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Comment by DrWumbo | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of commenters here talking about how they have no sympathy for the kid. I think it's important to remember that it's hard out there these days. A life of crime may not be the only option available, but it becomes more and more appealing as access to education or training gets more difficult to afford, inflation increase outpaces wage increases, workers rights aren't expanded.

Dehumanizing criminals is a very privileged way of approaching the world.

What we have here is a child who was failed by society.

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> I think it's important to remember that it's hard out there these days. A life of crime may not be the only option available, but it becomes more and more appealing as access to education or training gets more difficult to afford

No, no. It is a very discriminatory view. Many very rich people are criminals. I'm from a very poor neighborhood, from a third world country. Many of my friends got into crime and died. Many more are hardworking, in my experience it is easier to find a criminal who was born rich than a criminal who was born poor . I don't have much formal education. But using books that was going to waste, I learned programming, etc. And Today it is much easier to learn ANYTHING.

> Dehumanizing criminals is a very privileged way of approaching the world. What we have here is a child who was failed by society.

It's not Dehumanization. Someone works hard, buys something after years of work and gets robbed overnight. When someone defends the criminal in the first place, he is ignoring the guy who suffered without doing absolutely anything to deserve it. It's normal to hate the criminal.

And the poor hate criminals. Defending criminals is a very privileged way of approaching the world.

I am not a favor to kill criminals, etc. But sometimes when you get what you're looking for. And defending very bad behavior is not good for anyone, neither the boy nor society.

Flip that around. In a very real sense the criminal either chose to dehumanize his victims, or ignore the suffering he was causing (arguably worse). "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you".

Also, some people are just shitheads, and I don't think we can say with any degree of certainty where Foreshadow sits.

A person who boldly states their lack of sympathy is acting with a fair degree of certainty in regards to what kind of person they're talking about.

There's a lot of shitheads out there for sure and when one commits crimes in which there are victims one makes a moral decision to inflict some kind of harm. Even with that, you can never truly know another person and categorizing who committed crime out of necessity and who is morally devoid is near impossible. I think we tend to judge our peers harsher than we judge our corporate overlords.

Imo this type of crime is a symptom of our broken society more than a symptom of a broken person.

Copaganda and western hero-villain stories teach us from a young age that there has to be a bad guy who needs to suffer for their actions.

The net is that a criminal like this is someone who makes a conscious decision that other person's life or property (which is also in most cases life via time spent working) don't matter, the only thing that matters is that they want something, be it money in this case, or sex/power/... in case of violent crime. In this case the only possible excuse is that it's a kid whose brain maybe sorta is not fully formed. On the other hand, while for some crimes you could argue about making bad snap judgments, etc., and for other cases you could argue that your victims are far removed and abstract so you don't grok the above decision as well (shoplifting from a chain store is a good example for both); for something like SIM swapping, with extreme level of planning and foresight, aimed at a specific individual, I personally accord a person continuously making this decision zero moral value.

It's actually easy to tell the monsters apart from the desperate.

Once you can afford to stop causing harm, do you continue doing it?

> What we have here is a child who was failed by society.

I really embrace your faith in humanity and trying to understand and explain what might have led to this.

But in the end, he chose organized crime. That's where really terrible stuff happens, you know that, if you choose it.

Yeah there's obvious reasons why organized crime is dangerous, but it's designed to lure people in with quick money/protection/sense of identity and then trap them.

The same goes for any behavior where one knows adverse consequences beforehand. I remember I bummed my first cigarette from a stranger one day when I was stressed out as a teenager. When I got hooked on the addictive properties and irreversibility damaged my lungs should there have been no room for empathy?

I'm not saying choosing to view this kid as a victim solves anything or that people should share my view. I want more voices spreading it so people can see there's another way to see the world.

And fwiw like most people my attitude flips 180 when I'm the victim of a crime. I am after all, only human.

> When I got hooked on the addictive properties and irreversibility damaged my lungs should there have been no room for empathy?

The only person hurt in that scenario was yourself.

I feel bad for the kid, but he's talking to the FBI, so at least he learned his lesson relatively easily (he's still alive).

I agree. People who are born wealthy routinely choose crime, if sometimes for no reason other than adrenaline rush or pure greed.

Judging from the photo, the kid has fetal alcohol syndrome. He likely came into the world with few choices.

You seem to be asserting all this as fact when I think it's mostly conjecture or opinion. I find it far more dehumanizing to think of people just as the product of society.

How many criminals do you know well?

Sure, some criminals are people who make “mistakes”. It was an error in judgement, they feel remorse and won’t do it again.

But many criminals know what they are doing is hurting others, their attitude is “who cares”? It’s a risk they take, if they get caught it’s just “the cost of doing business”. These are people who take your sympathy and use it against you.

Especially, when you do something that hurts people, there are ways to rationalize it. "If I didn't do it, someone else would", "they'll get it back from insurance or something, it won't inconvenience them too much", or just plain trying not to think about them at all.

But none of those options really work for the kind of identity theft where you take up loans in someone else's name, try to extort them with private information etc. The people who do that know perfectly well what kind of Kafkaesque hellhole they're sending their victims into. About the only thing they can do to justify themselves to themselves, is pick a victim they already hate for some reason.

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