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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

The father was hired after his arrest. To me, that's troubling. It suggests bad judgement...and the Greens and Lib. Dems both agree with me.

Further, I don't believe in the existence of a 50 year old man who one day decides to rape and torture a 10 year old child. I believe he's guilty of more than that though I have nothing to support that assertion except my priors about how pedophilia works. Nevertheless, I'm fairly confident of those priors and so is our justice system: there's a reason sex offenders are forced to register.

Progressives seem unable to ferret out deeply troubling behavior as long as it is associated with certain minority groups. I do fear for backlash against innocent people by those with the opposite bias but that's no excuse to downplay what's going on here.

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I absolutely 100% agree with you.

But I am trying to decide if the internet brigade is upset because they think this person is guilty of more than they are letting on, or if they are guilty of extremely poor judgment, and the internet is never going to let them forget it.

I further wonder how long people can be punished for exercising extremely poor judgment, or at least making the wrong call when the optics are already extremely poor.

>I further wonder how long people can be punished for exercising extremely poor judgment, or at least making the wrong call when the optics are already extremely poor.

I really think you're being too generous. If someone told me their chosen campaign manager was a man who had been arrested for raping and torturing a child, conviction or not, I would not give this person the benefit of the doubt. She claims she didn't know the "extent of the crimes" - even if that's true, it's a complete failure on her end, because she should have known. I also find it very concerning that reddit would hire a person with a history of "extremely poor judgement" as an admin (it's already concerning she's a mod of so many subreddits) given that reddit has millions of users and lots of them are children.

I'm going to presume we mean literal torture here, and not rape being akin to torture.

Sadistic behavior is indeed a risk factor which puts someone at a heightened risk of re-offending over other child rapists (this isn't to say sadistic fantasy will lead to such crimes in someone who is more empathetic).

If the individual is psychopathic, there have been some recent breakthroughs which show it is possible to treat such individuals, but researchers call for more research in this area. A couple of programs look promising.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/opinion/when-junk-science... Not all sex offenders have the same risk factor (sex offense is a very vague term, and unfortunately, one people associate strongly with the worst kinds), and the risk factor for a lot of them is fairly low.

Courts are moving towards more individualized assessments of recidivism to determine what tier of risk they should assign someone to.

There are a few questions I would ask here in connection to this case:

Has he been taking any sort of drug?

Does he have any mental health issues?

Has he had any recent head injuries?

Does he have a brain tumor?

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