More or less, yes. He spent some months there recently.
Eleven years ago, I moved here [rural Louisiana] with my wife and children to be close to my Louisiana family. I expected to stay in St Francisville for the rest of my life. I wanted to. Now I am leaving Louisiana with all of that in ruins. I have been careful not to give too many details, out of the respect for the privacy of others, but when I tell you it’s all in ruins, I don’t exaggerate . If I could stay here in Louisiana, I would, but circumstances are such that there is nothing left for me here but pain and brokenness. (I owe it to others not to get into the details in public, and anyway, that’s not important; I would only remind you who are eager to judge, and who think you know what’s going on, that you really, really do not have all the complicated facts.)
But apparently his eldest son is going to join him in Budapest after his college semester finishes, so not all his family bridges are burned I guess.
These things are totally consistent. One of the main reasons that corporations have so thoroughly embraced DEI is that they rationally believe that they can implement these programs at very little or no net cost. I think that DEI programs are a good thing because they have succeeded in elevating DEI issues in the public debate, and that certainly has a real social value. But at the same time, corporate DEI programs have a lot of space in them for bullshit and that’s the sweet spot for corporate managers. Corporations (by which I mean corporate leaders) are absolutely going to prioritize corporate profits in any initiative, and DEI is no different. For example, in the last couple of years practically every large company has undertaken the work to identify “gaps” - they’ve quantified their degree of underrepresentation in senior roles, and they’ve figured out the ugly percentages for their orgs, i.e. women make x% less and black people make y% less than their peers. If DEI was given priority over profits this would easy to fix - on one day promote a bunch of women, promote a bunch of black people, give women an x% raise across the board, give black people a y% raise across the board. But doing that is literally impossible in the corporate legal structure, even if management wanted to. Big companies have policies that make management get approval from the Board to enact a compensation change that large. The Board, acting on behalf of shareholders, will demand evidence of a return on that investment. So you literally cannot enact a DEI pay correction for the purpose of achieving DEI goals. You can ONLY enact a DEI pay correct to achieve better profits.
This is why the normal corporate DEI “correction” is taking a “slow drip” approach. They will very slowly give underrepresented groups slightly more promotions and pay increases each year in the hopes that things equalize. This gives them time to achieve their DEI balance in a profits-friendly way. An unstated implication here is that us long suffering white males (WILL WE EVER CATCH A BREAK!) will get attenuated pay increases in the coming years as well, to help bring the DEI gaps down in the cheapest possible way.
So, yeah, corporations are “super woke”. But they are more woke in word than in deed, and it all takes a back seat to the profit goals of the shareholders.
think CN mentioned he’s against the death penalty - and I am too - but like, say in the case of these horrific mass killers or serial killers, is there an argument to be made that death sentence prevents further suffering of the victim’s family? lots of these guys end up trying to write books, get tons of fans and mail, etc., stuff that could re-victimize the families. is there any argument to be made there?
I mean only for the most horrific crimes, like killing a classroom full of children? really just asking i dont have a stance
I don’t really know either, but my two instinctive (and therefore possibly incorrect) reactions are:
Families probably need to work harder at obtaining closure than just having the state kill the killer. I am sure that 90%+ of victim families want the murderer killed because that is an understandable instinct, but I would guess that far fewer families find that the execution of the murderer does that much to help them heal in the long run.
The ongoing existence of the killers and their opportunity to explain themselves may feel unseemly or distasteful, but it also gives us the opportunity to learn how the think and potentially better deal with them in the future. This understandably seems like a cold calculus but having psychiatrists interview psychopaths does have a benefit to society even if it seems kind of abstract.
This isn’t some unsolvable problem, although making it so that the USA has a prison system run competently and humanely sure seems impossible. It’s quite easy to limit communications in and out of prison. It’s even possible to do it humanely.
The implicit assumption in this post is that the people who did the worst crimes (killed a room of children, mass killers, etc) are also the worse criminals.
That’s really not the case. For Parkland, that was a 19 year old kid who was adopted then orphaned three months before the shooting. He had multiple people try to commit this kid for the big psych issues he was having, but never was for what seems like super obviously bad reasons in hindsight. Seems more like untreated severe mental illness than evil. That seems far more like a systemic failure of society than evil to me. Columbine was a similar situation (those kids should have been in jail already, and one was basically dependent on the other).
Even among the classical ‘big time’ serial killers, I wouldn’t say all of them were truly evil. Dahmer was a broken man with severe mental health and alcohol issues coupled with not being able to handle that he was gay. Gein was against a simple mental health issue. Charles Manson really just wanted to keep is orgy going and I don’t think actually killed anyone himself. Richard Chase held a delusion that he needed to drink blood.
The most evil ones aren’t well known because they aren’t the story the public really wants. Very few people know David Parker Ray (The Toybox Killer), Albert Fish, Lake/Ng, Dean Corll, etc because they are too fucking gross. (Warning: these all involve either systemic sadistic rapes that end with murder and/or child murder).
The exceptions to this are strange to me. Bundy is an exception because his story is epic and people think he’s hot. They’ll ignore the horrible things he did because he broke out of prison and looked good doing it, plus he gave his life to Jesus dontchaknow. The media is very complicit in what was the increased coverage of serial killers in the 60s/70s, and it would have been quite easy to not allow them to go public with anything at all.
I know all those guys, yea, pretty horrific and those types of people are kinda who I’m talking about - I think of how I’d feel with any of these guys enjoying their notoriety after they killed my loved one and I can’t imagine
the weird thing is how prolific serial killers are in the USA and is a seeming outlier there
I don’t think they are tbh. We’re just way more into it as a public. Also there’s some very big time Euros like Fred and May West, Chikatilo, Kurten, Unterweger. Hell a nurse was just found to murder like 7 babies in the UK. India and South America have some huge ones too.
The US does have by far the greatest number of “official” serial killers per capita but that may have more to do with the fact that the US is where the phenomenon of serial killers as a formal law enforcement concept was created, and not that long ago in the 1970s. There may be just as many serial killers per capital active in any other country but they may never be identified or caught.
On the other side of that argument is that the US is a very friendly place for serial killers. Interstate jurisdictional law enforcement conflict plus the interstate highway system is kind of a perfect storm for serial killers. There’s no easier place on earth to murder two people 800 miles apart in the same week and dump the bodies in a dark wood off the side of the road.
