Reply to This is one troubled young man (James Holmes court appearance)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]
That may be true, but the level of sympathy for this person, in the absence of a single statement or real evidence of hardship in his life, is striking.  I think that sympathy would largely evaporate if he was a muslim.  But much like with the Huguely case, many posters are looking to causes other than "evil".  And I think much of the reason is that he looks like one of our kids.[/quote]

If he were Muslim we would be discussing terrorism and debating the need to attack Iran.  If he were black, the entire black community would be held responsible. It is possible to acknowledge those realities (and fight against them) and still believe that Holmes is affected by serious mental health issues.

It is patently false to suggest that there was anything close to a consensus on DCUM that Trayvon was a thug. That was by far a minority opinion. Those trying to turn this into a racial issue are as guilty of racial generalizations as those who thought Trayvon was a thug.
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I am the person you are responding to, and I did not make that statement about a consensus about Trayvon.  That said, I do believe that Zimmerman would have been booked if Trayvon was whilte.  And therefore it is a racial issue in that sense.

I also do think that Holmes might be mentally ill.  But I also think that sometimes we call them crazy in order to dissociate from them.  It is uncomfortable to imagine that people like us can do evil.  But it seems to me that a lot of the evil in human history is perpetrated by ordinary people,.  And if we don't recognize that potential, we run the risk of going down a bad path.  Maybe not a path of machine-gunning an entire movie theater, but a bad path nonetheless.

Amnesty International says that anyone has the potential to become a human rights abuser.  The Stanford Prison experiment scientifically verifies it.  And I do believe in Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil.

So of course the court needs to be fair about Holmes and may find him insane.  But when I see this guy, I also think that he was a geeky science student with potential, just like me and dozens of people I went to school with.  And I wonder what else besides a haywire gene or a bad life event might have led him to this point.[/quote]

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