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Comment by cupscale | Hacker News Reader

Ehhh sorry, saying things like "I'm Albert Einstein and you're all just fucking monkeys scratching in the dirt" doesn't strike me as the speech of someone who's particularly nice.

Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that.

It's ok for the conclusion here to be, "Rick's an asshole who should've been fired but management fucked up pretty badly." Situations don't have to be binary with only one party at fault.

EDIT: Let's also not forget the accounts of Rick supposedly berating people in meetings. If multiple people think you're being mean to them, you're probably being mean.

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I don't know: in my experience pretty much everyone has a breaking point somewhere and once they reach it things can get pretty random. I've seen people I thought had it all together just completely lose the plot and disintegrate too many times to believe it's all bubbling away there, just below the surface, in all of us.

Your reasons for being an asshole don’t change the end result though. It just changes the context around it.

Similarly I can understand how an aggressive dog came to be (poor training, etc.). That won’t change my opinion that the dog should be put down when it mauls a kid, you know?

Perhaps it's the dog's owners who should be put down. After all, they'll just get another dog and make it as aggressive as the previous one...

Blaming an innocent for how they were cultivated is silly. Especially when those innocents can be rehabilitated.

We're getting a little off topic, but this company is just setting up another Rick to take the blame when the train goes off the tracks again.

If you read my other comments, you’ll see that I agree with you completely.

That doesn’t mean the dog shouldn’t be put down. It just means there are also other parties at fault.

It absolutely means the dog shouldn't be put down. Dogs, and more importantly people, can be rehabilitated.

All it takes is one person in power to care enough to see to that rehabilitation to transform an aggressive "dick" back into a productive team member.

>Your reasons for being an asshole don’t change the end result though. It just changes the context around it.

No, it very much does.

We are not cavemen to assign labels to people based only on external outcomes. Ever courts take emotional state and other circumstances into account.

Sorry, it really really doesn’t.

The court might take your emotional state into account when you murder someone, but if they’ve got you dead-to-rights you’re still going to prison.

Does Rick deserve to get blacklisted? No. Would I have been incredibly upset if they named the individual? Yes.

Did Rick deserve to get fired even though they basically set him up to get fired? Yep, he still does.

Did Rick react inappropriately to a horrible situation? Yep, he did.

Actually no, just because you kill someone doesn't mean you're going to jail. If someone is attacking you and you lash out in self-defense, you're very likely to not go to jail as everyone is expected to be able to defend themselves. It sounds very much like this was a defense mechanism to overwork. The fact that they didn't give him time off before approaching him was kind of crappy in the first place. It should never have come to what it came to.

Most people (at least in my experience, you know, the one who's making the subjective judgement about him being a dick) can be angry without saying something pretentiously mean like that.

Doesn't matter.

Someone backed into a corner is just act like someone backed into a corner. The die was already cast. Everything that happens after is blame-shifting.

Uh, what? It absolutely does matter. There are appropriate reactions when you’re “backed into a corner”, and there are inappropriate reactions.

I absolutely get to say what the arbitrary line is in this case because I’m the one making the subjective judgment that Rick was most likely being an asshole.

If Rick had snapped and shot up the place would you think he should face no consequences?

If Rick had snapped and shot up the place would you think he should face no consequences?

I'm sorry I insufficiently hedged my tolerance of someone showing anger when pressed and didn't think to explicitly cover the case of escalation to violence.

I absolutely get to say what the arbitrary line is in this case because I’m the one making the subjective judgment

And I absolutely get to tell you that in my assessment you're wrong. That how opinions work.

> I’m sorry

Good, I’m glad we agree that you insufficiently argued that people backed into a corner aren’t responsible for their actions.

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