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I don't think the user you replied to didn't think about it at all. They thought about, and found strange, the fact that cutting grass was the thing someone lov

• throwanem 2y ago
  It is unsurprising. Seliger was a fairly close presence on HN during the end of his life, and not everyone here is well equipped to understand and account for the effect on themselves of sharing such pathos. It isn't something Californian or American culture handles well in general, and even then HN participants constitute an unusual cohort selected partially (if not intentionally) for a habit of privileging rationality over emotion - which isn't at all the same thing as skill in managing one's emotions, especially at their heights. When someone speaks intemperately in such a moment, as here, in that light it reads easily as if selfish and contemptuous of the entire circumstance, and receives a response in accord with that reading. I don't think that's unjustified, even if I did take the time to unpack it a bit for our mutual interlocutor here. It was not my first instinct to do so. Someone whom a lot of people here care about was within days, possibly hours, of dying. At a time like that, someone who speaks out of turn may very confidently expect to be slapped down for it. It's worth explaining why that's the case, because all else equal a better understood error is less likely to be repeated. But it was an unmitigated error, and the response it received is the one it deserved.