

Ask HN: Please stop tearing each other up. - jacquesm

I am beginning to believe that one of the unintended casualties of Aarons' passing is that HN is dying as well. I've never seen such a rift in the community as what is happening right now.<p>Can we please all stop this before there is no turning back? I understand the need to grieve, this is for sure not an easy time for any of us but the amount of hate-mongering that is happening right now is really beyond the pale. Please stop. Really.<p>edit: those flagging this: You really have to wonder what it is that you're trying to achieve here.
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anigbrowl
I think the Techcrunch article (top for much of today) is unhelpful. There's a
vast gulf between aaronsw asking for help with the costs of a predictable, if
improbable, legal defense that several people (including myself) felt he
brought upon himself, and the implicit (via hindsight) suggestion that aaronsw
was asking for the help needed to stave off suicidal behavior.

I think it's most unfair to conflate a person's legal and psychological
problems as this headline does, and equally unfair to single out a
contemporary critical comment from a HN participant as if that participant's
skepticism about the merits of Aaronsw's hacktivism were made with an
understanding of his psychological fragility. Both the original comment and
this story make the mistake of assuming the worst about their subject, but
there's a wide qualitative difference between peer-peer commentary on a
message board and pseudo-objective commentary on a commercial news site.

As someone with a few suicidal episodes of my own, I can easily see how the
stress of Aaronsw's socio-legal situation could have been a contributing
factor to his suicide. However, the suicidal impulse is very often an
irrational one and attempting to analyze it rationally often misses the mark
completely and ends with projecting one's own views onto the dead person -
doubly so where the stressors are political rather than personal and the
person's death is widely viewed as an episode of martyrdom.

People are not machines, and policy issues (administrative, legislative and
judicial) do not operate in mechanistic fashion. It would be a more tractable
and perhaps even a better world if people were as clear and consistent as
computers, but they're not. Often, we end up attacking each other as a poor
proxy for attacking a problem.

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anigbrowl
_a predictable, if improbable, legal defense_

Reading this later, it sounds as if I'm critiquing his defense case. What I
meant to say was that while there was a low probability of a major
prosecution, it was predictable that such a thing _might_ happen. I haven't
read _any_ of the defense briefs and have no opinion on what his legal defense
would have been.

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jusben1369
I'd like folks to stop posting every conceivable article written on it. I've
cut back my visits since it happened as the home page is dominated by Aaron's
stories.

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deevus
Agreed. Aaron's passing is a tragedy, but the inundation of articles covering
the same thing over and over is getting tiresome.

I understand people need to grieve, but I don't think Hacker News is the place
to do it?

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lilfrost
What rift are you speaking of?

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Mz
Out of respect for this request, I have posted an article (confession: my own
blog post) which has nothing to do with Aaron Swartz or suicide.
Unfortunately, my writings are generally of little to no interest to people
here and I have no talent for finding stuff that would be of interest. But my
experience is that getting people to talk about something else is generally
the best way to move on. So if you wish to support this request, please post
something on another topic, which has more hope of drawing interest than
anything I ever post.

