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Aaron Swartz commits suicide

tech.mit.edu

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Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#241

Post by pretoriusB »

icelancer wrote: post #180
daeken wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's suffered from mental illness for most of his life, I disagree. While I have things largely under control these days, it had nothing to do with the professional help that was offered/forced on me; in fact, it was a huge impediment. Receiving help is not a panacea, and I can't blame anyone who's dealt with it for a long time for completely lacking hope. I don't think suicide is the answer, but I can at…

Absolutely. The idea that all suicides can be prevented "if only he would have gotten help" is such a trite and simple answer to a complex question. Other comments like "What a waste" and "This didn't need to happen" are borderline insulting. Whether someone realizes it or not, those are incredibly disrespectful comments.

>I have no illusion that therapy is magically going to stop all suicides.

I think the very existence of "professional therapy" is a factor in FAVOR of depression and suicide.

It means that as a society we have compartmentalised social life, so that the help one previously expected from his family/friends (and ultimately: from the way he can structure his life) is now to be had from paid professionals (or tacky volunteers).

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#242

Post by jacquesm »

jacques_chester wrote: post #217
jacquesm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took these to be part of the DOJ: "The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter." So it's not as if anybody outside the govern…

Prosecutors can usually act on their own initiative. It's because of the historical legal concept that an offence against a person is really an offence against the Crown. So the Crown takes a legal monopoly on force and logically, this means that the Crown gets to decide what to pursue. The USA inherited this concept from England. What I was trying to say above is that a prosecutor's goal is to prosecute as many case…

As you can see I'm not a firm believer in the 'this is my job so I do what I'm told' concept.

Everybody - including prosecutors - gets to decide what they do for themselves. If your job is so repugnant that you go after good people you have to question your own morality. Just following orders isn't good enough for me.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#243

Post by jacquesm »

wheels wrote: post #240
jacquesm wrote: post #159

Man this so sucks. If you hit someone with enough felony counts sooner or later something can snap. This in response to those that claim the DOJ didn't have anything to do with Aaron killing himself. For some people the mere fact of being suspected of a crime they didn't commit is enough to push them over the edge. When you're placed in a holding cell the police will remove your laces from your boots so you don't han…

It really rubs me the wrong way when something like this happens and folks jump to conclusions as you have here. You didn't know this person. For all we know he could have not given two shits about the whole legal process and this is linked to family or relationship problems or long term general depression.

> You didn't know this person.

That's an assumption on your part.

And this was in response to people jumping to completely different conclusions, for instance that these things are not related at all. I wouldn't be so quick to make that call.

Maybe you feel like arguing this line with his mom? : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5047398

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#244

Post by corporalagumbo »

jacques_chester wrote: post #231
corporalagumbo wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not your job to give this sort of advice to people here. It's not some sort of mental disfigurement to think about these things you know. He and everyone else has the right to explore and experience unhappiness. And anyway, by fixating on a peripheral detail of his post you derail the conversation and force him into a rather supplicatory posture. Not cool.

There's a difference between unhappiness and depression.

Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. I fail to see the relevance. The real issue here I would say is that you seem to have worked yourself up into a bit of a soul-saving frenzy, but your efforts are misplaced and frankly not appreciated. You seem not to realise that Hackernews is by and large a community of smart, stable, motivated and successful people, rather than a casualty ward for self-imploding depressives.

I would suggest you shift your efforts to a forum where people are actually starkly discussing hopelessness and self-destruction, rather than just briefly mentioning completely normal moments of weakness, and might even appreciate your help. For example, http://boards.4chan.org/r9k/. Enjoy.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#245

Post by alan_cx »

rohamg wrote: post #211
jacques_chester wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Context certainly matters. Depressed people are not perfectly rational agents. By the time you are contemplating suicide, it's not even close. And depression is a factor in almost every suicide. Depression is insidious because it makes all the alternatives to suicide seem much more difficult than they actually are.

This is right. I'm shocked at the "suicide apologists" in this thread.

I'm shocked at "life bullies".

Which lets face it is a Christian rule, and not applicable to all people.

I would like to die right now. I'm just too cowardly. There is no simple switch to do it quickly and painlessly. No way to stop others being upset. No way to stop others discovering something that may scar them. I do not wish to mess up others.

Why? I simply do not belong. I don't understand the human race at all, or the world that has been created. I want to leave, assuming I was ever part of it in the first place, which I don't think I was. Certainly not now. I want to shed my human slavery.

This is rational. It, for me, is not a label like "depression". It a conclusion based on my observation and experience. I willingly concede that others may well be different. How ever, many may not be able or willing to express it, especially given the amount of disdain and patronisation fired carelessly at people who feel this way, by people's knee jerk, ill-considered "opinion".

If you reply, be careful. Its too easy to be arrogant, ignorant and judgemental. Its too easy to trot out the usual tired incorrect tropes. Hearing or reading them just confirms conclusion.

Counselling? Don't make me laugh. I seen a few, none had anything to say. Nothing I had not already considered. Last one I tried packed it in after I left her with no where to go and she realised her profession was at best cosmetic. And that is all people have to offer, well, that or drugs. Oh yeah, be drugged up. That solves it all. Well, it might for people with things like chemical imbalances, but they do nothing by put thinkers to sleep.

Right now? I'm just waiting for it to all end peacefully, or at least quickly.

Sorry if this doesn't fit. But then, neither do I.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#246

Post by pretoriusB »

gfunk911 wrote: post #154
paraschopra wrote: post #141

It's easy to deride suicide but fact of the matter is that it is the final but a very powerful option we have at our disposal. Instead of saying that a particular person should not have committed suicide, our hope should be that if a suicide happens, it is well thought through and is not done in haste. If a particular person decides that decades of painful life is much worse than simply ending the existence, who are…

You made me think. The idea that I have the option to end it makes life more bearable. Give it your best go and reevaluate.

As Nietzsche put it: "The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night."

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#247

Post by stiff »

paraschopra wrote: post #141

It's easy to deride suicide but fact of the matter is that it is the final but a very powerful option we have at our disposal. Instead of saying that a particular person should not have committed suicide, our hope should be that if a suicide happens, it is well thought through and is not done in haste. If a particular person decides that decades of painful life is much worse than simply ending the existence, who are…

It seems to me that in majority of cases suicide is simply the final symptom of a mental illness that was not or could not be treated and in that the situation is not that different from one in which someone dies for example from cancer. I don't think anyone is really saying that "he should not have committed suicide", what would that even mean really anyway, but it's OK to be sad that we don't always know how to more effectively help people in such cases.

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#248

Post by pretoriusB »

aneth4 wrote: post #49
alrs wrote: post #7

Fuck this country. EDIT: The guy was facing 13 felony counts for downloading academic articles.

Understandable emotion, but the country did not kill him. He did that. You can disagree with the laws of the land, protest them, even violate them in protest assuming you are willing to pay the consequences. You can blame the country, its politicians, or its voters for having bad laws. You can't blame those entities for this suicide. That was his choice, and it's unfortunate he will not be around to make his case.

>Understandable emotion, but the country did not kill him. He did that.

This idea is quite an easy cop out, isn't it?

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#249

Post by auggierose »

Here is a thing you can do: Boycott JSTOR from now on. And refuse to publish to any journal / conference that demands $10 or more for downloading a paper that should be free (if you are not that lucky to have access to a subscription of that journal / conference).

Re: Aaron Swartz commits suicide

#250

Post by kzar »

tricolon wrote: post #219

I never met Aaron Swartz but always wanted to. His work has had a profound impact on my life. His blog was thought-provoking. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ His work on the RSS 1.0 Specification enabled richer, more efficient information consumption. http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/spec His work on Markdown enabled intuitive, unobtrusive formatting and structuring of information in plaintext and conversion to HTML. h…

Nicely put, reading through your list I realise I've used half of it too! What a waste :(
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