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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

She was just a mass murderer. I don't see any indications of sociopathy.

I bet most people could be turned to this life given her circumstances and environment.

The two biggest mistakes people tend to repeat are thinking that (1) it can't happen here and (2) if it does happen here I'll be different.

It's our society that is better, not our people.

It'll never go to zero, but in a well-off society you see mental health issues accounting for a lot of crime. In poor or chaotic societies, there is the added element of otherwise normal people forced by circumstance into doing terrible things.

Societies are not on some kind of monotonically increasing slope, they can regress and they can do so with astonishing speed.

Society cannot erase the demons of our nature. At best you achieve a level of control that is fleeting.

She accepted payment from a friend to murder the friend's boyfriend's other girlfriend. Not only that, she decapitated and dismembered the body. Did we read the same article? Having a "just doing a job" attitude about killing other people is sociopathic.

You don't have to be a sociopath to do horrific things. A lot of people are capable of doing the same in the right (wrong) circumstances.

A lot of people don't like to hear that. It's simmilar to when people call Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, etc. "monsters", they weren't monsters, they were human. Humans are capable of some pretty fucked up things

If what she said about killing the first person was correct, she felt remorse. She had a conscious, she just forced herself to ignore it until killing stopped bothering her.

Historical genocides, and massacres show that either there are a lot more latent sociopaths out there than we ever dreamed of, or normal people can become desensitized to killing.

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