Norwegian bomber and Utøya killer Anders Breivik ruled sane | Hacker News Reader

Norwegian bomber and Utøya killer Anders Breivik ruled sane

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1 pointthomasfl5 comments

If the killer was not ruled sane, he could have been set free after his medichal treatment had ended.

If he is ruled sane, then his killing 60 people is considered the actions of a sane person. his rationle and entire defence was not he did not do it, but that he did it to wake People to the awful democratic liberal open society - basically they just declared terrorism a sane response to democracy.

Drawing a line for mental health is hard. Where would you put it? Are religious people sane? Helicopter parents? Fanboys? People with fetishes? All that isn't exactly completely reasonable. It's been said that sanity is more about consensus, than rationality.

Terrorism itself surely can be a sane act. Sanity has nothing to do with morality. Spreading terror to win your battles has been practised since antiquity, war paint, bag pipes, guerilla warfare. I would find it hard to draw the line right here. Then it wouldn't take much to say that by definition, every killer is insane.

Absolutely. Insanity would be considered in the medical sense in a court room, not in a societies preconceived notion of what insanity means.

Webster defines it as, "a severely disordered state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder (as paranoid schizophrenia)".

This means that they concluded that he committed the crime in a non disordered state, and his mental health did not point to any particular disorder. Just because someone holds extremely radical views (you mentioned religion, politics can also be included) doesn't mean someone is insane.

However, I'm sure it was a very close call.

Not everyone who commits inhumane acts are insane. Some people's actions are based on their mental health, other actions are based on people's ideologies. In this case, the man was an extremist.

No normal sane person would do such a thing, only someone who is either an extremist or an insane person would.

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