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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

The amount of scams happening is insane.

The amount of people being wraponized into doing terrible things for others is insane.

This is kind of a gun story but not really IMO.

This is kind of like a story like the people who SWAT others and sometimes people die and sometimes they are held accountable.

If someone is committed to presenting a false narrative for a long time they can manipulate people into doing things. That's not new, but it's certainly more accessible than ever and nobody is ready for it =(

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> amount of people being wraponized into doing terrible things

This story is headline news because it’s rare. The man shouldn’t have had a gun. That’s where a confused elderly man went from deserving sympathy to contempt.

The elderly man even figured out he was being scammed! The scammers didn't have the full name of the family member, and they had a key detail of the alleged situation incorrect.

When the elderly man called them out, the scammers responded with threats and this apparently triggered the elderly man into (unfortunate) action.

And every scam across borders is a flyer for nationalism, isolationist politics and a cold shower to multiculturalism - as it shows the prevalence of "scams" beeing different and socially accepted beeing very different in different cultures. And when scamming the elderly can be socially accepted career in a society, the opinion of the affected on that society will corelate.

What are you talking about?

Have you heard about the Epstein files? Was that a failure of multiculturalism?

Not only that, some people from western cultures are also preying on poor women in 3rd world countries with sex tourism.

Western cultures are supporting the rape of resources and corruption in poor countries around the world.

Capitalism, as practiced in western cultures, is in many ways a sad scam that leads to a lot misery for a lot of people.

These are just a few examples to show: all cultures have bad in them. No culture is good

But some cultures try to better themselves and some cant even do that- with all the money in the world.

PS: The west - is no longer important though, the middle east is going to blow itself up, the far-east is where the futuri is at.

This man was not "weaponized into doing terrible things for others". After he kidnapped an Uber driver and determined she was not a threat, he murdered her in cold blood.

I don't know about "in cold blood." Allegedly they threatened him and his family with death, and he didn't really have time to premeditate killing her. I guess the prosecutor is getting at your point when he said it was not a "reasonable person"'s choice to kill an unarmed person backing away, but I don't think it quite qualifies as cold-blooded either. Maybe I'm too pedantic, but personally it's a reminder to not let emotions push me into a horrible choice like this, because after the fog passes it is objectively senseless.

I've noticed this lately - when someone dies by accident or somewhat on purpose, people are re-writing the story to say something like: "they put them on the curb, stomped their neck, a shot them in the back of the head with 4 ak-47s for 10 minutes. Something they planned for 6 years."

I guess the gun makes you see it differently? In that, it's easier to kill someone with a gun, therefore the killer less "cold-blooded"? i.e. if the old woman had been stabbed or beaten to death rather than shot, I don't think you would take be taking issue with the term.

Yes, I think so. In a flash of emotion it’s easy to pull the trigger. A caveat I would put is that he seems to have done the shooting over a somewhat long period (I didn’t want to watch the videos closely, but maybe 30+ seconds), so maybe it’s not very “hot-blooded”, but more so than emotionless or planned killing.

>The amount of people being weaponized into doing terrible things for others is insane.

Really is mind boggling when you look at it as "fractional evil". Some hypothetical clerk may make 99 "could go either way" decisions one way or the other to little ill effect and 1/100 or maybe 1/1000 of the time their decisions costs someone tens of thousands of dollars for no good reason for it could have gone either way.

How much of society's wealth is lost to such endeavors?

One wonders how much "evil" exists only because there exists some amount of legitimate activity it can be mixed among to dilute it enough that nobody cares.

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