Subject: Re: Israel Thomas and Marcus G. Daniels and respect for people From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 10 Dec 2000 08:34:06 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3185426046243327@naggum.net> * Marcus G. Daniels | As you've observed, I've been following your posts. Extrapolating | from disrespecting you to disrespecting people is not justified by | what you've seen via this bait-and-observe procedure of yours. I was not going to respond any more to your increasingly obvious mental problems, but when I'm not even _people_, you have clearly made it all the way to full-blown insanity, and anything can happen. It is only the criminally insane who no longer believe their targets are _people_, who are _able_ to commit violent crimes against them. What keeps us all back from killing others is that we are of the same kind, the idea that hurting somebody else physically is a violation of very important principles that apply equally to ourselves, but you keep showing me that what applies to me does not apply to you, and now I'm not even people. Losing respect for people is the first step towards the criminally insane mind. Losing the ability to think of other human beings as of one's own kind is the last, the idea that one is different from others, an outsider to humanity. You have crossed that crucial line, probably a long time ago. I wonder what kind of people you have already killed or hurt and how they offended you, if it was enough to say something you disagreed with, or if they said something that you thought was bad, so you could hurt them without remorse, because you have none of that, either, and never have, as the record shows with frighteningly extreme clarity. I'm glad you finally admit to disrespecting me, however, and that you do so as if it is something you are entitled to and proud of. You really are mentally sick. That _is_ good to know, however. I'm sorry I have wasted so much time on you, but the end result, that I have a criminally insane stalker named Marcus G. Daniels out there who has actually lost the ability to consider others as human beings, is a _little_ easier to deal with than if you were sane and smart and just plain evil, which I thought at first. Now I can ignore you, like you actually deserved from the beginning, and you can go back to your sick oblivion where you won't be visible until you can disrespect and annoy somebody else who responds to you, probably until you kill them or do physical, violent harm to them. Insane stalkers like you can safely be left to the police. The kind of evil intelligence that continues to post disrespectful snide remarks for years on end cannot, as it is and must be within our concept of freedom of speech, but it is very seldom _just_ that, as we have discovered about you today. Both the sick obsession with me, which actually scared me a long time, and the insistence of your stabs, were good indicators several years ago that you had a problem that went far beyond the reality of the situation. Your insane rant about bizarre cults was the first solid clue, but now that you have excluded me from the category "people", too, it is no longer about me, and it probably never was about me at all, I was just so unlucky as to push one of your buttons. That has happend only once before, but he got a three-year jail sentence for the stuff he did, not just towards me, but to a few other people who pushed his buttons and caused him to create demonic and monstrous images of people that he thought he was in his right to hunt down. This horrible experience is part of the reason why I make such a big deal about not attacking people, only their actions, not their person, only their choices, and why it is important to let people get an unlimited number of chances to change their ways for the better, which must be rewarded and their past ignored when they do. But some people can't change -- they have lost the ability to be fully human, and they end up hurting people or their property because they no longer consider them principally the same as themselves. You are that kind of person, Marcus G. Daniels. Other people ought to beware of you. Your inability to discern fact from fantasy, such as in your sick exaggerations about me and what I do, means that nobody is safe around you. I don't know what caused you to attach to me, but I know it scared me when it happened about seven years ago if memory serves me right. Other people must know that you attach to people and obsess about them and fantasize about them and create demonic images that you cease to compare with reality before you act on them. You attack people for something they do not in fact do just because your own mental images of them tells you what they _should_ have done if your mental image is to remain correct, and it is much more important to keep the mental image intact than to quit the obsession with people. I pegged you as a religious fanatic first because they share the same mental disorder: That of raising their beliefs so far above reality that any observation that does not fit the belief is simply discarded -- hence your exaggerations about me, your demonic image that is not me at all, and your obsession about me over so many years, complete with hundreds of pointless snide remarks only directed towards me. That kind of patience is _frightening_ from a person who has lost the ability to think of others as human beings and provably does _anything_ he can to hurt somebody else. There's no hope for you, Marcus G. Daniels, but others need to know that if they see someone place themselves _outside_ what they do to other people, _outside_ any group of people for whatever reason and whichever kind of group, even the so-called social outcasts, and they defend their actions by virtue of being outsiders, you look straight at a person capable of evil and violent crimes. It's not just about absence of empathy and remorse, but about their ability to be part of humanity. Once somebody loses their bond to humanity and think that some people are not the same kind of people as themselves, somehow exempt from the rules that bind them, you have people whose ethics _first_ has to determine whether the other person is "their kind" before it applies at all. Racists are the easiest example: People who respond emotionally to somebody who bears the genetic manifestations of a different group and therefore to them sufficiently different that they are no longer bound by the ethics that apply to "their kind" of human. Racists actually do kill people because of this conviction alone, but racism is not a cause. Disrespect for people, be it one or everybody else, is the root cause: They have set up the distinction between two groups: Whom to treat within their ethical boundaries and whom not to. People who first consider _who_ somebody is don't have time to respond emotionally to anything else -- our emotions are very simple things. Either we fear people or we fear actions. I don't know what goes wrong or how early, but some people get their wiring wrong seemingly at a young age and make that mistake for the rest of their lives. I don't think they can be rewired except through so much pain that they regress to the point before that wiring was laid down. This is _not_ an issue of what people think or believe, it is _how_ they think and believe. They can be described in words and language, but they cannot seemingly be reached with words and language, as no amount of counter-evidence affects _how_ you accept the evidence, or filter it out, as the case may be. Take Marcus G. Daniels, who says he has been following my posts, but he summarizes them with a total absence of nuances and reflection. He has not _seen_ deviations from his expectations for many years. To him, a deviation from expectation is an _error_ in the observation and the facts, which he must have ignored systematically through all these years. To people who are wired right, an expectation that does not come true is a signal that the _expectation_ was wrong. What causes some people to prioritize their own _prejudiced_ expectations and disregard reality? What causes someone to hold onto expectations that only come true once in a while, without even considering new relations and causes but holding on harder to what he already believes? Can such people be trusted at all? Can they do any work with their mind at all? Marcus F. Daniels is not an _unintelligent_ person, but the severe mental disorder that subjugates a complex reality to his neat, orderly mental images also afflicts those whose intelligence is so high that their ability to make correct expectations at an early age causes them to believe in some mystical powers of their own mind, and reality no longer matters. I enjoyed working with highly intelligent children many years ago, and it is one of those incredibly painful and sad experiences of my life to see one of them turn into a murderer who had absolutely no ability to conceive that it had been wrong to kill the girl he killed, by an incredible act of reckless violence that had me wondering for years what caused him to kill her, but it was quite simple: She had violated his expectations, and he had always worked so hard to get his expectations right, often rearranging reality to fit them with an extreme amount of effort and dedication that we all thought would end in some incredible creative force, but instead he had to remove that mistake in reality rather than in his expectations: _She_ was an error and she had to be fixed, with violence. She just failed to get fixed and died instead. That's disrespect for people and elevating one's own prejudices and ideas above reality. He also failed to expect the reaction from society to such an extent that he collapsed as a person within days and committed suicide at age 15, before anyone could have managed to straighten him out. I have never seen unintelligent or children of average intelligence muster the intellectual power that causes them to believe their own mind to be better and more trustworthy than reality, although the enjoyment of every kind of magic and fairytales and mystic and wizardry is a sign that many _wish_ their minds were better than reality at a certain age. I have concluded that it is a phenomenal curse when it is and children experience that they can guess faster than they can learn. This latter thing is what I mostly associate with stupidity, however, and why I do _not_ equate intelligence with absence of stupidity. Quite the contrary, the more intelligent, the more potential to be stupid in just this crucial way, to believe that what you can pick out of your own mind at zero cost is better than what must be dug up from reality at great effort. I have seen that mistake cost two lives that both should have been great by all measures and indicators. It made me focus very hard on the methodologies of correct assessments of reality and on what kind of requirements we must have to avoid bugs in observation that can lead people to prefer their ideas over the facts and become something horribly disfigured like a Marcus G. Deniels. Maybe I'm overreacting when I see people who show every sign of a runaway intelligence that recklessly ignores counter-information that would have blown their prejudices and expectations to smithereens, maybe I'm overly hostile to the kind of stupidity that mostly really smart people suffer from and maybe not enough people react healthily to a sudden change in reactions relative to their expectations: namely to go "what the fuck?" and reexamine their expectations rather than just curse reality for failing to live up to them. Maybe, but I don't think so. I think people of much higher than average intelligence have a goddamn _duty_ to avoid these methodologically easily avoidable mistakes, even though they do cost a lot in terms of the effort it takes to put reality and observation first when you haven't had to do that since you were a pre-schooler. (I also think the school system is throughly evil in the way it is optimized for children so slow that kids only one standard deviation above the median begin to see that learning from experience is significantly more costly than guessing and lying and making quick fixes where it failed.) I have much more sympathy for unintelligent people who signal a failure to get the point and request a better explanation than the intelligent people who signal impatience because they think they got it and didn't. There is much less intellectual dishonesty among people who aren't smart enough to make up a sufficiently large part of the world that they can live in it, and the bigger part of the world you can create inside your own head, the more important it is that you don't move into your own mind, but keep living in the real world, with its incredibly annoying habit of wrecking _every_ constructed expectation sooner or later. And I consider anyone smart enough to discover Lisp ipso facto subject to that goddamn duty. This is probably a mistake of expectations on my part -- I'm not exactly immune to such mistakes. After this Marcus G. Daniels stalker experience and the last insane rant from an equally obsessing and soon-to-be-recycled Israel Thomas, plus that Aaron K. Johnson fuckup, maybe it's time to jack down the expectation that most people _understand_ their goddamn duty when exposed to it a couple notches, but I'll still think they are just the lazy good-for-nothings that avoid the effort because it hurts to think. With the retarded popular culture and mass marketing that makes everything completely effortless for anyone with an IQ 80 or above, idle minds of greater prowess get so lazy that most of them probably get stuck in neutral and never have to _do_ anything, except perhaps in some relatively small niche they call their specialty or carreer, which they got into by working really hard for a relatively small fraction of their youths and then stopped wanting to learn more, like how to push the fucking buttons so Dumbya wouldn't get elected with *minus* 350,000 votes. That's _also_ disrespect for people, and Dumbya kills people, too. #:Erik -- "When you are having a bad day and it seems like everybody is trying to piss you off, remember that it takes 42 muscles to produce a frown, but only 4 muscles to work the trigger of a good sniper rifle." -- Unknown