I don't know if ending another human's life leaves any possibility of redemption for a person, but reading this I still empathize with the sense of loss and powerlessness that emanate from this letter.
Reiser committed premeditated murder of his (ex?)wife Nina around 2006 and hid her body so well they could not find her. He made his children think either that their mother abandoned them. He had thought without a body he could not be charged and convicted.
I believe he waited until it was apparent he would lose the trial and then plead down so that they could recover her body.
I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
If I recall, he bought a book on murder investigations and a socket set after his wife's disappearance (which was easily tracked back to him), removed car seats (blood) from his car, and willingly testified in court that it was his manly dream to sleep in the car, or something along these lines.
He could have likely gotten away with it if he kept his mouth shut. Luckily he had the arrogance of believing he had actually come up with a convincing story.
It is totally bananas:
The wildest part was the friend who had an affair with his wife who blurted out unprompted on the stand that he had killed 7 people. They let that guy go!
Sean Sturgeon was not called by the prosecution or the defense. He did not testify at the trial. The defense hinted several times during the trial that the police had not adequately investigated Sturgeon for the murder.
Before the trial, Sturgeon called the Oakland police and said "I've killed 8 and half people, but I didn't kill Nina." The police didn't know what to do with the 'half' part, and discounted him as a crank.
I think it was my first experience with absolute egregious fanboism.
It was really cringey.
Hard to believe for the younger folks around here, who grew up in a culture that praised and valued technical skills, but Slashdot was a place for the prior generation, for whom technical skills were mocked and ridiculed.
Hans was "one of us", and it's a very human thing to believe that a member of your specific outcast group would ever be one of the baddies.
They were even at it after Reiser led police to his wife's body: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240814
Best comment on that thread, calling out their ridiculous takes:
> I gotta say it: the guy was a f-cking murderer and yet you guys are arguing about whether he got a fair trial, even after he led the cops to the strangled, decomposing corpse. And then complaining about the sheer brass neck of a journo who fails to show appropriate respect to this f-cking murderer. What, just because he hacked on Linux once upon a time? Jeez, you really couldn't make this stuff up.
Hans Reiser gives a jailhouse interview to Salon, and when he comes off as unremosrseful murderer, the peanut gallery says:
> I find it to be just another case of math envy, the imbecile KNOWS that he could never in a million years achieve 1% of what Reiser has achieved, however Reiser is now a convicted murderer, thus the idiot can now feel better about himself, and hurl contempt and scorn on Reiser.
Like anyone gives a shit about some computer filesystem.
Here is a popular Instagram account where someone does exactly what you are saying is unreasonable: https://www.instagram.com/salvagetoscenic
Except they don't. First post shows them asking themselves if there's a more comfortable way, second post shows them installing a flat surface.
> (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
> (Bro. A car floor isn’t even flat.)
Do you dig it ? A car floor is not fucking flat. That's why it's suspicious to remove the passenger seat without installing a flat surface over it. That's why the instagram poster did install a flat surface. Because they didn't want to sleep on the car floor. Because it's not flat. It's not comfortable. And because it's not comfortable it's not reasonable.
> As investigators follow Hans, they discover the missing CRX, but something is missing, says prosecutor Paul Hora. "He removed the front passenger seat. Then he completely disassembled, removed the rear cargo area of the car, threw away the carpeting that covered the spare tire and the cover that covered the spare tire."
> When it was Hora's turn, he asked Hans why he had removed the front passenger seat from his car. "He said he removed the passenger seat in order to make a Honda CRX a more comfortable place to sleep," Hora recalls. "His explanations were ridiculous. I mean, they were lies. A Honda CRX is an awfully small car that wouldn't be comfortable no matter what you did to sleep in it."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/betrayal-29-12-2008/
> On October 11, 2006, law enforcement officials said that blood spatter had been found in Hans Reiser's house and car. Forensic testing (including DNA analysis) could neither confirm nor rule out Nina Reiser as the source of the blood. Officials had not located the missing passenger seat of his car. They also indicated that they had found in the car two books on homicide investigation purchased by Reiser on September 8 — five days after Nina Reiser's disappearance: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, and Masterpieces of Murder by Jonathan Goldman.[28] Daniel Horowitz, a high-profile defense attorney, joined the defense team[6] but dropped the case on November 28, citing Reiser's inability to pay for his services.[29]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser#Murder_investigati...
It has never been mentioned that the car was modified to accommodate for sleeping on the floor in a comfortable and reasonable way. The passenger seat, carpeting were removed but that doesn't make the floor flat.
JFC.
>All this has happened before,
>and it will happen again.
The real killer is out there! And Hans and O.J. are on the case!
Seriously though. If this isn’t suspicious behavior, what would characterize as obviously suspicious behavior from a suspected murder?
Well, this depends a lot on what kind of people you spend your time with. I know at least two people in my circles (let me put it this way: they both slightly schizophrenic traits) about whom I would not be surprised if they came up with such ideas.
I guess I have a light tendency to gravitate towards smart mavericks in my social life. :-)
That argument is self contradictory since you justify their behavior by invoking their specific and out of ordinary mental traits, which reinforces the idea that removing a passenger seat car to sleep directly on the floor is not reasonable, normal or expected.
Maybe I was unfair to you as well; if so, I apologize.
The reason I brought up that he might've been in the process of installing a flat surface was that your comment mentioned that attempting to sleep in your car without installing a flat surface would be too uncomfortable.
It's completely reasonable for me to, for example, want to convert my car and be in process of determining:
1. Is it reasonable to sleep on a bumpy surface? Let me try it out for a couple of night first. 2. Know that a bumpy surface is uncomfortable, and be in the process of figuring out a solution, e.g. what to buy.
Of course, in this specific case, those are irrelevant because Hans Reiser never intended to sleep in his car. But, they are perfectly valid reasons why one might remove a car seat without then immediately having converted it to a comfortable bed.
He had a plea deal offer for not much more than time served so he even had a definite option to a form of getting away with it.
... then again, if he was reasonable he'd probably never commit murder.
I fully believe there is a layer of Reiser that was convinced he did not murder his wife.
I didn't realise this when I was younger, but I'm pretty sure everybody lies to themselves. Like not about grey issues, but simple cases of black and white.
Yes, even most people reading this lie to themselves about facts. We might not be murderers, but we do.
I have an important conversation once where I told someone what they'd done wrong, and how to make things better, in a very mature way. I *remember this conversation.
Years later I took a drug that is known for causing an 'ego-death' and realised what actually happened was that I was angry and tried to hurt the person as much as possible with my words. There's a book on this topic called "Night of the Gun".
If you're looking to get away with orchestrating the murder of someone you know, it can be difficult.
However, if you're just looking to get away with murdering someone in general, that's surprisingly easy. Just go a town or two over and knife a random someone in a random parking lot. Police success rates are comically low.
Complete success is something like 50% overall, but in general in many of those cases that "aren't solved" they know who did it, they also know they can't prove it.
But it's also why I qualified my statements. That if you're looking to kill a particular person, that's way harder than "getting away with murder" in general.
Police only have so many tools at their disposal. And if there is no link between victim and perpetrator, the job becomes way harder.
Humans are amazing at compartmentalizing things like this away, even while they are happening.
It is impossible to know from this single datapoint if he is remorseful or not, but it is not at all outside of the realm of possibility.
As a child I merely punched my brother and I tried to kill myself afterwards because of the guilt. In the moment I could not have been more prescient about what I was about to do and what I was doing. I recalled how I had observed him fighting others, how he threw punches, how he swung his arm based on how angry he was, and I planned an arc that took advantage of his habits and clocked him. Knocked him out in one punch.
The instant he hit the floor I felt remorse like I had never felt before. Who the hell am I to take an action like that?!
Anyway, how someone feels while doing something like that does not necessarily reflect how they feel at any other time in their lives. It also may reflect how they are at all times, or anywhere in between.
There is no foolproof way to know.
I think it would be ridiculous for me to presume that I can possibly have any view into whether or not someone has sincerely changed, but why should the fact that someone was calculating once affect whether they have changed? I could see doubting the apparent demonstration of change, because they might have calculated the appropriate words to say, but I don't see any reason that a calculating person is less able sincerely to change than any other.
So, someone who is demonstrated to be calculating has higher odds of faking a behavior if it is beneficial to them (e.g. leaving prison).
It's for him to know, but I don't think it's ridiculous for me to question.
My reference to ridiculous was to the ridiculousness of my thinking that I have any insight into Reiser's character—a disclaimer at the beginning that I was not presuming to offer any. I was in no way meaning to call you or your statement ridiculous.
> I consider it a Bayesian approach to understanding potential internal drivers. Someone who is not cold and calculating likely has less capacity to completely present the appearance of redemption whereas someone who is calculating has that capacity.
Yes, that was exactly what I was meaning to say. Someone being known to be calculating should create a higher evidentiary bar—they need to do more to convince me that they have changed. But I don't think that it offers any evidence against their having changed. And maybe this is what you were saying:
> I want to believe redemption is possible, especially given how eloquent he is, but his demonstration of calculation over emotion in her murder makes me strongly question his change.
I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?
What is a psychopathic person?
Psychopathy is a severe personality disorder characterized by interpersonal deceptiveness and calloused, remorseless use of others, as well as behavioral recklessness, impulsivity, and overt antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression, violence). From: Encyclopedia of Mental Health (Third Edition), 2023.
Then again, everything I've read leads me to believe he's impulsive at times (even says so in the letter!) and the calculating part was afterwards not before or during (if it was, he was notoriously bad at it).
> I read this as "the fact that he is calculating makes it less likely that he has changed." But maybe you just meant "the fact that he is calculating means that I require stronger evidence that he has changed"?
That's a fair point. I need to reflect more on that. It is not my place to proclaim absolutely likelihood, you're correct. I think the latter statement is closer to the thrust that I'm getting at. My burden of proof for redemption is higher than a less calculating criminal/crime.
My impression was that he got an assignment in class to write a letter where he reflects on bad interactions in the past, apologize, and try to put them behind him.
I also got the impression that he really wants people to write/call him and discuss computer stuff, so this might be part of the motivation for writing it.
But I don't know him, so who knows what's going on in his head?
I do think we wants to discuss computer stuff; he seemed entirely unaware of SSDs and how that has (and should) change filesystems, and still thinks Slashdot is a place to post things.
It is! But this isn't there :)
Everything I saw made it look like it was spontaneous (and then he put a lot of work and some poor planning into trying to hide it).
I could obviously be wrong, I didn't really spend that much time on it.
(Note: I know he was initially found guilty of first degree murder but it appears that first degree murder doesn't necessarily require premeditation.)
He was able to plea to second degree in exchange for the location of the body and essentially a confession.
They convicted him of first degree because without the body, there was no evidence that he didn't plan on the murder as well. Ironic in a way. He hid the body to try and hide the evidence that she was dead, but turns out that only made things worse for him.
If he had called the authorities and copped to it as an "accident of passion", he'd probably be out by now.
Seems like it was probably premeditated to me if so
* He testified on the stand that Nina was a terrible person and a danger to their children. A bold strategy when you're on trial for murdering your wife.
* He was angry that Nina preferred that one of his sons not play violent video games like Grand Theft Auto, because he believed his son was special and might learn something about how violence really works.
* Right before he was arrested, he handed the hard drives from his computer to his lawyer. His lawyer gave the drives to the court about 3/4 through the trial. The judge was extremely displeased. The court had the county's forensic investigators go through the drives. The drives were formatted with NTFS, NOT ReiserFS. One insane email chain discovered in it was Nina mailing Hans about the logistics of planning for new clothes and school supplies for the 2 kids for the upcoming new school year, Hans response was "It is Moscow 1942, you are the Germans, I will prevail".
Most of the murderers I met are some of the nicest people I ever met (if you can temporarily disregard their crime). People are not defined by their worst mistake.
I am in very regular contact with many of them as they work their way through the system. Some of them have life sentences without parole, which is a hard pill to swallow.
I think my autobiography will be titled "All my friends are murderers."
That said, to me, some of the specific phrases used felt that they were for a parole board rather than the broader audience, or charitably, both. But perhaps I've become too jaded.
I don’t think you are. The number of times the person inferring I’m jaded is later found out to be a manipulator is very high. Calling people who are perceptive of lies, “jaded”, “negative”, “pessimistic”, etc is seemingly a common tactic employed by sociopaths to socially empower themselves while simultaneously weakening those that might call them out.
Redemption? Possible I suppose, but don't make the mistake of looking at this from your perspective, because he's not like the rest of us.
He's human and killing other humans is something a humans can do, given the right circumstances.
From my recollection, his wife was sleeping with another man, or there was some conflict between the two that was related to another man who I _think_ was supposed to be a friend to them both.
it's been a while, but the point remains, he very well could have been in a state that allowed him to "pass that bar".
If someone plots the death of a person who sexually abused their child no one would claim that it being premeditated implies they were not in a heightened emotional state.
I've given a clear example where that's not the case.
The Reiser children moved to Petersburg, Russia, because Nina's parents were awarded custody of the children, since Nina is dead and Hans will be in jail possibly forever.
You're really misinterpreting the timeline of events. What software industry are you involved in, so I can be very afraid of anything you may be involved in writing?
Absolutely not. Average human needs to be ordered to kill and lied to and desensitized throughly to be able to do it. People who can kill out of their own initiative are not like the rest of us. Most cases of killings happen only because humans are so fragile in context of our technology. Intentional killing is something very unique.
what peop le want out of this word is a decent enough amount of compassion and altruism, something that would prevent that kind of harm to others (but i forgot if there was some heated arguments before he decided to step onto the murder path).
unless passionate crime is what you had in mind
I don't think we can know this, and there's no point speculating. I would say that the letter doesn't read as someone who's imperfectly simulating regret.
That said, the premeditated murder of someone, let alone your wife and children's mother, is not something that the average person is capable of. It is entirely different than the crimes one may commit out of rage, fear, or passion (i.e. when your amygdala is driving).
I don't believe in capital punishment or lesser forms of punitive justice, but I have a hard time believing that psychopaths can ever be meaningfully rehabilitated. They are just humans that shipped with a fucked up firmware and that's all there is to that.
We only have a say insofar as we're part of the society that determines the laws that form the judges who will decide when it's appropriate to let him back into society.
And then there’s murdering your ex, hiding her body over two days, lying to your children that she’d left for russia and they’d been abandoned, and only revealing the location of the body so you could plea down to second degree murder (a good 18 months later mind, we’re not talking quick change of heart).
Oh and then filing a civil suit against pretty much the entire legal system, including the trial judges and your attorney.
And when sued for damage by your children’s grandmother (on their behalf) assert that you killed your ex to protect your kids (which you had basically never been there for, which was the entire reason your wife left you).
I’m not saying redemption is not possible, but I’d think some reflection and atonement would be the baseline, and I’m not aware of Hans Reiser having done any such work.
The fact is - he killed his wife.
> To all practical intents and purposes she was no longer 'his wife'
It doesn't work like that, though. My soon-to-be-ex-wife is still listed as spouse on our health insurance because I can't remove her until the divorce is finalized. I still have to specify her in many legals documents as my wife.
Even outside the legal field, many in my personal life consider her as my wife, go "call me when it's finalized".
I think this is just bs for his next parole hearing tho.
Doubly so because she's, you know, dead.
While I won't say redemption is impossible. He is going to have to serve his time and dedicate the rest of his life to helping others to even come close.
He got 15 to life, the maximum for second-degree murder, and his first request for parole was rejected so he’s doing at least 20 for now.
>An Alameda County Superior Court judge confirmed today Hans Reiser was presented a deal last year in which the convicted murderer would have only served three years in prison. During what was supposed to have been Reiser’s sentencing hearing – which has been delayed due to this week’s events – Judge Larry Goodman, in an effort to clear up what he called inaccuracies in the media, said that Reiser was given the opportunity last September to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter. While voluntary manslaughter can carry different prison terms, Goodman said he agreed to give Reiser three years – the lowest possible term – to spare Nina Reiser’s family the turmoil of going through a trial and having the couple’s oldest son testify. Goodman pointed out in court if Reiser had accepted the deal, he would have been released in May 2008. However, Goodman said Reiser chose to “roll the dice,” and a jury convicted Reiser April 28 of first-degree murder in the killing of his wife.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2008/07/09/reiser-rejected-volun...
On the other hand, the first degree homicide seems absurd given the evidence. Did they just give him that because he refused to cooperate, and not because it was actually an accurate verdict?
Had he driven the car with her dead body directly to the police, he probably would have received the three year sentence or even less.
The prosecution offered the deal because historically convicting someone of murder when you can't find the body is nearly impossible. But Hans found a way!
It was true in the past that it could be used as a defense, but juries and judges no longer buy it and it generally won't get you anywhere at all in 2024.
Source: I play a lawyer on TV.
Well I would hope drunk driving while drunk would be treated differently than drunk driving while sober.
Where I'm from, most people who kill other people while driving get off without any punishment at all.
Broadly speaking, there are two independent axes the judicial system is trying to satisfy:
- punitive punishment. There are some actions that cannot be undone and some catastrophes for which there is no "making whole" the victim. Our system factors in a certain amount of eye for an eye retribution in these cases that dates all the way back to Hammurabi. If you're looking for a justification based on societal structure and survival and not just "vibes" (and make no mistake, there's a huge amount of just vibes in the way law, crime, and punishment come about)... It is believed a general understanding amongst the people that committing irrevocable transgressions on their neighbors will cause society to inflict transgressions upon them keeps the society from degenerating into infliction of individual violence on each other in the common case. Does it work? Depends on who you ask. But that's the idea, at least from the Machiavellian "stable society" standpoint. In that context, it doesn't matter if Reiser completely overhauls his philosophy of life in jail; he took something that he cannot give back, he took something no one can give back, and a certain amount of punishment is necessary to inform everyone else this is not acceptable ("thus always to the enemies of the country," etc).
- rehabilitation and rebuilding of trust. We humans broadly speaking divide other humans into two categories: those who would never and those who would. Certain transgressions bump a person from the would-never into the would category, and that opens a fissure that can never be closed. The fissure can be diminished by the transgressor demonstrating that they understand why that's unacceptable and providing reasons for the public to believe they will never commit that transgression a second time. Under this theory, crime commission is contextual; if a person can demonstrate that they will never be in the context again that would cause them to commit the crime, a certain amount of trust can be reestablished.
And here we get to the question of why drunk driving is treated less severely than, say, premeditated murder. As an individual, it's very hard to guard against premeditated murder. And people premeditating murder look like everybody else; It's hard to generate signifiers that would rebuild trust if somebody does such a thing. So the state has a large interest in discouraging it via "the olde ways," because the state has a hard time detecting it coming or defending the victims. In contrast, crimes committed under the influence of mind-alterers we generally feel would be something the transgressor would not do if the influence were removed. It's a lot easier to reestablish the trust gap in theory if somebody who drives drunk swears they will never drink again.
... That having been said, in practice, I totally agree with you. I think the numbers on drunk driving recidivism are ridiculous and it is completely unacceptable to maintain the status quo trust model on this issue; drunk driving should be an immediate revocation of the ability to use a licensed vehicle for life without extraordinary circumstances (on the order of pardon from the governor) to allow someone to retest for a license. We treat pilot licenses thusly; we should treat vehicle licenses with similar scrutiny.
... Problem is, in the US at least, we've built a society so heavily dependent upon cars in most of the country that doing this in the general case would be a sentence worse than the location constraints we put on sex offenders, and there's an upper limit on the state's capacity to actually enforce a law.
I'm not christian so I don't see the world like that.
He killed his s/o, like what 15 years ago now?
People change and deserves a second chance.
That's a lot. The prison system is neither equipped nor designed to resocialize or rehabilitate people. He hasn't demonstrated any considerable change in his character or outlook on the value of human life that makes me believe he changed for the better.
He didn't make a mistake. He intentionally planned out the murder of his ex and how to hide the body and explain her disappearance and he did this to keep his children he neglected, which was the reason for her breaking up with him to begin with. And then he acted out that plan and stuck to it for months. Most people don't even commit to their gym memberships as long as he did to his cover story.
People aren't evil. But people also don't improve by rotting in prison. You can argue that means we need something better than prison and I would, but you can't argue that means he should be treated as redeemed or released early.
Dropping a feel-good out of context MLK quote to try and impress a future parole hearing is not a demonstration of character growth. Still referring to his victim as "my wife" when she had already broken up with him is not a demonstration of character growth. If he seeks redemption he needs to address those surviving his victim. If he wants to demonstrate rehabilitation he needs to do more than just get older and memorize meaningless platitudes.
For sure, there were reasons. We just don't know them.
> but you can't argue that means he should be treated as redeemed or released early.
I'm not. Was just saying people deserve another chance.
His first parole board certainly didn’t think so and decided to keep him in for 5 more years.
Now if I’m positing that human beings have intrinsic worth because god made them, and that we need to turn the other cheek and all that, then no, the process is deeply flawed and shouldn’t be happening.
Thus spoke Zarathustra..
I think many people can agree that inherently "evil" people are very very rare. Usually people who commit an "evil" act have a reason or justification. It's portrayed in literally every movie with an antihero and spawned the "villain origin story" meme.
But even if they have a reason/justification, that does not make the antihero or villain any less evil.
I mean that the popular idea of evil is a childs story and should not blur our reasoning.
One can consider an act "evil", but if you saw the other side of the coin, perhaps it was done out of necessity, revenge, fear or another "non-evil" reason.
(I am not trying to rationalize away horrible deeds).
I believe in selfishness tho. That's a real thing.
I did not claim that Christianity invented good & evil. I claimed that it is a central concept in Christianity.
Your way of reasoning here is often referred to as a straw mans argument.
Even today, people still read and are influenced by Plato and Aristotle.
> I did not claim that Christianity invented good & evil. I claimed that it is a central concept in Christianity.
You claimed you don’t believe in evil because you are not a Christian. Not being a Christian and not believing in evil have little connection with each other, given billions of non-Christians believe in evil.
> Your way of reasoning here is often referred to as a straw mans argument.
You argument was too unclear to strawman.
I don't know where you live but it's almost impossible to overstate the significance of Plato on Western thought.
Christianity doesn't own "good and evil", even though it features it, and nor are these premises even owned by religion generally.
Christianity is, and is still influencing our world, like I wrote above.
When Cristianity didn't even exist, the Chinese already had a good chunk of philosophy perfectly set and written, and even modernish rules for war and diplomacy: Tao Te King, and The Art of War.
Heck, America from Canada to the Patagonia didn't even know about Jesus until the Europeans arrived 1500 years later. 1500s damn years. For a huge continent mass spread over from almost the North Pole to the South pole.
So much for an 'Universal' God. So universal that Aquinas had to rip a good chunk of Greek philosophy to adapt (more like smash it down with nails and duct tape) ancient Middle East fairy tales into the less-desert bound Europe as the modern Christian canonical sources.
If any, the Western world is shaped by the Roman architecture and law, and the Greek worldview, mindset and math.
> Hinduism it's pretty much alive, and Christianity it's just a fork of Judaism
Okay, so you're a hindu or a jew.
Are you arguing my point about christianity influencing "our" world? I guess I expressed myself rather western-centric.
I mean, here people it's Christian by name only. Technically, even the Southern Spain with infamous street parades with large walks carrying a big structure with a Virgin, most of that it's just a showoff and a way to say "look how loaded we are, so much that we can build great golden clothes for our Virgin".
If any, lots of lore in Europe it's just paganism with a Christian disguise.
Even Christianism itself it's so-so Christian-wannabe unlike the original one which came from the Middle East; it was largely repurposed with Greek values so people here could assimilate better these alien customs such as not being able to eat pork or nonsense about alcohol when the risk of dehidrating in Europe was near nil.
Kinda like North Korea with Communism. Marxist? Today, in name, maybe. Because Juche it's almost a copycat of right wing fascism with Asian features. Kinda like the Japanese one, but with Koreans.
But the idea that "evil" is an attribute a person can possess is 100% a religious one. If you're not religious, there can be no evil person unless you think there is an "evil" gene or an "evil" psychosis - "sociopath" and "psychopath" are often used this way but usually in ways that have very little to do with diagnostic criteria and more with trying to sound more profound than just calling someone a bad person; in pseudoscience this also sometimes manifests as the idea that some people are more predisposed to crime, though usually nowadays this more often manifests as vague notions of "racial culture" than measuring skull shapes, but this too is just a more elaborate way to call groups of people inherently bad.
As a religious concept, "evil" can be somewhat nebulous where people just take some wrong turns and "evilness" seeps into them making them irredeemable: many Christians (especially certain sects of American protestantism) believe "sins" (i.e. disobeying God's rules, not necessarily causing measurable harm to others in secular terms) work kind of like this where habitual sinning in one way can lead to sinning in other ways as sinfulness takes over the person's life (like an addiction spiraling out of control). It can also be a much more literal idea of outright demonic possession (e.g. the kind of thing you need an exorcist to help with) or demonic presence (e.g. evil people actually being lizard people masking themselves as fellow humans to hide among us). And yes, I'm labelling certain fringe conspiracy movements as religious as they operate on a similar framework and often have direct ties to religious traditions and concepts.
Conversely, not only are "evil people" a religious concept but so are "good people". If good is something you do that means you need to continously demonstrate your "goodness" by doing good things. But if good is something you can be then any accusations of wrongdoing are highly suspect because a good person would do no such things. This is why most people don't take kindly to being told even in the most polite terms that something they did was kinda racist (or sexist, or misogynist, or...) because "I'm not a racist" (i.e. thinking of it as an innate attribute of their character rather than one of their actions and hence something they can and need to actively control) - mind you, liberals did not do a good job with this distinction either over the past decade because as it turns out even self-professed non-religious people often have religious upbringings that stick with them (i.e. self-applied labels like "feminist", "anti-racist", etc should only ever be read as statements of intent and dismissed if they do not manifest in their actions which they rarely do).
The above does not rest on religion. Christians/etc having their own theories about evil is irrelevant. When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.
Well, no. Most people I've heard say something like that would mean that he was innately evil as a person. They wouldn't spell it out like that but the underlying assumption is that a "normal human being" couldn't do what he did and therefore he was a freak mutation in some way. Most people even struggle with the idea that there was a time in such a person's life where they weren't "evil" yet. Even when talking about Antisocial Personality Disorder ("psychopathy") they rarely know that this is often in part caused by severe early childhood trauma, e.g. sexual abuse or parental abuse and emotional neglect - most seem to believe these people are "just born evil" and any prior period where they didn't do anything sufficiently evil were just a mask.
This is easiest to see when talking about the Nazis. Instead of trying to gain a systemic understanding of how the Nazis came to power or how "ordinary citizens" could be made to commit massacres and genocides we single out the big names as uniquely evil and make up excuses for the rest. For the longest time I had been told that soldiers who participated in massacres were implicitly threatened with death or at least physical punishment but we know that this was not the case and the mere threat of social ostracization by the other members of their unit was enough. The majority of those involved in the massacres saw themselves as victims for having to carry out those commands and deal with the trauma because denying their own agency helped them cope with what they had done.
So no, they don't mean "a person who has done something evil" when they say a person is evil. They usually mean something more transcendental than that. When most people say Pol Pot or Hitler or Milosevic was evil they mean he wasn't human the same way "normal humans" are human. They may not think he was literally possessed by a demon or the physical manifestation of a demon but they will think there was some essence of evilness inside him that would inevitably manifest. He wasn't evil as a result of doing evil things, he did evil things because he was an evil person. This is called essentialism and it's extremely widespread and antithetical to a systems theory based understanding of social dynamics and behaviors.
> Personally I am not a christian
You really shouldn't extrapolate from yourself then.
I've seen this discourse repeatedly in Germany when it comes to Hitler and the Nazis:
1. Hitler did unspeakably evil things.
2. Therefore Hitler was evil.
3. However the evil he did was so uniquely evil he can not be compared to others.
4. Therefore Hitler was uniquely capable of committing such evil.
5. This implies Hitler was already innately evil prior to committing those acts.
This usually extends to falsely distinguish the evil SS from the "patriotic" Wehrmacht (who were "ordinary soldiers just following orders" and only "incidentally" ended up participating in mass murders). It's directly tied to the Great Man narrative of history: only Hitler could have been Hitler because he was innately different. The idea in the Great Man narrative usually being that a great leader emerges and changes history, rather than history changing through the conflict of material conditions (or ideas, if you're a Hegelian) and the actual figureheads being largely incidental (i.e. what Marxists call dialectical materialism).
According to demographic data, over 40% of Germans identify as non-religious whereas in the US it's a bit over 20%, so I would expect Americans to actually be more likely to think this way (if not outright going with the "demon person" idea of evil).
Also, according to most Christian faiths Jesus specifically atoned for the Original Sin (Adam and Eve disobeying God by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil). The entire "redemption" thing is also a bit more complicated: in practice even Protestant and Catholic Christians generally behave as if they were following the Eastern Orthodox view of mortal sins where mortal sins are irredeemable and the separation from God they inflict on the sinner is permanent.
But this is a digression. The point is, most people view evil when it comes to person not as a mere descriptor of having done something but
- either: having a pre-existing innate essence of evil-ness that allowed them to do it
- or: having been so corrupted by the act itself that they now possess a permanent essence of evil-ness
or a combination of the two. In other words: an Evil Person™ is not just a person who has done an evil thing but a person uniquely capable of and predisposed towards doing evil things to a greater extent than a Normal Person™ would be. Pol Pot wasn't just evil because he did evil things, he did those evil things because he was Pol Pot, an evil person.
I'll shut up now before I get started on how different ideas of free will play into this.
I wish I was as good expressing myself like you are!
Yes, we've all done stupid things we regret. But this is not it. This is way to bad to fit in the "stupid things" category.
Ain’t killed anyone, though.
You realize the volunteer soldiers that enter a battle to kill other humans also fall under this scope? Yet in many countries we celebrate their return and service, despite what they may have done.
I agree these are not quite the same thing, in how a deed is carried out, but the end result is in fact the same.
Volunteer soldiers that go abroad to try to annex another country at the behest of their local overlord are looked at differently then volunteer soldiers that defend their country from annexation. It's not that the 'end result is in fact the same', it's that circumstances matter. In some cases killing another person is acceptable, in most others it is not.
That's why we have so many very specific terms to describe the different situations in which one person kills another, and which of those applies is a big factor in whether we see the killer as having acted justifiably or not. Reiser is on the extreme side of that scale in terms of not having acted justifiably, then he compounded that by his stance during the subsequent trial.
Are they? Americans seem to think very highly of their veterans ... who all fought in distant wars in countries that were not an serious immediate threat to the US.
Yes. And I strongly believe there's something wrong with their brains. Not so wrong as with the brains of murderers. But to let someone's words override your innate blocks against killing is some weaknes of the brain, easily exploitable with disastrous consequences for humanity.
It makes wars feasible.
I'm a conscientious objector against military service which at the time that I did so still carried a prison sentence and even if I ended up not going to prison (through some luck and a sympathetic police officer) I was more than willing to do so rather than to be used as a tool. So that takes care of the second part of that statement, the first has so far not been put to the test (and let's hope it stays that way).
I would never serve for an offensive war, but for example I would have been proud to serve the Allies in WW2.
Humans and other primates are more prone to this deficiency of the brain than other mammals.
But even so, only 2% of humans were killed by other humans. And since many killers usually kill more than one person killers are a miscule minority even in such deficient species as humans. Even with all the cultural pressure that glorifies killing in the "right circumstances".
Given that anyone who volunteers to be a killer has something wrong in him. Falls on the far end of some spectrum.
Consider the native american indian warriors who volunteered to defend their land against the invaders. Or jews in Poland who volunteered to defend against the Germans in WW2.
Does your statement apply to them as well?
Not everone who joins the army is a volunteer killer. Some people just want to help. Treat wounds. Recover wounded. Scare the enemy away. Some tentatively accept that some people might die in the process. People tend to accept that in war people die. They are more like armed robbers who'd love to have their goals met without killing anyone but some are accepting that someone might die in the process. But fraction of people are killers. They participate in the process in order to kill. Those are the most deficient ones. They are present in every place where people die, on both sides.
But being willing to say "I'd kill to protect X if there is no other option" is not that.
Someone who becomes a surgeon so that he can kill a patient now and then and get away with it obviously has something wrong. Someone who becomes a surgeon and now and then causes a patient to die unintentionally (even if they intended to do the surgery, knowing it could result in death) is not the same.
If you are not a pacifist, then I don't understand how you think a peaceful society should act when an aggressive neighbor tries to kill all of them?
I don't know how a peaceful society should act if neigbour tries to kill them. I think if that's the case, they made a lot of mistakes already, if they reached that point.
Probably the only thing to do is gather your killers and send them to kill and tell everybody it's ok this time. And most likely just die regardless of what you decided to do. If this society somehow survives it's way ahead because they not only repelled foreign killers but culled their own. That's pretty much was the result of WW2. Europe was destined for prosperity after it no matter who won. Just because higher fraction of killers than normal people died.
There are literally thousands of examples throughout history of smaller ethnic groups that were completely wiped out by their bigger and more aggressive neighbors.
Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all have a death wish?
How do you appease someone who is determined to take over your territory while getting rid of your people? What does the compromise look like?
> Europe was destined for prosperity after it no matter who won.
Wow. If the Germans would have won, they would have cleansed large parts of Europe. Do you call that "prosperity"?
Same thing with Stalin. If he had gotten a free rein across Europe, I don't imagine there would have been many Scandinavians left today, for instance. The few left would live somewhere in Siberia.
Exactly. Figting and killing didn't help them in any way.
> Do you think these small groups were provoking their neighbors? Why? Did they all have a death wish?
The wrong decision in that case was deciding to be separate from their neighbors despite the fact that they presented overwhelming force. They were multitude of ethnic groups who survived by getting assimilated into their stronger neighbors. You might argue that it's not a survival if culture disappears. But that's just words. Genes are what matters in any broader context.
> If the Germans would have won, they would have cleansed large parts of Europe. Do you call that "prosperity"?
They would possibly kill all the Jews which is unfortunate and a terrible loss. The rest of the populace would just become the part of their empire. And running an empire is a troublesome thing as countries like Britain found out. India used to be a British colony. And today more property is owned in London by the Indians than by native British people. Some regions of London are minority white. Nobody designed it like that. It is just a result of previous attempts at exploitation of their acquired empire. Same happened to France. Germans would eventually succumb to the same fate.
Stalin is a different thing. Just because Russians are terrible at everything. I'm still sure they wouldn't manage to keep whole Europe under their shoe for long. And if they did that would mean they seriously stepped up their game, so prosperity of sorts.
> I think it's ok to take life if it's your own life or help someone to take their own if there are good reasons for it.
I read this as you think it is never OK to take a life in self defence, even if that means that tens of millions will be exterminated?
If so, you can disregard the rest:
> Figting and killing didn't help them in any way.
There are also many examples of much smaller ethnic groups who avoided complete extermination because they had a very competent army.
If you don't resist a neighbor who wants to exterminate your ethnic group, then the outcome is given. If you do resist, you still have a chance.
> The rest of the populace would just become the part of their (WW2 Germany) empire.
No. That is only true for northern and maybe western europe. Eastern europeans were considered vermin by them.
> They were multitude of ethnic groups who survived by getting assimilated into their stronger neighbors.
That can happen. Doesn't mean it's a given. I feel your overall logic reasoning leaves a lot to be desired? Do you strive to make logically sound arguments, or is that not important? If not, I don't think we can take this any further.
There is a sliding scale here. You have everything from pressure to align your country with the bigger neighbor all the way down to 100% extermination.
Germany's plans for the Slavic peoples were complete extermination. There was nothing the slavs could do or say to convince the German leadership to change their mind.
> I'm Polish. How much good do you think killing Germans did for Polish people in 1940?
Maybe you think that Germany didn't plan to exterminate all poles. Ok, let's just pretend that's the case. By advocating that Poland shouldn't have resisted, you're at the same time advocating handing over the 3 million Polish jews to Germany without a fight, knowing what would happen to them. Are you really OK with that?
> Stalin is a different thing. Just because Russians are terrible at everything. I'm still sure they wouldn't manage to keep whole Europe under their shoe for long. And if they did that would mean they seriously stepped up their game, so prosperity of sorts.
Sure, the Russians would have had a hell of a time keeping western europe under control. Stalin's answer to such problems were simply killing enough people until the problem disappeared. Not letting them do their own thing.
During the 1930's, Stalin sent out his underlings with orders to kill a certain quota in given area. The quotas were in the hundreds of thousands.
However I arrived at it independently from two beliefs I hold. First, that killing is innately evil. The other one is that I believe that the idea that good and evil are somehow additive and can cancel each other out is worth of people from two thousand years ago. This simplistic view of things that are core of any morality was (and is) propagated by major religions for the purpose of getting away with evil. Religiously fossilized perception of good/evil as a single axis is far behind current cultural development of humanity.
More accurate perception, I believe, is to see good and evil as orthogonal. To be considered independently. To be rewarded and punished separately and accordingly.
> I read this as you think it is never OK to take a life in self defence, even if that means that tens of millions will be exterminated?
It's good to save millions. It's evil to take life. If you managed to save millions without taking a life you are purely good. Way better than a person who saved millions but killed someone.
A billion people owe their entire existence to Norman Borlaug. Would you be willing to absolve him of guilt if he intentionality killed 100 people during his research?
I assume not. Why should fighting be considered different?
> There are also many examples of much smaller ethnic groups who avoided complete extermination because they had a very competent army.
Does some specific case come to your mind?
> Do you strive to make logically sound arguments, or is that not important?
I agree that logic is important and I would like to have reasoned beliefs (apart from things I take as axioms, like killing is evil, less suffering is good).
> Maybe you think that Germany didn't plan to exterminate all poles. Ok, let's just pretend that's the case.
We don't need to pretend. We know that they didn't. Slavs were destined to be subservient workers in their plans. Many ethnic Poles died in death camps, second only to Jews. The main purposes was to terrorize populace (to achieve control), reduce number of Poles (to make lebensraum for Germans) and eliminate Polish elite (that was deemed counterproductive to the idea of turning Poles into workers). All in all terrible, far end of the evil axis. But completely unpreventable by attempting to kill Germans. I could argue that some lives might have been saved if Germans believed they already have full control so that terrorizing is unnecessary.
Poland has a history of armed resistance and uprisings that almost all failed. Again, compare to how much suffering was inflicted on countries that didn't resist this much. Poland was leveled.
> you're at the same time advocating handing over the 3 million Polish jews to Germany without a fight
And you are advocating handing them out with a fight. Result is the same. Just more people dead.
The correct action is to evade, hide, run, bargain. Fighting is in almost all cases the worst possible idea even from purely utilitarian standpoint. And for the cases it somehow succeeds it still doesn't mean it's only good in a moral sense. When it's effects ar deaths and destruction it is also evil.
> During the 1930's, Stalin sent out his underlings with orders to kill a certain quota in given area. The quotas were in the hundreds of thousands.
I think Russian would be way worse than Germans. Then again Eastern Europe was effectively given away to Stalin unconditionally and most survived, no thanks to attempts at armed resistance. Just by waiting out till those idiots run out of steam.
You should tell the Polish people in 1940s that they should only treat wounds and not fight back.
Compare to France and other western European countries that immediately retreated, lost one battle and peacefully folded and stayed down till the end.