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At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

nytimes.com

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Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#61

Post by [deleted] »

voxic11 wrote: post #56
mrkramer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The Horizon IT system contained "hundreds" of bugs[0]." If your accounting software has hundreds of bugs then you are really in the deep shit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~...

But it was the decision to gaslight and charge the postmasters with crimes that caused the suicides, not the bugs in the code. If they had just admitted that the accounting issues were due to bugs in the system then I really doubt anyone would have committed suicide.

[deleted]

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#62

Post by closewith »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #53
closewith wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British legal system is and always has been a litany of injustices dressed up in formal attire. To be avoided at all costs.

That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world. IMO common law is still better than case law at least.

> That mess inspired the American legal system though, which is probably one of if not the best in the world.

Poe's Law strikes again.

The American legal system isn't even the best legal system in the US.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#63

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

CrazyStat wrote: post #55
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade: The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand. The person is dead either way. There's literally no way…

What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?

I don't have a big issue with that particular phrase itself. Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here. Attributing a suicide to anyone other than the actor starts to appear oxymoronic very quickly. Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.

But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.

People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#64

Post by lou1306 »

xbryanx wrote: post #38
mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

> please don't say they died by suicide I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_terminology#%22Committ... https://www.iasp.info/languageguidelines/

I think they are saying that the current title ("people died ... amid scandal") muddies the water when it comes to the causal relation, arguably "people were led to suicide by baseless accusations" _might_ be a more faithful descriptor of who's at fault here, but I understand journalists don't want to risk being sued (and neither do I, hence my use of _might_)

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#65

Post by mrkramer »

voxic11 wrote: post #60
mrkramer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea management failed but wouldn't the most logical thing be to call in computer forensics experts and quality test the software, reverse engineering it and try to catch the bugs. This wasn't the classic case of financial fraud, this was all about faulty software.

The Post Office management knew about the bugs but didn't want to take the blame for the accounting issues they caused (since it was management that purchased and approved the software some blame would have fallen on them).

Fujitsu was all to blame, after all they created and maintained the software. It just blows my mind why would courts pursue the individuals and not the creator of the software, when they realized that this mess was widespread and not isolated.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#66

Post by SirFatty »

RandomBacon wrote: post #18
SirFatty wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. " That's a really odd take.

> odd take It's not odd when the sentiment is widespread, for example, look at the other comments in this thread that talk about it.

Oh, well if everyone else is parroting it, then it must be correct.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#67

Post by vanderZwan »

xbryanx wrote: post #38
mike_hearn wrote: post #8

To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…

> please don't say they died by suicide I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_terminology#%22Committ... https://www.iasp.info/languageguidelines/

I suspect the point was that they were driven to suicide. As in pushed into a corner by external, human forces.

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#68

Post by imtringued »

rwmj wrote: post #59
cedws wrote: post #34

The failing is as much with the court as it is with Fujitsu. Why did they blindly accept Horizon’s data as evidence? What if the computer said the Queen stole all the money and ran off to Barbados, would they have thrown her in jail? Why was the output of a black box, which may as well have been a notebook Fujitsu could have written anything they wanted into, treated as gospel?

The actual answer to this is terrible. Courts had to trust the computer was correct. There was a common law presumption that a computer was operating correctly unless there is evidence to the contrary (and getting that evidence is basically impossible for the individuals being charged who were post office workers, not computer experts, and the source code was a trade secret). This might change, partly in response to…

The emperor has no clothes. Oxford is the worlds AI Safety research hub and yet they didn't think about campaigning to overturn a law which negates their entire reason for existing?

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#69

Post by reliabilityguy »

CrazyStat wrote: post #55
tjwebbnorfolk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade: The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand. The person is dead either way. There's literally no way…

What makes “committed suicide” any more plain or honest than “died by suicide”?

Because the latter implies some external attribute to it?

Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

#70

Post by arp242 »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #20
XCabbage wrote: post #6

[flagged]

“Died by suicide” is not new. I heard it 30 years ago as a kid. Many, many professional organizations use clinical language around suicide because it’s always been a sensitive topic. You also see this everywhere in when people use euphemism instead of saying it directly.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Died+by+suicid...

Bloody woke libtards in Victorian era!

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