Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

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> I can understand why people who do not have direct experience with mental illness might have trouble separating the symptoms from the person

I don't judge mania, or schizophrenia. But at what point do you stop trying to separate "the person" from the things they believe and say? He's a schizophrenic, and I can't hold that against him. But a racist, homophobic, antisemitic schizophrenic is just an asshole with a regrettable mental illness.

A quote from the "poor misunderstood" genius:

The IRA beat Sherlock Holmes with the grace of God. Ghandi was a faggot. God said boys should be taught military things.

Reputation is worth more than gold. Niggers have a reputation -- no fathers. Irish have a reputation. Germans have a reputation. Attacker has the advantage. Jews have a reputation. God said the French once stood for character. (Code of Chivalry) Ironic. I guess Jews did, too. Woah! God is boss. Too bad the Jews were cowards and didn't assassinate NAZI's.

What you quoted is a textbook example of "word salad," a symptom of schizophrenia. Look at it, it's not even close to coherent. Racist delusions are not exactly unheard of in paranoid schizophrenia. Unless we have information about what Terry was like before he developed schizophrenia, it's impossible to tell if this apparent racism is him or the disease. Honestly, I'm inclined to think it's the disease. I've seen him write coherent things and I've seen him write incoherent things, but I haven't seen any instance of him talking coherently in a racist manner.

Terry's "schizophrenia" just means he perceives reality differently than you do. The "word salad" is actually not random nonsense. Your mind is perfectly trained to value political correctness and money, and so you find his thoughts nonsensical or abhorrent. Terry's mind has developed to value art and speaking the truth as he perceives it without any social filter. What you are seeing is a true artist with a perception of reality so different from your own that you don't comprehend it as rational. If you read it carefully, you'll realize everything he says is perfectly rational, he knows perfectly well what he's saying, and racist or not, from a certain perspective there is reason to it.

Imagine you are talking to someone who has been living in the wilderness for a long time, who has stumbled back into civilization and has gained a reputation for being a crazy person, and they point at a cave and say "bear hole makes the rain go away!" and becomes very frustrated that nobody bothers to try and understand them (and instead just repeats the popular opinion about how they are crazy). Are they actually speaking nonsense? I think that's what [some] schizophrenia actually is.

That's not what schizophrenia is.

The Hacker News community deals with those behaviors the same way it deals with them when exhibited by other members of the community. Likewise, Davis' work is recognized as intellectually interesting just like other intellectually interesting work.

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