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Comment by z9e | Hacker News Reader

Ouch. I'm sure this will destroy him financially and his reputation, but what if he actually turned his life around and is completely ashamed of this past? I don't want to come off like I support his past whatsoever, because I don't, but I feel there's no forgiveness left in our society to give people like this a second chance.

I guess I just believe people can change for the better and I want to encourage that more, rather than seeing people shunned after trying to become better and potentially being a danger to society once again as a result.

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Forgiveness falls upon members of the public who read the story, not the press. I have no problem with this past being reported, especially given that he now runs what sounds like a large surveillance company. Being a successful CEO carries extra scrutiny that he might not have to deal with if he took a path with a lower profile.

I don't think random people in the public deserve an apology.

The people he hurt do. Since when does the general social media community deserve to be apologized to. People are getting an emotional power rush by forcing apologies from people who never transgressed against them.

This is poisonous behavior.

I think you misunderstand me, I’m not suggesting that the general social media community deserves to be apologized to.

The comment I replied to questioned whether publishing stories like this ruining people is right given the subject’s success and the public’s propensity to judge, which I didn’t agree with. It’s not the responsibility of the press to filter stories on compassionate or moral grounds, and there was nothing wrong IMO around its release.

I don’t believe that the public deserves an apology here, just as I don’t believe that journalists should refrain from publishing legitimate accounts of this kind of behavior, no matter how old.

Shooting up a symbolic religious building is an indiscriminate hate crime. He intended to hurt more than just the specific individuals that were in the building at the time, he meant to make an entire community of people with a similar background afraid.

>I don't think random people in the public deserve an apology.

They do, because he claims to serve the public by fulfulling government surveillance contracts.

It's lunacy. I have no idea about the man or who he is but 30-odd year old incidents should never ruin a person's career. This reeks of moral panic.

I agree with that, but would you extend that sympathy to e.g. people running for political office?

Yes? I do not see why that would be different.

I also agree, but it's a crazy world we live in and I don't know if most people feel the same when it's pointed towards a political opponent. We think the current President did questionable things in his past, but imagine what kind of dirty laundry will be revealed looking farther out into the future in the age of total & instant information... The entire life of future politicians from the time they were wearing diapers through adulthood will be documented in HD, geographically tracked, word-for-word. It will be interesting!

I don't necessarily disagree, but can one do anything that puts them past a point where society should afford them a chance at redemption? Does an individual always deserve to be given a second chance?

Nobody deserves one.

Yet something remarkable happens to all of us when people who don't deserve them, are given one.

Some people won't ever change....

The ones who will, will stun you. And we are all made better by the effort.

Yes

These are great questions. When I look at religious institutions (I'm thinking of the Catholic church, or the LDS church that I grew up in) there are formal ways to achieve absolution. I wonder if we need a secular version of that, other than "prison time"? (And even "prison time" typically carries life-long stigma, rather than absolution).

Absolution doesn't mean you ignore character traits, unless it's a simple society.

If a KKK recruiter and organizer can eventually renounce his past and go on to have a 50 year career as a legislator in DC, why can't this guy put his past behind him?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd

Possible. Ultimately for Byrd, the voters decided. In this case, the market will decide.

Which market is that? He’s a powerful ceo. There’s no market for those, as such. The market can set prices for bread and orange juice, although that’s manipulated too, but it’s not like this guy was traded on some options market or something. He got the job by raising capital, knowing the right people, etc. not everything is a market.

Also, the products his company sells are not on offer to the public but to a small elite of powerful government and private officials, who definitely don’t care what the public thinks since all this can be shrouded in secrecy and ignored or denied.

This will likely have no effect on him or his career. We have white nationalists in all levels of public and private life, more or less out in the open, and almost nobody can do anything about it, and those who could, don’t care.

There are literally billions of people more deserving of his position in life than him. Sure, this applies to some extent to everyone, but given surveillance companies like the one he's built most disproportionately harm the blacks that he wanted 'elimination' of, it's maybe not the best to give him the corporate-equivalent of a loaded gun.

This assuredly won't destroy his finances. It probably won't absolutely kill his reputation; he's not the worst guy in the circles he runs in. That doesn't mean that suddenly others should respect him or give him the time of day, though.

People do change between being 17 and being adults. If you write about your life, knowing you are now a public figure, and leave this huge racist detail out, then the change is not enough.

We can't accept both that people change, and it's ok to lie about it to everyone.

Why can't you accept that? People change and people can still be afraid that if everyone knew what they did as a teenager they'd be attacked relentlessly. Lying is exactly the correct thing to do when living in an unreasonable world.

Lying because you're afraid of an unreasonable world... That's your argument? Lying because of fear doesn't make it right. I think we fundamentally disagree on values and maturity levels that adults should aspire to.

What if telling the truth could bring harm to your family, who had nothing to do with it, but omitting the truth would harm no one?

> Lying is exactly the correct thing to do when living in an unreasonable world.

I suppose this mindset could be an ingredient for a CEO that wins. But there's a difference between forgiveness and credibility of character, and credibility is part of a CEO's job.

What Damien did was drive white supremacists to a synagogue shoot-up, and in the Navy he continued to befriend white supremacists. All these matters affect credibility, and credibility is part of the CEO's job, and hence why Banjo is being distracted right now.

Wait... so you expect people to walk around with a giant billboard on their chest reading "I used to be in the KKK"?

It's one thing for a person to atone for their mistakes. ...it's another more sinister thing to demand that they apologize to everyone perpetually.

I find these demands for public apologies disgusting in their own right. All these social media types demanding that they deserve an apology for someone else's historic transgression.

If you think about it - it's really just a power rush you get forcing people to cow to you.

> It's one thing for a person to atone for their mistakes.

It sounds more like he tried covering up his mistakes once he became a public figure, which was his decision. He could’ve acknowledged it during any of his media appearances, which would’ve allowed him to discuss the issue on his own terms instead of letting a devastating article dictate the tone of his past. He chose to hide it instead.

There’s nothing wrong with publishing this kind of information, it’s absolutely in the public interest when a CEO of a successful company was involved in white nationalism. Nobody is explicitly demanding an apology, the public just demands to know these things.

He's been lying. He practically wrote a book about it and lied about that part. You invented the part about forced apologies - I didn't say that.

...and what any of this have to do with you? Why do you think you deserve to be apologized to?

...for a crime you were not a party to. ...at a time you likely weren't even born.

Ask yourself what emotional chasm are you trying to fill to get people you've never met to apologize to you.

Not writing about a 2? year period that happened 32 years ago isn't lying.

A CEO of a surveillance company clearly has not turned their life around.

That probably has more to do with having been in the military...

It doesn't change the fact that it is fundamentally a bad thing, because it will be used mostly for nefarious ends.

I'd probably have a leg up selling anti-personnel mines to the US military if I were a former officer, but using this advantage would be unethical (because land mines are fundamentally evil).

I disagree. It looks like he got this experience because of the work he did against the skinheads.

I think that's a little bit of a strawman argument. Surveillance has its time and place, especially when used to deter crime or bring justice to really bad people out there. That's like saying Kevin Mitnick didn't turn his life around when he started consulting.

>especially when used to deter crime or bring justice to really bad people out there

At what point does the vague goal of "deter crime" start to infringe on privacy? We're already seeing this happen and it's a bullshit argument, frankly.

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