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flatt commented on Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel   ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Lette... · Posted by u/wut42
hnbad · 2 years ago
(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.

flatt · 2 years ago
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.

flatt commented on Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel   ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Lette... · Posted by u/wut42
hnbad · 2 years ago
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.

flatt · 2 years ago
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.

flatt commented on Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel   ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Lette... · Posted by u/wut42
kstrauser · 2 years ago
Is he a diagnosed psychopath? I'll grant that murdering one's wife seems like good supporting evidence, but I'm not aware that he's known to be one.
flatt · 2 years ago
It's not even the murder so much as it's the premeditation. Even the most non-psychopathic mentally ill individuals with the most awful intrusive thoughts will still have an active conscience telling them not to do the things their minds are telling them to do. This is a big part of the torture schizophrenics are going through. Psychopaths do not have a conscience and psychopathy is not a diagnosis. The diagnosis given to psychopaths is typically Antisocial Personality Disorder, of which I have no idea if Reiser personally qualifies. But yes, premeditated murder is going to rank quite high in the scoring criteria. Hans believes/believed that he had the right to kill his wife. Even if he legitimately feels sorry (and I would be highly skeptical), the question becomes whether he actually feels sorry for the murder or the fact that it has landed him in prison (and that he only really feels sorry for himself).

Dead Comment

flatt commented on Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel   ftp.mfek.org/Reiser/Lette... · Posted by u/wut42
kstrauser · 2 years ago
That was fascinating. It sounds like he’s done some real introspection during his lockup, and I hope he’s able to apply those learnings to future situations.

I felt bad for him[0] while reading. He was a brilliant young person with a big dream, yet without the interpersonal skills to help him realize it. I’ve seen that so often. Maybe this will help me look past the next person’s challenging communications, and think here’s someone who means well but doesn’t know how to explain it. Reiser wants to learn how not to be an ass. I can try to learn how to recognize when someone being an ass is caught in the same traps he was. That, and how to be sure I’m not the one being the ass.

Best of luck on the continuing personal growth, Hans.

[0]Minus the obvious, of course.

flatt · 2 years ago
I mean nothing personal by it but all I see when I see posts like yours (and many others in this thread), is that the average person understands nothing about psychopathy. What he did was premeditated. His brain is wired in such a way that killing his wife was always an option. No amount of neuroplasticity will override this baked-in reality of who this man is. Teaching psychopaths social skills will not provide them with the idealized "personal growth" you imagine. I highly recommend, "The Psychopath Test" by Jon Ronson (of "The Mean That Stare at Goats" fame) as an amusing but on-point introduction.
flatt commented on Dollar Tree says US$1.25 price point to become new standard   bnnbloomberg.ca/dollar-tr... · Posted by u/Krontab
heartbreak · 4 years ago
> A 50lb bag of white rice can be had on Amazon for $88

There's an obvious problem with cost per unit tricks like this. You have to be able to front the money to buy the big bag of rice. If your food budget is $40/wk, how are you going to spend $88 on a bag of rice? With your non-existent savings account? By eating plain rice and literally nothing else for > two weeks?

flatt · 4 years ago
I think the point is that people on the poverty line eventually have to start making decisions that will break them out of the cycle. There are plenty of programs out there that will do just that. A 50lb bag of rice might very well be too much upfront but it might mean hitting the local food pantry while building up a pantry full of staples from EBT. I don't pretend this is an easy process but continuing to do that same and getting the same results shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Additionally, it can't be stated enough how important it is to build up credit for these people.

Dead Comment

flatt commented on Google suspending Parler from the Google Play store   play.google.com/store/app... · Posted by u/jimmy2020
dleslie · 5 years ago
It's almost like there was some sort of catalyst event that occurred very recently that would provoke such a response. /s
flatt · 5 years ago
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." -Some guy from some political party
flatt commented on Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name   deepsouthventures.com/bui... · Posted by u/whalesalad
kristopolous · 6 years ago
It's not about cheapening out, it's an exorbitant amount without much real customer value. "news.ycombinator.com" apparently works just as well as if this was "techtalk.com" or "bizchat.com" or whatever.

Yahoo isn't about cowboys, Amazon isn't about rainforests, uber isn't a firm from Germany, Google isn't about mathematics... It really doesn't seem to be correlated with business success.

Any made up name will do. Blorpblip, flipturf, dundrill, yepyip, nodnod, whatever. Those only look weird because it's your first time seeing it. Substance comes before brand

The meaning is assigned by the business praxis, not the other way around.

flatt · 6 years ago
Does it though? There's little doubt in my mind that this site would have far greater reach (the actual desirability of that aside) if it were located at hackernews.com. I have no idea what the current owner would want for it but I'm sure it's substantial and rightfully so.

u/flatt

KarmaCake day8April 5, 2017View Original