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Comment by throwawayx134ax | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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