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Comment by Timpy | Hacker News Reader

Imagine feeling completely one with nature, making your position clear that this is where and how you would like to die. The time comes for you to wrestle with your mortality, you've worked for 30 years to do it with dignity. You've rejected man's system, because you know it's not right for you, and in your final moments it comes for you, steals you away, and forces you back into the machine. This isn't a morally imperative prevention of suicide. Mr. Nagasaki should be left alone.

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Imagine some mentally ill person decides he wants to be at one with nature on your property...

There's two (or more) sides to everything. The people who own the island have the legal right to kick him out. I get your perspective but if he really wants to get back to nature he should find a place where he is welcome to do so.

EDIT: For all the people asking about the details of the property owners asking him to leave, read the article linked in the next top level comment by doall.

From reading this article I didn't get the impression the owners of the property were at issue with him. I assume that wasn't the case, this narrative certainly was not "30 year pest finally eradicated from beach front."

I made brief comment on what I believe the other side of the story would be; he was sick (suspected flue) and modern medicine could heal him. In most cases I would consider that a moral imperative, as in "it is wrong if you don't do it." But according to the information presented in this article, healing an 82 year old man of the flu is not assuring him any quality of life. Consider it a "Do Not Resuscitate" order. Plenty of elderly have DNRs and have made their wishes clear; they want to die at home.

edit: article posted by doall apparently explaining he was attracting unwanted tourism to what is private property, it's in Japanese: https://www.dailyshincho.jp/article/2015/12090710/?all=1

There's another comment here in the article explaining the reason he was removed was at the request of the people who owned the property.

Easier to remove him while he is alive. If he died there it would create issues for the owners probably.

if he died there why would you remove him?

If this happened in the US, it's likely that the island would be /his/ property under adverse possession law: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/adverse-possession-t...

Adverse possession must be adverse to the original owner's title. If the owners knew he lived there and tolerated him and otherwise made use of the land, then his presence wasn't adverse. See, e.g.,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession#Hostile_pos...

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession#Exclusive_u...

mentally ill person

How did you discover Mr. Nagasaki has a mental ailment?

I wouldn’t jump the gun on that. OP was clearly trying to create a worse case scernaio so that a reader may see the story from the perspective of a land owner vs the first comment which while a beautiful sentiment doesn’t really take practicalities like liability into consideration.

Finally, someone creating a scenario so we can see things from the much-neglected perspective of a land owner.

Okay. Fine.

Still doesn't explain how we, or ebbv at least-knows the gentleman has a mental condition. That seems-in the absence of anything confirming so in the article-to be an incredibly uncharitable assumption because the man has chosen a lifestyle us in the 21st century would be inclined to "other"-ize for no good and justifiable reason.

Arbitrarily defining someone as mentally ill in order to take away their chosen way life is an age old strawman.

That's not what the term "strawman" means. What you mean is it's an excuse used to oppress people, and that may be true but you'd have to give supporting cases. (Certainly it has been the case for LGBTQ people being oppressed in the past, even currently in some countries.)

Mental illness is also a real thing and a real problem, and people with serious problems who need medication often live outside the bounds of normal society. But that issue is not going to be solved here, and I think it's a distraction from the actual topic because the reality is he was on other people's property where he wasn't welcome.

I think they're describing your applying a mental disorder to someone when there's no evidence of that anywhere in the article-to justify your position against the comment you responded to-as being a strawman.

Because it is.

First word of the sentence was "imagine" my dude.

Yeah no the problem with that is that it's adding a variable to this discussion that does not apply, is not relevant and begs an arbitrary emotional response based on a hypothetical mental health problem-when mental health has been used for quite a long time as an excuse to deny people their rights to life and land.

I'm not going to play 'let's pretend' and step around how ugly your hypothetical is, "my dude".

Ok then ignore that part of my comment it doesn't change much.

Anybody wanting to live on your property, whatever their reasons, who you didn't invite there, is probably not gonna be ok with most people.

"find a place where he is welcome to do so."

These places are disappearing rapidly from the map. There's very little wild country left, and at the rate economic growth is going, there probably wont be any left in several decades.

It also sounds to me like the same rhetoric applied to unwanted immigrants. We don’t care about the circumstances, go somewhere else!

It’s cold and heartless.

>Imagine some mentally ill person decides he wants to be at one with nature on your property...

Imagine some mentally ill person decides he doesn't want to be one with nature on/as your property.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania

> mentally ill

Ah, and what is health? We use this term to talk about physical health (infections, disease, cancer), mental health and also habits (eating healthy, or playing video games all day isn't healthy).

This starts to get really ambiguous. You're now applying societal standards, maybe throwing a little happiness index in there ...

We don't see living alone in solitude as healthy. Yet this man claims to be find after decades, with pretty minimal human interaction. What is health? What even is his identity?

If everyone made his decisions, humanity would cease to reproduce and exist? Is that were our baseline is? Homosexuality was in the DSM as a mental health condition. We treat anorexia as a mental disorder to be treated, as we do body integrity disorder, but we support gender reassignment surgery, even though they are all forms of body dymorphism.

I ask again, what is health?

Health, like beauty, is averages. If you take a group of people and average them, the resulting person is very likely considered pretty and healthy.

https://leadingpersonality.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/avera...

https://leadingpersonality.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/average-...

There are evolutionary reasons for preferring averages. And the further you deviate from average behavior, the bigger the risk you run.

So health and rightness and validity are a popularity contest? On average, a lot of people do a lot of things that I am happy to be deviant from. A lot of people eat at McDonalds and bury themselves in credit and loan debt. That overwhelming popularity does not all by itself constitute validity.

But "mental health" also implies specific value judgements which are relative to the dominant ideology of a society or civilization. It's these value judgements that determine how the "averages" or the data in general, is interpreted.

For example, if you lived in the middle ages and you were a radical atheist, no doubt that under that system of education and propaganda, you would have been deemed by that society to be "mentally ill" (or similar contemporary equivalent).

The charge of "mental illness" or psychological pathology in general, has throughout history been weaponized to isolate and/or suppress politically incorrect or heretical ideas that run totally counter to the prevailing world-views.

The fact that you equate wanting to be alone in nature with mental illness highlights how fucked up we have become as a society.

> on your property...

What property? It's an island in the middle of nowhere. Nobody owns jack squat.

Humans are so arrogant.

That's a perfect explanation of the problem with being able to monopolize land.

>> making your position clear that this is where and how you would like to die.

Have a good think about how that death will actually go down. This isn't falling asleep in a field of flowers. Say you have a stroke. Then follows days, weeks, of confusion and fear as you rot away on the ground. Or say you fall and break a bone. That's weeks of pain as you wait for the infection to kill you. On anywhere other than an island a predator would eventually come along to quicken the inevitable.

This seems to be a controversial post (getting upvotes and downvotes). But for the downvoters, also consider that his decision to remain isolated is a current one, but not necessarily an indefinite one.

He may come down with any illness or condition that causes him to change his mind at any point, but no longer in a condition to do anything about it. There are certain conditions that modern civilization makes coping with considerably easier, and it’s plausible that he would chose that over his current surroundings, but no longer able to change his surroundings.

That’s the question that keeps coming to my mind.

So you, random person on the internet, are better suited at truly evaluating his wishes than himself?

Maybe not, but a "random person" may well one day have to make that decision. Should this guy be injured, and that injury be made known to others, those others will have to decide how to handle the situation. When any of us become ill, ill to the point of not being able to sustain our own lives, outsiders take control. We wouldn't let a dog die in the woods with a broken hip. If this man broke his hip, rescue services would go in and remove him. We don't let people die horrible deaths no matter how much they may want to.

So the alternative is you have a stroke and get rushed to a hospital. Get pumped with meds and IV lines. Then follows days, weeks or years of suffering in silence in a place you didn't want to be in the first place.

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