Bright Lights, Big City
Lifted from the comments, it turns out that Transport For London is advertising assisted suicide. They seem to be giving it quite a push:
Westminster Death Tunnel sponsored by @dignityindying pic.twitter.com/fW0mbtqVRc
— Fleur Elizabeth (@fleurmeston) November 25, 2024
Very on-brand, I’d say. Almost too on-the-nose. I mean, if London’s buses and tube network were suddenly to be plastered with huge posters saying END IT ALL NOW, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO, it wouldn’t be entirely inexplicable, or entirely dissonant with the customer experience.
It’s perhaps worth noting that Transport For London has a staff training centre, complete with fake station and platform, and “suicide pits,” where employees learn how to manage what are euphemistically referred to as “passengers taken unwell” or “disruptions to the tube service.” Events that occur on average once or twice a week.
In 2019, staff “intervened” in the self-destructive thoughts of 426 customers deemed “visibly in distress,” “up from 252 in the previous year.”
As EmC quips darkly in reply,
Update, via the comments:
The adverts for assisted suicide are now being partially covered, by persons unknown, with posters for a Samaritans helpline.
Consider this an open thread.
Sooo, they’re saying “Instead of jumping on the tracks and disrupting service, why not avail yourself of this lovely clean method”?
As someone who’s experienced the soul-withering properties of attempts to travel in London – and who would not care to repeat it – there is, I think, an unhappy irony.
It’s also worth noting that TfL, supported by London’s leftist mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been quite eager to forbid adverts on the tube for foods deemed insufficiently healthy and life-affirming, including artisanal cheeses.
Fame at last.
Well, it wasn’t an entirely inapt comment. If I were of a mind to seriously degrade someone’s mental health and make them feel utterly wretched, urging them to live in London would be a pretty good way to do it.
The adverts for assisted suicide are now being partially covered, by persons unknown, with posters for a Samaritans helpline.
[ Post updated. ]
The adverts for assisted suicide are now being partially covered, by persons unknown, with posters for a Samaritans helpline.
Good people – and sane people – still exist.
To be clear, I don’t at the moment have strong feelings on the subject, in principle, in theory. But the location of the adverts – and their sheer density, dozens of them, one after another – in a place where unhappy people regularly hurl themselves onto the tracks – seems a little, um, tone-deaf.
Watching the video above, the experience of walking down a tunnel in which every wall is plastered with repeated invitations to extinguish yourself does strike me as a bit of a downer. A dark irony.
Subliminal message: “If you have to ride public transit, your life really sucks.”
The tube is bad enough as an occasional visitor, a grim novelty experienced for just a day or two. But as something that has to be endured every day, at rush hour, when it’s at its most unpleasant, I think demoralisation would be difficult to avoid.
A thread on the mentally corrosive effects of so-called “diversity training.”
Oh, and That Thing That Never Happens has… well, you know.
Nearly one a week actually commits? I tried to look up comparable stats for NYC subway system. Of course google and now even Perplexity.ai are shit but it appears that for a system that handles 20% more passengers, their numbers were less than half London’s. That was until there was an “alarming increase” to 27 in 2022. Gee, wonder why suicides are increasing in general? I thought leftism taking over the world was supposed to bring us joy? Wonder how such is playing out in Canada, home of the MAID service.