That is very true.
That is very true.
First off, I've already PM'd BB and figured out our little mis-communication (I didn't mean "BadgeBunny" when I quoted here and posted "you" - I thought that was obvious because I assumed she didn't mean "BadgeBunny" when she said "poor little me" but in retrospect, I can see how it wasn't clear and I apologized - that was truly not my intention to call her out).
The point of my posting this article and pretty much all of my posts wasn't to tear anyone down but to discuss both sides of the sort of torn emotional/psychological feelings I have in cases like this. If you went through abuse or other horrible things as a child, then I applaud you if you came out the other side as a well-adjusted human being.
What did I do to piss you off, man? That's really where you're going to go - Hyperbole. So nobody has said "Kill 'em all" on this message board? I just did a search for that phrase and got 3 pages of results. A search for Kill Thief yielded 2 pages. It's not a gross exaggeration just to win an argument, I was just trying to illustrate that literally too many folks on OSA jump to the "kill 'em" part without trying to dig around to the source and question what happened.
We don't want to do that because it humanizes our enemies. We don't want to think of them as innocent children way back in the day who they themselves were abused and then became monsters - it's easier to hate someone when you just see them as monsters and don't question what's happening (but figuring out the source is a good start on preventing it from happening to others in the future).
Having a lack of empathy is another form of psychological issue that is often caused by living through a traumatic experience (which was also my point - you don't just grow up to parrot what happened to you, sometimes it just makes you hard and unable to empathize with anyone).
Again, I'm not calling you out or trying to start anything (so please don't read this like I am), but in order to make your previous statement and this one - you're sort of assuming that your past was as bad or worse than all those other "weak people" who didn't overcome (at least in the context of your previous statement as "the excuse for the weak"). I don't personally think everyone is built the same way or subjected to the same trials. What is too much for some may not be for others, but I don't think it's fair to look at what someone else didn't survive and say "I survived so they should have to" when the situations could have been totally different.
If you did survive one of the harshest situations out there, then - that's amazing and I applaud you for your strength. I happen to have friends that from a young age their situations were much worse than mine in a different sense (and mine wasn't what I would call good) and they crashed and burned. I never looked at their situation and said "I think I could have made it through that" because I'm not certain I could have.
They're adults now so I don't have the same sympathy I did for them that I did when we were all kids, but I don't for a minute forget that I had it only slightly better than they did and that could have been the difference in my not going down the path they did.
It's not an excuse, but it is a sort of humanizing perspective. There are very few human beings born as monsters. In almost every situation, there is an external cause.
The point of my posting this article and pretty much all of my posts wasn't to tear anyone down but to discuss both sides of the sort of torn emotional/psychological feelings I have in cases like this. If you went through abuse or other horrible things as a child, then I applaud you if you came out the other side as a well-adjusted human being.
What did I do to piss you off, man? That's really where you're going to go - Hyperbole. So nobody has said "Kill 'em all" on this message board? I just did a search for that phrase and got 3 pages of results. A search for Kill Thief yielded 2 pages. It's not a gross exaggeration just to win an argument, I was just trying to illustrate that literally too many folks on OSA jump to the "kill 'em" part without trying to dig around to the source and question what happened.
We don't want to do that because it humanizes our enemies. We don't want to think of them as innocent children way back in the day who they themselves were abused and then became monsters - it's easier to hate someone when you just see them as monsters and don't question what's happening (but figuring out the source is a good start on preventing it from happening to others in the future).
Having a lack of empathy is another form of psychological issue that is often caused by living through a traumatic experience (which was also my point - you don't just grow up to parrot what happened to you, sometimes it just makes you hard and unable to empathize with anyone).
Again, I'm not calling you out or trying to start anything (so please don't read this like I am), but in order to make your previous statement and this one - you're sort of assuming that your past was as bad or worse than all those other "weak people" who didn't overcome (at least in the context of your previous statement as "the excuse for the weak"). I don't personally think everyone is built the same way or subjected to the same trials. What is too much for some may not be for others, but I don't think it's fair to look at what someone else didn't survive and say "I survived so they should have to" when the situations could have been totally different.
If you did survive one of the harshest situations out there, then - that's amazing and I applaud you for your strength. I happen to have friends that from a young age their situations were much worse than mine in a different sense (and mine wasn't what I would call good) and they crashed and burned. I never looked at their situation and said "I think I could have made it through that" because I'm not certain I could have.
They're adults now so I don't have the same sympathy I did for them that I did when we were all kids, but I don't for a minute forget that I had it only slightly better than they did and that could have been the difference in my not going down the path they did.
It's not an excuse, but it is a sort of humanizing perspective. There are very few human beings born as monsters. In almost every situation, there is an external cause.
Dear Lord, forgive me for saying such a GURL thing ... but ... they are the same ... they are both ... ahem ...... well ... CARS ...
BB, I'm with you on this one. A Prius and a Hummer are, in fact related...to a degree of course. They are more related than a Hummer and a Harley on most levels and they are much more closely related than a Prius and a Pineapple are. Commonality and relation come in degrees. One can always argue that a claim is wrong because it places too much emphasis on a relationship or metaphor. Still, one should always be careful about dismissing comparisons offhand. It's all a matter of degree and context.
And now for some closing thoughts on this topic/discussion:
-Childhood maltreatment is something that happens to a lot of [i.e. far too many] people. This impacts these peoples lives and demonstrably changes the way their brains work. Being abused doesn't "make" a person anything. Tons of wonderful, kind, and decent people were abused as children. That said, childhood maltreatment is definitely a contributing factor to the development of a person into an abusive adult (with the extreme being serial child rapists and the like). This is not a matter of strict causality. There are many other factors at play here. So, as with any other outcome or even in the world, there are reasons and causes, complex as they may be, for why people like this exist. Understanding those reasons (and not simply writing them off as non-humans who just randomly escaped from hell into their mother's tummies) is important in talking about how to deal with these sort of people and to stop and prevent this sort of thing from happening.
-We do not live in some sort of anarchic, circle-of-life society. Which is a good thing since the whole abusive, psychopathic type tend to thrive in those sort of circumstances. We live in a society that makes an attempt (however flawed the implementation might be) to seek liberty and justice through a legal and punitive system. When a prisoner--whatever his crime or level of a-holeness--is gutted in a prison, that is a breakdown of the system. However we feel about the individuals involved or even like the outcome, that is something that we should always work to prevent.
-The previous statement should apply regardless of whether or not you believe that anyone who rapes a child should necessarily be put to death. Heck, maybe some folks believe that all child molesters should be disemboweled with improvised knives. That wouldn't change the legal and moral wrongness that exists in situations like this.
-This topic is, by it's very nature, very much tied up with emotions and individual situations. We should not ignore this aspect, and it should inform our thoughts and policies. But, it's also true that we should not let our emotions and personal experiences overshadow or get in the way of our assessment of justice and the shaping of our institutions and policies.
If someone broke into my home and I accidentally left my toothbrush and razor out of my gun safe should I feel responsible if a violent crime was committed with my toothbrush?
We as a society can decide what's allowable. God gives us that latitude. Is this any different than public hanging? I think not. There are codes to be followed in prison just as there are on the outside. If we took better care of meting out justice ourselves murderers in prison wouldn't have to do it for us. The murderers, rapists and pedophiles ultimate fate is still determined by God, we don't get to do that.
Laws are written, not to punish the guilty, but to establish a commonly accepted system of punishment. This is done in the hopes of derailing the innate, natural, and wholly correct response of "Touch me or mine and you BURN!"
People who abuse/molest children (usually their own) are a special kind of evil, who have chosen to abandon their humanity, and need to be destroyed. That they are not is a failure of our system. The two hoods who gutted this particular villian may have done so out of the wickedest intentions, but they were only afforded the opportunity by our "evolving into an enlightened humanity". Were we a society of barbarians, this severely disturbed ex-human would have been erased after his first attack. Because he survived on the mercy of our superior civilization, he was able to terrorize at least two other victims, that we know about, and possibly more if there was any truth to his bragging.
Call me callous. Call me inhumane. Touch someone I love and pray you make it into the system forever.
People who abuse/molest children (usually their own) are a special kind of evil, who have chosen to abandon their humanity, and need to be destroyed. That they are not is a failure of our system. The two hoods who gutted this particular villian may have done so out of the wickedest intentions, but they were only afforded the opportunity by our "evolving into an enlightened humanity". Were we a society of barbarians, this severely disturbed ex-human would have been erased after his first attack. Because he survived on the mercy of our superior civilization, he was able to terrorize at least two other victims, that we know about, and possibly more if there was any truth to his bragging.
Call me callous. Call me inhumane. Touch someone I love and pray you make it into the system forever.
Who said I was pissed off? I was pointing out that you were exaggerating. Sorry... hell, I forgot about this thread after that.
Movin' on, 'cause I don't really care, and I hope they kill all those MFers who do this the same way...
There. Now you happy?
