Reply to Eight People Shot in Black Church in Charleston, South Carolina

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I think conflating mass murders and serial killers is a category error.  Dahmer was obviously loopy; people who kill abortion providers are rational given their premises.  I think this gets at the crazy vs. evil distinction, which in real life is, of course, to some extent muddled in all cases. [/quote]

I agree with this. I have a very hard time handing mental illness as an excuse to mass murders. Do you need to have some crazy in you to do that, sure. Should that be an excuse for your crime, in my opinion, no.

Serial Killers, different story. Should be locked up forever, but no doubt that they have a compulsion and they cannot be anything but a predator.[/quote]

For me the question is, if we could address the mental illness... can we prevent mass murders? In this sense, we need to see how mental illness plays in these sort of situations, as a prevention, not an excuse.[/quote]

While I strongly disagree with those who are arguing that whites in general use "mental illness" as an excuse for murders committed by other whites as compared to how they discuss black murderers, it is fair to say that there is no reason yet to assume this guy was mentally ill.  He did something evil, for reasons he apparently stated while doing so, and there is no evidence of meaningful delusions, etc.  Some seems to believe that a person "has to be" crazy to do something like this; I disagree entirely.  Consciously-chosen evil is relatively uncommon, but it does exist, and it exists here I believe.

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I agree. Depends on your definition of "crazy" though. People are calling this man a sociopath. Sociopaths do not fit my definition of "crazy" because they know exactly what they are doing. But that is an unlikely diagnosis because sociopaths do not tend to care very much about a "cause" like killing people for racist reasons and they do not tend to commit crimes for which they will definitely get caught. This man left a witness. He did this for a reason which made sense to him and he wanted notoriety for it. This is clearly a hate crime.

Now... whether or not he was having a psychotic break and operating under a set of delusions remains to be seen and we should not make those assumptions. Plenty of so-called "sane" people have committed hate crimes who believed they were doing the right thing.

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"Hate crime" is a term of political advocacy, and one that is used in intellectually dishonest ways most of the time.  A better word for this is "terrorism," given the context---that at least has a theoretically objective definition as violence against innocents for political reasons---although all such fights over words are laden with implicit political assumptions that shed more heat than light.    [/quote]

Point taken but I am comfortable with "hate crime" in this case. Unfortunately, many Americans believe that the word "terrorist" is synonymous with "Muslim"  and that further complicates the issue. And once again, we are only splitting hairs when we really intend to discuss the fact that this was a racist crime whether or not the guy was mentally ill. [/quote]

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