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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective

I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.)

It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent.

The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not a random act of cruelty, but a result of his heroism. And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.

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> And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.

I expect monstrous actions from all humankind, though. What sets “us” apart from deviants is the deftness of our self-justification.

To be clear, there’s no actual evidence that he’s being evicted. Talking about “his eviction” is pretty premature. It also seems like he will receive the reward.

Last sentence went a little insane.

> Last sentence went a little insane

I'm drawing a moral analogy to mass murder, so the whole thing is going to tend towards the unhinged. But I'll stand by it. There is something sad in ordinary people bending to banal evil. Monsters being monsters is just horrific.

Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.

The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.

Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.

Why not give him cash or a job or something else?

He wasn't interfering with the building owners. You're making up a justification to screw this guy over. That's really sad.

Oh if he wasn't interferring, then they must have allowed him to keep living there? Why is that sad, you want him to be kicked out?

(You forgot to use logic or explain a point of view and instead just made a random moral judgement and expressed the emotion it made you feel, so I had to make some assumptions about your intentions and depth of thought)

I think my logic is fine. You pulled reasons to get rid of him out of nowhere, not based on the facts of the case. Not just supporting a possible eviction but preemptively deciding it's the only way to get peaceful use of their building even though they were already getting peaceful use of their building. That's sad, because you're justifying a big punishment as consequence of doing a big good deed, with nobody benefitting.

And your first sentence makes no sense. That's not how people usually work. They get possessive and risk-averse and ban things that are unusual. That "if-then" is a total joke, and without it your criticism of my argument falls apart.

> Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal

Not what was said.

> Why not give him cash or a job or something else?

Sure. Why not.

> Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.

The characterization of “us” as “assailants” is an acknowledgment of the sorrowful fate that we as a society inflict on nearly every whistleblower despite the fact that we as a society encourage people to be whistleblowers.

This is conflating whistleblowing with the need to pay rent on your residence. This guy is not exactly a Julian Assange.

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