Maybe he wants to learn, or maybe he's a psychopath trying to upgrade his human emulation software so he can get out sooner. Even experts find it hard to tell.
Philosophical question: if "fake it 'til you make it" allowed someone to emulate a human (I like your phrasing here) well enough that they, indeed, act like a human... isn't that good enough?
The biblical advice to "judge not, that ye be not judged" seems relevant here. It's pretty obvious to me that it refers to a person's heart, that is, their internal desires and motivations that no one but them can truly know. If that motivation leads to a person acting the way I'd like them to, and they claim it's for reasons I agree with, and I'm not on the parole board or one of their family members where I have a need to look deeper, then fine.
It would if you would be sure that they'd never break out of character. But that's a tricky question: if someone who has already murdered someone in cold blood with substantial premeditation presents a changed exterior do you perceive the chances of them doing that as premeditation as well as larger than the chances that they've really changed? I'm happy I'm not on that parole board, and I hope they have budget for a good psychological evaluation.
Yeah, you and me both. I acknowledge it's a lot easier for me to wax philosophical about some person I don't know, safely far away in prison, and with almost zero chance our lives will ever cross. If he were my son-in-law, or dad, or neighbor, the issues would be way more complicated.
Psychopaths are still people even if their brains are broken. It is indeed hard to integrate them into society, especially if their family did a bad job of it in their childhood.
In a better country he'd be in therapy rather than in prison. Alas the US legal system only exists to detain people, not to allow them to become unbroken.
I wholly believe psychopaths can be redeemed and live a fulfilling life without hurting anyone if given the proper support and guidance. I don't for a second believe the US legal system is equipped to do that, especially the prison system.
Closed institutions are a thing. You can be in therapy under close supervision and unable to leave until it is safe to allow you to do so. Arguably that is better than therapy in prison because even with trained staff on site a prison is still a prison. You could say that closed institutions are functionally a form of prisons and you'd be right but the difference in motivations matters: mental institutions exist to provide mental support, prisons exist to lock people away.
I don't live in the US but as far as I'm aware they shot a guy who tried to set fire to a bunch of empty ICE vans so direct action against institutions you don't like doesn't seem to be a winning strategy if you're not enough people to stage an armed insurrection.
I'm interested if this really is your approach for "being the change you want in the world" though. When you think something could be improved somewhat do you play out an elaborate cargo cult interpretation of what you think would work better despite having no resource or professional qualification to pull it off? How has that been going for you?
It's not like there aren't any organisations you could get involved with to advocate for reforms to the US legal system. You don't even have to go whole hog and try to start at the top, a lot of the underlying structures are cultural. If you're a parent, trying to treat your child as a dependent human rather than an inferior (i.e. care, not control) would be a start to building a healthier society where carcareal punishment doesn't feel like the obvious solution to societal problems.
But if making assumptions about strangers and mocking them for saying things could be improved somewhat is what makes your life more bearable, nothing I can say or do will change that. I hope you find what you are missing.
No, you don't understand. I don't really care about your politics, I care about the ridiculously extreme risk your toxic optimism causes society without there being an ounce of data to support your position.
You are asserting that people without a conscience and a proven violent criminal past belong back in general society after some hypothetical rehabilitation program. Further, you are asserting that it is the US prison system (and by extension, the US itself), that is somehow failing these supposedly misunderstood people. The reality is that there is no fixing a lack of conscience and giving these people social skills training only gives them more tools to exploit people by. Literally every mental health professional will tell you that. Those that deviate from this position have a strong tendency to end up strangled in a ditch somewhere with their underwear around their ankles. That is why I tell you to shelve your virtue signaling until you actually understand what you're advocating.
You want these people out of prison and moved right next door to me and my family. I merely want you, since you've made it personal, to try dealing with them first... ideally firsthand. Barring that, maybe look into the reality of the situation first. The good news is that if you do manage to fix them, there's a Nobel prize waiting for you and you will be remembered as the greatest psychological mind in history.
(EDIT: Deleted my original reply because I made the mistake of trying to reply to the text in earnest despite your complete disregard for what I said in all of your replies so far. This is still said in earnest but I won't bother trying to continue the game of talking past each other and instead address the elephant in the room directly.)
> You want these people out of prison and moved right next door to me and my family.
Now, ignoring that this barely even counts as a strawman because it bears so little resemblence to anything I ever said, this also jumps out to me as an interesting point: you're demonstrating a high level of aggression to me as a perceived threat despite nothing you accuse me of saying being what I actually said and you instantly frame it as protecting yourself and "your family".
Reiser was hardly a family man but what led him to murder his victim was her decision to leave him with their children which he also had been neglecting. In other words, he reacted with immense aggression to a perceived threat to "his family" even though it was specifically his (ex-)wife, a threat from within. As I pointed out elsewhere, he still refers to his victim as "my wife", thus clearly re-asserting his framing of his relation to her and her role in "his family" despite her demonstrated wish to end this relationship. Just as murdering her served to establish his authority and control over "his family", her death now continues to be used by him to maintain this fiction despite his status completely removing him from "his family".
I'm not saying you'd kill your wife if she'd try to leave you and take the kids. I'm saying while you're afraid of me because you catastrophize about imagined scenarios I might advocate for, women are afraid because of people who talk like you do.
Intimite partner violence is more widespread than stranger danger. Most sexual abuse happens between acquaintances or in relationships. Most child abuse and child sexual abuse is inflicted by close relatives. The greates predictor for Antisocial Personality Disorderd (ASPD, which is colloquially often called "psychopathy" or "sociopathy", which are themselves not formally defined conditions) is early childhood abuse, sexual abuse and parental emotional neglect and authoritarian overprotection.
I can't change the US penal system. Neither can you. I can point at statistics and research and other countries implementing more humane systems with better or comparable levels of recidividism and lower crime rates and I'm sure you can derail them or shoot them down by appealing to moral outrage and telling me to kill myself in as many words, again (because yes, that's what telling me to surround myself with untreated violent criminals you think are habitual reoffenders after explaining how "my" way of thinking leads to people ending up in a ditch after implied sexual abuse, is).
But what I can do is tell you to treat your children as humans, not inferiors. Their brains don't work right yet and that's fine. They need what humans need and they want to be treated like humans want to be treated. Think of them as you would think of yourself (or your spouse if you already think of them like you think of yourself) after a brain injury and with more limited mobility. You don't want to have arbitrary rules imposed on you that you don't understand and that change seemingly at random. You don't want to be held down or hurt or yelled at, especially when you don't understand why. You want to feel safe, not through displays of violence and threats against others but by being accepted for who you are and held and knowing you won't be hurt. They're your children but only in the sense that they depend on you and your care, not that they owe you anything or that you own them in any sense of the word.
There's so much fear and evilness in the world, let's not bring it into our families, not even under the guise of protection. Learn to let your guard down and genuinely love people. Allow yourself to be human and to see the humanity in others, not just as a hollow phrase. Accept your spouse and your children as genuinely human persons with their own internal lives and desires and accept it when they make choices you disagree with. It's okay to go against your children's wishes when they're too young to understand the bigger picture but let them live their lives and be who they are. Make sure they know they're safe to come back to you when they screw up rather than trying to lock them in figurative cages and trim their wings.
I'm not saying you would kill your spouse if she left you. I'm saying you sound like the person I would be afraid of doing that. Most femicides happen in relationships. Men are rarely well-equipped to handle rejection, especially by intimate partners. Most child abuse happens in families. Life can be stressful and viewing children through the lens of discipline and obedience deeply poisons any chance of a healthy relationship. Most family abuse is carried from one generation to the next. Let's break the cycle, even if the abuse is subtle enough others might dismiss it as "traditional parenting". Keep them safe and be safe for them.
Heh, okay, there's a lot to unpack there. It's a lot of facts but lacking in wisdom.
The fact that you equate a person warning you about the dangers of toxic people with barely being better than one themselves means you personally need this knowledge more than anyone. You are very much at risk and certainly not from me, I can assure you. Calling out your naivete on the matter is not aggression. Far, far from. I suppose I'm guilty as charged in not having much empathy left for the Cluster B individuals of the world. Virtually everyone who has had their lives ruined, their (often overflowing) empathy weaponized against them, and their belief that people are fundamentally good destroyed, tend to end up that way. And that's one of the hardest things in recovery: most people simply can't understand it until they've had it happen to themselves personally. After all, perhaps the psychopath is the real victim here. They certainly play the part very well. Believe whatever you want about me, an internet stranger, but this is coming from a genuine place of empathy and (hard) love. So, lets try something a little different.
There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't. Suddenly, somehow, the owner's face is inside of the pitbull's stomach, their tracea is in the neighbor's yard, or their child is lifeless on the floor in a pool of blood with the dog "smiling" at them. Everyone is shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you. How could this have happened?
Your empathy is not going to fix psychopaths. Not at a personal level or a societal level. No amount of love is going to give them a functioning conscience. Whatever happened to create them (no matter how awful) never justifies what they do to others. Personally, I don't give a damn about Reiser and wouldn't trust a single word that comes out of his mouth about anything. I used his filesystem once back in ~2004 and that's the most positive thing I have to say about him.
Oh, cool, so you just go on ignoring what I say and responding to a strawman of things I did not say (like empathy fixing ASPD or victimhood justifying harm against others or that therapy will always be successful and everyone can be a free member of society to the fullest extent).
> (hard) love
Yeah, there's my concern. That's literally a concept only abusers use to justify their abuse as "love". You may think you have empathy (after all you feel strongly about ASPD individuals so you can't be that) but I question to what extent you do genuinely love if you have internalized the idea that "hard love" is a thing.
> There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't.
It says a lot when your path to what you see as healing is paved with schadenfreude. That's not a story of the folly of being a good person. That's a story of ignoring past trauma. Trained fighting pitbulls are traumatized. You wouldn't hand a gun to a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Dogs have natural lethal weapons. Handling an animal that can kill you must be deliberate. You can not reason with a dog so you must treat a traumatized dog as the loose canon it is. When people die to trained attack dogs, they die either because they didn't know about its past or because they (no longer) took it into account in their interactions.
I'm not concerned with psychokillers who want to wear my child's skin as a costume only because I'm far more concerned with the equally unempathetic billionaires, politicians, lobbyists and investors who don't even consider my child as their actions threaten their health and future. Our economic system encourages "sociopathic" behavior. The psychokiller (or the far more likely abusive partner) is just too impotent or incompetent to acquire a position of real power and their behavior is far more likely to get them in trouble.
The thread has rightfully been killed so I'll just say this: kiss your children good night. And maybe think about why you feel the need to frame those deepities as "hard truths" instead of considering that if you're a victim, you're traumatized and you're coming from a place of hurt and your pre-existing beliefs cloud how you can make sense of it all. If you find catharsis in the suffering of others, that should give you pause.
1) Most of uk.gov is actually designed and built in-house.
2) Germany, as a nation, got to about 1991 and collectively decided "This is nice, let's keep it like this". Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.
Honestly, this just reflects the age of the population. Change is more painful when you're old, so stasis becomes more attractive. Usually Germans like the general idea of improvement, but they hate change.
The joke about the Merkel government was that if the French state is founded on the concept of 'Liberté, égalité, fraternité', the German state is founded on 'Stabilität, Stabilität, Stabilität' even in the face of badly needed change.
Fax is a secure channel, apparently, which of course is complete horseshit. It uses the phone network, which is only marginally better than the internet. Many know that email headers can be faked, but not so many know that phone numbers can, too.
Legally I guess this becomes the problem of the party that introduces the intermediate stages. The other party doesn't need to care.
> Even the most technologically progressive regions of Germany still think it's 1997. Elsewhere, it's like the wall never came down.
It is in my opinion a little bit more complicated. The central issue is: many ideas for digitization that other countries or private companies do or have done are very privacy-invading.
Germany had two surveillance states on its soil in the 20th century (of which one ended only a little bit more than 30 years ago). Additionally, lots of German citizens remember the aftermath of the dragnet investigation to fight the RAF in the 80s. So privacy and the possibilities of surveillance are very sensitive topics in the German population.
Additionally, basically every German citizen knows that when data accumulates, politicians will find a reason to use this data to spy on the citizens (prosecution of criminals ... blah blah). Thus there is an insane distrust in the German population in the politicians. Just to give a more recent examples: when the TollCollect system for truck toll was introduced, there were from beginning on concerns that the billing data will become abused. The politicians appeased the citizens that this will never happen. Of course it did happen:
"Rasterfahndung, heimliche Online-Durchsuchung, Datenauswertung der Lkw-Maut - Bundesinnenminister Wolfgang Schäuble und die Unionsfraktion drängen auf zahlreiche Verschärfungen der Sicherheitsgesetze. Die SPD will mitziehen - aber nicht beim Datensammeln zur Verbrechensvorbeugung.
Entsprechende Pläne präsentierten Unionspolitiker nach Informationen des SPIEGEL in einer Koalitionsrunde am vergangenen Donnerstag. Unter anderem sollen dem Bundeskriminalamt die Rasterfahndung und die heimliche Online-Durchsuchung von Privatcomputern erlaubt werden. Außerdem sollen die Daten der Lkw-Maut dabei helfen, Verbrechen aufzuklären."
DeepL translation: "Grid searches, secret online searches, data analysis of truck tolls - Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and the CDU/CSU parliamentary group are pushing for numerous tightening of security laws. The SPD wants to go along - but not with data collection for crime prevention.
According to SPIEGEL, Union politicians presented plans to this effect at a coalition meeting last Thursday. Among other things, the Federal Criminal Police Office is to be allowed to conduct dragnet searches and secret online searches of private computers. In addition, the data from the truck toll is to help solve crimes."
"Das Computer-Ausspähen wird also kommen. Wieder einmal wird der Gesetzgeber das Grundgesetz einschränken. Es mag nachvollziehbare Gründe dafür geben, wenn es darum geht, Terroristen davon abzuhalten, Hunderte von Menschen zu töten. Aber es braucht wenig prophetische Fähigkeiten, um vorauszusagen, dass es so kommen wird, wie es in der Vergangenheit immer gekommen ist: Erst versprechen die Innenpolitiker und die Sicherheitsbehörden hoch und heilig, das neue scharfe Schwert nur bei den ganz gefährlichen Straftaten und Verbrechern zu benutzen. Doch dann kommen die Drogenhändler, die Kinderschänder, die Betrüger und schließlich die Steuerhinterzieher. Und plötzlich sind auch Onlinedurchsuchungen ein ganz normales Instrument polizeilicher Ermittlungen.
Das war so bei der Kronzeugenregelung, bei der Datenspeicherung zur LKW-Maut und bei der Telefonüberwachung. Die gehört längst zum polizeilichen Alltag und wird von Richtern routinemäßig genehmigt. Auch beim Großen Lauschangriff drängt die Union seit Langem auf eine Ausweitung. Ihr passt es überhaupt nicht, dass die Polizei die Mikrofone ausschalten muss, wenn die belauschten Gespräche privat werden."
DeepL translation:
"So computer spying is coming. Once again, the legislature will restrict the Basic Law. There may be understandable reasons for this if the goal is to prevent terrorists from killing hundreds of people. But it takes little prophetic ability to predict that things will turn out the way they always have in the past: first, domestic politicians and the security authorities promise on high and holy to use the new sharp sword only on the very dangerous crimes and criminals. But then come the drug dealers, the child molesters, the fraudsters and finally the tax evaders. And suddenly online searches are also a normal instrument of police investigations.
This was the case with the leniency program, data storage for truck tolls and telephone surveillance. This has long been part of everyday police life and is routinely approved by judges. The CDU/CSU has also long been pushing for an expansion of the large-scale eavesdropping program. It does not like the fact that the police have to switch off the microphones when the conversations they listen in on become private."
Thus: never trust a politicians: politicians are nearly all fraudsters who belong into a high-security jail instead of a parliament.
Actually at the time Ford's in-car entertainment was more integrated than most. Unlike others, they fitted own-brand audio systems which were either non-standard shapes and hard to replace, or they were built in entirely. I think what we see here's just an afterthought that got added late in the design process.
We use it on our rinky-dink ecommerce site, and it represents 40% of requests at the moment. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2 are at 30% each. Our users skew a bit older, and definitely aren't techno-savvy (one scrolled past all the products and used the contact us page to ask for a printed product catalogue and order form...).
Humanity goes extinct if sustainability and climate change don't matter. And so does a lot else. We've already ensured through our actions to date that what remains of our time on this earth will be miserable, but we might still stand some chance of not completely ruining the place.
A 33% reduction in the population of one country is a tiny step in the right direction, but still far short of making a significant difference.
That is not at all necessarily true. We have another 5 billion years or so before the sun exhausts it's hydrogen and starts substantially changing.
Applying even current levels of intelligence and knowledge (nevermind projecting even hints of the growth rates over the last ~10K years since agriculture, writing, etc. started), that is more than sufficient to develop resources for interplanetary and interstellar travel.
I've heard many an anecdote of soldiers deployed for months in male-only settings who could smell that a woman had arrived on base. They weren't able to describe what they smelled, or how they knew it was a woman, but they just knew.
In the books of the former Navy SEAL Richard Marcinko (he sadly died in Dec 2021), it is repeatedly stressed that soldiers shouldn't use any cologne or indeed any perfumed soap, because these smells carry a long way in the wild. The plainest soap possible and that's it.
In About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (1989), David Hackworth mentions about being on patrol in the Korean war:
None of us used repellent (Chinks could smell it as easily as after-shave, soap, tobacco, and toothpaste); we couldn’t slap at them (noises traveled loud and far at night). So we waited and reluctantly contributed our blood.
and about poor discipline in Vietnam:
Guys were using soap, toothpaste, and shaving cream before operations. They were smoking and wearing mosquito repellent on patrol.
reply