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Comment by nym | Hacker News Reader

Summary?

Guy dicks around with forces he doesn't have the free cash available to dick around with, blames IRS.

Later finds himself losing work due to working in aerospace as Air Force bases are closed in the 90's, leading into 9/11 and a meltdown in his ability to generate personal revenue. Blames IRS.

Runs out of money, blames IRS.

Flies plain into IRS building with the intent to indiscriminately murder anyone who happens to be in the building at the time, ending his pathetic life. Doesn't even garner a headline on the Huffington Post. Forgotten two weeks later.

I tell you, I can be sympathetic to a letter such as his, to some of the things any of us can easily see are wrong right now in the USA, but of course I do not condone his extreme by any means.

However, here was the kicker for me: "But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income". Let me get this straight -- he was in love and married. Forget all the money stuff, tax liens, unemployment, whatever it was. He was so in love that he just got married. And then what does he do? He pilots a plane into the IRS building. I also read somewhere that he burned his house down before doing that. It's probably anyone's guess that his wife was at work while all this was going on. So this troubles me that a man focuses so myopically on purity principles such as anti-corruption, that he would block out one of the purest principles at all, which is love.

Meanwhile, local television in Austin, the Texas capital, said Stack's house was fully engulfed in flames this morning just before the crash into the IRS building, and that Stack's wife and 12-year-old daughter had been pulled out distraught but unscathed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/18/austin-plane-sui...

Last I checked marriage does not always proceed from love.

I think he has a point about the sloppiness and unresponsiveness of the government -- although the sloppiness and unresponsiveness of a large, bureaucratic organization hardly justifies carrying out his own miniature September 11th! Doubly painful in that the people he killed probably liked the IRS no more than he did -- few workers in government bureaucracy _enjoy_ what they have to put up with...

Killing others and committing suicide are both very serious matters, so I hate to say this, but his rant on the IRS reminded me of nothing so much as Timecube. What have we done wrong in this society, that we get people like this, especially the deadly ones? I don't think it's a political, moral, or social-outlook problem; but I hardly know what it is. A more honest and competent government would have removed this man's particular grievance, but it wouldn't have fixed the root problem; someone in his mental state is probably going to find something to be aggrieved with regardless...

It's just a bug in our design as humans, IMO, but it's that same bug which allows us to occasionally do monumentally amazing things. It just depends how you spin your perceptions to yourself, I suppose, and if you can accept that greatness is, more or less, a large scale way of turning a frown upside down. :)

Oh, I'm a nut too, and humanity would be much worse off without its nuts, but what concerns me is that particular, Timecube-esque variety of nut -- not particularly creative or ambitious, but turgid and cramped. Why do people end up like that...?

I can't really say why, but I think the common thread they share is they get lost following a path of information that becomes self-referential - and rather than seeing that as a flaw, they apply a kind of naive mathematical reasoning and assume that because they ended up back where they started it proves the whole system is consistent - and that's therefore a good and universal truth.

If you've ever listened to any significant amount of Coast to Coast AM, you've probably heard any number of conspiracy theorists and paranormalists justify and build their books and beliefs upon the books, beliefs, or incidents of others. My untested hypothesis is that if you unraveled all those interdependencies and book citations, references, etc. you'd end up with an entirely self-contained cloud of "evidence" that is disconnected from objective reality.

Whatever it is in a culture that leads desperate people to decide to kill strangers before commiting suicide has far more to do with the culture than with human DNA.

Culture is a byproduct of humanity and therefore it's quirks are a reflection of our quirks.

Front page. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/18/austin-plane-crash-...

Spoke too soon!

You forgot the parts where he blames the Catholic Church.

The general feeling I get from this is that the guy cares way too much about money and tit-for-tat.

This is currently the only story the TV news networks are covering.

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