Man identified by police as Max Azzarello, from Florida, declared dead after incident outside lower Manhattan courthouse
A man has died after setting himself on fire outside the New York courthouse where Donald Trump’s hush-money trial is taking place.
The New York City police department said on Saturday the man had been declared dead by staff at an area hospital.
Officials had said earlier the man, who was in his late 30s, was in critical condition.
The New York police department said the man, who they identified as Max Azzarello of St Augustine, Florida, did not appear to be targeting Trump or others involved in the trial.
Witnesses said the man pulled pamphlets out of a backpack and threw them in the air before he doused himself with a liquid and set himself on fire on Friday. One of those pamphlets included references to “evil billionaires” but portions that were visible to a Reuters witness did not mention Trump.
I think I understand the sentiment here, but you are assuming no matter how bad it is, the state a person is living in is inherently better than death. I think you’d find a lot of people can imagine a life worse than death. Death means everything is over, blank, no more consciousness. That sounds better than unhappy life to me, and it definitely sounds better than miserable life.
I didn’t say that. My point is more that ending a life (including your own) is permanent and irreversible.
You don’t know that, no one does.
Not trying to be argumentative, just clarifying…
You don’t know that a flying pink unicorn doesn’t follow you around everywhere. Is it safe to assume it does?
That sounds better, but I kind of doubt that realistically anyone can actually understand what “no more consciousness” realistically means, because it’s axiomatically opposed to the idea of consciousness itself, to the degree that you cannot experience it. “oh I get it when I go to bed” or “oh it’d just be black nothingness with no thought” yeah that’s bullshit. People think that cause they smoked weed and it shut off their internal monologue, that’s the same as true oblivion. It’s not, it’s imperceptible, by it’s very nature. Maybe you could make an argument against fearing on that basis, on the basis that it’s un-understandable, much as epicurus did, in fact, that’s an argument I’d make, but that’s a different argument altogether.
Well definitely don’t kill yourself for a random political reason. Especially for an individual that isn’t even in power currently. Also don’t kill yourself if he ever gets into power, because how on Earth does that help?
But then again we’re attempting to apply logic to a situation where it clearly was absent.