"Cub Driver" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 04 Jan 2005 03:28:25 GMT, "G.R. Patterson III"
wrote:

Dying from the effects of a disease is hardly self-inflicted.

AIDS is often a lifestyle disease, like lung cancer or cihorris of the
liver, hence self-inflicted.

But when you dismissed the possibility that his death was "self-inflicted",
as you put it (and you subsequently affirmed that you were referring there
to AIDS), you then proposed *instead* of "self-infliction" that "his diet...
and his drug habit" are among the more plausible explanations (as indeed
they are). By what conceivable rationale would an AIDS death be more
"self-inflicted" than a diet- or drug-induced death (*especially* at a time
when the danger of AIDS was *not even known*)?

When pressed, you retreated to a standard of "self-infliction" by which the
vast majority of Americans' deaths would qualify. Clearly, though, you
ordinarily use the term far more selectively, as your original statement
demonstrates.

--Gary