Not everyone is redeemable. Certain actions means you forfeit your right to live with the rest of society, and a second chance is out of the question.
Just like not every sperm is sacred, nor is ever person. There is nothing wrong with feeling good that a monster won’t be able to hurt anyone anymore.
I think they can see him for the monster he is. From his brother, Onli:
"I hope he rots in that jail,” he said. “I don’t even want them to take his life like that. I want him to suffer in that jail to the last extent. I don’t care if they even feed him. What he has done to my life and my family’s.”
I’m using actual science and evidence-based methods of looking at things, rather than just letting a bunch of madmen in politics and media tell us what boogeymen to fear and obsess over.
Seriously . . . it’s fine if you don’t agree, but the fact that you’re all emotion in this kind of indicates that maybe you’re not rationally thinking things through. I’m sad that you’re all worked up,but it is kind of self inflicted, I guess.
You claim that you don’t care about, him and that you just treat him and his victims as some variable. Yet you still have not explained why it is ethical to do so. Nice try on the deflection. The point, as always, is ethics. If you can’t argue that, then you can’t argue.
Explain to me why it is ethical to treat humans as variables.
Explain to me why you automatically think Hitler, a person of incredible malice, could be saved. Are you one of those assholes who considers that all evil is a mental illness?
Explain why you think it is wrong to have pity for the victims
Explain why your monkeysphere bullshit overrides ethical considerations
You are trying hard, really hard to pretend that you are super smart and have found a magical scientific explanation to how people have to live. You tell everybody in each post. I’m raising the bullshit flag. Explain why you are so smart that ethics doesn’t apply, or else explain your ethical reasoning.
Ad hominem. I asked you to explain via ethics and you just attacked me and called me emotional. But yes, I get it. This is your MO. You are sooooo smart. The rest of us here are just too dumb to understand your brilliance. Oh, and science!
Btw, did you perform any of the research? Or are you twisting the meaning of scientific research and using it to promote your own social goals? I’m sure nobody has ever done that before, right?
[quote=“William_Holz, post:102, topic:8944”]
. . . the moment we start thinking about people outside it with anything OTHER than compassion and respect is the moment we start screwing everything up. [/quote]
You’re the kind of person who is genuinely surprised when the bears you love so much turn around and eat you.
Man, you’re putting a LOT of words into my mouth. But fine, let’s hit your list, shall we? I think I can see where we didn’t communicate properly. .
It’s not.
I don’t. Neither of them should have had any power over anybody else, at least not the adult versions that we know. Perhaps they were mad enough fundamentally to need to be separated from everybody else, and if so that should have been done LONG before they got dangerous like they did.
A-ha!!!
I for one only have pity for the victims and their families. The only positive things about Castro’s death is maybe other people will shut up about it so they can get on with their lives.
I know this may come as a surprise to you, but they don’t care if you ‘pity’ them. You getting angry at me doesn’t do them a lick of good. If you want to help them, get to know them, send them money, whatever. . . I’m not sure they want anybody’s help right now, so be gentle.
So . . . seeing the problem yet?
It doesn’t. It is however a real thing. I mention ‘Monkeyspheres’ because it’s actually an extremely clever article that people actually read. Have you read it? Because if not I’m not sure where to start. If THAT’S TL;DR or ‘boring’ then we’re not going to make any progress in PubMed,are we?
So, please. . either re-consider or re-read, note the places where you clearly added a whole lot of things to my stance that don’t exist, and let’s reset, okay? We’re both people too, no reason to be jerks to each other. Either ignore, or treat like human beings. Either way it’s better than just ranting back and forth without communicating, true?
William, you started out by ask us not to poison ourselves by enjoying the death of even someone who seriously harmed other people. You mentioned that Rebecca, in the case of mass murderer Bin Laden, naturally turned her thoughts to the family that lost him, and present that empathy toward people she doesn’t know as admirable.
And yet right here, you scoff at the idea that anyone could have real empathy toward victims. If they don’t know them, they can’t really care and shouldn’t try. I understand the point you were trying to make, but this double standard buries it. If you don’t want hate for someone who hurt people, yet also dismiss compassion for people who were hurt, all you’re really advocating is indifference to suffering. That’s it’s own poison.
Yet again you attribute malice to mental illness. Newsflash for you: Hitler wasn’t a psychopath. Neither was Stalin. Mengele probably was. The soldiers and leaders who orchestrated the Holocaust and the starvation of the Ukraine were not psychopaths. You have pathologized the ethical concept of ‘evil’ and have convinced yourself that it is some undesirable trait of abnormal human beings. It isn’t. It is a normal trait of all human beings, and the thing that makes it possible is opportunity! If Hitler was never born there is still a reasonable probability that the Holocaust would have occurred. The hate was always there and the opportunity would have presented itself. This is not to say that since it is a neurotypical that we shouldn’t hold evil accountable. We should. This is where ethics comes in.
You are pretending that you are Vulcan and then lecturing everybody on how smart you are. This is a tricky lesson–it took me ten years to learn, but emotions are part of your humanity. They are not a defect that is designed to make suboptimal choices. And if you suppress your emotions, you will actually distort your ‘logical’ thinking and exacerbate your mental illnesses. 99% of people probably feel great pity for these women. It is not a flaw in their thinking. The only flaw in thinking is that you can somehow excise your emotions and that you are ‘wiser’ without them.
Yet again, you have not answered the question. You are using a relatively recent scientific article as the basis of a social model and telling everybody how you are so right and how they all need to change the way they think as if you are the final authority on the matter. Why haven’t the scientists who researched it done the same? Do they need you as a champion to get the truth out? Or perhaps this is just research that doesn’t completely describe how humans interact socially or empathize with each other? And perhaps we shouldn’t all become Vulcans just yet because there are other consequences from that? Or just perhaps, you were caught in a hole of saying “please won’t somebody think about the rapist” that you used any reasoning that you could find so that you wouldn’t be called on it. Yeah, I’d say that is probably the most likely.
Hmm, maybe I misspoke or said something open to misinterpenetration?
I think real empathy towards victims is awesome, I just don’t think that ‘I’m angry at the person who hurt you and they must be punished! RAWR!’ is helping them except in the most direct, personal way, nor is ‘I’m angry at the person who treats that person like a human! Must be bad!’ At this point, putting Castro out there for the world to see is only harming them, some may want to be known by their names first, rather than as ‘that girl who was raped and imprisoned by that weird guy’, y’know?
I don’t think ‘empathy for the victims’ translates to ‘only caring that the imprisoned person get punished’ or ‘Yay! He’s dead!’ I don’t really think that’s empathy, that’s more projecting a desire for a sense of justice or some sort of vindication on them.
You’ve got to admit, there IS a little psychological trap in that mess, isn’t there?
I know it’s more the media that’s to blame, and what’s considered acceptable in our society, and how our politicians need to get votes in our broken system. . . but that doesn’t mean I’m a big fan of pretending uncomfortable truths don’t exist.
Obviously, there’s not much that can be DONE with this, I can’t really use it directly to help people or save people, but maybe something clicked with somebody, and at the least I’ve gotten a tiny bit more insight into the variety of humanity, which I can perhaps put to use later.
No, that’s most definitely not true. You’ll note in my FIRST post I mentioned the specific poison and fighting that poison is something that’s good for us. Please stop making assumptions like that.
I’m not sure how to answer it to your satisfaction. The awareness that we engage in irrational behavior when we dehumanize others is hardly new to science. The article just combines some other elements in a rather elegant way.
I’m pretty sure we’re not communicating, that’s fine. If you want to take the conversation offline and PM me that’s totally cool, but I’d rather not clutter up the thread.
My point is there is a huge trap in the approach you are taking too. We’ve all seen where people go “man, he had such a bright future, too bad he raped what’s-her-name” and then give the victim no further thought, or outright blame her. Good people consider it abhorrent, and that’s why your presentation here - opening with accolades for a counterfactual Castro, and then faulting people who mention anyone else - has brought up such a strong reaction.
Please take a moment to consider that response, and whether everyone here is really so hate-filled and obtuse as you claim, or whether your concern over the one poison has not been sending you toward another.
I’m not poisoned. I’m not upset, and I don’t have any negative feelings or ill will to anybody else here. You’re all people and this is a tough medium to communicate in, true?
That’s an impossible scenario for me, or anybody with the approach I’m espousing. Of COURSE the victim is a human too! And clearly more obviously traumatized and likely less of a risk around other people, true?
For example, I still worry about Marissa Alexander, who should not be in jail, and I’d far rather she be out than George Zimmerman be ‘punished’.
It doesn’t mean George and I are all hugs and puppies, I just know when my brain starts getting stupid, though admittedly that rabbit hole runs deep!
Your concern about people wishing ill on Castro makes it seem like you are concerned about him, especially when you bring up this imagined good that he could have done with his life:
You may be trying to argue that every life is valuable and has the potential for good, but it comes across as very dismissive of his actual actions. Your argument that he could have done something useful if he did not have “secret places to hide people” is also rather offensive. It seems very similar to the victim-blaming that victims of sexual assault deal with. For all we know, he could have done something useful if only those women had never gotten into his car …
I disagree. First of all, people in prison can continue to torment their victims, so it is wrong to say that he was “harmless” in prison. Secondly, I have every right to feel passionately about the subject of rape … which means that I have every right to get upset about what he did and every right to feel angry. One in three American women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. Why should we be dispassionate about the people who commit these crimes?
I know this may come as a surprise to you, but if I were in their position, I would be fairly upset to hear someone arguing that Castro could have saved the world if only he did not have places to hide people.
