Former Nurse Charged With Aiding Suicides Via Web 168
mernil writes "A former US nurse has been charged with two counts of aiding suicides on the Internet, US officials say. William Melchert-Dinkel, 47, is accused of encouraging the suicides of Mark Drybrough from Coventry, UK, in 2005 and Canada's Nadia Kajouji in 2008. Melchert-Dinkel, from Minnesota, allegedly posed as a female nurse, instructing people in suicide chatrooms how to take their lives. He reportedly admitted helping five or fewer people kill themselves. Some legal experts say it could be difficult to prosecute Melchert-Dinkel under a rarely used law because he allegedly only encouraged the victims to kill themselves, without physically helping them to take their lives."
Ok, so what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Killing yourself is, and should be, an individual's choice. Providing responsible and accurate on how to do it without causing oneself a lot of pain and suffering is a good deed, not a crime.
Re:Ok, so what? (Score:5, Informative)
Except that's not what happened, this guy pretended to be a woman, made fake suicide pacts and actually pressured people to go through with them.
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Except that's not what happened, this guy pretended to be a woman, made fake suicide pacts and actually pressured people to go through with them.
So what you're saying is that this is like The Crying Game [imdb.com] but without the happy ending?
Re:Ok, so what? (Score:5, Informative)
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Parent post makes a telling point. The more so since the the accused had been trained as a nurse, which includes training in using communications skills and presentation of self to alter a patient's mood or self-assessment. In the nursing program I attended this training came under several titles: "therapeutic use of self", "active listening skills", etc. These can be very powerful techniques especially when working with a subject who is in a suggestible state of mind-- and there is definitely a potential f
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Yes, this guy is pretty sick. From the summary I thought this was about assisted suicide of the terminally ill
To be perfectly honest they were terminally ill - mental illness leading to death.
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If you ignore the fact that depression is often treatable. This is like seeing that someone has broken their leg and suggesting euthanasia just because you think it would be cool to see someone die.
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Beautiful too. He helped kill this 18 yr old Canadian girl [google.com]
What kind of sick fuck would say "Hey beautiful girl, you want to die? Let me help you with that..."
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Er, when did beauty come into it? If it had been an ugly person would he have been less of a "sick fuck"- even marginally?
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Of course. Out of the top reasons to off yourself (financial problems, relationship, school/job problems, etc), I'd say "ugly" is one of the better reasons, wouldn't you? Most of those other problems come and go, but "ugly" is pretty much forever. That is one reason I could understand, didn't you learn anything from The Twilight Zone? [youtube.com]
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Not only is it okay, but it's probably one of the best reasons to off yourself.
Out of the top reasons to off yourself (financial problems, relationship, school/job problems, etc), I'd say "ugly" is one of the better reasons, wouldn't you? Most of those other problems come and go, but "ugly" is pretty much forever. That is one reason I could understand.
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I hate how people in the 21st century still think mental diseases are somehow “not real” diseases. And that one would be “physically healthy” and “just depressed”!
Guys, just because you can’t see it, it’s not not real!
Let’s make the Data comparison: If data had short circuits in his positronic brain, causing him to act “all weird”, would you say he is defective, or physically healthy?
Now if those short circuits were software-caused?
The thing
Re:Ok, so what? (Score:5, Interesting)
So now we can't tell some jerk to "drop dead"? (Score:2)
Better not say "Eat shit and die!" either ...
Next up - legal liability for someone going blind because you once told them to "go f*ck yourself" - and they did, over and over.
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It's contextual. Speech doesn't mean anything that is a vocalization. Vocalizations can be speech, or they can be intended to create immediate, injurious actions, bypassing other people's rational cognitive function.
There's nothing wrong with using the word "Fire" but shouting it in a crowded theater is not protected free speech. Similarly, telling somebody to drop dead is generally protected by your right to free speech, sure, but if you go up to somebody standing on a ledge, who is clearly mentally ill and considering suicide and you tell *them* "Drop dead, you worthless sack of shit. Nobody likes you and nobody will care if you are dead", well you are no longer expressing yourself in a manner intended to convey ideas to a rational actor (speech), but rather trying to cause an imminent action that you know will be fatal to another person.
Is there a legal concept of "speech intended to create immediate, injurious actions, bypassing people's rational cognitive function." ?
Re:So now we can't tell some jerk to "drop dead"? (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. At the risk of being tautologous it's either "political campaigning" or "advertising".
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I'm fairly sure that if you walk up behind someone involved in a potentially risky procedure and yell BOO! specifically to cause an accident, you have committed a crime.
Certainly if you "exercise your free speech" to yell FIRE! in a movie theater you can and will be prosecuted.
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> Don't ask me if it's right or wrong. I don't think it's that simple a question, with black and white answers for every case.
Actually it is pretty black and white and very simple: Freedom is about being able to do things that are unpopular and others don't approve of. Anything else is not freedom at all.
Or, as one of my favorite quotes [cat-v.org] much more eloquently put it:
"The only freedom which counts is the freedom to do what some other people think to be wrong. There is no point in demanding freedom to do tha
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I think most of us are happy that people don't have some freedoms.
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There may not be black and white answers for many cases but there sure are for this case.
Free speech gives you every right to have an unpopular opinion.
Disagree with the way the country is run? That's free speeach.
Hate my religion? Shout it from the rooftops.. I'll deal because that's your right.
It may even give you the right to think that girl is better off dead.
What it does not give this guy is the right to say to that girl "hey we can die together it's alright" when he had no plans whatsoever to go th
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What it does not give this guy is the right to say to that girl "hey we can die together it's alright" when he had no plans whatsoever to go through with it.
So "meet me in heaven" is a bribe today, is it? He isn't saying "trust me with your money" or "trust me with your life", he's saying "I promise if you kill yourself then I will too". How does it make a difference to the other person that he doesn't go through with it, once they're already dead? Will they get the seventh circuit court of the afterlife to press charges?
Sounds like virtually every religion to me. "Hey, waste all your time and money and reputation on our doctrine until you die, and you will be
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There is one problem with complete freedom of speech.
Trough advances in social engineering, rhetorics, and (mass) psychology, speech has become an effective tactical weapon of mass-control like never before.
The list of problems is endless. For example, if you repeat something often enough, people start believing and defending it, even if they previously saw the opposite to be true with their own eyes. There were studies about this.
Nobody is completely free from this. Not even you and me.
It’s the whole
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And that's a problem... why? Seriously, if someone wants to kill themself, as long as they are not leaving a burden on the people they are leaving behind, what's the big deal?
The problem is that many people who are suicidal are just suffering from mental problems that could be cured. Allowing someone to commit suicide or assisting them when the only cause for the suicide is a treatable mental illness is the same as allowing someone to die when they have a medical problem that is lethal, but only when untreated.
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So everyone in the western world is guilty a billion times over for the countless utterly treatable/preventable deaths they ignore in the rest of the world?
And those are mostly people who actually want to live.
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Except that's not what happened, this guy pretended to be a woman, made fake suicide pacts and actually pressured people to go through with them.
People don't get "pressured" into killing themselves. they make the decision themselves.
Those people obviously wanted to kill themselves, the fact that he may have encourage them to shouldn't even be relavent.
Sure, the guy is most likely scum, but the truth is, those people were looking for an excuse to die, and now their family or whomever want someone to blame.
Look, the world is full of all sorts of peeps. Some are nice, some are mean, some are mentally ill, some are physically ill. It's just how it i
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Media loves sensationalist headlines like this. "ZOMFG, The Interwebs killed 5 more people today. It's horrible!"
Srsly folks, just don't f$%^ing feed the trolls. 8I
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I think suicide should be legal provided that you inform the proper authorities and close up some loose ends.
Quite right (Score:4, Insightful)
Suicide should be a human right.
If society tries to ban that THEY MUST help the person in every way and totally support them their entire lives - and if they are not prepared to do that they should shut up and back off and not prevent people from ending their lives if that is what they feel they must.
Re:Quite right (Score:5, Insightful)
Suicide should be a human right.
From what I know, from a humanist philosophy point of view, any human being needs to have the right to full control of their body. So if someone wants to do something insane with their body, they are entitled to it. Encouraging mutilation or death however, would not be humanist. So if you decide you want to die, fine. If you want to preach people should want to die, need help to die, should be sold equipment, manuals, videos, books, have suicide parties, suicide lounges, suicide workshops, suicide encouragement boot camps, pro suicide marketing campaigns, etc, all of which is speech, well, that would be psychological violence. Thats ideals, philosophy, morality, etc however. The field of law is another matter, and how to word the law so it's not abused either way is not so easy.
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Sometimes there is no difference between the simple truth and what you call psychological violence. When a person faces nothing but grim days, poverty, pain,abuse and disease recommending suicide should not be called a crime. There are some people in such rotten conditions that they really need to die. Pointing that out to them is not always a hostile act. I'm not sure that the law should ever get involved in such an issue.
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Suicide of a person of a mainstream western culture is the ultimate act of selfishness.
That doesn't mean that it may not be appropriate in some instances. It means that in western cultures the decision to suicide is usually made at a time when the person is seriously under estimating his value to his circle of family, friends, and acquaintances.
Other cultures value things differently. Suicide in some eastern cultures is apparently sometimes regarded as a way of protecting the person's social circle from
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So it's selfish to kill yourself... presumably because other people rely on your emotionally (at the very least).
So, if someone wants to kill themselves, it's wrong because other people might get really upset over it? So if someone is sick of life, in pain, or just plain emotionally damaged, they ought to stick around for others' sakes? Doesn't that make it selfish on the part of the people that rely on them emotionally instead?
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> Suicide of a person of a mainstream western culture is the ultimate act of selfishness.
On whose part: the person who wants to die, or the people who, because they would feel bad if said person were no longer around, want this individual to continue his or her suffering?
I agree. (Score:2)
Suicide should be a human right.
I understand the guy my wife took off with left a note on his computer's Notepad that became very depressed and was found dead with his soda loaded up with a bunch of sleeping tablets.
Yeah, make suicide legal...NOT
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Based on your other posts, I would guess that your wife ran off with this guy because you are a self-important jackass who thinks he knows everything and treats everyone with a different opinion as if they are stupid. People like you should kill themselves. You are useless drain on the world's carbon cycle.
In any event you
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It probably should be a recognised right, but you do realise that won't matter much in this case? The accused allegedly misrepresented himself in various ways, also called fraud. You have a right to buy real estate, and if you already own it, to sell it, but if somebody offers to sell you the Brooklyn bridge, the case doesn't hinge on anybody's rights being limited by a fraud prosecution. This is not a case such as Dr. Kevorkian's, where there may be a legitimate first amendment issue, but the sort of case
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While I completely agree with you, this little piece of poetry here really made me think... ...that in reality, it’s not always as easy as we both would like it to be.
Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip — Magicians Assistant [youtube.com]
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Prepare for the onslaught of "but suicide is cowardice" posts. IMO, it takes either a person of incredible will (overlooked), or extreme depression (always assumed).
I was never seriously depressed, even after withstanding several (literal) life-changing events that would drive most people mad and permanently change their careers/public life. Suicide was (is) one legitimate option, and yet I could never bring myself to even seriously think about it; I consider it cowardice on my part to not embrace it: brave
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I will never kill myself willingly, and I am shamed for that fact.
The fact that you feel shame for this says interesting and rather uncomplimentary things about the society that trained you.
Re:Ok, so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
An individual choice has to be a rational, informed decision.
William Melchert-Dinkel was a nurse. He could identify and take advantage of vulnerable people, who were clinically depressed and unable to make rational, informed decisions. He tricked them into making irrational uninformed decisions.
It's as if you had a curable cancer and he told you, "I'm a nurse. Your cancer is incurable. You're going to die painfully. You'd be better off killing yourself now."
This is similar to the situation that doctors deal with every day in which a patient who is dying has to decide whether they want to stop treatment.
A patient has to be capable of making a rational decision. Some drugs and medical conditions make people depressed (independent of the normal depression that comes from dealing with the situation of an illness). Regularly, people decide during an illness that they don't want to live, change their mind after they get better, and are glad they didn't die.
Depression itself can be a clinical condition. People who are treated with drugs or talk therapy often get better, sometimes dramatically so. If a drug can make such a dramatic difference, that without the drug your individual choice is to die, and with the drug your individual choice is to live, that shows you how unreliable and irrational individual choice is.
I would reluctantly concede that people who don't want to live simply because the burden of life is too much, and who have been treated unsuccessfully for depression, physical pain, or any other cause, have a right to kill themselves. Quadriplegics have a legal right to refuse feeding. But that's only after they've exhausted every other option, which wasn't the case here.
We give people the right to make an individual choice to die, but not when they're obviously incapable of making a rational decision. Most of us want the government to interfere and stop us from killing ourselves when we're temporarily irrational.
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I believe that's covered under "freedom of speech".
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If it's not wrong to commit suicide, how could it be wrong to advise someone to commit suicide? You're advising them to do something which isn't wrong.
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So, do you think it can be wrong to advise someone to commit suicide if the commitment itself is not wrong? I'm sorry, that was my question. It has nothing to do with the particulars of the case reported here.
"If I talk someone into killing another person, whether for pay or other incentive, I am just as guilty of the murder."
I can think of cases where this is not true. Say I am the person in charge of a justified execution (say the person has to be executed or some divine punishment will come down from
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I don't think the one encouraging others to commit suicide is any more rational than the victim. Either punish them both, or give both treatment. He probably need as much educational camp as the suicidal.
Equal treatment for both. I agree fully. I understand that two of the guy's victims are dead.
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You could make that answer to any claim of free speech. But if you accept free speech, the burden is on you to demonstrate that advice on suicide is an exception. If you reject free speech, we have nothing to discuss.
I'm not a Christian at all, never h
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I assert that people who don't want to live for any reason, even if they have never been diagnosed or treated for anything, or have been diagnosed but refused treatment, have a right to kill themselves. They have no duty to stay alive.
Looks like we have a freshman philosophy major here.
Where does this unqualified "right" to kill yourself come from? Certainly not from U.S. law. Every state has restrictions on the circumstances under which one person can kill another person or himself. Doctors who have to deal with these problems every day have established guidelines which are close to, but not identical to, the laws. That's what I'm going by.
There are many medical conditions, including antibiotics, epilepsy drugs, anesthetics, brain infec
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I've never been a philosophy major and it's been a long time since I've been a freshman.
No, of course not. It's a natural right, one which the law can protect or infringe but not create. IMO, forcing a person to remain alive against his will is a form of slavery.
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No, of course not. It's a natural right, one which the law can protect or infringe but not create.
And where does this "natural law" come from? Freshman philosophy class.
Only in philosophy classes will people say that you have a right to help a mentally incompetent person commit suicide. In the real world, people overwhelmingly reject such things, and the law tries to reflect that.
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Your bare assertion does not make it so. Nor was it shown that either of the suicides was "mentally incompetent", unless you circularly declare that anyone desiring suicide is mentally incompetent.
Really? Jack Kevorkian was controversial rather than being overwhelmingly hated, and was only succe
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Talking about bare assertions, how do you decide that natural law gives you the right to do something? Aristotle, who made some offhand comments that people use to justify natural law, believed that slavery was OK. Does natural law give you the right to own slaves? Who decides?
You just decide yourself, right? Natural law says anything you want it to say.
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Well, if you'd like to throw it away, there's no need to worry about whether it's OK to kill yourself, as freedom of speech is based on the same thing, so we can just throw it out.
As for the right to kill oneself -- who are you (or anyone else, including the government) to tell anyone they must go on living? What duty do they have to you to do so?
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And where does this "natural law" come from? Freshman philosophy class.
As George Carlin put it.
"You have no rights"
You have as much right to kill yourself, convince someone else to kill themselves as you have to speak your mind or stab me in the face.
Only in philosophy classes do people even try to remain consistent.
In the real world people don't attempt any such thing.
Overwhelmingly they simply decide everything case by case based on how it makes them feel rather than based on any coherent framework of what you have a right to and what you do not.
Luckily the justice system tr
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Actually, it was approved by the Soylent Corporation.
Maddox (Score:2)
Hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
If you can find a person guilty for giving advice on ending the lives of two people over an acute period of time... ... How liable should liqour, cigarette, and high carb + fat + low nutrition food producers be?
Is the only difference that she helped them intentionally take their lives, while the enablers of unhealthy lifestyle consumables help people take their lives over the course of years?
Either put the peddlers of these long-term killing substances behind jail, or get your hands off of my rights to do w
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You need to find the reason people commit violence in the first place. Why do people murder, steal, cheat, and etc? Resources. We can solve this problem by using a Resource Based economy. http://www.thevenusproject.com/a-new-social-design/resource-based-economy [thevenusproject.com]
Taking on planning to reduce and eliminate all violence ends up with discussions altering all of society. Economy, to reduce suffering and violence caused by it. Education, to reduce violence caused by ignorance. Health care, to reduce pain and anger. Communities, to get things done with less suffering. Politics and law, to reduce war and police abuses. And on and on. It's the invisible detail lurking behind everything that everyone ignores and laughs at.
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Umm, that is pretty much the law anyway, unless you wish to ban using violence in self-defense or in law enforcement or in war which is crazy.
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Umm, that is pretty much the law anyway, unless you wish to ban using violence in self-defense or in law enforcement or in war which is crazy.
Trouble is, everyone with a reasonable lawyer and PR firm uses violence "in self defense", and most often gets away with it. Disagree, become a threat, they defend themselves. The use of force and violence is now institutionalized, sanitized, and invisible. Corporatized. The poor or ignorant, without PR, get involved in "violence". Others get 'briefly disrupted' by (insert undesirable element) and then 'return to normal operation.' In other unrelated news on the next week, there was an accident.
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Self defense is not "trouble". In fact, suggesting that self defense should be removed as a viable legal option should make you a target for elimination. In self defense.
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So the difference being what? One has a single "evil person" who does what they do for their own personal sick joy. The other is a group of people working for a large corporation doing what they do for a paycheck. Single evil deceitful individuals should be held responsible for encouraging bad behavior that could potentially result in death, while groups of people doing the same shouldn't? Or is it simply the suicide is an unacceptable form of bad behavior, and eating scientifically proven unhealthy foo
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You analogy is ridiculous, and you know it.
Obviously I don't agree.
The consumables that corporations produce, while being dangerous over the long term, do provide a level of nutrition. In other words, they aren't "all bad". Yes, you could find better nutrition, but it is nutrition nonetheless and therefore help people live. The person in question did nothing to help make a person's life better, just a way to end it.
I guess. Tobacco products provide enjoyment for the tobacco user. This guy provided some le
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Obviously I see the difference between them, and several times have noted differences. The thing you seem to miss time and time again is that they don't have to be "the same" to make comparisons. The world isn't black and white which you seem to need to make it into. For me the comparison is enlightening about what we value, what we don't value, who we find responsible, and who isn't responsible. If you try to paint this into black and white terms, the entire point of view vanishes into your dichotomy.
T
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I'll point this out again: the accused has had special training (is an ex nurse) in manipulating the emotions and ideations of others and allegedly used these techniques in his communications with suicide-prone persons to push them toward suicide.
In a fist fight resulting in death from a blow to the head, a person with no training in fighting should be held to one standard, but the martial arts expert should be held to a higher standard, since he could be expected to know of less lethal ways of terminatin
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I'll point this out again: the accused has had special training (is an ex nurse) in manipulating the emotions and ideations of others and allegedly used these techniques in his communications with suicide-prone persons to push them toward suicide.
Special training? WTF? He's a nurse, not a shrink. What kind of "special training" does a nurse receive to manipulate emotions and ideations of others? Is psych 101 really considered "special training"?
The lengths people are going in this discussion to make thi
mob justice (Score:2)
It's sad that people are being prosecuted for being dicks rather than for breaking actual laws. Mob justice acts with an arbitrary and inconsistent hand, and has no place under the rule of law.
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The law is supposed to define what being a dick means so you can be punished for it. I think I heard of a similar case (probably in another country) where someone got arrested for encouraging suicide. It counts as psychological assault and conspiracy to murder I think.
Re:mob justice (Score:4, Informative)
It's sad that people are being prosecuted for being dicks rather than for breaking actual laws. Mob justice acts with an arbitrary and inconsistent hand, and has no place under the rule of law.
He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.
To clarify, the issue is not that he pretended to be female, but rather that he pretended to be a nurse (although if anyone relied on him being a female for the purpose of committing suicide, it in fact could be an issue).
I'm fairly certain that fraud, especially in the context of pretending to have medical training, is in fact a crime based on actual laws.
Meanwhile, he has been charged with two counts of assisting suicide, not convicted by mob justice (for example, being hanged in a tree without a court hearing). He has a chance to prove that he did nothing wrong, or to be convicted of a crime that has been committed, specifically because of rule of law. Your implication that charging someone with a crime based on valid allegations (in this case, based on the fact that the accused admits to having helped people commit suicide) should be seen as mob justice is patently absurd.
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He pretended to be a female nurse in order to instruct others on how to commit suicide.
No, he was goading people into committing suicide by presenting a sympathetic ear, the female bit of course being a big incentive for his lonely victims.
Suicide pacts are fairly common in Japan. You get suicidal people meeting on the net and forming dysfunctional little suicide support groups. They don't want to die alone so they get together to kill themselves, usually C02 poisoning from a charcoal grill. You just go to sleep and don't wake up. Often times the peer pressure of having a group will sweep peo
Need tougher laws (Score:2, Funny)
They need harsher penalties for those who commit suicide, so they are deterred from killing themselves. The death penalty would seem appropriate...
Die, die, motherducker, diE, DIE! (Score:1, Troll)
Utter insanity (Score:1)
If the law cannot distinguish between speech and action, then it is a failure.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide [wikipedia.org] -- "According to recent commentators the news
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The solution is a counterpoint, never censorship..
Yes, ideally, combating ignorant speech with intelligent speech rather than censorship is best. Combating violence with law enforcement is best. However if in charge of a situation of a population with low education level, an obviously growing hatred level, several warnings of coming mass murder, weapons gathering, etc, as happened in Rwanda, all motivated by a few nutcases on television programs and radios using their 'freedom of speech' to promote mass murder, well, insisting on their freedom of speech a
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Define "go after", you pompous horse-fucking fart-smelling cross-dressing dim-witted thespian, who eats babies and impregnates women of a different race and is a shill for the Pretend-Nurse Unintentional Suicide Encouragement Association? I saw you littering, this person is a litterer and I'm sure I have proof around here somewhere.
So what happens now, how do you "go after" someone? I turn the above paragraph into a commercial and play it on every American Idol commercial break. You are internationally k
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Re:So words are actions then? (Score:2)
Sic your lawyers on me for using words, which you continually try to say should not be punishable? Or do you mean that when I used words I acted, undermining your argument that the nurse using words was not an action?
Your point is basically that slander and libel are fine until they hurt you, then you have to take legal recourse. I can't believe you don't see how much sense this fails to make. With the current laws, you have a deterrent against libel and slander, so it doesn't happen as frequently. If e
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I would hold the idiot who believed it, if he took any action against me. (say deny a job, credit, rental) responsible.
How would you know ?
There's an app for that (Score:2)
Example of "help" provided (Score:5, Informative)
From here [thestar.com]:
Words fail me, really.
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Words fail me, really.
Weird, I dont see any problem with that chat.
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Hi,
Assuming you are not trolling, then you ahve a real problem. There is a definite problem with encouraging someone to commit suicide. You not seeing a problem with it shows a complete disconnect with human compassion.
I'd also suggest you probably have problems with relationships in your life which will only get worse as time goes on. Please get professional help.
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Hi,
Assuming you are not trolling, then you ahve a real problem. There is a definite problem with encouraging someone to commit suicide.
I dont see the encouraging part. Some dude wants to kill himself, other dude pretending to be a girl tries to convince him hanging is better than jumping.
You not seeing a problem with it shows a complete disconnect with human compassion.
Compassion? Is that the same compassion that kills abortion doctors?
We don't know why he wants to kill himself, we only know that he already is convinced he wants to jump. There is no inciting to commit suicide, rather to do it in a specific way.
I was expecting bullying and/or blackmailing to commit suicide, instead there is only someone giving advice to
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I don't think she "committed" to dying until she stood on the bridge above the Rideau and decided to fill her lungs with water.
Here's a quote from the mother of the other guy;
Emphasis mine. The point being, he helped these people make that "commit
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He sure as hell isn't discouraging him from committing suicide... or actively seeking police or other authorities to help the other guy out.
Here's an analogy with a less controversial and sympathetic crime:
If someone told you that they were about to murder their girlfriend told you they were going to do it with a knife, if you responded that a baseball b
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Minnesotan here (Score:2)
From the quick flash on the screen by the local news, our law might be worse than "encourage". It might even criminalize "inform."
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Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
This man must be a 4chan god, a living avatar of Anonymous, the inherent contradiction of an individual embodiment of collective asshattery whose very existence generates lulz.
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Did she kill herself?
FTFS:
William Melchert-Dinkel
I know this is /. and no one actually reads the articles (just like Playboy), but at least pretend to read the summary.
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A vast majority of people who were nearly successful in their suicide attempt generally regret having ever gone down that dark path. Often times survivors of bridge jumpings point out years later that they are extremely grateful that their attempt did not succeed. It might be unfair to use bridge jumping as an example though, because that is one of the impulsive types of suicide. Plenty of occasions where people did not plan on jumping off a bridge, they just thought about while crossing and just jumped ove
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No one who has actually succeeded regrets going through with it. And many who are not successful try again and succeed the next time; those who don't are the only ones you hear from, thus there is some serious systemic bias in any sampling.
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You should interview Golden Gate bridge jumpers some time. few of the survivors attempt it again. And most of them end up better off after psychiatric help.
I used a very specific example to avoid systemic bias. The only assumption that I have to make is that what makes some people succeed and some don't when they jump off a bridge isn't behavioral. I suspect jumpers survive due to chance and not a lack of resolve in their suicide attempts.
If we can assume survivors and those who succeed are the same when th