Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby FourthBase » Thu Mar 21, 2013 9:29 pm

8bitagent wrote:The gas chamber is heinous, we must have done way different research into capital punishment. A Che' styled bullet would be more humane, but again it's become harder for me to be comfortable with the
death penalty.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7183957.stm

He discovered that nitrogen could do the job in about 15 seconds, and the prisoner would not feel pain - on the contrary he would feel euphoric, like being drunk.


In addition to opposition from anti-death-penalty advocates (like me) for the obvious and less obvious reasons, that it's still murder, that it could serve to encourage more death sentences and erode opposition to the death penalty -- it's also opposed by the other side for the ghoulish reason that it's too good a death, that it doesn't inflict enough suffering.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby justdrew » Thu Mar 21, 2013 9:50 pm

we could put the convict in a quantum suicide machine, where on the basis of random particle decay, from true random sources, the air will be replaced with nitrogen at an indeterminate time. Most likelihood designed such that the trigger random event will occur within 24 hours, but of course, may never occur. Stipulate that if they last 3 days, they are spared and returned to jail with possibly some parole possibility if they're "reformed" at some point before natural death.

The probabilities are no one will make it 3 days, from our external point of view, but if certain quantum formulations are correct, from the standpoint of the convict, they'll always end up in a different world line where they do make it the 3 days.

Thus kicking them out of our reality without actually killing them, assuming the many-worlds interpretation.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Freitag » Fri Mar 22, 2013 12:02 am

justdrew wrote:we could put the convict in a quantum suicide machine, where on the basis of random particle decay, from true random sources, the air will be replaced with nitrogen at an indeterminate time. Most likelihood designed such that the trigger random event will occur within 24 hours, but of course, may never occur. Stipulate that if they last 3 days, they are spared and returned to jail with possibly some parole possibility if they're "reformed" at some point before natural death.

The probabilities are no one will make it 3 days, from our external point of view, but if certain quantum formulations are correct, from the standpoint of the convict, they'll always end up in a different world line where they do make it the 3 days.

Thus kicking them out of our reality without actually killing them, assuming the many-worlds interpretation.


:shock: :praybow

Preferably they land in a universe where their hand are cut off... or I guess we could cut them off here just to be sure.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Wed Jul 03, 2013 1:04 pm

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill ... ychopaths/

Using Twitter To Identify Psychopaths

(Fairly long article.)

Edited once to correct url.
Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby justdrew » Wed Jul 03, 2013 8:23 pm

Pele'sDaughter » 03 Jul 2013 10:04 wrote:http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/07/20/using-twitter-to-help-expose-psychopaths/

Using Twitter To Identify Psychopaths

(Fairly long article.)

Edited once to correct url.


aka Using Twitter To Identify Psychopaths WHO TWEET COMPULSIVELY

I fucking hate twitter :crybaby
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 05, 2013 2:48 pm

Just to trouble the issue here, what about Jon Venables? I think that case is supremely disturbing to either side of this argument, in that he is so clearly both monster and victim.

(I also have doubts we'll ever get the full story of how a 10 year old picks up a taste for such atrocities to begin with...)
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Searcher08 » Fri Jul 05, 2013 3:41 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 05, 2013 6:48 pm wrote:Just to trouble the issue here, what about Jon Venables? I think that case is supremely disturbing to either side of this argument, in that he is so clearly both monster and victim.

(I also have doubts we'll ever get the full story of how a 10 year old picks up a taste for such atrocities to begin with...)


I am reminded of one of the Inuit tribes solution to psychopaths. One tribe had described to them some of the features of a psychopath. They were familiar with it and added in their culture, this person would demand extra food, find reasons not to hunt, pressure-seduce married women etc.

They were very matter of fact - they had tried allowing people like that but it didnt work.

The solution was to arrange a seal hunt and at the appropriate moment push him off the ice into the sea.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby SonicG » Fri Jul 05, 2013 11:18 pm

Reminds me of a discussion never had with a friend who asserted that evil does indeed exist...I often come back to my arguments against although I'm not sure where to take it right now as I have some very personal thoughts about it. Certainly Arendt's "banality of evil" is still important for applying to the larger scale. I have always looked at individual psychopaths as, exactly as the term implies, a sickness, a crossing of wires with both physiological and socio-cultural root causes. Reading about the young man in the OP is certainly a test of one's resolve to argue against the death penalty in all cases...
In relation to the quantum suicide machine, I was always intrigued with the torture device in the Hitchhiker's guide where you are shown the infinite scale of the universe and your relation to that vastness. Would that experience humble even a psychopath? Of course, for Zaphod Beeblebrox it just reconfirmed how cool he was...So was he a psychopath? Or just extremely enlightened already? There is certainly a power trip to taking lives indiscriminately - for that is God's power.
I hate to trot this out all the time but Gurdjieff said, "Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?" And more:
“For a man of Western culture, it is of course difficult to believe and the accept the idea that an ignorant fakir, a naive monk, or a yogi who has retired from life may be on the way to evolution, while an educated European, armed with “exact knowledge” and all the latest methods of investigation, has no chance whatever and is moving in a circle from there is no escape…..

What do you expect? People are machines. Machines have to be blind and unconscious, they cannot be otherwise, and all their actions have to correspond to their nature. Everything happens. No one does anything.

“Progress” and “civilization” in the real meaning of those words, can appear only as the result of conscious efforts. They cannot appear as the result of unconscious efforts. And what conscious efforts can there be in machines? And if one machine is unconscious, then a hundred machines are unconscious, and so are a thousand machines, or a hundred thousand, or a million. And the unconscious activity of a million machines must necessarily result in destruction and extermination. You do not yet understand and cannot imagine all the results of this evil. But the time will come when you will understand.”


Yet I hate when this is twisted in self-superior finger-pointing at "the sheeple" who refuse to "wake up". It is important to always first see one's own complicity as that is the only thing we can truly be personally responsible for...
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby blankly » Sat Jul 06, 2013 1:48 am

Evil exists in the same way that love exists. Its just a word, a best attempt to describe a whole collection of approximately related feelings and intentions. In the spectrum of evil acts and actors, intention does play a part. Its that intention (to do harm to others) which we'd like to explain away with a preferably curable disease. However its not possible to ignore the part of individual will, of choice, and the feedback of collective will. Evil doers can more easily thrive in complex societies, simply because they can move around and move on.Those who seek to publicly flaunt their evil acts are in a minority, and actually less dangerous than the undercover variety. Complex societies give the illusion of protection from evil - each of us creating our own bubble of safe friends, or believing we have, whilst actually being disempowered.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Sounder » Sat Jul 06, 2013 8:28 am

Excellent posts SonicG and blankly

and thanks for the Gurdjieff quotes SonicG.


sonicG wrote....
It is important to always first see one's own complicity as that is the only thing we can truly be personally responsible for...


We all seem to have vested interests in remaining unconscious in regard to wide swaths of reality even as we use claims of awareness in one area to cover up for lack of awareness in regard to issues that have, by factors of hundreds or thousands of times, more fundamental effects on our situation.

I have long been intrigued by Abraham Heschel's definition evil as being the promotion of divisiveness.

By this measure, all of us carry around at least a bit of evil.

But no, nobody is 'just' evil.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby semper occultus » Wed Aug 23, 2017 7:20 am

Oxford University official and US professor 'killed Chicago hairstylist as part of sexual fantasy'

Image
Professor Wyndham Lathem, left, and Andrew Warren, an Oxford employee CREDIT: AP

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/21/oxford-university-official-us-professor-killed-chicago-hairstylist/

21 AUGUST 2017 • 6:56AM
The fatal stabbing of a hairstylist in Chicago was part of a sexual fantasy hatched in an online chatroom between a Northwestern University professor and an Oxford University employee, whose plan included killing someone and then themselves, prosecutors told a Cook County judge on Sunday at a bond hearing for the men.

An Illinois prosecutor shared disturbing new details about the July 27 slaying, describing to the court how Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, the 26-year-old boyfriend of since-fired microbiology professor Wyndham Lathem, was stabbed 70 times at Lathem's Chicago condo and with such brutality that he was nearly decapitated. His throat was slit and pulmonary artery torn.

Lathem, 46, had communicated for months before with Andrew Warren, 56, about "carrying out their sexual fantasies of killing others and then themselves," Natosha Toller, an assistant Cook County state's Attorney, told the court. While the prosecutor used the plural in talking about the alleged fantasy to kill, she did not say there were other victims.

Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr. at one point shook his head in apparent disgust as he listened to the prosecutor offer a chilling narrative of the slaying. He later deemed both men potentially dangerous and flight risks, ordering them to remain in jail pending trial on first-degree murder charges.

"The heinous facts speak for themselves," he said.

Lathem and Warren - a British citizen employed as a financial official at Oxford University - were dressed in their own clothes on Sunday at their first court appearance in Chicago. They stood calmly, their hands behind their backs, as the prosecutor and judge spoke.

Lathem paid for Warren's ticket to travel to the United States and he picked Warren up at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport a few days before the killing, the prosecutor said. On July 26, one day before the killing, Lathem booked a room for Warren near the condo, Toller said.

Lathem had told Warren to take video of the killing using his mobile phone, but Warren did not end up recording it, the prosecutor said.

Cornell-Duranleau, a Michigan native, had been asleep in Lathem's high-rise Chicago condo when Lathem let Warren into the 10th-floor unit around 4:30 a.m. on July 27 - treading carefully so as not to wake the victim. As Warren stood in a doorway, Lathem crept up to Cornell-Duranleau and began plunging a 6-inch drywall saw knife into his chest and neck, Toller said.

When Cornell-Duranleau awoke, he began screaming and fought back; Lathem yelled at Warren, asking him to help subdue Cornell-Duranleau, the prosecutor said.

Warren ran over to cover the victim's mouth, then struck him in the head with a heavy lamp in an attempt to silence him, Toller said. As Lathem continued to stab the victim, Warren left the room and returned with two kitchen knives, she said.

Warren bent over Cornell-Duranleau and joined Lathem in stabbing him, the prosecutor said. At one point, the victim bit Warren's hand as he struggled to fight off the attack.

She said the victim's last words were to Lathem: "Wyndham, what are you doing?"

While prosecutors said Lathem and Warren had concocted a plan to kill themselves after the stabbing, Toller did not say why they never followed through with it.

After showering, Lathem and Warren left the apartment an hour after the stabbing began, the prosecutor said. They surrendered to California authorities on August 4 after an eight-day manhunt and were recently returned to Illinois.

The stab wounds to Cornell-Duranleau included 21 to the chest and abdomen, and 26 in the back, as well as multiple cuts on his hands. Cornell-Duranleau's lungs were also both punctured, and there were wounds to his colon, spleen and liver.

After leaving the apartment and renting a car, Lathem on the same day left an anonymous $5,610 donation - in cash - at the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago in the name 'Cornell-Duranleau.' They then drove to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and, 13 hours after the first payment, Lathem went to its public library and wrote a $1,000 check as a donation, also in the victim's name, the prosecutor said.

Toller said Lathem, while on the run, sent a video message to his parents and friends, admitting to the killing and telling them "he is not the person people thought he was."

Lathem's lawyer, Barry Sheppard, said in a brief statement to reporters after the hearing that people shouldn't "engage in a rush to judgment." He said his client had led "a life of unblemished ... citizenship," which included academic work on the bubonic-plague virus.

Warren spoke briefly when the judge asked if he wanted a British diplomatic office to be in contact. "No," Warren said. For the bond hearing, Warren relied on a public defender, who did not comment later.

The judge set a Tuesday hearing for the men, when another judge will be assigned to oversee the criminal case. Both would have a chance to enter pleas at a later arraignment.
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Iamwhomiam » Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:30 pm

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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Grizzly » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:25 pm

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ement.html
Montana couple 'stabbed two people to death and then left the bodies to dissolve in plastic tubs of chemicals'
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby brekin » Wed Aug 23, 2017 6:11 pm

Searcher08 » Fri Jul 05, 2013 2:41 pm wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » Fri Jul 05, 2013 6:48 pm wrote:Just to trouble the issue here, what about Jon Venables? I think that case is supremely disturbing to either side of this argument, in that he is so clearly both monster and victim.
(I also have doubts we'll ever get the full story of how a 10 year old picks up a taste for such atrocities to begin with...)


I am reminded of one of the Inuit tribes solution to psychopaths. One tribe had described to them some of the features of a psychopath. They were familiar with it and added in their culture, this person would demand extra food, find reasons not to hunt, pressure-seduce married women etc.
They were very matter of fact - they had tried allowing people like that but it didnt work.
The solution was to arrange a seal hunt and at the appropriate moment push him off the ice into the sea.




Sounder wrote:Excellent posts SonicG and blankly
and thanks for the Gurdjieff quotes SonicG.
sonicG wrote....
It is important to always first see one's own complicity as that is the only thing we can truly be personally responsible for...

We all seem to have vested interests in remaining unconscious in regard to wide swaths of reality even as we use claims of awareness in one area to cover up for lack of awareness in regard to issues that have, by factors of hundreds or thousands of times, more fundamental effects on our situation.
I have long been intrigued by Abraham Heschel's definition evil as being the promotion of divisiveness.
By this measure, all of us carry around at least a bit of evil.
But no, nobody is 'just' evil.


I'd surmise all of us are to some degree evil, 10%? 25%? and that probably varies across time - depending on circumstances, environment, opportunity, stress, etc. But I could see some people being just plain old evil to a very high degree almost all the time, or when there best opportunities present itself to engage in evil acts. Some people are profoundly benevolent to a high degree consistently - I don't see why some people couldn't be profoundly malevolent to a high degree consistently. A lot of evil orgs/regimes trawl for sadistic convicts/evil psychopaths to maintain their power, so there is a market demand for high end evil individuals. Could someone be 100% evil though? I'd say it is the condition of being or the desire to be that is lacking - but the opportunity. Something which technology and slowly closing.

If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: Maybe Some People Are Just Evil?

Postby Grizzly » Fri Aug 25, 2017 5:47 am

Every once in a while this place is outstandingly thought provoking... More so when Jeff was here, sad, but true.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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