None, thanks

An altruism-steeped culture, which coddles people tends to encourage them to act like children to get attention, which can be quite aggravating to the adults.

So while I certainly don’t applaud the pusher’s actions, it speaks to the dehumanizing effects of the coddling society that when faced with someone like this, the possibility that it’s just someone engaging in infantile, attention-seeking behaviour is sufficiently likely that someone would be frustrated enough to act on it, like this.

Remember the jumper in the UK who was being goaded by the crowd to jump? They asked him “How far can you bounce?”

Turns my stomach when such individuals are called thugs. It was reported that both would-be jumpers had heavy financial losses.

We know why Cheryl and Wynand did what they did, and it was excruciatingly painful to see them willfully end their lives. But we know they had no choice in their context, as they psychologically and philosophically could not get out of their respective states of mind.

It’s so easy to think the worst of these suicidal people — as Objectivists, we have the luxury of not only understanding the right philosophy and moral code, but it’s easy existentially as we live in the (still) freest county on earth.

I would never come to the most negative conclusion about someone’s motivation for attempting suicide.

Then again, I take it back – I don’t know what personal tragedy has brought you to the stage of writing such a horrid response to this topic.

Certainly no one has a right to hold up traffic with such a public spectacle, but the motives behind such an action can range anywhere from publicity-seeking to great personal tragedy to mental illness or worse. In the absence of evidence, I can only say, too bad such a thing happened.

I don’t have compassion for such people.