The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years

Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by afterburner on Saturday September 30, 2023 @06:46PM (#37720672)

> When he was told that he was going to be shown films about the second world war, he moved his chair to the very back of the room - only to be disappointed by his first encounter with television and its tiny images.

Lol, expecting a movie theatre, guess he was a back-row guy.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by praisewhitey on Saturday September 30, 2023 @06:58PM (#37720767)

Some more information from the reporting at the time

>He had never learned Russian, and has lived the last 20 years in linguistic isolation after the last other Hungarian patients left the hospital in 1980.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/860033.stm

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by phkahler on Saturday September 30, 2023 @07:07PM (#37720828)

How TF does any institution anywhere keep someone that long and NOT figure out what language they speak and establish communication.

OTOH they didn't find him economically unviable and offer suicide like Canada apparently does...

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by smsm42 on Saturday September 30, 2023 @07:34PM (#37721008)

They don't care. The function of those institutions isn't to heal people, it's to warehouse them where they won't cause trouble, or sometimes punish those who did cause trouble. It's not that expensive if you pay pennies (or kopecks) to the medical personnel, use the cheapest food that could be found and basically run it as a prison, but with pills and syringes.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by elmomle on Saturday September 30, 2023 @07:34PM (#37721010)

Could you offer a citation for that last part?

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by chownie on Saturday September 30, 2023 @08:03PM (#37721179)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada#Controver...

(Filter to sources if that's your inclination)

iirc it's a reference to a receptionist at the veteran's affairs in Canada, it was claimed they offered an assisted suicide kit to a veteran who requested a stair lift -- the VA later investigated and found no record of the offer. Either that or another (never verified, only alleged) case of this same scenario but with a veteran who asked for help with PTSD.

These two anecdotes come up somewhat often on HN, usually vaguely alluded to rather than explicitly called out.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by chupasaurus on Saturday September 30, 2023 @07:31PM (#37720988)

Healthcare system in USSR was `something`, as you can tell.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by jsocuwl on Saturday September 30, 2023 @07:50PM (#37721102)

Ah fuck off, why are you picking on Canada suddenly. It has no relevancy whatsoever to that story.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by ehPReth on Saturday September 30, 2023 @08:05PM (#37721190)

>economically unviable and offer suicide like Canada apparently does...

Hi, Canadian here.

Having asked... 4? different professionals multiple times for MAID and being denied each time it isn't that easy to get if 'you're just mentally ill'. I wish it was, but that's another debate. Sorry to burst your bubble.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by dang on Saturday September 30, 2023 @09:08PM (#37721549)

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37720767.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by dang on Saturday September 30, 2023 @09:09PM (#37721553)

Ok, we've changed the article to that from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma. Thanks!

Submitters: Wikipedia links are fine if there really isn't a more substantial or engaging article about the topic somewhere on the web, but please try to find one first.

Also, please don't editorialize the title. (This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.) The submitted title was "The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years" which is not at all the title of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A1s_Toma.

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by Clamchop on Saturday September 30, 2023 @11:26PM (#37722251)

Not wanting to disagree with mods as it's rarely a good look, but in this case, nobody would know why to (and so probably wouldn't) click through with its original title, and the change doesn't appear to meet the English definition of the word editorialize as it's about as flatly descriptive of the point of interest about this man as you can get.

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Re:The man who did not have a conversation in over 50 years by dang on Saturday September 30, 2023 @11:32PM (#37722288)

You can disagree! We don't hold that against anyone.

Your point is good. There's no set of rules that works every time.

I think the root issue is that the Wikipedia article just wasn't the best submission for this story. There were a number of other articles about Mr. Toma's story on the web. Picking the best of those would have been a better strategy, and then the title issue would most likely have taken care of itself.

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