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Comment by CrazyPyroLinux | Hacker News Reader

> (apparent) suicide

The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...

My ex killed herself not long after telling me she wasn't suicidal. This may surprise you, but suicidal people often lie about being suicidal. Or, they rapidly go from not being suicidal to being so. Or, due to mental illness, they've lost a grip on reality.

This is a little different, he literally said to his friend, "I ain't scared but if anything happens to me it's not suicide."

Not leaning either way, but there was a famous case about a lawyer in Guatemala who recorded a video message claiming he wasn't suicidal and that the government was out to kill him. He was killed days later and the video was released. The country was (briefly) thrown in to turmoil. A few days later it came out that he had ordered a hit on himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Rosenberg_Marzano

I'd never considered a technique to strengthen your argument. Put in that light -- it makes it more plausible.

Wasn't there an old movie about this scenario? Guy orders a hit on himself, decides actually he wants to live?

That article is an absolute hodgepodge of statements and retractions, but the same hitman appears to have also killed the laywer's clients, who were causing problems for the regime. That seems like pretty strong evidence that it wasn't a suicide by hitman, unless the lawyer also had his own clients killed?

He was also in the middle of testifying against the company that had made his life hell for years. That is a rather strange time to kill yourself.

I don’t know, it was presumably extremely stressful. Extremely stressful events or when a lot of people kill them themselves.

I don’t really have a strong opinion on this particular instance one way or another. It seems unlikely to me that even Boeing is like hiring hitman to whack people and make it look like suicide, and that seems much more unlikely than a guy who was about to commit suicide saying he wasn’t going to make it look that way.

But also, it is not impossible. People have undoubtedly killed for a lot less money than what this stuff is costing Boeing.

> I don’t know, it was presumably extremely stressful. Extremely stressful events or when a lot of people kill them themselves.

Or sometimes to attack the people who made their lives extremely stressful. Or someone who works for them. Or commit arson. But somehow that's not what we are observing

Perhaps he viewed Boeing’s malfeasance as killing people. It did. And it was a clever form of martyrdom. That’s not exactly 3D chess, it’s just thinking one move ahead.

I really have no idea. I just don’t think we can say definitively that he didn’t kill himself because he said he would not.

Mental health is not a logical thing. Try telling someone who's in their darkest moments to just look on the bright side. It doesn't work.

That’s why it always cracks me up (in a sad way) when people tell someone suffering an anxiety attack to just calm down, or someone depressed to cheer up. Like oh, why didn’t I think of that? Thanks genius!

Telling someone you're not suicidal and then committing suicide sounds more like she was depressed and people worried about her and she wanted to calm people by telling them she won't commit suicide.

The wisleblower of a worldwide famous controversial airplane company didn't seem suicidal or depressed, and then he says if he hits the news that he commuted suicide it's not.

That's 2 completely different situations that you can't really compare.

You can compare any two things. Abraham Lincoln is taller than a turtle.

I wasn’t equating the two, just pointing out that suicidal people are not in their right mind and thus their word cannot be taken at face value. Perhaps he did the sequence of events we’re discussing specifically so that we’d be saying it can’t be suicide. He was, after all, trying to take Beoing down right? Maybe he viewed it as a worthy way to give his life.

I’m not saying that’s the case, I surely have no idea, just that it very well could be.

It just doesn't make sense to me that someone would commit suicide with the idea that people would think that he was murdered by a company you want to expose. That's just a ridiculous idea. Yes it's an idea and a possibility, but yeah it's very very unlikely I would say, so unlikely that it's not worth considering too much. Because it highly probably didn't happen like that, because it doesn't make sense, it doesn't add up. It's not a good theory. Even if it's a possibility.

People that commit suicide is because they stopped caring about their life. They won't have any side goals for their death, they won't care about taking down a company. Especially not if that covers up the truth of them being fed up with this world which would be the only message they would want to leave behind.

If someone really wants to take a company down, they would do stuff for that, not commit suicide with the idea that you might have blamed them for it without having assurance, and with the risk of being remembered as someone who faked their suicide in order to harm a company. It just really doesn't make logical sense to me.

As if taking down Boeing is more important than your own life. Who would have such logic?

>The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...

This game of telephone is absurd.

His family has said no such thing. A proclaimed "friend of the family" claimed he told her this.

If only mental health were that simple. Many people aren't suicidal until it gets too much and then the thoughts take over

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