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Comment by andrewfelix | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: Why do so many people empathise with McAfee's plight?

From where I stand he looks like wealthy man who lost direction, turned to drugs and likely killed a man.

Techies read a lot of genre fiction with anti-heroes on the run, and that kind of thing. Maybe even some political sympathy, McAfee as an example of "going Galt".

Who is Galt?

"John Galt is a fictional character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

What I meant was: Who is John Galt?

A fictional character.

Ah, the lesser seen cousin of Poe's Law: any sufficiently confused exchange on the Internet is indistinguishable from an Abbot and Costello routine.

If only it were so! Profound confusion would be much easier to spot in a world that worked like that.

tednaleid, you seem to be dead. Perhaps posting a link to wikipedia with no other content auto-triggered something.

We are!

I don't think that phrase means what you think it means. Fleeing countries for possibly being responsible for other peoples' deaths isn't quite the same thing as stopping work to avoid being leeched dry. Regardless of whether you think the latter action is silly, they're hardly similar.

Yes, but we can pretend. Life is more exciting that way.

Best one-sentence explanation of the McAfee blog phenomenon over the past month or so that I've seen.

All humans need and deserve empathy: healthy/unhealthy, good/evil, innocent/criminal. In particular, empathy often provides psychological healing, although it won't do him much good personally unless it reaches him.

I believe he should be treated humanely, though I do not know why empathy is required to do so.

From my perspective, it's because as a fellow human I can imagine his thoughts and feelings and in turn care about them that I believe he should be treated humanely. That imagining (and caring) is empathy. Where does your belief in humane treatment come from?

I suppose I set that as the baseline without needing to specify an appeal to innate humanity, so I agree.

It might be what enables you to treat the subject humanely in the first place. It seems it would certainly make it easier, at least. Advocating empathy isn't the same as being soft on crime. It's perfectly possible to punish for crimes, even with death, and still display empathy and compassion.

The part of the plight I empathize with is where the police want to question him, not over the phone, but in a place where they can both question him unfairly and also have the possibility to detain him before trial, for months.

FYI: This is Belize, not Afghanistan. I know to many US-ians with limited world views, they may seem like the same things, but they aren't. Comments like this reflect poorly on you.

In Belize or the US it's the same. Police want to question at their own facility so they can employ unfair methods and detain for trial if they wish. I did put "months" instead of "years" because presumably in Belize it's not as bad as in the US.

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