Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crossroadsguy | Hacker News Reader

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I have heard this play out too many times.

Most recently here, a college junior's wife revealed four months after marriage that she is actually a lesbian (she didn't share it – he caught her in their bedroom with a colleague of hers when he returned home early from the office), and he would be free to do what he wants; she should be too. Hit him hard, but he said they should go for an annulment— out of question; a divorce— out of question. Her point was if she had to do all this, why would she have agreed to a marriage in the first place! It was to get society off her back and her parents.

Well, he filed for divorce, and it resulted in false dowry cases (yes, it's that part of the world), cruelty.. a long list. He was in lock-up for almost a month and a half, his almost 80 father and 70 mother was in a case of beating her up - (they met her exactly once – two days after marriage for a day when they went to his native village and after that they barely even talked to her on phone when they came back to they city they worked in), he lost almost everything he had, and finally, he just broke down in court and, against his lawyer's advice, just told the judge to give her whatever the judge wanted and just grant him a divorce. This was after almost three or four years of struggle. This guy is damaged now. We were in two sports team together in the college. One of the gentlest people I know. He had a minor stroke recently. He has sleeping issues. He is still fighting to just stay alive. It's difficult for him to get jobs because there's police record against him. He worked for a major MNC bank and he was fired summarily.

No, this is not an isolated cruel example of extreme and from the hinterland of the world - this is an example of people fucking others over, mercilessly. No, this is not fighting to stay afloat in the water. It's like kicking someone off the boat because they were closer to the life jacket on the boat by few feet of another available lifeboat that the person could have taken instead. No, it's actually worse!

I am sorry for how the world treated you and him, but no, fuck no! Life fucked him – or could have fucked him, so he gets to fuck others, right? Awesome!

> but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person.

No, he is a bad person! Ffs.

There is another, third perspective one can have on this.

One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.

I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.

Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.

Both things can be true:

Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.

Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.

But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.

He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.

When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.

We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.

Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.

The author refers to their dad as a coward.

When the wife wanted to divorce, the dad recruited his mother-in-law to convince the wife to stay on the marriage.

He was selfishly hiding information and making lifelong decisions for everyone because "he knew best."

The dad died of a heart attack. His family was too ignorant to know a quick drive to the hospital was the best action. They didn't know because the 911 operator told them to wait for the ambulance (for legal reasons, they will not tell you to rush to the hospital. Imagine the liability of a wreck).

There's no need to play devil's advocate. Private decisions were made, and we all have the privilege of reading about the outcome. It gives us much to consider, and not much else.

I think I am totally naive on this subject,

why was the divorce so hard for him? In that society, they just don't let you get divorced unless both parties agree to it? And with the evidence he had of her being a lesbian, does that mean nothing? What is even the point of divorce in that society?

I'm guessing India, and it's dowry part of it that complicates things a lot. And once either party goes into legal proceedings, it becomes a shit slinging mess of he-said she-said. Hence why most people try to "settle" things out of the court even if they were the victim. You wouldn't wish the Indian legal system on your worst enemy.

Because it's the great nation of India, where harassment and dowry cases and custody laws swing hard in favor of the wife. Which has resulted in the worst of both worlds - poor women who won't even see a the light of day in front of a courthouse, never mind inside it, continue to be oppressed by their husbands, while wealthy women tired of their marriages hire ever-more-eager lawyers and slap false dowry cases on their ex-husbands.

A guy, Atul Subhash, recently (about a year ago) committed suicide because his ex-wife and her family slapped false dowry cases against him and his extremely aged parents. Another case, a woman named Jasleen Kaur falsely accused a guy of sexual harassment, because they had a minor argument on the street. That case took 4 years, and in the meantime, Jasleen went to Canada to study, received the then Chief Minister's support and never appeared in court even once. Meanwhile the guy, Savjit, was arrested, had to post bail, was called "National Predator" and "Delhi's Pervert" on mainstream media, and received zilch for all the harassment he received. After he was acquitted, he pressed criminal charges against Jasleen and her family for false accusations, but the courts threw that case away because apparently "loss of reputation" isn't enough to press charges.

All of this in a backdrop where poor women are raped, sometimes even murdered, every single minute, while actual rapists walk free and often even freely contest and win elections on the current ruling party's ticket. Yeah, India is super fucked.

Why are you all talking about India when the blog post used Chinese words and explicitly said he was in China?

One of the parent comments mentioned a similar situation involving a colleague who other comments think was from India based on the description of the dowry.

I didn't think he is a bad person. I felt he is not brave enough to take the challenge.

Your comment definitely made it sound like the victim/husband's suffering came from the culture they lived in, not the wife's actions directly.

So I vote for bad system, not bad people.

I think marrying someone despite being attracted to the other sex without telling them and then having an affair with someone definitely makes you a bad person. But that’s me.

I think judging a person's actions without considering their circumstances, which includes culture, is a mistake

I can even tolerate / excuse / forgive up until that point, because it is indeed an unfair system. She took a gamble and got caught, at which point she ought to have made a deal with the guy. Not exploited the other unfair system of state violence against him.

He was the one who filed for divorce after she tried to make a deal with him.

> No, he is a bad person! Ffs

That is quite the judgement of a person you've never known, based solely on the view of one person's brief writing processing a deeply emotional experience.

Your judgement reflects poorly on you.

There's too much apologizing for people's horrible actions these days. Nearly everyone is a sympathetic character when you get to know them, but that doesn't excuse them. There were other people, in his situation, who took different approaches that didn't result in locking a woman away in a loveless marriage for her entire life. I'm sure a lot of us come from easier situations, but the people who come from hard situations will probably tell you, yeah, it was hard, it was horrible, but he didn't have to do that.

I'm not apologizing for anyone's actions. This is not to say he is a good person. It is to say that there isn't enough evidence to judge one as a bad person.

A lot of good people have made bad choices, and these writings reflect a mere sliver of a man's life choices from the very thin perspective of one person's grief laid bare.

I agree. To me, it's like a blameless retro. You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.

The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding. I think the last line makes that clear:

> the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well

And it's not to say someone can't attach judgement to characters, or that no one should hold blame. But I think it's important to honor what the author is seeking.

> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.

This is the first I've heard this statement (not necessarily the idea), but I found it incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity - thanks for sharing!

Are there origins to this that you're aware of? With some searching I found some adjacent thread lines to stoicism and Buddhism, but nothing quite the same.

Is it even remotely appropriate to blame without first understanding? In which case, doesn't this perspective completely rule out the possibility of any appropriate blame?

> Is it even remotely appropriate to blame without first understanding?

Yet, blame is easy and satisfying and true understanding requires empathy and is hard and often unsatisfying.

The term "understanding" is fractal and infinite. Therefore Its 100% reasonable to find a stopping point and say "I blame you" (or, as you point out, otherwise, no one would ever be allowed to assign blame).

My comment is more about intent. The "seeking" word weights heavy. Many commenters are not seeking understanding, they are seeking satisfaction. Validation. The author of the post could have stopped much sooner if they were seeking blame, they could have chosen to build a caricature to heap more judgement upon. But they chose a more nuanced and exploratory path.

Even if the end result is blame or judgement. It's important that the purpose of the journey is clear. True understanding requires empathy, and it's really hard to empathize with someone you're actively trying to judge or vilify.

I (think I) got it from ReinH on birdsite (before everyone left and moved to mastodon and Bluesky). He also gave a lot of talks on blameless postmortems and culture and general SRE stuff. This is one talk but not sure if it touches on the origins https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrsvLMqF1Q

The notions of "blame", "excuse", and "forgiveness" are strange to me now. I want to say that understanding is key, and everything else follows from understanding. If I understand a person's action, I should act, according to my values, regarding that person. Consistency to one's values is also key. Any emotions, feelings, etc. should either be recognized in my values or shouldn't interfere. If I am to praise or elevate someone, I should praise or elevate that person, and the same if I should rebuke or punish someone. Any extraneous desires that would prevent me from doing what I should do are to be contained. I must understand my values, by which I will understand the world, and how I should act within that world is then determined.

I recommend reading Susan Wolf's essay "Blame, Italian Style." It's a response to TM Scanlon's contractualist approach (as made famous by the TV Show The Good Place), and it is a vigorous defense of a concept of blame that includes emotions such as anger. Even if you've never read any Moral Psychology, it's accessible and thought-provoking.

(I haven't presently read Wolf's essay on account of it being paywalled. However, I think I get the gist of it, and Scanlon's view too, from the abstract and some commentary.)

I see good points from both Wolf and Scanlon, but I don't fully agree with either. To express myself crudely, I might say that I think "feelings" ("emotions") can be either rational or irrational. That is, logic and emotions are orthogonal concepts, and in fact we must perform logic within some domain, which may involve emotions. So I embrace emotions as one domain in the exercise of logic, but that gives rise to "logical beliefs based on emotions" and "illogical beliefs based on emotions".

If someone believes a friend is worthy of blame for something, but does not consider their friend to have caused an injury as Scanlon says, then Wolf says this is indeed blame, part of a valuable notion of blame. But I don't tend to consider emotional-logical beliefs to convey blame or praise, because really they are just reflecting reality. I wouldn't praise a friend for having the sense to pour a thirsty person water anymore than I would praise the water for having the sense to obey gravity when poured. But lack of praise isn't the same as determining whether to feel or express, say, gratitude or pleasure. I believe that all deeds should be judged as they are, and others should express themselves about those deeds accordingly. That the friend has done something blameworthy is just to say that the friend should be blamed (in my opinion, which I recognize is contentious). But blaming the friend does not require a specific response, and the response may be quite amicable. In this sense, I think blame and praise are useful when they logically correspond personal responses with logical judgements, but they reduce to dull logical exercises.

Illogical beliefs rooted in emotion are where blame becomes dangerous. Case in point: this overall thread. I think it's fair to say that some comments are combative. Still, something illogical is merely illogical, and also dull in the end.

I think the real challenge, and point of interest, is dealing with human beliefs in practice, where the presence of logic (or lack thereof) in a comment is highly subjective, ambiguous, not obvious, not formally coherent or perhaps not even informally coherent.... This is a good example of human "messiness" but also human "value". Especially when discussing beliefs rooted in "emotions", with blame being a prominent category, things aren't so easy to judge.

Oh wow, thanks for engaging.

You might really appreciate reading some of Bishop Butler's sermons, which are not pay walled. When I briefly studied Moral Psychology, I was taught that Butler is sort of the under-appreciated bedrock of Moral Psychology. His perspective is on the surface religious, which is perhaps why he is not considered among Locke and Hobbes as a foundational thinker of the Enlightenment. And yet his methods are just as rational and philosophical. He tries to construct a taxonomy of what you call "emotional-logical beliefs."

https://anglicanhistory.org/butler/rolls/08.html

Thank you for engaging. I'm having a good time talking with you.

Maybe I ought to read older texts more often...I do not fully understand what Butler means by terms such as "plain"! But that was a good read.

I do wonder which instances Butler imagines "sudden anger" to be useful in. I would think it rare that immediate action without consideration is good, but where it is good, I do not think the actor is acting in anger so much as he is acting in a justified instinct. It is probably more correct that the actor acts in anger when the action is bad. To be precise, I am talking about the actor's intention, whereas his action may turn out to be good or bad in that split-second. I don't believe that people should be judged on what occurs but only what they tried to do, while keeping in mind that "ideal intention" and "actual intention" are distinct (as good intentions pave the road to Hell!).

I do like how Butler described "deliberate anger" and its role in addressing wrongs committed unto people. I had to ponder what I myself meant when I brought up emotional-logic, because I have not understood it so well that I never confuse myself, but I suppose that is what Butler is describing: logic that addresses emotions, or allows emotions. In fact, if logic is not subservient to "cold-bloodedness", emotions are presumably a major component of the logic we perform every day, at some level or another.

I'm not religious, nor atheist or the like. I consider myself agnostic, but I think to be a proper agnostic one has to work to earn the title. Extending the notion of agnosticism to its logical conclusion, I find that we should all be agnostic in all matters: never professing knowledge to anything that we are ignorant of (which ultimately must be everything, because who knows anything nontrivial?). That's an extreme position, and would require a dense discussion, but it can be moderated to suit the circumstances. It suffices to say that, on momentous matters such as God, we must be ignorant. This doesn't preclude positing axioms, accepting them on faith, and performing logic, however. Indeed, we all require faith in some way or another. Anyways, I've found that freeing myself of the expectation of believing a certain way has helped me better appreciate all manner of religious, spiritual, mystic, etc. schools of thoughts. God is the greatest of the unknowable things, so any way we discuss Him shines light on some mode of life.

I think you're misreading that last line. I'm pretty sure what the author is saying is:

> the evening we found the love letters my mom said to me, "he wasted his entire life, his entire life, and mine as well."

Also, I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.

> I don't think she's seeking one vs the other, nor is she judging him less now that she knows he's had a bunch of affairs. She's presenting a story and it's obvious that she has mixed feelings, full of both positive and negative judgement.

It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.

> I think you're misreading that last line.

Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's *no* judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.

> It sounds like violently agree with everything other than my framing and wording choices.

No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.

> The author seemingly had a lot of judgement and blame for the dad before finding this out. It sounds like they are seeking understanding

If you read the story, it looks to me that prior to learning all this she felt bad that he didn't get to have a life of his own and sacrificed for her. But she learned that this wasn't the case. This is kind of the opposite of what you're suggesting.

Also on this:

> You can either seek understanding or seek blame, but not both at once.

My point here is that she's doing both.

> Maybe. I didn't notice it was a period and not a comma until posting it. I still read it as "we found...his life" sure maybe they interpret it was him wasting that life, but your prior sentiment I quoted is the thing I'm emphasizing. I'm not saying there's no judgement. I'm saying there's a clear (to me) attempt at understanding that goes beyond blame.

It's not about the period - it's that she's using italic for quote and this is part of her mom's statement.

> No, you previously implied that the discovery of this information is somehow leading to less judgment and blame and more of an effort to understand.

No

There are good and bad actions, not people.

There are students who get good grades on their assignments and tests, and there are students who get bad grades on their assignments and tests, but there are no good and bad students.

Does chinese law not allow a woman to individually apply for divorce without the partner's consent, or start a court case? Seems like they were both 'locked' in similar ways.

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