Comment by Kednicma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kednicma | Hacker News Reader

> A millenial himself, [MBS] spent his youth eating fast food, playing Age of Empires and first-person shooter games, and keeping up with friends on the internet, according to people who’ve known him since childhood.

It's worth remembering that dictators are not inhuman, and they are not so different from us.

> Asaker would pay more than $300,000 to Abouammo, deposited in a Lebanese bank account that Abouammo had a relative open for him. “Proactive and reactively we will delete evil, my brother,” Abouammo texted Asaker just before one deposit of $9,911.

They structured [0] the bribes to avoid SARs; structuring really does happen.

> A third, a Saudi, was “a professional” who used encryption to conceal his identity, though once he signed in without encryption, and Alzabarah was able to track his IP address.

> [Alzabarah] spoke with Asaker on an open phone line and communicated via email.

> So rather than follow the FBI’s request to keep things quiet to assist the case, Twitter lawyers brought Alzabarah in the following afternoon, accused him of improperly accessing user accounts, and told him he was temporarily suspended.

Operational security is hard. Just one slip-up can doom the entire scheme, and here we see those slip-ups from everybody; from the folks being targeted by MBS, from MBS's goons, and from Twitter.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring

> It's worth remembering that dictators are not inhuman, and they are not so different from us.

It's also worth remembering we're talking about someone who assassinates his critics and cuts them up into pieces. I would say the "bone saw" aspect outweighs the "playing AoE" aspect and he is very different from us.

The point is that in his situation we don't know how many apparently "normal" people will start sending bone-saws out into the world.

100% this. It’s also important not to dehumanise history’s bad guys, because that leads to a culture of complacency whereby people think “it could never happen here, because they were monsters and we are not”.

There might be two slightly different definitions of "humanize" at work here. Both of these are from the Cambridge dictionary [1]:

1) "to make something that is not human seem like a person"

2) "to make something less unpleasant and more suitable for people"

With dictators, I think we should try to do 1) but not 2).

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/humanize

>It’s also important not to dehumanise history’s bad guys

Too late for one group. Go check how much Nazi vampire zombie media exists today.

Normal people don't personally send bone-saws out into the world, but look at the rhetoric surrounding the recent protests in the US and Hong Kong. Plenty of normal people (many mainlanders, many persons of a particular political party affiliation) are cheer-leading the rabble to get dispersed with the maximum possible application of force - and most of them don't even have any stake in either the issue being protested, or the impact of the protests themselves!

And assuming the police are normal people too, they are all too happy to carry this out.

Normal people are quite happy to endorse or inflict violence against the enemy. Most of us just aren't in a position of power to do anything about it, though, other than post on Facebook, and write angry letters to the editor.

But give that normal person power over other people and freedom from consequences... And, well, you get something quite repulsive.

The idea that morality is a function of situation more than character is called "situationism" in philosophy, I just looked it up, see [1][2]. Experimental psychology does find that character is fairly weak in most people and that under external pressure people will often behave inhumanely (Stanford prison experiment, Milgram obedience experiment, etc).

I still believe it is important to not be overly cynical. My mental model is that most people are neutral or good. It might be proved wrong say 5% of the time, when people are indeed put in MBS-like position. But the vast majority of the time it will be correct, and it will be much more useful than the cynical model where your normal friends are potential murderers that just lack opportunity. A more correct mental model is not always more useful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationism_(psychology) [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character/#MorChaEm...

My mental model is that humans are pieces of shit, each and every last one. There is no such thing as a good human.

By insisting that MBS is some sort of specially evil person, I feel that you are devaluing the importance of genuine ethical consideration. I do not disagree with your specific points about his misbehaviour, but I want to emphasize that it is the throne and crown which empower him to do so much harm, and not any sort of blackened and hateful heart.

Another very common example throughout history: cannibalism. Nobody thinks they're capable of it yet somehow in a starvation situation it just happens to happen.

Or worth considering: https://twitter.com/mccormickprof/status/1278529694355292161

This is super important. A lot of people think that bad guys always behave like monsters and you can easily recognize them. In reality you would probably be positively impressed by a lot of them if you met them and didn’t know their background. Hitler was able to convince a lot of smart people to follow him and I have read he was very personable. Bernie Madoff could convince . Trump/Obama/Clinton haters would probably be surprised how nice these people are when meeting in person.

Indeed. It's easy to forget that very different behavioral rulesets can create similar conduct in some situations but radically different conduct in others. For example, your dog doesn't operate on the same moral code you do. It may love you, enjoy seeing you, would never harm a hair on your head, and enjoys all the same activities as you. It might also catch a squirrel, slowly pull all its limbs off, and spend the afternoon frolicking with its corpse. Don't mistake someone sometimes acting like you for someone who thinks like you.

It's worth remembering that even normal people can do this.

I often hear people say "I cannot imagine X (person I know) can do Y." They have a poor imagination.

A lot of people can't understand just how often people, including their friends, lie; yes even to them! People think they will be able to detect any lie.

People are delusional.

There are two failings here:

1) Twitter immediately revealing to the employee that they were under investigation

2) The FBI not considering #1 and being prepared to detain Alzabarah if he attempted to flee.

I'm not surprised by twitter but a little disappointed in the FBI.

I get the impression that Twitter has become a much smarter organization through really painful growing pains like this. I still wonder how I would play it if I became knowledgable. How long does this go on, do you just keep moving the person along on their career ladder? It seems like you'd need help from the FBI in how to maintain the charade if it were to go on for too long. But fascinating, I'm sure it comes up.

Prisons are full of murderers who've also done ordinary things like play video games. This isn't novel and shouldn't impress you.

I wouldn't consider murderers to be very abnormal. Every one of else has the capacity to kill in the right situations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com