kind before then with thinking about places for his wife and the like.
It’s just no good thinking about it all. That was a rough thing.
‘night, Danger.
The first time he tried to “free ” an egg on Mork and Mindy was one of TVs funniest moments.
::weeping:: “How can I learn to help you when you won’t even help yourself?”
I can still see that scene in my mind whenever I need a laugh. To be fair, I’m a bit older and remember Williams in “Can I Do It ‘Till I Need Glasses”, where he fapped-if memory serves-on a bus. Yeah, it’s strange the stuff that stays with you.
With regards to some of the awful comments I saw over at Ace’s place, I replied in a not so friendly manner, which I won’t repeat here. Regardless of whether or not you thought he was funny, regardless of his political views, Robin Williams was a human being who left a wife (who found him dead) and children behind. Imagine the pain that they’re going through. Even if you thought Williams to be so loathsome that you can’t say anything decent about him personally, squatting on his grave and pinching off a rhetorical loaf while his family is grieving is pretty damned soulless and evil. I’m used to such behavior from the left. Seeing it from people I would normally consider allies is disheartening. If that’s where we are as a people, it doesn’t really matter who or what is in charge of this country because we’ve already lost.
And now, because I need a laugh today, and believe y’all might need one as well, I give you Robin Williams on golf.
-The word ‘Depression’ is so damned overused that it, I think, ends-up harming the people who actually suffer from it, because doing so, in a sense, waters-down the understanding of the severity of the condition by including in it those who are not suffering that way.
I don’t suffer from it, so, to describe when I’m feeling down and out-of-sorts, I like to describe myself as ‘fighting vainly the old ennui’ or ‘having a bout of Black Dog’ or ‘a bout of Melancholia’.
-It seems to me that women have a much tougher time dealing with Depression then men, as the example of you, Di, versus your Brother shows. I’m not exactly sure why, but it may be the different wirings of the male and female brains.
I’ll take “sedated.”
On those occasions when he went political, he pissed me off — but so do a lot of very talented people who, when they shut up and perform, make life a lot better.
As long as they don’t let their politics displace their God-given talents, I can still enjoy them doing what they were put here to do. I even still have a few early Dixie Chicks songs in my library.
Williams was good about supporting our troops* through the USO. That rights a lot of wrongs in my book.
*to use that tired cliche.
Does it help when others express their appreciation of your brilliance?
Computers are brilliant, too, but they’re not worth much. Just organized sand. Nobody treasures them just for existing.
It’s a chick thing. Some years back, my brother found himself unemployed and living in his in-laws’ basement with his wife and three kids. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a job for about 18 months. He’d drive hundreds of miles for an interview only to be the second-best candidate. Over and over this happened.
You dudez can imagine how devastating that was for him and how worthless he felt. Bad enough he can’t find a job but he’s got his in-laws staring over his shoulder.
So we’re talking on the phone during that time and he can’t understand why I’m so bummed out about my life, because I’ve got this great job I’m really good at. I can’t understand why he’s bummed out because he’s got this great family.
Women get their self-worth from relationships; men from achievements. I’m exquisitely clear about my achievements. I have no relationships.
Trouble with relationships, is you have to persuade another person to cooperate. Achievements you can do all by yourself.
Depression and fatigue aren’t particularly good selling points when trying to make friends, and neither, as it turns out, are mad essay skillz. Or a compulsion to organize information.
Here’s the thing: I haven’t been captured by Boko Haram and I have indoor plumbing.
That’s pretty good these days.
My most rewarding achievement seems to be my marriage. We menfolk can find a way to turn anything into “Mission Accomplished.”
Before, I was lucky to stay with a woman for two months.
One peculiar thing: what can be most interesting about the extended (even as obsessive, necessarily uncontrolled or uncontrollable) risk-taking improvisationists are those moments when the performer presses beyond his carefully maintained limits in humor — going to territory of human experience into which, on reflection, neither the performer nor his audience would wish to go. These of course aren’t funny moments at all, though the audience and even the performer may still be suffering from residual laughter generated only seconds prior. The sudden shift often takes time to notice, for one and all, and then time to make an escape, sometimes deftly, sometimes clumsily, sometimes not at all.
We see collected now, for show, many of the humorous effects Williams made, but not the scary, appalling or merely annoying, even though these latter may be equally useful or instructive. Some other day, perhaps.
I think she’s gonna buy me a belt buckle.
He was good at making us happy — and now we grieve.
I pretty much agree with Jeff’s comment about Williams, ie “I never saw him as genius[…]but when he was on he was great.
As for the rest, I understand there is mental illness caused by biological abnormalities of the brain, but I believe it is vastly over diagnosed. I mean, I have heard it reported something like 2/3’s of American women are on one sort of prescribed happy pill or another. That’s just crazy. (sorry)
To me, most times the problem is the chickification of our society. Feelings have become more important than thoughts and actions. For example, the whole self esteem movement. Someone says “I hate myself, I’m so ugly (or stupid, or clumsy, or whatever)”, and they are told they have low self esteem, and they need to love themselves more.
No, the problem is they love themselves too much already. If they hated themselves, they would be glad they are ugly. Instead they are ticked off such a swell person such as themselves isn’t better looking. What they need is not a better self esteem, but a proper self esteem.
Romans 12:3
For I say, through the grace that was given me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think as to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to each man a measure of faith
Here’s the thing too few people anymore understand. Feelings are a product of our thoughts. They are responders, not drivers. This is why you can be watching Psycho and feel scared even though you are in a comfortable, safe movie theater eating popcorn.
The concept of love is especially messed up by the misunderstanding that love is primarily a feeling. It’s not, it’s a decision. The first commandment is not about your emotions, it’s a commitment. When a man gets married, he vows to love his wife forever. That isn’t about feelings, in fact, it’s a vow made especially because there won’t have those feelings all the time, but he is supposed to love her anyway.
We have to master our thoughts if we are to control our feelings.
Philippians 4:8
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
There won’t BE those feelings all the time. Is what I meant.
Philippians 4:8
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
– The idea that someone who is suffering from a deep disorder can “just think it all away” is the page of the human owners manual that is missing.
– I suffer just watching my youngest adult son struggle every day….. Looking for s heart of gold….and he’s getting old.
Feelings are a product of our physiological state. Thoughts can affect physiology, but so can other things.
We have to master our thoughts if we are to control our feelings.
Both happen in the brain. If your brain malfunctions, you don’t get to control either your thoughts or your feelings, because the pathways are effed up.
Try controlling your thoughts and feelings while high on something. Or drunk. Go ahead. Show me your awesome self-control and mastery that I obviously lack.
Unless you want to go tell that guy with cerebral palsy that his limbs are waving all over the place because he’s not THINKING properly.
but I believe it is vastly over diagnosed
Thanks for that, doctor. I was hoping some smug ignoramus would make such a pronouncement today, based on his disdain for Oprah or something. I feel oh so much better. From now on, I’ll consider myself one of the misdiagnosed and everything will be just fine.
One thing you neurotypicals miss Every Damn Time: a broken brain is broken.
Had someone drugged Robin Williams into high suggestibility and instructed him to hang himself, would you call that a “choice”?
Because that’s what his goddamn brain did to him. It screwed with him for 63 years until it finally got him to off himself.
All you smug ignoramuses who insist on saying “he didn’t die from a mental illness, he made a choice” are delivering powerful kicks into my face and the faces of everyone else whose brain screws with them daily.
YOU’RE NOT EXPERIENCING WHAT YOU THINK YOU’RE EXPERIENCING: WE KNOW BETTER. WHY CAN’T YOU JUST GET A HOLD OF YOURSELVES?
…is what you’re saying.
STOP IT.
Here’s another part that neurotypicals don’t get: the part of the brain that can partake of the Love of God is likewise broken. A radio that can’t pick up the signal because the transistors are missing. A telephone with a dead battery.
Religious people get off on denying that such a thing is possible, but perhaps you could explain how that buttheaded insistence is helpful to ME.
Because if such a thing can’t be broken, that means I’m every bit as awful and worthless and evil and detestable as I think I am.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t feel this way.
Right?
“‘F’ you, the horses you rode in on, anybody who looks like you and anybody who looks like the horses you rode in on.”
You would never pull this kind of bullshit on a blind person. “Just open your eyes a little more.”
Why do you insist on pulling it on ME?
Feelings john, exist why? That is, looks to me as though the mere presence of what Quine refers to as irritations if I recall correctly, hence to the biological “systems” developed to respond to those irritations actively in this recursive auto-intentional thing we call life, point toward these “things”, these irritations, very much as drivers. It happens that our drivers can be spoofed, but that won’t remove the purpose(s) for which they exist.
An apparent problem here is the fact that for those of us fortunate enough to have only experienced manageable bouts of depression, the expressions of support from others does help lift us up. And when we see others suffering, we in turn want to offer our support to them. This is not a bad thing. Unfortunately, as Di points out, the clinically depressed may not benefit from such efforts and may even be further saddened by them.
Oh, and by the by, remember the origins of “ideology” back when Destutt de Tracy followed Locke? Yep, that was what we call “psychology” today. Names change, but the underlying object of interest remains.
BBH
I acknowledged real mental biological disorders happen. I’m sorry you have a son struggling, understand I’m speaking generally.
TaiChiWawa
Indeed. What I’m getting at is the only way to control your feelings is with conscience effort.
I’ve been low enough that expressions of support didn’t help. They annoyed me. To some extent I even lost respect for those offering them.
Not a good place to be.
for the rude commentators in other groups, I believe Mr. Williams said “joke them if they can’t take a f**k”
Dicentra
I didn’t intend that an attack on you personally. Actually, my first sentence of the second paragraph was meant to acknowledge what you were saying.
It isn’t always about you, girl. [here I would insert some cute and charming emoticons, but I don’t want bh to puke]
heh, people in the O’s world are issuing cheery expressions of support to us anxiety-stricken Machadocalypse sufferers, McG, and it’s damned annoying too. What we want is a firm diagnosis, one way or the other, but instead we get “he’s in good spirits”, as if good spirits are going to put a torn ligament back together.
I don’t try to control my feelings; if I don’t like them I deconstruct them — I try to separate them from myself so that I can endure them.
The only thing within one’s control, if anything, is how to react to them. My way diminishes their immediate importance while choosing to focus on whether something real is trying to get my attention through this emotional rush.
It’s a distractive strategy, really, but one that clearly has limits.
What I want at times like these, sdferr, is not so much to be in good spirits as for good spirits to be in me.
an invented emoticon for the times:
..-|
It’s either a picasso or what’s left of an ISIS captive’s split skull, pick-’em
“What I’m getting at is the only way to control your feelings is with conscience effort.
An example of my thinking from Prager*, and his opinion we have an obligation to be happy. It’s not that we will never experience unhappiness, it’s how we handle it that counts.
Now if you really want me to be frank (be mad at him, not john), suicide is an evil thing. The ultimate act of selfishness and cowardice. Murder.
* My thoughts are not always consistent with Pragers, his was just an easy example.
I didn’t intend that an attack on you personally. … It isn’t always about you, girl.
You were making general statements about mental illness. On a thread where I had just expressed frustration and dismay with people who insist on expressing just the kind of bullshit you expressed.
Perhaps you could explain why it was necessary for you to expound as you did. From a place of such profound ignorance.
Seriously. The less people know about mental illness, the more they feel compelled to opine on them as if they were a political or social issue rather than a medical one.
Perhaps you can tell us your thoughts treatment options for cystic fibrosis.
Given your extensive experience with breathing, that is. A good cough always brought up the phlegm for you, didn’t it?
McGehee says August 12, 2014 at 2:05 pm
McGehee, We are talking past one another again I’m afraid.
The ultimate act of selfishness and cowardice.
Even Dennis makes an exception for mental illness. Why don’t you?
Suicide is not selfishness or cowardice unless you hang yourself in your jail cell to avoid prosecution for a crime.
God DAMMIT you really are a butthead. A person with bipolar disorder is no different from a person who is being drugged against his will.
What philosophy do you insist on clinging to that prevents you from accepting that a broken brain is broken and that you can’t hold broken brains to the same standard as healthy ones?
What the hell is the matter with you? Happiness is possible only if all your neurochemical ducks are all in a row. A few people don’t have that luck.
You can’t spare a moment of pity for that situation? Why the need to condemn them as screw-ups or whiners or whatever you’re thinking?
Stop being such a butthead. Just stop.
Suicide hardly seems to appear as a clear-cut sort of thing, that is, as a simple evil, john. One might say it amounts in some ways and places as a simple conventional impiety, I suppose, but only in some ways and some places, since in others it appears in the guise of the one among the highest of conventional pieties.
Sorry dicentra, I did not realize I was being so foul.
I’ll leave the opinions to the experts then.
“Even Dennis makes an exception for mental illness?”
I DID! Twice.
At least I thought I did.
I must be a horrible communicator.
You are a horrible commenter. You say “X but Y” and then wonder why I object to your insisting on Y, because you did say X, after all.
Look at the conjunction. BUT is a negator. Don’t structure your arguments that way if you don’t mean to assert Y in favor of X.
Now.
Go on down to the cystic fibrosis clinic and ask if any of them have thought of using an expectorant.
Then tell the Down’s Syndrome kids that they’re not applying themselves enough.
Later, you can swing by the school for the deaf and offer them Q-tips to clear out their ears so they can hear better.
And then take a blind person to an art gallery, because the paintings have brought you such joy.
***
This is what I endure all the damn time. THAT level of cluelessness. Maybe that’s why Williams offed himself: nobody around him had the sense God gave a turnip.
It happens. This being PW the hashing out of meanings can sometimes overshadow the substance of a discussion, but it can also be a prerequisite to the discussion.
Non-experts can and do hold their own here, if they just take an extra moment to understand and be understood.
women: can’t live with . . .
. . . well, whatever they can’t live with . . .
. . . either they don’t or they do, and the rest of us remain in the dark.
But it’s pleasant here in the dark, at least for the most part.
“Can’t live with ’em. Can’t stuff ’em in a sack.”
—Larry
My take on suicide is that it is the ultimate hostile act.
– The so called “experts”, both psychologists who can treat by therapy but not proscribe medications, and the psychiatrists who can do all of it, none of them seem to really have many answers, and are not all that helpful.
– I raised my son through 24 years of pronounced autism, Aspergers, and OCS, mixed with spells of bipolar II. The kid is an absolute genius scientifically, and a walking train wreck socially and just day to day living. I resisted all the drugs during his childhood, preferring to deal with the issues the hard way rather than turn him into a vegetable and possibly ruin his school efforts. As a result he was an honors student and life was really hell from time to time. In hindsight I’d do the same again.
don’t forget therapy dogs
OK McGehee, but if I talk to you, will dicentra keep yelling at me? We’ll see I guess.
“McGehee says August 12, 2014 at 2:05 pm
I don’t try to control my feelings; if I don’t like them I deconstruct them — I try to separate them from myself so that I can endure them. ”
[That’s controlling your feelings]
“The only thing within one’s control, if anything, is how to react to them.”
[One can have a strategy for handling strong feelings as well. Like counting to ten when one gets pissed]
“My way diminishes their immediate importance while choosing to focus on whether something real is trying to get my attention through this emotional rush.”
[My way calculates the importance of the immediate emotional rush, so I know how to handle it. And sometimes it’s legitimate to feel depressed. I don’t necessarily want to diminish the emotions, I just don’t want to be controlled by them ]
“It’s a distractive strategy, really, but one that clearly has limits.”
[I see it the only strategy. Either you control your emotions or they control you. ]
My take on suicide is that it is the ultimate hostile act.
Thanks for your take.
Now stuff it.
yes sometimes even therapy dogs can become depressed and lethargic which is why sometimes you have to train therapy dog therapy dogs
good thing is there’s plenty of grant money available
No, seriously, leigh.
If I hold you down and inject you with mind-distorting drugs, then instruct you to jump off a building, I can then tell your family that you just gave them the world’s biggest middle finger.
Is that about right?
Or do you prefer your smug “take” instead?
dogs
wait a second, what about the cats, mr. egyptian?
therapy cats are still in development stage
To me it isn’t, because to me control implies being able to change something directly from what you don’t want, to what you do. A strategy is something you use when you don’t have control.
What I’m controlling, and it seems what you’re controlling, is the reaction to the emotional rush, not the emotion itself.
therapy cats are still in development stage
– Yeah. Like they’re waiting for the cats to decide if they’re interested or not.
20 years later I can’t decide if my mothers’ suicide was a hostile act or not. I know she said the docs said she had depression, at least that is what they treated her for. However, the timing of her various half-hearted attempts before success seemed to be trying to make a statement about some slight she suffered.
She took pleasure in many things but, still seemed difficult to please. I have come to see her a suffering from narcissism more that anything else. However, I’ll yield to dicentra and admit I am probably not capable of fully understanding clinical depression.
Gotta go with dicentra on this. Until you or a loved one have actually gone through the helplessness of your brain chemistry actually fucking you up, any non-experiential comments are weighed accordingly.
There’s more to the equation than mere will. Knowing how the whole business happens can offer a way to leverage how you react to it.
Still, the way to prevent emotions from controlling you is to exert control over your decisionmaking. That’s a cognitive process and serves only to help wait the emotions out — but they will be there until they pass.
I raised my son through 24 years of pronounced autism, Aspergers, and OCS, mixed with spells of bipolar II.
How often did people opine that the kid just needed a bit more steel in his spine?
Or that he should “just stop doing” the obsessive repetition thing?
Or that your kid would straighten out if your parenting skills were better?
Or compared what he was going through to some piffling thing like a typical temper tantrum?
It’s always nice when people think the best way to help you is to minimize whatever you’re going through, on account of they’ve never had to deal with it, so how hard can it be, really.
You just have to try.
And as has been stated — and as I myself have experienced — strategies don’t always work. I’ve never been suicidal, and I pray I never am.
I have come to see her a suffering from narcissism more that anything else.
There’s plenty of comorbidity with personality disorders and organic mental illnesses. Imagine having a bipolar or schizophrenic mother who created such a chaotic, insane world for you that you develop a personality disorder as a coping mechanism.
Then later inherit the bipolar disorder for good measure.
I knew a woman who was bipolar AND had paranoid personality disorder. The PPD came from her parents’ intense, relentless fighting wherein they used the children as pawns in their lifelong feud. That kind of environment produces a mentality wherein slights provoke an intense desire for revenge in an effort to “protect oneself.”
She also was bipolar. When she went off her meds in a manic phase, she was hell on wheels. I don’t doubt one of her parents was bipolar and that fueled much of the feuding and its intensity.
People are more screwed up than we think. It’s easy to attribute assholery to mere assholery, but there’s usually a few levels of hell behind the behavior. Doesn’t make the behavior any less damaging; it just makes you scratch your head harder in contemplating the train wreck that is humanity.
it may be simpler to just skip the cats and dogs to go straight for the suet-fried potato strips.
As a side issue to people who truly need help, I have seen personal anecdotal instances of young people diagnosing themselves with a disability like aspergers/autism etc based on reading something on the internet. Odds are they are going through regular teenage angst and are not helping themselves or people who truly are afflicted.
good point dicentra, I do forget that disorders like narcissism are coping mechanism with underlying causes.
You just have to try.
– You develop a fine sense of bullshit filtering just to survive. You also get over your surprise at how hostile people really are, where you expected, if not sympathy at least empathy, particularly for a single dad raising a child.
– Me least favorite terms after all was said and done. “Well meaning” and “passing phase”. Well meaning is the catch-all excuse for all forms of uninformed stupidity and outright bigotry. Passing phase is the blow off excuse when they don’t know what else to say, and in its way it’s cruel since for the most part it gives false hope. Long term prognosis shows that most mental issues are life-long, and remission is so rare that it’s not worth talking about. You learm these things by experience. No one will tell you.
I’ve come to expect people who are trying to be sympathetic to be limited by their own experience when it comes to understanding what other people are going through, which tells me my own efforts at expressing sympathy are likewise limited.
Makes for a frustrating day.
i’m down with the comfort foozles for sure
and sangria counts as a comfort foozle if you serve a toothpick to spear you out the tasty fruit chunks
what else is i think people with a sincere and genuine interest in being happy and well-adjusted should stay away from the social media like the facebook and the twitter
it’s just a very warped way to look at the world
except sometimes i understand that you kinda need to have a linkedin page depending on the sort of circles you move in
my last job told me to get one and i said no
then they said you don’t understand it took me x number of years to get n number of contacts
then i said no YOU don’t understand – i said no so stop it with all this squackering on about how i need a linkedin page cause that’s not going to happen
and since we seek relief in comforts foods, as well as to escape our own madness, it’s good to remind ourselves “we don’t eat people, we won’t eat people, eating people is wrong.”
my next job – knock on wood – is way more technical and less client-facing so i slipped that noose again
eating people is wrong!
i saw a movie about that recently
it had some hard-to-watch stuff but overall it was sort of well done, and really drove home the point that it’s wrong to eat people, so in that sense it was a very successful film
btw if i get my new job I’m a be chicago-bound
i’ll still come back to LA a little bit to see my orthodontist i guess and to visit
but I won’t pay no more rapacious taxes, so that’s muy bueno
eating people is wrong
For the record, that is mostly grizzly and polar bears that eat people.
goddamn bears
Good luck on that Chicago job.
Now, I must cook comfort food for the peoples. (Or help anyways and not get in the way.)
thank you sir I’m excited, almost enough to move up there job or no job
ha, listen to mr levin going all sdferr on their asses
good you join in, mr levin
(We’re serving bison as buffalo wings with a thai pepper vinaigrette because we’re cheeky and fun, we are. Tempura fried gorgonzola “cheese curds” are on stick for the bleu cheese dressing. What cheeky monkeys we are.)
Bad chemistry runs in my wife’s family, whereas I grew up in a household where any emotional problem could be fixed with a smack upside the head and an admonition to “snap out of it!” It would be fair to say that this disconnect caused a fair amount of marital discord early in our relationship.
One of the more enlightening metaphors I’ve heard used is parallel in many ways to what McGehee was saying about controlling one’s feelings, versus controlling one’s reactions to them.
My educator said that one’s state of mind was often like driving a car: when everything is ticking along, one can drive defensively, so that when a car veers into your lane, you’ve already opened up space to avoid them. When things aren’t so optimal, one must rely on quick reflexes and experience to avoid or mitigate harm as best as one can. And sometimes things just suck out loud, and no matter what you do, something is going to take you out.
And then, she said, there’s clinical depression, in which case you’re not at the wheel in the first place, so all the arguments about skill and planning and reflexes don’t mean a fucking thing.
It took a long time for me to find enlightenment, and I know that I really annoyed my wife and her family during the time in which I was learning. Twenty years ago, I’d have been the one making John’s comments, so I’m not going to pile on at this point. Some of us just test the patience of others.
“Still, the way to prevent emotions from controlling you is to exert control over your decisionmaking. That’s a cognitive process and serves only to help wait the emotions out — but they will be there until they pass”
I agree with this.
I think we are hung up on the word “control”. I don’t mean the ability of disappearing emotions altogether. That’s not even desirable for me.
(I’m participating because a line cook just went to jail for a couple days because the po’ po’ caught him riding dirty. I reckon it needed to be three ounces at least to keep the kid in jail for a couple days rather than releasing after processing.)
(Parentheses are useful for showing when you’re not actually commenting because you’re at work and people at work are not allowed to use their phones or tablets or laptops unless they’re on a break. Sure the rule sorta sucks but as it’s mine we have to used these sorts of marks to express our meaning appropriately.)
sorry you feel that way about da Bears ‘feet but, at least Chicago has an NFL team unlike LA.
Only somebody in California could think that a Chicago job was going to be an improvement tax-wise.
bh, you are supposed to stand in the kitchen and micromanage your employees. That’s what keeps them productive!
bison is super healthy i love bison
Mr. bear for reals it’s just the ones what eat you face I have a problem with
The thing is, squid, it probably will be an improvement tax-wise.
isn’t that sad Mr. Squid but yes it’ll be a nice break, that plus the general cost of living differential
. . . it needed to be three ounces at least to keep the kid in jail for a couple days rather than releasing after processing.
is his job still his, and if so, is there a single or multiple joint tax upon his return in order to vouchsafe the fact?
i mean, what’s lower than a bogarty linecook?
(Yeah, the job is still his if he has a good attitude when I talk to him, sdferr. The kid has a work ethic and ability. I’ll look past quite a bit when it comes to either work ethic or ability. Get both at once and I might even bail them out so that I can be the first person yelling about not throwing those things away.)
(Kids are dumb though, that’s just a thing. It’s frustrating.)
Di wrote: …The less people know about mental illness, the more they feel compelled to opine on them as if they were a political or social issue rather than a medical one.
American Society is so infected with the Leftist way of thinking these days that, I believe, most people do see mental illness as a political and social issue. Another reason why such thinking must be overcome. It does so much harm in so many areas of Life.
heh, what points would he get if it turned out he secretly was reading you here right now (an extreme suggestion, I recognize, but still fun to have played with)?
The notion of “young and dumb” is more an alliteration than anything else.
Squid, I tried to make it clear, I’m not speaking to clinical depression at all. Even a dunce like me understands the difference in controlling your emotions and being not in control of anything.
If some ones brain is biologically or chemically altered from the norm, obviously behavioral therapy is a non starter. I do think however, many suffering from what has been diagnosed as a mental disorder can benefit from a therapeutic big dose of reality. AA has been very helpful in this endeavor.
Heh. You’ve been listening in with my meetings with the pm sous chef it seems.
Dude doesn’t get the idea yet. He still wants to put his hand on their hand and guide their movements like some sort of deranged tennis coach.
Squid, I tried to make it clear, I’m not speaking to clinical depression at all.
But we were.
This being the thread about the suicide of someone whose bipolar disorder finally killed him.
Now stuff it.
You’ve been lambasting everyone on this thread. Take your expertise in being a fuck up and get lost.
If you weren’t referring to Clinical Depression, John, you should have stated that to begin with, or waited for another thread, or for it to come up in the conversation. I, like Di, interpreted it that way.
can benefit from a therapeutic big dose of reality
Only if they have the tendency to blame everyone but themselves for their misfortunes. Some people are in complete denial about how their decisions have led them to where they are.
Many addicts are in this situation.
The other type of person — with or without biochemical imbalances — blames herself for everything and figures she’s utterly worthless and oh look, this mistake or that blunder proves it.
The remedy for the former type of person is toxic to the second and vice-versa. (I’m not sure, but it seems that the first type is predominant among men and the second among women.)
Providing a big dose of reality (telling someone off) is really fun if you’re the one delivering the dose. Helping the second type of person (reassuring them they’re OK no matter what) is not fun at all.
So that tells you which kind of remedy is the most often offered.
Take your expertise in being a fuck up and get lost.
Exhibit A.
“Doesn’t make the behavior any less damaging; it just makes you scratch your head harder in contemplating the train wreck that is humanity.”
Depraved and deluded and degraded as we are, I think the animals have it much worse than us. Which is why when we make a god of nature alone or the material world, our lives tend to worsen.
I am sorry to see Dicentra and Leigh come to this.
I’ve gotten to like and respect you both.
If someone was a really, really good DJ they’d know what song to put on right now so that everyone in the thread forgot what they were talking about and thought, “Yo, that’s my jam.”
“Dude doesn’t get the idea yet. He still wants to put his hand on their hand and guide their movements like some sort of deranged tennis coach.”
He might be like me and always “sees” people falling off of ladders or dropping plugged in toasters into a sink full of water even though neither is likely to happen. One of the worst things I ever went through was riding a mule down the Kaibob trail. Mule doesn’t want to fall to his death. Probably. Except he’s gonna kill us both! I know it!
Gonna give it a shot. Yo, that’s my jam!
You know what was even worse (though in a different way) than riding a mule down the kaibob trail? My second trip, taken in college when we went down Bright Angel and up Kaibob. That’s not how you do things. That’s tugging on Superman’s cape and then some.
grinding, down in between the existential-nitty and the eternal-gritty, helps aren’t necessarily going to be available — though the helpers refuse this business or not, persisting as helpers despite all evidence to the contrary
I am sorry to see Dicentra and Leigh come to this.
Leigh has repeatedly made it evident that she thinks I’m just making excuses for my bad behavior.
Maybe if my parents had laid on a little discipline back in the day, I wouldn’t be getting away with all this great shit.
Ella Fitzjerald and Louis Armstrong ” Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJsEss5jOcA
Yo, that’s my jam!
Kaibab trail.
Unless you meant the other one.
And this is more of a “haven’t heard this in a while” gratuitous sort of thing.
Les Paul and Mary Ford: ” How High The Moon”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOzB7I2y7Ic
Okay, I have it now.
Yo!
Shit, that jam got a violently drunk Rich L. to the dance floor back in ’98. Song has the power.
Yeah it’s Kaibab named after the limestonee layer which was itself named after a nearby forest. which was named after an Indian tribe.
(Okay, we have an 8 top and a 6 top walking in the house, later, y’all.)
Hey yo, that’s the wife’s jam!
Hey yo, that’s the wife’s jam!
I think I’m going to go over the Stiles and Stich Barbecue and Brew tonight. They have something called Thorndale sausage(made with…by real Wends!) which tastes quite a bit like Elgin Hot Sausage from Southside smokehouse used to. I could do with a couple of white-bread sausage wraps and a shiner bock right now. But the place is sadly kind of bring your own mustard.
It’s the closest thing I have to a way back machine when a lot of german speaking old folks were still with us and horny toads were still around town.
Fatboy Slim “Weapon of Choice”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCDIYvFmgW8
Leigh has repeatedly made it evident that she thinks I’m just making excuses for my bad behavior.
That isn’t accurate and it’s an unfair accusation. And what is this nonsense about discipline? I don’t condone that sort of thing.
Clearly, there is no room for dissenting opinion on this thread, so I’ll go find something else to do.
Clearly, there is no room for dissenting opinion on this thread
Your “dissenting opinion” was that Williams committed an act of hostility. As if he were sending a big Eff You to the world and especially to his family. Because that’s what bipolars do: tell the world to eff off and then kill themselves to emphasize the point.
My expressing frustration at the hits I take every damn day from insensitive people is “lambasting” rather than an expression of genuine pain that everyone in my situation experiences.
In the past you’ve also denied the reality of PMS: women just use it as an excuse to bitch at their husbands. Which, that calls for a strong pimp hand if I’m not mistaken, because of the immaturity.
Just now you identified me as an expert at effing up, which, that’s the antithesis of recognizing that depression isn’t something you do on purpose. All day long I’ve been reading comments and tweets about how Williams “had a choice” but screwed it up. All day I’m trying to tell people that depression is like being drugged against your will — that suicide isn’t rebellion against God or an act of supreme selfishness.
So you sail in and repeat the same kind of tripe I’ve been trying to dispel.
It wasn’t a “dissenting opinion,” it was Yet Another Kick In The Face.
Lauren Bacall has shuffled off this mortal coil.
We can talk about her now.
“dicentra says August 12, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Yeah, personally I was more responding to Jeffs comment, and took the occasion to speak generally about my opinion of what’s going on in our society.
Seriously, it doesn’t all have to do with you.
or listen to hoagy (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9C1vJ2Z8aI0) in her honor
Lauren Bacall R.I.P.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/lauren-bacall-dead-hollywood-icon-719699
Classy broad.
– Ah jeez that really sucks, but I gotta say she had a long and reasonably happy life after bogey bought it back in ’56, but she really never got over losing him. Her and my mom were long time friends, actually sort of a club of gal entertainers. Ann Miller was one of the group of friends. Bob Hope, my twin sisters god father, his wife was in the group also. I find myself reminiscing more and more lately. The visit from my middle son last month probably triggered it.
darn, got another death watch right(someone asked here at beginning of year). I assume Mickey Rooney, and guessed Lauryn Bacall. Never would have guess Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Robin Williams.
Who will number 3 this week? Does James Shigeta count? He died July 28.
Yo, all. Chill pills all around. If PW isn’t the place for dissenting opinions, I don’t know what is.
Uhh, maybe chill pills is the wrong phrase, given all the medicating needed. Ah, fuq it.
I believe I assumed Eli Wallach too, he was 98.
PW is a good place to test arguments without getting called racist or sexist. Uninformed, ignorant, insensitive maybe but, not hammered in the style of lefty “intellectuals”.
Went out into the yard to water my recently planted Esperanzas and Mexican Bird of Paradise plants (also called Pride of Barbados).
A yellow jacket stung me on the toe.
I should have worn shoes.
so was you ever stung by a dead bee?
I mostly lurk, sometimes comment, as I think this site has some of the most intelligent people on the web. I am just a H.S. graduate and get lost in a lot of the comments. However, what we will never know is why exactly Robin did what he did unless he left a note. It has been reported he had money problems, and was on a downward spiral career wise. He had two divorces and he probably lost half of his wealth each time. If that don’t have an affect mentally what will? I do know that if he did start drinking again or doing drugs, that could not have helped any. In the end he was just a man with all garbage that a lot of people deal with. Some better than others. RIP Robin.
A wasp stung me in the back once, the evil, treacherous sassenach.
ISTR Robin’s recent TV series was canceled? With movie deals on the horizon it would seem odd losing a TV show would trigger him, but the gist of this thread might be distilled to, “You can’t expect these things to make sense that way.”
bit by a live bee, but no strings attached, not yet (http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=YPTm5DWJGK0)
To err is human. To be human is to not be divine. Humans are animals, but with self -awareness. Actually, I’m sure my cats and some primates are self-aware.
Point being that we are necessarily flawed, some more than others. Some is self-inflicted, some is bad hardware, some is bad software.
Where I am going and why this matters is something I’ve lost track of. So, ima going to self-medicate with another Dark and Stormy. Which, in paraphrasing Ben Franklin, is proof that god loves us.
His show was cancelled. One of his friends said he took the job just for a paycheck. Who knows. I think I read it on the Hollywood Reporter site.
Suicide isn’t painless to the surviving kinfolk. My mother’s stepfather (her father was killed in a car crash when she was a teenager), a WWII vet who married my grandmother a few years after the war, was diagnosed with emphysema, a horribly painful condition as I understand it.
He was sent home to Scottsdale from the VA to die.
Well, he did, in their bathroom, aided by a 12-gauge. With my grandmother only a door away. Did you know places like Scottsdale have these suicide cleanup squads that respond faster than 24-hour disaster cleanup services? Paid for by the townships, because there’s lots of older folk who do these things.
My first thought after hearing of this, “why didn’t he get himself outdoors amongst the lizards and cacti? didn’t he know what a mess that 12-gauge would make?”. Other than that, who was I to hold him at fault?
Williams had 4 films in the can. Can’t be too bad.
Heh. I don’t have that shotgun, but I do have the M-1 Carbine he carried in the war. In immaculate condition, too.
If I was going to arrange my own exit, I’d go skydiving and forget to pack my parachute.
Though with my luck what I’d forget to pack is my toothbrush.
serr8d,
HTML fail.
You just go straight into the tree rather than turning because you were asleep. The life insurance policy gets paid out.
I admired my longtime next door neighbor’s resort — a handful of barbiturates and a bottle of her favorite scotch, thus creating a pleasant, relatively clean and efficient departure, understood by everyone involved, the nearest and saddest the best.
Good freakin’ lord
CEASE FIRE!! (as Danger would say)
THIS is the problem when our Left-feelings-based “culture” is ascendent. Real issues get buried under the latest fad.
There are real kids that suffer from ADHD and benefit from therapy/strategies/drugs, but suddenly gobs of kids (usually boys) are having normal behavior patheologized and are drugged to the satisfaction of their “I don’t want to be bothered” teachers/school admins … parents & others notice and now real sufferers are suspect.
Real rape victims suffer as Left-gender-feminists shove through the #WaronWomen crap and demand colleges define “sexual assault” down to “I changed my mind the next morning” and campus “due process” is guilty until proven innocent.
Clinical depression is NOT sadness or even deep sadness. But we are so eager to find that (and I’m using this expression deliberately) ‘magic pill’ that way too many people ARE getting “happy pills” so now those with clinical depression are going to be looked at as “yeah, another crank who doctor-shopped until they found their own Dr. Feelgood.”
Generalities don’t negate exceptions, and even a bunch of exceptions don’t negate the generalities.
Suicide, in and of itself, IS a thorny subject because it has such a devastating effect on the people left behind. It can be the result of mental illness or it can be the ultimate last word of an asshole, with lots of other issues along the continuum in between.
Doesn’t make people claiming one side or the other completely wrong or right.
PW is a good place to test arguments
And for performatives. Such as What Mental Illness Looks Like.
A winter’s night, go for a long swim in the Great Salt Lake, which can get colder than freezing.
Check the freight train schedules and duck into a night run so the engineer never knows until way after.
Bathtub with the drain open, jugular and carotid, nice and fast. Aim the spray into the tub to make cleanup easy.
But not really. My self-preservation instincts have never been disabled. I’d settle for a coma if it were available.
I am withe the barbiturates and booze. And maybe a little Barry Manilow.
Longtime next door neighbor, by the way, was not mentally ill in any sense, but was ill, having just been diagnosed at that time with her second bout of liver cancer, in a worse onset than the first. She was determinedly lucid regarding this, and had in the years prior made everyone around her understand her view of the suffering she refused to endure — as she had come to that view both from her own prior experience of disease, as well as having nursed her own aged mother through the terminal stage of stomach cancer, witnessing at close hand what she thought utterly unnecessary agonies. So reason, even prudence, of a sort at least, entered in to her preparations.
I wouldn’t second guess your neighbor, sdferr.
I couldn’t, despite harboring a bit of anger at the pain she made the rest of us suffer, bh. We were forced, that way, but forced the other way to concede her autonomy.
I agree with which dive without a parachute
If you are going to shoot yourself, at least go to a cheap motel so no one that cares about you has to see your demise.
It’s the least you can do
hey now lee, halloo, and good to see ya.
The high dive whiteout a parachute that is…
Hell, when you’re dying from cancer there are opiates around. These choices are never ruled a suicide. They don’t even check for this.
Dying painfully, day by day, when you can’t manage going to the bathroom yourself and all those related indignities, is not something anyone is looking to put other people through either.
Imagine even bringing this up to a loved one like a spouse. But, there you are.
I am sorry to see Dicentra and Leigh come to this. I’ve gotten to like and respect you both.
I hate to say it, but this is one of the reasons there are only a few people left to read this blog (which is to most people’s detriment, in my opinion). The fact that we have some people here who agree on so much, then get personal when there is one or 2 things to disagree on, makes for a sad thing.
This is no slight on anyone at all, and especially not our host(s). But it is sad to watch this stuff happen, and it makes it not fun to read.
Just my humble opinion.
Hey Lee!
Oh, thanks adder. Still a lively bunch I see.
Hiya bh. How they hanging?
so a snake, eh? heh, i’ve reached lower than I would have imagined
if everybody who ever thought of killing themselves did it, the suicide rate next year would be a record low
Gonna go with “up tight and out of sight”, Lee.
How you doing, buddy?
Adder!! SDFERR.
Phones are stupid.
don’t I know it twiddling along on this stupid-smart kindle-thingy, hating the auto-fill as we go!
Things are dry bh, very dry.
You still in Cali, Lee?
holy crap I’m hopin’ no tiger’s fans are feeling an itchy trigger finger on account of this sudden plunge into ineptitude their heroes have taken — simpler to hang ausmus in effigy probably
Glancing at Insty I see that Kimberlin creep just got kicked in the nuts by a judge, and mr McCain and others benefit, which, good.
holy crap I’m hopin’ no tiger’s fans are feeling an itchy trigger finger on account of this sudden plunge into ineptitude their heroes have taken — simpler to hang ausmus in effigy probably
As a Tigers fan, I feel no such compunction. I’m not even willing to blame Ausmus.
It’s about time the millionaires on this team starting hitting the ball, or at least manufacturing runs. No one is to blame except the hitting.
However, as a Lions fan also, there seems to be a symmetry between the feelings…
didn’t mean to imply ausmus has anything to do with it, but that fanatics will often reach for the easiest fix of rage and blame, regardless of actual causes
Kimberlin. Why couldn’t he have had a bomb-making accident all those years ago?
that’s not even true
Sorry, happyfeet — the troll turd you replied to has been flushed.
Is it just me or did Hannah Montana take a turn for the bitchy?
I am thinking of getting a team of full time writers so I appear smarter in comment sections.
a pleasant turn of events the flush, McG, in any case
I was practicing my performatives.
he came in like a wrecking ball
except not all nekkid and what have you
Yes bh. Central Valley foothills, an hour or so north of Bakersfield.
People’s wells are drying up all over, the further west you go the worse it is. If we don’t get a good snowpack this winter, we’re fucked.
I suggest you start hoarding food now.
“except not all nekkid and what have you”
trampstamp, it gots, presence however, none
drying wells are bad bad bad
that ain’t something a happy lil raincloud’s gonna fix
i’m ok with snow this winter but the next one for 2016 needs to be dry cause of i really want that to be the year i hike the john muir trail solo, since this new job is gonna scramble the best laid plains of mice and pikachu both
low snowpack means maybe i can go late june
high snowpack means waiting til the heat of summer, and i have a further conundrum
it’s really hard to condition yourself for hiking in heat in chicago cause of they have no hills like here in los angeles
See there, I outed myself. I am john.
It was fun while it lasted.
of course i shouldn’t count my lil chickens just yet huh
good job Mr. Lee you really had me going
Heh, good times, john/Lee.
Tell you what, I miss the fun of messing around with sockpuppets from the pre-registration days. I’m too lazy to do it now.
that’s so not even true
Also, note to self: start hoarding food.
Ha! Remember we had to do the touring test, and we would point out touring words that were on topic?
They seem such innocent days…
I’ll volunteer to be the stupidest one here, but only if miley is no longer here.
Otherwise, I gotta be the second stupidest.
‘Cuz of with miley, ya gotta point out the obvious.
Howdy, Lee!
Turing Hashtag: #Ferguson. Because it’s right around the corner.
Turing. that was it.
I’m sorry in advance, but this pisses me off. No matter who’s rioting.
Hi serr8d. Good to see you around.
Hey Lee. :-)
@ 82 %
>
Milwaukee Sherriff Primary – Dem
Clarke
51.36% (46420 votes)
Moews
48.64% (43967 votes)
<
serr8d
I want to see the next 3 seconds of sequencing on those photo…cuz it looks like both parties are interested in walking past each other (both sides are striding … not stopping/confronting)
>John Kerry said that I if you didn’t study or were stupid, you would get stuck in Iraq. Today, John Kerry is stuck in Iraq. #tcot<
link
Gosh, now I’m getting embarrassed!
Hi Darleen, Very appreciative for your efforts at PW. Don’t know where it would be without you.
Darleen, video would help. To me it looks like the guy with raised hands is stepping backward.
Hard to know for sure.
“hands up” is their motto thank allan the nyt has nifty photo!
Those cops look like their parents gave them too much money to spend at the Army/Navy store before they went to someone’s paintball party.
When you take the name of a rather untalented media whore as a handle you’re already two strikes down and headed for the dugout.
for example
Protesters use hands-up gesture defiantly after Michael Brown shooting
omg i’m just now finishing all that canned foozle you wizzles told me to buy when obama was elected
i mostly just have some baked beans and some pozole left i think
but i did learn a lot of new recipes
BTW … I hope to hell we are not going to romanticize suicide here.
It’s been 25 years and I’m still am partially pissed & really sad at my cousin’s suicide.
and oh…want to know about a suicide as final “fuck you”?
Take a cop (who shouldn’t have been … long back story) who decides to kidnap a waitress from a parking lot as she gets off work. Takes her to a storage place where he proceeds to rape, beat and assault her most of the rest of the night (I’ll spare the gory details). She knows she’s going to die – that he’s going to just take her out to the desert to finish the deed.
At some point he drifts off to sleep — she slips out of the truck, runs bleeding and naked into the street to flag down a passerby in the early dawn.
This guy is arrested, jailed but somehow continues to think he’ll get off. Defense attorney pulls everything out of the bag including saying he “blacked out” due to alcohol and anti-depressants.
Jury doesn’t buy it. He’s convicted of enough charges he’s looking at 25 to life in state prison.
Night before sentencing, when he knows his victim will be allowed to give an impact statement, he hangs himself.
>Those cops look like <
propaganda photo for the proggtards. classic paliwood!
Who is romanticizing suicide here?
Name names.
well you should look at this a a paliwood photoshoot. the proggtards showing their media power.
Lee
Video would help because it looks like the guy is walking forward while the cops (both feet almost off the ground plus motion blur) are running/jogging. They would NOT be this close to someone they wanted to confront while still moving.
Another “hands up” video, and T-shirts.
The gas masks can only be for the crap they themselves dispersed. One can get the feeling there is more than a thousand words in that story.
bh
I’m just a bit sensitive when people start discussing the “preferred” method for offing themselves.
While I can sympathize and forgive the suicide of people in great anguish, mental or physical, I just find talk about how to off-putting.
YMMV and I admit I come from my own biases in this regard.
– I notice the NYT is getting more schitzo by the day. One minute they’re doing a piece on IWonPenPhones disastrous foreign policy, and the next they’re staging yet another cop/innocent protester agitprop setup.
– I’m pretty sure none of the major dailies want to get caught waiting at the gate when the Lefts house of cards finally collapses, so they have to fence sit for now. Bastiches.
Oh, in that case I’m one of the guilty.
Just idle BS, not meant to make a statement
I’m sticking with frankly’s opinion that suicide is selfish and cowardly. Exceptions just prove the rule.
Darleen, we are goofing off . My brother in law killed himself. No one knew why. Some times humor is the only release.
hamas theatre news
Breaking: Police Block Off North St. Louis County Roads – Youths Gathering at Jamestown Mall – Shots Fired – Arrests
maybe some rockets too
Okay, I hear what you’re saying, D.
Yeah, it is off-putting. Terribly so. That’s why I was reacting to “romanticizing”. I was thinking it was just about the opposite. For myself, it comes from a place of wondering why people who commit suicide don’t make more of an effort to conceal the act a little bit if they have loved ones left alive, hence, driving “accident” or medicine dosing “accident”
– Do you get the feeling we’re just getting started with the happier shades of Obama’s rainbow Utopia™.
Here is another angle on that picture, but what is needed is one from the reverse angle to show what is behind the guy in the blue shirt. The hands raised shouting “Don’t shoot us,” is the general cry of the ‘protest.”
>One can get the feeling there is more than a thousand words in that story.<
right like the the "peaceful gazans" launching rockets into israel. i say good bye to the proggtard "narrative"
> “Don’t shoot us,” is the general cry of the ‘protest.”<
why is this idiot confronting the police in a problematic setting?
Another one which makes it seem that there were more than just that one guy that the cops were facing.
geoffb
oh sheesh …. yes, what is behind blue shirt guy
I don’t like the militarization of cops at all but, then again, I watched live on air as Reginald Denny was yanked from his truck and he was beaten to a pulp because the LAPD decided not to show up.
>I don’t like the militarization of cops at all but<
the proggtards are attacking "the great satan" and the "little satan"
I still find it remarkable how Geoff can do things like find multiple camera angles of a random picture posted here that quickly.
It’s as likely if the LAPD did show up, they woulda beat Reginald Denny before the rioters got to him.
Yeah, I’m a cynical bastard still. Surprise!
meanwhile hussein plays the back 9 while iranian jarret sips her tea
iraq falls apart. let’s do racial strife in the bitter clingers zone. stat.
Dicentra,
Would you do me the great favor of sending an e-mail to dangerdaveoc at gmail dot com. I have a story I’d like to share with you. Promise it will help (just not promising who;-).
“I still find it remarkable how Geoff can do things like find multiple camera angles of a random picture posted here that quickly.”
bh,
I told you Geoffb is everywhere and we’re all moving in peace and harmony to Geoffness.
GEOFFOLUTION!!!
.
Tends to support Di’s point about how the brain can betray you into offing yourself –against your will* even.
The only suicide I’m even remotely familiar with happened a few years after I graduated h.s. when one of the 10th grade English teachers shot himself on Christmas eve. The story goes he walked out of the middle of a room full of family and friends celebrating the holiday, stepped into the garage and shot himself in the head. No warning, no note, no nothing. I don’t know whether there was a history of clinical depression or other mental illness or not.
*will used in an overly vague Augustinian sort of way which I don’t propose to argue over unless and until we all agree to bust out our copies of the book –and while I’m sure I still have it lying around somewhere I haven’t seen mine in close to twenty years.
that’s a keeper Danger. Geoffolution is earnestly to be wished.
Here ya go:
You guys are getting goofy, late hours will do that, go to bed. I am.
I think Di’s point was the clinically depressed don’t really have that option.
Granted, you’re not talking about the clinically depressed, but then, nobody’s really argued against the point you just made again.
that’s a keeper Danger. Geoffolution is earnestly to be wished.
Seconded from the cheap seats …
Willco Geoff.
G’Night all,
PLEASE TRY TO KEEP THE POINTY END DOWN RANGE PEOPLE!!!
Night before sentencing, when he knows his victim will be allowed to give an impact statement, he hangs himself.
Yes, that one’s an Eff You and rebellion before God and all the other stigma you want to place on it.
Me, listing the ways I might go is whistling past the graveyard.
Suicide isn’t romantic at all. As people have said elsewhere, it’s like jumping out the window of a tall building because the room is on fire. Just because it makes sense in a terrible way doesn’t mean it isn’t awful.
Also, a place to excoriate Matt Walsh.
Speaking of unbearable despair, the Yazidis can tell you something about that:
What the hell, people? What the everlasting hell?
“However, Iraqi officials said that much of the US aid had been ‘useless’ because it was dropped from 15,000ft without parachutes and exploded on impact.”
That “tale” seems to be a vicious piece of propaganda, false and intentionally spread to do discredit. No US airmen would do any such thing.
Sorry Dar, mine was meant as a setup to a lame joke, if that makes it any better.
In my defense, I did resist the temptation to say I’d aim to land on Brett Kimberlin.
I have a question.
Is suicide, as a percentage, higher in the past 50 years or so, then the prior? Does anyone have any data on that?
The only thing I could find was this:
“The suicide rates of 14 nations were examined for 1875, 1952, 1962, 1975, and 1986 and found to have increased over this period. There was no change in the dispersions of the suicide rates over the years.”
I wonder if the lower existence of religious faith over this time has anything to do with it. In other words, why wouldn’t Matt Walsh’s opinion on this have some bearing?
Not saying that he’s 100% right; just that the reactions on his blog and the one dicentra referred might be a bit knee-jerk?
I’m just gonna lie low on this post.
Ok, one thing. Words do matter, and i think that is one thing we all can agree on, right?
http://popchassid.com/robin-williams-didnt-kill/
Yes. Yes he did kill himself.
And, one thing I wonder -what is the suicide rate in non-western countries? Anyone know?
something about that “he killed himself” “he didn’t kill himself” folderal begins to wander out into the field of human consciousness — which, I don’t think the interlocutors there are actually serious about the problem itself, a problem that’s about as open-ended as any we know.
In 1875 you really didn’t have a lot of time to think about killing yourself, nature was doing its best to help you leave this world.
Carin, here, though the accuracy is no better than that of the reporting country.
We’re getting Goofy?
Yum!
Things must be dire in Greenland.
Also interesting is the VAST difference of male/female suicides.
It doesn’t say it directly but, it looks like the suicide is mostly amongst Inuit Greenlanders if you read between the lines. Sad.
Greenlandia — says there the population is 85% – 90% Inuit.
Likely the long dark winters are a factor in far northern nations.
Those two factors near certain geoffb, followed by living in proximity to Communism and it’s remnants. It might be telling were Tierra del Fuego’s numbers culled out from Chilean and Argentinian totals generally, in order to get a sense of high latitudes as causative.
Note to happyfeet: death rate by polar bear is not high in Greenland.
Dicentra, I just saw this and thought of you:
I was listening to a lady who called a radio pastor. The pastor was a wise, grandfatherly gentleman who has that calm reassuring voice that can melt all fear. The lady, who was obviously crying, said, “Pastor, I was born blind, and I’ve been blind all my life. I don’t mind being blind but I have some well-meaning friends who tell me that if I had more faith I could be healed.”
The pastor asked her, “Tell me, do you carry one of those white canes?”
“Yes I do,” she replied.
“Then the next time someone says that hit them over the head with the cane,” He said. “Then tell them, ‘If you had more faith that wouldn’t hurt!'”
“Ernst Schreiber says August 12, 2014 at 11:36 pm
I think Di’s point was the clinically depressed don’t really have that option.
Granted, you’re not talking about the clinically depressed, but then, nobody’s really argued against the point you just made again. ”
No, but I discussed it with McGehee. What was the point of your comment to me? Talk to di or don’t talk at all? What?
I’ll also say di doesn’t know shit about the state of Williams brain anymore than anyone else here. She is the only one I’ve heard say he was bipolar, but she isn’t his shrink and never examined him.
A far more likely cause for Williams mental problem and untimely demise is a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, IMO. Not what di is implying.
Hi, Lee! Long time no see.
You’re correct that none of us here is in possession of Williams’ medical files and since none of us are personal friends or family, we know only what we have heard and read about his death.
I have read nothing suggesting he was bipolar. It is suggested that he was terribly depressed and was being treated for it. I read yesterday that he was more than $30M in debt from his last divorce and that his latest television project had been cancelled after only one season. Most likely, it was a combination of life events that lead him to take his own life since, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he had been sober for many years, more than twenty.
We just don’t know. I can only offer my sympathy to the family and my prayers for Robin.
Howdy leigh. I heard he checked into rehab some months back. I dunno.
Anyway, I’ll echo your final sentiments; we just don’t know. I can only offer my sympathy to the family and my prayers for Robin
Note to happyfeet: suicide rate of bipolar bears is not tracked in Greenland.
Does that mean Williams had a pre-nuptial agreement that was for more that he had by the time of the divorce? Otherwise I do not see how a judge could award more than he was worth.
I know he didn’t have a prenuptial with the first wife. Most likely not with the second, either, as she had been in his employ as his son’s nanny. Perhaps he owed spousal support or there was a division of property dispute? I don’t know. His home in San Francisco was on the market and you know he market is soft even for high end properties. I don’t recall if the Tiburon home was for sale, but he may have been mortgaged to the hilt, too.
I wasn’t aware until today or had forgotten, that he had open heart surgery about five years ago. He could have been having health problems on top of his monetary problems.
His friend, anonymously claims that it was a confluence of these events that he believes led to Robin taking his life.
I have read nothing suggesting he was bipolar.
You missed his manic phases?
He joked about being bipolar.
Even if he was merely unipolar depressed, you don’t judge his suicide any differently than you do the 9/11 jumpers, who were in an awful situation.
Where THEY cowards? Because they DID take the easy way out. Burning alive or suffocating is much worse than ending it quickly by hitting the pavement.
Unless someone offs himself to avoid criminal prosecution, asserting that it’s cowardice or selfishness or whatever is inaccurate in the extreme.
People who survive their suicide attempts don’t berate themselves for being cowardly or selfish. They just say they couldn’t see any other way out.
The survival instinct is pretty damned strong. TOO strong to be overwhelmed by a mere character defect.
You mourn the fact that Williams was worn out by the internal torment, that despite all the rehab and support and meds and self-meds and success and whatnot, just couldn’t take it anymore. Six decades of trying and failing isn’t something you minimize.
He just couldn’t bear to be conscious another day.
I am not minimizing his pain, di, nor have I suggested he was a coward.
This is personal with you and I would ask you to back off the personal attacks. It’s wrong of you to project your feelings onto the opinions of others. If you wish to discuss Robin’s suicide, then do so in a less passionate manner that is suggesting that you and only you understand him and the rest of us are full of shit.
You don’t know that. You don’t know how many of us have lost loved ones to suicide or have felt suicidal ourselves. I can assure you the number is larger than it seems. This isn’t about you or me or the lamp post. We are discussing Robin Williams and we are not him.
As I said above, I pray for him and the boy in him that I knew long ago. I pray for his family and for all who suffer so.
Yes. Yes he did kill himself.
Like I said: so did the jumpers on 9/11.
But LET ME BE CLEAR: they didn’t light the building on fire. That was NOT THEIR FAULT. No one is saying it was. However, they made a choice between a quick death and a longer, more painful one.
Let’s drive that home some more: jumping from that building was a conscious choice. Because if we don’t emphasize that, other people in burning buildings might jump, too.
Let me remind you that the sound of those bodies hitting the pavement has caused some serious PSTD in the minds of those rescuers. Hell, you didn’t even have to be there to be traumatized by it.
Sure, it sucks to burn alive or suffocate in the acrid smoke, and nobody wanted to die in the stairwells when the buildings collapsed, but those deaths did not traumatize people in the same way that the jumpers deaths did.
They had to know that. They had to know how it would look to everyone to watch bodies hurtle down 100 stories and splat on the sidewalk. They didn’t have to inflict that trauma on the survivors.
Yes, I know this is hard to hear, but sometimes hard truths need to be said.
*****
See how that sounds?
What the hell kind of person goes out of their way to make that point? It is, after all, 100% accurate. And yet people like Matt Walsh and his defenders refuse to see why his essay was so far out of line.
Because they spoke the plain, unvarnished truth, you see.
And what could be wrong with that?
It’s wrong of you to project your feelings onto the opinions of others.
You’re right.
I should respect everyone’s opinion on the subject, no matter how much it hurts.
darn it, if Barack and Hillary can do it. I think we all need to be “hugging it out” .
[Thread about gender roles]
dicentra: This is just my opinion here, but I think stay-at-home dads are unmanly and are setting a bad example for their kids. In my experience, it’s better for the man to work and the mom to stay with the kids. Any kids raised by a stay-at-home dad are a menace to society. Me, I was raised by a stay-at-home mom and a working dad, and it was the best way to do it.
jeff: [pounds my head down into my ribcage several times over]
dicentra: Cripes, Jeff. This isn’t about you. I thought pw was a place to express ideas and have a free exchange. Why are you projecting your feelings onto my opinion? You don’t know what I’ve seen. This is a thread about gender roles, not about you. You don’t know what goes on in other homes. I suggest you ratchet back your emotions and be more rational. This blog would have more commenters if people didn’t get all angry over some little disagreement.
***
…is how it looks from my perspective.
I am sorry that you feel hurt. I apologize for making you feel that way, as that is certainly not my intention.
Matt Walsh is misusing the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church in his column regarding Williams’ suicide. Matt is not a priest or confessor. He is using those words as a layman who is out of his depth when discussing such a loaded topic.
The Church teaches that suicide is a sin. Up until the last century, indeed not until after the Second Vatican Counsel, was a suicide allowed to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. My young nephew blew his head off with a pistol and is buried with his grandmother who had died of natural causes a year previous.
As a believer, it is important to me that I forgive those who have broken their covenant with the Lord and taken the gift of life. Intellectually I can understand their pain and suffering. As a human being, I am angry at the pain and suffering they have caused their loved ones who often spend the remainder of their own lives wondering what they could have done to stop the suicide. It doesn’t help to tell them that most likely there is nothing that could have been said or done to stop the event from happening.
As Catholics, we have Masses said for the dead. It is cold comfort to a mother who buries her child, but it helps us to know that God is forgiving even if sometimes we cannot be. At least not right away.
life is dark everything is dark
and i have to rework my resume they said and add a bunch of shit on there i know fuck nothing about
i got your SQL server right here
but for fuck’s sake do NOT ask Mr. Williams to do a SQL
oh crap too late
I am sorry that you feel hurt. I apologize for making you feel that way, as that is certainly not my intention.
Very well. I accept that.
It doesn’t help to tell them that most likely there is nothing that could have been said or done to stop the event from happening.
That’s not even what I believe, nor is that the counter-argument to Matt’s column, though he certainly thinks it is. The counter-argument is that people with mental illness who succeed at committing suicide are non compos mentis by definition. Drilling home the fact that it “was a choice” is totally beside the point and hurtful to boot, but he refuses to accept that.
People left behind after a suicide are of course angry, bewildered, betrayed. “Why didn’t you let me help you?” is a genuine cri de couer. It’s fully legitimate to wonder why the suicide saw fit to inflict such pain and to be really angry and hurt by it. I don’t wonder that people’s lives are permanently unhinged by a suicide.
I myself believe that “my mom doesn’t deserve it” is the best argument against harming myself.
However, I’ve got enough mental wherewithal to see the validity of that argument. When a mental illness is bad enough, that part of the brain might be shut off.
“You couldn’t have done anything” is true only insofar as the suicide was determined to keep people from helping him. It’s reasonable to assume that Williams had gotten to the point where he didn’t want help anymore, so he made sure no one stopped him.
That’s just his situation, though. All mileage varies. Do what you can to stop a suicide if it’s at all in your power. Caring enough to interfere might make all the difference.
light up your face with gladness and hide every trace of sadness
although a tear
may be ever so near
that’s the time you must keep on trying
SMILE! – what’s the use of crying?
you’ll find that life is still worthwhile
if you
just
smile
:)
The second quoted portion of mine, is just that. Matt is over his head in the discussion of mental illness and should shut up. Too late, though, since he’s already gone to press.
In my own life, I’ve known several family members and some friends who have committed suicide. They were of all ages and both sexes and no one close to them knew of their plans. As you say, if they are determined, they will find a way.
why so glum, chum?
why so glum, chum?
SQL, naturally.
Damned external joins.
Ha!
I remember back when you’d refer to SQL as sequel and you’d get a few chuckles from the old school mainframe guys.
see i don’t remember anything
i got an MCSE in like 2001, never used it really, and they want me to talk it up
Visual Basic for Excel?
We coded basic on a number of manufacturing lines. Only way to pay a hired hand to write crap code for under $45 an hour.
All the legacy people with skill and knowledge were these Fortran dudes who actually knew how the whole system was duct-taped together. These were not people you’d want to sit down with at lunch. They didn’t like the rape culture that was developing on those legacy systems.
nope that’s not a me thing
huh
active directories are still a thing who knew
That was an OOD thing in that transitional period back at Merc.
oods are a doctor who thing is all i know
it was on netflix
Lee, I thought you took your ball and went home! Glad to see it ain’t so.
Hi Red, thanks.
I didn’t go home, and just covered my balls.
I probably shouldn’t be here now. Keep it on the down low brother, would ya?
I took FORTRAN 77 on punch cards.
I love being able to say that. Tends to impress or baffle.
>I took FORTRAN 77 on punch cards.<
me too so
Talking Heads: 77 (Album)
I took Fortran 77 on the VAX/VMS.
I also learned assembly on a Terak that used 8 inch floppy disks that held a whole 128K each! You had to boot the machine from the floppy.
put me down for baffle
I really do enjoy my elders pulling their Fortran trump cards here.
Good times. Seriously, good times.
Any of y’all want to break out the hardcore Cobol experience?
DB-2 or bust.
We ran controllers off the mainframe that required disk booting from 8 inch floppies, cranky.
Their down time was about 0 seconds a year though so I don’t think anyone ever had to actually do it.
i hate gainful employment
i always hated when the card reader kicked out a card. or when the vax was thinking about the matrix inversion you gave it.
-i hate gainful employment-
rejoice: in barackyville you have funemployment.
wait that’s where i’m moving for to yoke myself to industry
i’m doing this wrong huh
speaking of which, i was reading this today
FRED
What was so, ah, fascinating?
MARTA
He was talking about the AFL-CIA and the American labor unions.
INT. TED’S CAR
MARTA
He described how, after World War II, representatives of the American labor union, the AFL-CIA, were sent to Europe to crush progressive unionism.
TED
How’d they do that?
MARTA
With sacks of money and the anti-Communist tactics of your senator Joey McCarthy.
FRED
The AFL-CIA?
MARTA
America’s largest union, terribly right wing and facha. You have not heard of it? It’s amazing the things Americans don’t know about their own country.
EXT. ROOFTOP PARTY
TED
There’s no such thing as the AFL-CIA. It’s the AFL-CIO. Actually, it’s the A.F. of L.-C.I.O. It was formed when the American Federation of Labor merged with the more militant CIO.
MONTSERRAT
How do you know so much about it?
TED
Chicago is the probably capital of 20th century American trade-unionism. The American labor leaders who came to Europe then – Jay Lovestone and, um… were giants.
MONTSERRAT
So what Marta said was partly true.
TED
Well, what do you mean, “partly true”? I mean, they were people.
MONTSERRAT
I’m sure I’ve heard of the AFL-CIA. There is some important American labor union of that name.
>I’m sure I’ve heard of the AFL-CIA.<
ax frank marshall davis or ann dunham
It’s really, really, really hard to decide whether that or Metropolitan is the better movie.
It’s also really, really, really hard to understand why Chris Eigeman wasn’t the biggest star of his generation.
hmm dialogue from the town of “make believe”. that be moved to dc these days.
Metropolitan is so sweet-hearted and gentle and it just turns me into a big girl when I watch it
the obscurity what pertains to the cast of Metropolitan is extremely remarkable i think
wtf
It’s a quandry and a shame.
Seconded.
– to the cast of Metropolitan –
do they have popcorn when watching obscure pictures that are boring?
movies, tv, et al: all stupid proggtardganda
is not boring at all i think they dance the limbo even
Is this such a concern?
Michael Bay will make another movie about robot turtles who can turn into cars next year too.
And the next. And the next. And the next. They’ll make a billion bucks each.
Is it really so offensive that people might like an obscure picture with good dialogue? Is this a problem somehow? I mean, really, is this a problem?
Thanks McGehee.
You guy’s are very sweet…for a pack of evil tempered misanthropists. haha
I mean, shit, you could actually watch these movies and see how Stillman is about the exact opposite of “proggtardganda” but then that would require some level of effort and discernment, wouldn’t it?
That may have sounded like nervous laughter, but really it was friendly laughter.
Instead of emoticons like…
>Is it really so offensive that people might like an obscure picture with good dialogue?<
is it so offensive that peeps disagree cordially?
If I thought there was a chance in hell that you had watched either of those movies and had a reasoned disagreement, I’d credit it to a difference in opinions.
But, no, you’re just talking out your ass again. This is what you do.
>Is it really so offensive that people might like an obscure picture with good dialogue?<
like all you want. the talk radio station does iheart commercials telling me about how hollyweird movies are doing this week. some peeps see the crash coming.
Okay, have you watched either of those movies? Are you familiar with Stillman?
Please explain why in the world you’d use such nonsense words like “proggtarded” in a discussion about a movie that is mocking the conventional idiocies of the European left during that time period?
C’mon, you’re talking out your ass.
>If I thought there was a chance in hell that you had watched either of those movies and had a reasoned disagreement, I’d credit it to a difference in opinions.<
i don't care to watch it. i skimmed the transcript here: http://www.whitstillman.org/films/barcelona/script/
boring. if you like it fine
Okay, we’re agreed then, you’re talking out your ass.
Oh, stop it you flatterer.
>that is mocking the conventional idiocies of the European left during that time period?<
well that helped alot then? hi eu! sorry finding golden oldies movie dialogue doesn't help the cause of liberty now.
I’ve always found reading the script more entertaining than watching the performance, bh, doesn’t everybody?
>, you’re talking out your ass.<
i'm just disagreeing with you. that is all.
Wait, I thought you were a big proponent of mocking the left, nr.
Don’t you say this all the time? Like, all the time you say this.
You are full of shit is what you are.
these comments are almost almost almost stillmanesque all by their lonesome
Heh. Certainly so.
I remember the first time I skimmed the script of Citizen Kane. Changed my life.
..-|
>I’ve always found reading the script more entertaining than watching the performance<
yea well that is how movies are made no?
>Wait, I thought you were a big proponent of mocking the left, nr.<
what has that to do with some obscure dialogue in a obscure film? the happy has the msce not the "hollyweird prime conservative degree". the hollyweird is filled with commies ax bogart and bacall.
>I’ve always found reading the script more entertaining than watching the performance<
you need to see certain actors reading certain lines no?
Why tie yourself in knots trying to support this bullshit? Just admit you typed a comment without thinking and it was stupid.
There are worse things in this world. For instance: what you’re doing now.
>Why tie yourself in knots trying to support this bullshit? Just admit you typed a comment without thinking and it was stupid.<
what that a director of a film needs to correlate the actors and the script?
> Just admit you typed a comment without thinking and it was stupid.<
feel free to point out my errors (with citations if possible).
“Typing telephone pole” is the term that’s coming to mind now.
>“Typing telephone pole” is the term that’s coming to mind now.<
that's fine for you. how about an honest discussion?
> Just admit you typed a comment without thinking and it was stupid.<
man you got the proggtard line of attack down.
*
> Just admit you typed a comment without thinking and it was stupid.<
no i stated linguistically what i thought. you found it "stupid". #INTENTIONALISM
for my friend
All You’ve Ever Wanted
Well, it’s official. I am now post-stress depressed. Feeling the urge to sleep when I’m not working. Not feeling anything at all as far as emotional reactions go. Staring out into endless miles of painted wall spackle.
Also I have an infection in my left eye and a low dose anti-biotic to go with it. Which means angry guts.
Yep. Good times.
I think it was the riot coverage and the people starving on the mountain in Iraq that sent me over.
So I’m probably going to be out for a week or two as I won’t have much spleen or humor or thinkin’ to muster until the new “replacement me” crystallizes and starts to want things and have stuff to say again. Yon shell beckons.
I want to see bh and dicentra tag team against newrouter and leigh in a steel cage death match.
And if Jeff dressed up like Auntie Entity and called everybody “soldier”? Hell, I’d sell a kidney to see to that.
Can’t we do it for the children?
>I want to see bh and dicentra tag team against newrouter and leigh in a steel cage death match.<
i'll settle for understanding:
All you’ve ever wanted
Well, if it was for the children…
mocking folks is hillary. you go saul.
Most of them folks are telling you to invest in gold –which is sure to go from @1300/oz. to +2000/oz. ‘before the end of the year” and silver to $50/oz. to boo0t –so sure are they in fact that they’ll send you a 1 gram bar of silver to start your metals portfolio (but only if you’re among the first 50 callers) along with their free report.
The rest of them think you should be hoarding something FEMA doesn’t want you to be hoarding, but you got to go to their free website to find out what it is FEMA doesn’t want you to have –which is already unavailable anyways across large portions of the U. S.
And don’t get me started on the guys telling you that you need solar panels on your roof and windmills in your backyard before you –and you alone(!)– are stuck subsidizing big oil, big coal and big methane because everybody else has already got their solar panels on their roofs and windmills in their backyards –sucker.
I’m strangling a drowned chicken here, but this link needs sharing:
In case you need to help someone understand the role of choice and suicide in the presence of mental illness:
I’ll wait to read the script.
Mc to the G ;)
I’ll be in your neck o the woods this weekend (daughter playing soccer in Columbus).
Care to break bread?
That’s not exactly a fair fight, Ernst.
Well, unless we can bring weapons.
Well, I flipped a coin to decide if I will answer dicentra says August 14, 2014 at 2:21 am, and heads says that drowned, strangled chicken could take a few whacks with a bat.
So, should suicide be legalized, or should cancer be outlawed?
Seriously though, the quoted person is saying they’ve always said no to suicide (admitting that despite the long term depression there is still the ability to choose, and choosing to kill is wrong), and if they do commit suicide, it will because the depression made the choice, meaning either they have lost the ability to choose at all, or they surrendered their choice to their feelings (or emotions if you prefer) because they just want out and don’t care how their choice affects others.
You are speaking to the first instance, people who have lost the ability to choose, and I absolutely agree there are such instances where the brain is biologically screwed up.
I am speaking to the second instance, the more common one I’d wager and the more likely one in this case, where suicide was a choice, even if it was a choice to surrender. I also think such instances are almost never selfless, brave, or deserving of empathy. They are not the victim, they are the murderer, their loved ones left behind are the victims.
This is of course only the opinions of an uneducated misanthropist, so take it for what it’s worth.
I love this place! And I love all of you, prickles and horns included. Well, not in that way, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Even if there is.
heh, RI. but I have to ask: are you high?
Flattered by the invite, but I’m afraid it won’t be possible. So much going on around this place I’m in cocooning mode for the foreseeable future.
What little sanity I still have has been whimpering in the corner for the last couple of years already.
Geez Red, quit looking at my horn!
High and horny, evidently.
Wow, it seems Ace has become an intentionalist, at least more so than when Rush said he hopes Obama fails ( I may be mis-remembering, wasn’t he one that criticized Rush at the time?). Anyway, here he is looking for contextual clues to Rush’s intent.
I just now read this post, but he says much here I agree with regarding suicide, so be forewarned.
I am speaking to the second instance, the more common one I’d wager and the more likely one in this case, where suicide was a choice, even if it was a choice to surrender.
Whenever mental illness is involved, you should wager that the person lost his sanity (ability to choose) and died as a result.
“In this case” means Robin Williams? He was suffering from a severe depressive episode, possibly the down phase of a bipolar disorder. The depression was exacerbated by his self-medicating with alcohol and drugs, both of which can physically damage the brain.
He’d been suicidal before, but he’d been able to say “no” to the suicide monster because he had juuuuuust enough sanity to do so. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that he’d lost that sliver of sanity and so his suicide was because he was actually CRAZY.
Medically, certifiably, crazy.
And when we’re talking about insanity, we stop talking about choice, courage, selfishness, viable options, and anything else that goes with a sane person.
This is of course only the opinions of an uneducated misanthropist,
Can a misanthropist distinguish between sane and insane? Can he apply a different standard of judgment to the healthy brain than to the sick?
If you’d like an example of a selfish, cowardly suicide, you can see one here.
This sick, evil bastard molested his sons, murdered his wife when she found out, hid her body so that the cops couldn’t charge him, then when his kids came for a supervised visit, filled the house with gas and blew them all to kingdom come to escape the consequences of his twisted decisions.
His wife was working on the same floor as I when she vanished without a trace. I’d only been there three weeks, so I didn’t know her, but damn, it still hit close to home.
he says much here I agree with regarding suicide,
Will you and everyone else please explain the compulsion to render such strong opinions on suicide and mental illness when YOU YOURSELVES ADMIT THAT YOUR INFORMATION IS SCANT AND NON-EMPIRICAL?????
Why do you think you know what goes on in the mind of a severely depressed person, a person with a BIOLOGICAL DEFECT, no less? A biological defect that you’ve never experienced and probably never will? Why do you attribute the thought processes of a sane person to someone who is NOT SANE?
How is that even CLOSE to rational?
Matt Walsh et al. think they know but they’re talking out their asses. Depressives DO NOT sit there and say, “I’m so sad, so very sad, that I have no choice but to kill myself.”
Walsh thinks he’s being helpful by reminding us that we do, in fact, have a choice.
But that’s not what’s going on. It’s not that the depressive sits there and concludes that they have no choice but to die.
A depressive is in the grip of MENTAL ILLNESS. Not a bad attitude. Not an information desert. Not a lack of spirituality.
Something. Is. Broken.
Try this on for size.
You’ve got cystic fibrosis. You’re talking with Matt Walsh. Your lungs seize up and you gasp, “I can’t breathe.”
“Sure you can,” says your helpful interlocutor. “The diaphragm is a voluntary muscle.”
O_o
Would you or would you not punch him in the face? If I were an onlooker to that conversation, I know I would.
Don’t be Matt Walsh. Don’t be so cock-sure you know what goes on inside the heads of THE INSANE that you drive them to despair with your arrogance.
That’s not exactly a fair fight, Ernst.
Well, unless we can bring weapons.
Leigh is too tough a broad to be defeated by the likes of me. She can match me in the bitch-slap department any time, and I mean that as a compliment.
I’ve known women for whom attitude is weapon enough.
just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming swimming swimming, keep on swimming
I was trying to be nice about who I’m being hypothetically paired with against youse and bh, di.
I thank you for the compliment and return it in kind, my sistah.
Williams’ old lady made a statement today that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Apparently, he was verklempt about this and was locking himself in his room. She feared for him, et cetera.
I would have put his tail in the hospital on a 72 hour involuntary hold. 5150, I believe it is in California.
Too late now, of course and it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have pulled a Norman Maine and swum out into the Pacific until he couldn’t swim no mo’.
So is it Thursday?
Then it’s a good day to read about a non-suicide-suicide (from Plato, ever with the paradoxes: and the very beginning and the end of the Phaedo):
the beginning: *** [57a] Echecrates —
Were you with Socrates yourself, Phaedo, on the day when he drank the poison in prison, or did you hear about it from someone else?
Phaedo —
I was there myself, Echecrates. ***
and the end: *** And Crito said: [116e] “But I think, Socrates, the sun is still upon the mountains and has not yet set; and I know that others have taken the poison very late, after the order has come to them, and in the meantime have eaten and drunk and some of them enjoyed the society of those whom they loved. Do not hurry; for there is still time.”
And Socrates said: “Crito, those whom you mention are right in doing as they do, for they think they gain by it; and I shall be right in not doing as they do; [117a] for I think I should gain nothing by taking the poison a little later. I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and spared it, when there is no more profit in it. Come,” he said, “do as I ask and do not refuse.”
Thereupon Crito nodded to the boy who was standing near. The boy went out and stayed a long time, then came back with the man who was to administer the poison, which he brought with him in a cup ready for use. And when Socrates saw him, he said: “Well, my good man, you know about these things; what must I do?” “Nothing,” he replied, “except drink the poison and walk about [117b] till your legs feel heavy; then lie down, and the poison will take effect of itself.”
At the same time he held out the cup to Socrates. He took it, and very gently, Echecrates, without trembling or changing color or expression, but looking up at the man with wide open eyes, as was his custom, said: “What do you say about pouring a libation to some deity from this cup? May I, or not?” “Socrates,” said he, “we prepare only as much as we think is enough.” “I understand,” said Socrates; [117c] “but I may and must pray to the gods that my departure hence be a fortunate one; so I offer this prayer, and may it be granted.” With these words he raised the cup to his lips and very cheerfully and quietly drained it. Up to that time most of us had been able to restrain our tears fairly well, but when we watched him drinking and saw that he had drunk the poison, we could do so no longer, but in spite of myself my tears rolled down in floods, so that I wrapped my face in my cloak and wept for myself; for it was not for him that I wept, [117d] but for my own misfortune in being deprived of such a friend. Crito had got up and gone away even before I did, because he could not restrain his tears. But Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time before, then wailed aloud in his grief and made us all break down, except Socrates himself. But he said, “What conduct is this,
you strange menO wondrous ones! I sent the women away chiefly for this very reason, that they might not behave in this absurd way; for I have heard that [117e] it is best to die in silence. Keep quiet and be brave.” Then we were ashamed and controlled our tears. He walked about and, when he said his legs were heavy, lay down on his back, for such was the advice of the attendant. The man who had administered the poison laid his hands on him and after a while examined his feet and legs, then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. He said “No”; then after that, [118a] his thighs; and passing upwards in this way he showed us that he was growing cold and rigid. And again he touched him and said that when it reached his heart, he would be gone. The chill had now reached the region about the groin, and uncovering his face, which had been covered, he said—and these were his last words—“Crito, we owe a cock to Aesclêpius. Pay it and do not neglect it.” “That,” said Crito, “shall be done; but see if you have anything else to say.” To this question he made no reply, but after a little while he moved; the attendant uncovered him; his eyes were fixed. And Crito when he saw it, closed his mouth and eyes.Such was the end, Echecrates, of our friend, who was, as we may say, of all those of his time whom we have known, the best [aristou] and wisest [phronimôtatou] and most righteous [dikaiotatou] man. ***
Will you and everyone else please explain the compulsion to render such strong opinions on suicide and mental illness …
Never mind. I found out from some exceptionally compassionate and theologically correct morons over at AoSHQ.
They think the mentally ill are getting away with something when people say the suicide wasn’t a choice.
Let me repeat that: Someone in the depths of depression who offs himself literally got away with murder.
Because unless you’re bat-spittle crazy, bouncing against the rubber walls in a strait jacket, you’re not truly cray-cray. Given that everyone totes wants to blow their heads off, but only a strong sense of responsibility prevents them from doing so.
And superior moral development, of course.
Gawd, some people will walk on broken glass to establish moral superiority.
Because as everyone knows, it is theologically and physiologically impossible for most of your brain to be in perfect working order but for a part of it to be FUBAR. If you can write a coherent sentence or hold down a job, you’re sane enough, and by God we’re holding you accountable.
I’m not answering those morons again. They’re worse than the friends of Job, who were hell-bent on attributing Job’s misfortune to punishment for Job’s sins. They absolutely would NOT believe his protestations of innocence because they had conflated popular notions about life (found in Proverbs, actually) with actual theology.
Plus, badgering Job to fess up to his wicked ways must have felt awfully good.
“Miserable comforters are ye all,” he cried.
That’s my favorite scripture, right there.
Aesclêpius
Also known as milkweed.
*** About life, the wisest men of all ages have come to the same conclusion: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life. Even Socrates said, as he died: “To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster.” Even Socrates was tired of life. What does that prove? What does it demonstrate? At one time, one would have said (and it has been said loud enough by our pessimists): “At least something must be true here! The consensus of the sages must show us the truth.” Shall we still talk like that today? May we? “At least something must be sick here,” we retort. These wisest men of all ages — they should first be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? tottery? decadent? late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion? ***
Your “It’s Thursday, so” post was excellence in enlightenment, Sdferr. Thanks for sharing that.
I’ve not read the story of Socrates death in 20 years. It really is TBT!
OT, but I just ordered a tee for my son that reads “Plato’s Cave Search and Rescue”.
this is a nice look at what a fundamentally retarded whore this Elizabeth Warren bitch is
What up with that guy kicking right off with the gratuitous lie “brilliant legal scholar”? The fuck?
Yep. And all that we find attendant.
For the life of me I really don’t understand this impulse to judge the dead in this strong form.
I do get it in the weak form but in the strong form it seems unreasoned.
“What you mean ‘we,’ Fauxcahontas?”
personally me I have totally processed the death of Robin Williams and I feel like I’m mentally and emotionally ready for any other celebrity death which might transpire in the week to come
just please God not Madonna
not next week
Madonna will walk the irradiated ruins of this planet in the year 3014.
Book it.
She’ll be all, “Kabbalah, bitches.”
damn straight
Will you and everyone else please explain the compulsion to render such strong opinions on suicide and mental illness when YOU YOURSELVES ADMIT THAT YOUR INFORMATION IS SCANT AND NON-EMPIRICAL?????
Di: I’ll happily admit I know jack-squat about mental illness, but that your commentary here and on the twitter-thingy has been most educational. My friend suffers of some depression, though neurotic anxiety is his bigger problem, and I’ve been guilty of the same sort of “well just *stop* it, you freak” unhelpful advice that you’ve been railing against.
The “here, snort this cocaine, now whatever you do, don’t feel euphoric” analogy was most illuminating. Thank you.
—
And on an unrelated note, I’m not seeing why everyone is so down on suicide. Perhaps my friends and acquaintances would be all like “what could I have done to prevent this tragedy,” though more likely they’d be thinking “so, the crazy old bastard finally did it.” (I’ve made no secret of my thoughts on the subject.)
I reject any supposition that I owe it to others to remain alive after my sell-by date; if I own anything, I own myself, and I’ll determine when I’ve had quite enough, thank you very much. It’s not a wholly unique position to say “I’d rather be dead than a slave,” and to my mind, to accept a situation where I’d tolerate the intolerable (e.g. not putting a bullet in my head, once I desire same) because it might make some people sad, that’s being owned. Not an acceptable condition for a Free Man.
Of course, I extend the same philosophy to my loved ones: they don’t owe me their continued existence, either. If my wife wanted to check out, I’d be heartbroken – and quite possibly follow her into the abyss – but I wouldn’t try to guilt her into staying alive for my sake. Bearing in mind the old “walk a mile in his shoes” adage, if someone has run the numbers and decided to close up shop, who am I to second-guess them?
If you live long enough or have some bad luck this does happen from time to time.
Not the mental illness part. The “I’m outta here” part.
It happens. It does.
I don’t know, I have a hard time being so fatalistic about suicide. There are people “being talked off the ledge” everyday. I don’t get the offense taken at suggesting it can be done.
Imagine hanging out with someone who can’t even find relief from straight morphine. Imagine not having a moment without pain.
How many months or years of that do they owe you?
If I were somehow driven to do myself in while my wife still lived, I would deserve to go to the special hell described by Dante. She would be devastated for the usual reasons that a spouse would be devastated, and also wracked with undeserved guilt over whatever imaginary thing she must have done to make me want to do such a thing.
I’d hate to imagine being in enough pain to be willing to subject her to that, especially given my freakishly high pain threshold.
Huh, dang it, that’s the third anvil I’ve dropped on that toe today.
In that scenario, yeah. Even hell yeah.
I’ve told my family if I’m ever diagnosed with a terminal cancer, I’m not doing treatment. I don’t want to be feeble and puking in my remaining time on the globe.
Occasionally, you do find yourself having these conversations.
That’s what I mean by, “this happens”. It does. People sometimes have a really long, tortured path to death. If we’re to make a strong form argument against suicide then this needs to be understood.
Like I said, if you live long enough or have some bad luck, this won’t be hypothetical anymore.
There you will be.
“If you live long enough or have some bad luck this does happen from time to time. Not the mental illness part. The “I’m outta here” part. It happens. It does.”
I agree with that bh.
My question is, if there isn’t a stigma on suicide attached by society , how many more would take the option when it presents itself that otherwise wouldn’t?
I think this is a wise thought.
Yes, there should be a stigma. We should try and make it out of bounds and inconceivable to everyone giving it a quick passing thought. If that muddies the water a bit intellectually then I’m okay with that.
We’re on the same page entirely there.
Somewhere along the way Plato makes Soc. say that there is a mystery commanding against suicide (I forget where just now I’m sorry to say), and Soc. commends this teaching to his interlocutors who if I recall correctly say little to nothing in skepticism of this. Wish I could put my finger on it, dang it.
Anyhow, it might be worth consulting the history of a people who placed honor with suicide, like the Japanese for one such people, in order to see why the act doesn’t run away with lives all willy-nilly like. Gotta think that there wouldn’t be honor in that, right? So that even where custom demands suicide, it also forbids it where it isn’t right?
We too have some remnant-ish cases, as for instance the captain expected to go down with his ship, if that were ever so. There seems to be an element of ultimate responsibility-taking in business like this.
I imagine that the Japanese were somewhat informed by the practices we later saw in full expression in Nanking, sdferr.
Better to die as your own master than just getting beheaded by some random asshole after you lost.
The operative concept where honor suicide exists is honor. If you can get that ingrained strongly enough, the rules for who, when and why are easy.
Would it be a bad death to kill yourself before jihadis were able to film your beheading for their own purposes?
I’d say not.
Of course, placing that high a value on honor can have its downside…
Would it be a bad death to kill yourself before jihadis were able to film your beheading for their own purposes?
I’d say not.
The IDF has had to confront this question recently regarding their Hannibal doctrine. Seems the question is somehow reopened, such that new evaluations may be made.
I’m loath to go very far regarding the origins of the Japanese ways, but nevertheless will venture that it has appeared to me that the origin of their ritualized suicide lay in the question of doing justice entire. In a sense, this might be expressed as a means of escaping the characterization of human beings as the animals that like to have their cake and eat it. We see this thing in the rules of golf, I think, which require the player to call his own infractions on himself.
That would be another example of the actual choices that people are sometimes faced with.
If I was being dragged off by savages to be tortured and killed on camera for degenerates to watch on their version of youtube then, yeah, lob in a few mortar rounds.
I’d fault the Japanese in the social sense of the practice because it’s my understanding the practice is most often carried out from a sense of displacement from the social body. In which case, fuck the social body.
In the military sense, where you’re just gonna be beheaded by a local warlord? Fuck that local warlord, let him behead some other villager to show off to his fascist hangers-on.
I’m a bit of an American, I suppose.
Nuts, I say.
It’s the difficulty I have with criticism of the development of feudal Japan that made me partially resist that choice of example. I don’t know much about it, is the main thing, outside that there was such a thing, it came about somehow, and lasted with some marginal stability for a very long time. This isn’t to say the period or ways were good for aye and all, but from my ignorant point of view it’s to say practically nothing about it, save perhaps that “there was this thing” or “there were these ways”, and all of that recognizably human.
I don’t doubt the practice was internally consistent with their tradition or that I’m a bit ignorant of the practice entirely.
But… I really have no problem saying that many, many, many internally consistent traditions are not to my way of thinking and are sorta dismissive of the independent spirit that jas allowed great Americans to dodge out of dishonor in Philadelphia and create a new life west of the Mississippi.
On further consideration, I might have hold of an example meant to describe the Japanese’ abandonment of the tail-end of their old ways, at a time when those older ways were already long out of practice. The instance I’m thinking of is the focus of the Kawabata novel The Master of Go.
That’s really the problem with all these uptight honor traditions. It’s stifling. There are no cars. No chance to start again after a fuck-up in front of earlier friends and family.
Go west young man. Get away from that time you puked on your prom date and crashed your dad’s car. Start again.
America, fuck yeah!
I’m sort joking maybe. Not sure really.
Joking and not joking fits though, both. Something big changed. Very big. We have airconditioners. They didn’t. But our puzzle is what we lost in the bargain.
There are people “being talked off the ledge” everyday. I don’t get the offense taken at suggesting it can be done.
Nobody suggests that people cannot be talked off the ledge. In fact, the only way some people can get off the ledge is if someone gives enough of a shit to do the talking.
Other people have been talked off the ledge over and over and over and yet they keep ending up staring over the edge. After awhile, they make sure no one’s around to talk them down.
Yes, there should be a stigma.
I’m pretty sure the self-preservation instinct located deep in our lizard brains is sufficient stigma.
I’d recommend “please for the love of God don’t off yourself we’d miss you like crazy” to displaying the bodies of suicides, naked, in the town square, pour encourager les autres. Which they did in Europe, back in the day.
“You are loved” vs. “we’ll defile your corpse and make your family yearn for death”
I hope it’s clear which one concords best with scripture and human decency.
it has appeared to me that the origin of their ritualized suicide lay in the question of doing justice entire.
The captain of that Korean ferry that drowned all those kids killed himself, probably as a form of atonement.
And to expunge his own shame, no doubt. I’d want to disappear from life if I were responsible for all those deaths, too.
I’m sorta hoping I haven’t come across as someone arguing for the latter actions, di.
If a sense of stigma is in the head of person thinking about the act then maybe they hold out through that depressive cycle. Maybe that helps. I know that one of the things you do mention to a suicidal person is how there are people in their life who will greatly miss them. That’s the soft sell of this very same stigma.
After the act? Then it’s pure sympathy. There is no hope of discouraging the act anymore. Then it’s just time to be nice to the family.
I reckon it’s a bit like having a depressed friend asking if you’d look after their dog if they weren’t around anymore.
There’s a difference between telling that person you’d just put that dog to sleep if they weren’t around to look after it and actually doing that same thing if it came to that.
Of course you’d take that dog in even if it made you cry a couple times a week. You still mention though that no one would be around to look after their fluffy, big-eyed, tail-wagging mutt.
“If a sense of stigma is in the head of person thinking about the act then maybe they hold out through that depressive cycle. ”
“Stigma” means “outcast.” Social disapproval. “If you do this, you’re a bad person.”
Stigma doesn’t stop you from offing yourself, so why should it stop anyone else? You don’t kill yourself because you’re terrified of dying, the way we’re all programed to be.
The thought of being hit by a train or falling off a cliff or being set on fire makes us recoil in horror, too. Those people who jump off the Golden Gate and halfway down say “oh shit” because their lizard brain MUST.
Depressives already hate themselves for being worthless and bad, believe themselves to be hated by society, and are already in hell now, so how much worse could Beelzebub’s reign be? So all those supposed “disincentives” don’t exactly work.
As for people who suicide for reasons other than mental illness, I have no idea whether social stigma would affect them. Sociopaths who check out to avoid justice definitely wouldn’t be deterred by stigma, and frankly, any sociopath who wants to off himself should be ENCOURAGED to put himself down like the rabid dog he is.
People get really nervous about “encouraging” suicide by not denouncing it enough.
Asking people to “please stay” seems a better way.
I reckon it’s a bit like having a depressed friend asking if you’d look after their dog if they weren’t around anymore.
My grandma, well into her 90s and failing, was anxious about the welfare of her cat. My aunt and uncle promised to feed her.
No sooner was grandma in the rest home, non compos mentis, than the kitty preceded her across the veil.
We don’t feel bad about it at all. The cat hated everyone except her, and we reckon she’d be glad enough to see the kitty again that she’d forgive us.
I mean, she’s in heaven, right? She has to forgive us. :D
I’m sorta hoping I haven’t come across as someone arguing for the latter actions, di.
The morons at AoSHQ were hotly insistent on “holding people accountable” for their wicked, selfish choice. Meaning you don’t mourn for people who suicide, you curse them for their evil act.
For centuries, Christianity taught that suicide is the Unforgivable Sin (when actually it’s blasphemy against the Holy Ghost). I’ve no doubt that formulation was intended to discourage suicide by threatening people with eternal hell with on Get Out Of Jail Free card ever ever again.
Some Christians still teach this in their churches to this day, despite its absence from scripture.
But like the Divine Right of Kings, making something sound scriptural is enough to manipulate the rubes.
“Stigma doesn’t stop you from offing yourself, so why should it stop anyone else? You don’t kill yourself because you’re terrified of dying, the way we’re all programed to be.”
Horseshit. Anyone contemplating suicide sees dying as an easy out, it’s living that is terrifying. And anyone that pulls back from the act does it not through selfish fear of death but selfless fear of what your act would do to loved ones.
Been my experience anyway.
“I’m pretty sure the self-preservation instinct located deep in our lizard brains is sufficient stigma.”
I’m pretty sure it’s not.
““You are loved” vs. “we’ll defile your corpse and make your family yearn for death”
You are being an ass.
My what a long way the Overton Window has shifted since right thinking people believed Kevorkian a monster.
I am no expert on Japanese history, but from what I’ve gleaned from works like Shogun and 47 Ronin, seppuku was only allowed to the Samurai class, and only then if allowed (or ordered) by their Lord. The lower classes were not worthy of the honor.
““You are loved” vs. “we’ll defile your corpse and make your family yearn for death”
Sorry, I gotta revisit this crap.
No one is saying that. More like “you were loved, but you left your bloated, shit stained corpse dangling in your house where any one of your family could find it.”
Williams is the one that defiled his God given life and hurt his family, and it was an ugly thing to do.
“For centuries, Christianity taught that suicide is the Unforgivable Sin (when actually it’s blasphemy against the Holy Ghost) […] Some Christians still teach this in their churches to this day, despite its absence from scripture.” [my bold]
Ah, noooo. It’s right there smack dab in the middle of the ten commandments. Thou shalt not murder.
After all of this back-and-forth on the subject of episodic suicide, I must conclude that anyone attempting to find a logical answer for an illogical act is not acting logically. There’s cases made for approving suicide as a reasonable alternative to extreme pain to be followed by certain death; cases where a suicide is defined as a noble gesture (Japanese society seems to have inherited these ‘trickle-down’ noble suicides more than any culture: g00gle ‘charcoal briquettes’ and / or ‘salary man’, Japan + suicide) .
Crazy suicides, like seemingly RW’s, are simply illogical and must be treated as outlier. No matter Parkinson’s, lawsuits over genital wart transmissions, and the bevy of divorced honeys and their attendant lawyers needing drying cash resources, his decision was his own to make, and no one knows or can possibly know exactly what was squirming in his braincase when he grabbed the belt.
All logic was gone from his mind by then. RIP, Robin, is all that’s left to say.
Stories of suicides
For me, it’s unusual to be truly bothered or affected by the death of someone such as a celebrity that you don’t know personally or have any real connection to .
But sometimes you are affected. The death of Karen Carpenter bothered me. So does the death of Robin Williams.
May you now find the peace that eluded you in life, Robin.