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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

Regrettably this behavior appears to be protected by the first amendment, unless suicide itself is made illegal (as it used to be in many jurisdictions). A law criminalizing such behavior in Minnesota was reversed at appeal: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/03/19/encouraging-suicide-isnt... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Francis_Melchert-Dinkel

I can't politely express my opinion about people like this.

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> Regrettably this behavior appears to be protected by the first amendment,

Good. Free speech is far too important to restrict based on the actions of a few assholes.

The best thing about free speech is that it lets us identify assholes easily.

To paraphrase a popular movie / meme, "You're not a criminal, you're just an asshole".

Should they go kill themselves? Funny that the mental failings of the jumper evoke such sympathy and the mental failings of the "asshole" evoke such hatred.

the asshole isn't killing himself/herself.

There's a significant qualitative difference between someone being self-destructive (albeit with traumatic consequences for those who are connected to them) and engineering the destruction of someone else.

There may be mental failings involved which are outside the control of the individual, but I don't think that's the whole story or we'd have to throw the idea of moral agency out the window (I picked the example I did because the person neither appeared nor claimed to suffer cognitive impairment AFAIK). We are actors as well as being acted upon by our environment and biology; insofar as our activities impact others, we have some responsibility to regulate them.

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