To quote an excellent film and it’s originating series of written works, “That’s the excuse of every tyrant in history, from Nero to Bonaparte.”
It is poisonously narrow-minded to label anyone or anything “evil”. There’s a word for that behavior - demonizing. We reduce people to less than human, to devils and monsters. We see them as “other”, as lesser, as “evil”, as intrinsically wrong or corrupted, of incapable of good, of absolutely no value.
In WWII, Germany and Japan were “evil”. By your arguments and those of the people who felt the same way then, these two nations and peoples should have been wiped off the face of the earth. They were beyond saving - they sought only to harm us, our children, our children, and deserved nothing but our hatred and our unflinching, unhesitating violence and destruction.
But the enemies of yesterday are the allies of today. Bitter rivals, now close friends. The demons were an illusion - they were people all along, as were we, despite their demonization of us.
This is the same rubbish that the pro-life frothers regurgitate on a regular basis. “He might have been the next Beethoven! He might have cured cancer!”
It is ridiculous. The guy was just as likely to be the next Hitler, and judging by his choice of pass-time, he wasn’t angling towards helping anyone.
**aa[quote=“William_Holz, post:22, topic:8944”]
Who did that? Where? looks around
You misinterpret. Think more.
The people I feel sad for are the ones poisoning themselves watching the news, and even right here in this very thread… He’s gone.
[/quote]
Your exhortations to think more, as though we are somehow just not trying hard enough are incredibly offensive.
Perhaps if those women had just “thought more” they would have found a way out of their situation sooner.
Or maybe it is you who must think more, that perhaps some of us are comfortable with removing the truly evil from our society.
Yeah, except no. That’s a false equivalency. You’re laying the deeds of a relatively small number of government and military officials upon an entire population. So far as I know, most Japanese did not participate in the sack of Nanking, nor did most Germans knowingly play a role in the Final Solution. Those who did, however, are not, as you say, “close friends.” They are monsters and they deserved to be judged and punished for their crimes. Just as Ariel Castro deserved to be judged for his crime and punished.
THIS. Every call for “humbleness” and “pity” in this thread is coinciding with condescending, arrogant demands seeking to dictate what other people are allowed to feel and think.
As far as my response to this news, I’ll do what I’ve been doing all along with regard to Castro and focus on his victims as the ones who matter, who deserve whatever compassion and care we can offer. All you “merciful” assholes erasing them from the conversation right now? You can get bent.
Logical failure there. In your haste to defend the sanctity of humanity at large, you disregard the horrible terrible acts of this one man. This one man was a malfunctioning being, as clearly expressed by his actions. I put him in the same category as a rabid animal or dangerous poisonous snake in a playground full of children. Good riddance.
I get it, I totally do. I mostly felt the need to throw out what most people will think. We shouldn’t be so quick to condemn people. Nor do I think we should be quick to forget what this guy did. Unless they were REALLY horrible to him in prison, he only experienced a fraction of the suffering of his victims. Maybe that was enough. Prison seems harsh but, since I’ve been watching Doctor Who reruns lately, Shakespeare’s quote about how knowing about the horrors of Bedlam kept him from going mad enough to be sent there.
I don’t know what it would take to change our society. There are only a few disciplines that teach forgiveness and love, and most of them are rejected as something only mouth-breathing idiots do, and the more hippie-like aspects tend to be rejected by followers (see: Conservative Christians) In 2000 years, the “love your neighbor” message hasn’t caught on.
I doubt much of value was lost. I have a feeling that in that other life, he would have had a dark side.
And perhaps one of the imprisoned women would have done the same? They would have had a three times higher probability. It must be nice living in the hypothetical and pathologizing all types of crime. He didn’t imprison and rape the women because he had psychological problems or because he didn’t have opportunities early in life. Mental illness and socioeconomic success don’t change your morality. They don’t make you maliciously hurt other people. He abused those women because he chose to do so. And as such, he was an enormous threat. Your argument and presumptions make it appear that we should pity him. He isn’t the ‘real’ victim here. He really isn’t.
Fucking right that. I am also glad he is not on my earth anymore. I am SERIOUSLY glad that asshole is dead. He deserved to die, but in a long, slow and VERY painful manner. I’d have helped do it myself after what he did to those women.
I have no interest in people being sent to prison as retribution, I don’t have any great desire to see people suffer for the evil things they did. Prison should be somewhere that people who are unable to function in civil society are placed until they are able to do so, if they can be rehabilitated, or removed from harm’s way so they can’t hurt anyone else. I’m not a vindictive person, I think it’s a waste of time and energy.
Because I wasn’t interested in seeing him suffer, I don’t feel cheated that he’s dead. Frankly I don’t particularly feel like wasting any more time on him. He did some evil, evil things, and now he’s dead. Shit happens. Moving on. He chose to do those things, if he wasted untapped potential that was his choice. He chose his path. He was a danger to society and now he isn’t.
As a society we should be focussing on a) helping his victims and b) making sure that crimes like this never happen in the first place, or the perpetrators get caught much more quickly.
This is the main reason I have such a hard time with war. On one hand, if another country attacks you, you need to defend yourself or face obliteration. But it’s the innocent people. One of those people will have a cure for cancer. One of those people will think of a new invention that prevents HIV infection, or cures it. One of those people will write the next most beautiful poem in the Universe. If we kill them, then we will never get to experience that great thing.
Anger can actually be a really productive emotional response. It can be inspiring, and energizing, and taken with a dose of forethought can lead people to make real, positive change in the things that they feel are unjust. I would actually guess that it was a little jolt of anger that gave you the fuel to write several lengthy comments. Pity is, in many cases, a condescending, uninspiring expression.
EDIT for additional conclusion:
Maybe you don’t support getting angry at the man himself for his deeds because you have a construct of mental illness that says that the chemistry of the brain was this man’s curse, and both he and his victims suffered from it. Fine, but in that case, get angry at brain chemistry and do something about it. Pity’s not going to help you much. Maybe the word you’re looking for is understanding. And not in the sense or, oh yeah, I can see why he did that, but understanding in the sense of: I understand that brains can go horribly wrong.
I don’t remember which class session it was that the professor explained in detail why I shouldn’t kidnap and torture women, or why Ariel Castro was absent from Extremely Basic Social Contract 101 that day. Snark aside, my point is that I don’t think you can minister to this kind of illness in such a simplistic way as “making them understand.” When somebody acts this far outside the realm of empathetic living, brain chemistry plays an enormous role, and the solution is going to be difficult to find and involve looots of careful science. Could we all benefit form a more empathetic life, public discourse? Of course. Would it prevent psychopaths from murdering, raping and torturing? Unlikely.
But how do you get the man in the street to accept that treating
people who have committed terrible crimes with respect and
consideration is in his and his family’s best interests. How do you
explain to victims that this way is best?
“I don’t think I will ever be able to do that,” says Nilsen. “If someone did
very serious harm to one of my daughters or my family … I would
probably want to kill them. That’s my reaction. But as a prison
governor, or politician, we have to approach this in a different way.
We have to respect people’s need for revenge, but not use that as a
foundation for how we run our prisons. Many people here have done
something stupid – they will not do it again. But prisons are also
full of people who have all sorts of problems. Should I be in charge
of adding more problems to the prisoner on behalf of the state, making
you an even worse threat to larger society because I have treated you
badly while you are in my care? We know that prison harms people. I
look at this place as a place of healing, not just of your social
wounds but of the wounds inflicted on you by the state in your four or
five years in eight square metres of high security.”
I don’t think you can begrudge people their “good riddance.” You mention the invention of cancer treatments, but I’d be willing to bet if we could decide between cancer and basement rape torture, many would choose the former. Also, to many, if not the man himself, then certainly the brain condition that caused him to do these horrible things ARE a cancer upon the world, and to like a cancerous organ being removed, he was. Now, a human is not an un-sentient organ to just be “removed” that would indeed be callous to think, obviously to simply cure the illness (in this case psychopathy) and not kill the person housing it would be ideal, but until such a treatment is found, it’s reasonable to feel relief when the body that is housing the murderous impulse is removed. I actually think it’s downright cruel to disallow frightened people, feeling upside down and out of control due to incidences of such empathy-less savagery to feel this relief, or a sense of justice when it has been removed. Perhaps, in time, we’ll find ways to exact our revenge on the illness and not the person, but pooh-poohing the emotional response to an extremely emotionally disturbing occurance is an unfair and unreasonable and condescending expectation.
I agree, but I also expect that someday humanity, or its descendants will know better. We’ll be able to heal such people’s minds, to save our brains states and survive the deaths of our bodies, and to choose rehabilitation over retaliation. It may happen in my lifetime, it might have happened in his. And when it does, there will be an enormous list of people who might have survived into the far future, but won’t because they died prematurely.
