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John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

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Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#731
post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s a murderer and fraudster. You do not in fact have to applaud him for anything.

This cancel culture thing where a few negative cancels all the good you could have done is really weird. Voltaire is racist, Washington had slaves, this or that twiteroo said 10 years ago some kind of sorry thing, McAfee killed and frauded. Look it's all kinda true and all kinda irrelevant. People are more than the 10% of the time they sinned. I sure have sinned, and I sure hope you'll still find me valuable as a hum…

There's a big difference between cancelling someone for something offensive they said on Twitter (which I disagree with) and cancelling someone who committed murder and rape.

Big, big difference.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#732
post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not interesting when its 9 months in advance Maybe a few weeks People arent just able to make a perpetual conspiracy indefinitely in the future, or you dont have to entertain people trying to do that I wont here He has increasingly depressing messages in an increasingly dimmed outlook and an increasing time in prison

The guys been in prison before and seemed to enjoy it, posted pictures from prison in the dominican republic which is way worse than spanish prison. The guy talked about being content a week ago, "I'm old and content with food and a bed", he felt bad for the young people who were afraid of prison. He was still able to tweet and enjoyed interacting with people. If you think he killed himself, you don't understand how…

> If you think he killed himself, you don't understand how humans work, plain and simple.

Suicide doesn't involve humans working as they should, and anyone who pretends to understand suicide, or understand what motivates people to kill themselves, or believes anyone to be incapable of killing themself, is mistaken. I hope you never find out how mistaken you are.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#733
post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is GU?

Geometric Unity, Eric Weinstein's supposed Theory of Everything. It's likely a bunch of nonsense, but the man won't release a paper, so we can't know for sure. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/...

[deleted]

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#734
post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geometric Unity, Eric Weinstein's supposed Theory of Everything. It's likely a bunch of nonsense, but the man won't release a paper, so we can't know for sure. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/...

He published a GU paper a few months ago: https://geometricunity.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/Geometric... (I haven’t read it, I’m not even remotely qualified.)

"*The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author."

Well, okay.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#735
post #688
post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the linked post, Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) aka bath salts.

In more recent articles about it it seems to be a variation of alpha-PVP (flakka), something called alpha-PHP that is outside of any schedule for drugs. Basically a designer cathinone that is (or was) still legal.

He wasn't totally certain exactly what he'd made, afaik; his neighbor troubles coincided with efforts to get a real chemist to assist him in identifying what he was producing and stabilizing his method.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#736
post #675
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selective enforcement is bad. The fact that the law says that you could go to prison for one year for not filing taxes on time, but that it's rarely enforced means that they should fix the law. Using it only on "bad guys" is a recipe for the government punishing people that disagrees with them.

Or you know...you could pay your taxes and stop stealing from the rest of us.

To be fair, the dude doesn't live in the US. There are only two countries in the world that tax citizens overseas, and the US is one of them.

I'm certainly not excusing his actions (and I'm sure he dodged taxes in many ways), but I have to say that as a Spanish citizen having lived in the US, Ireland, and now Japan, the US tax code is batshit insane.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#737
post #23

What a strange life he lived. I'm not going to make a value judgement about whether or not he was a 'good' person, but I do applaud the fact that he dared to deviate from the norm. "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." -- Hunter S Thompson RIP

I'll do it for you then, he was a 'shitty' person.

Does working in tech bring about a condition of no longer making value judgements, so that you never have to turn that spotlight on yourselves?

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#738
post #66

I met John in an Atlanta airport lounge years ago[1]. I recognized him immediately as I've always admired him, and I decided to go up to him and tell him as much. He invited me to sit down, and told him about when I was a teenager in the 90s learning about tech entrepreneurs at the time, I always thought he was pretty cool and had good ideas. I told him I respected him, and that I was sure he'd lived an incredible li…

Realise that people can be super nice to you and cruel/evil to somebody else. The serial killer living next door might be a great neighbour. That doesn’t change the facts of what he/she is.

This kind of subjectivism is so lacking in nuance, though, that the good parts that one is seeing (and, in many ways, choosing to see) are a mere reduction of the whole truth, and isn’t the whole truth of a person

So a serial killer is a good person just because he’s a nice neighbor to you? If you’re hanging out with a friend in your inner circle of elites and that friend is nice to you but is very rude to waiters and other blue-collar workers, is that friend a good person?

I’m not making a judgment of McAfee’s character here, just pointing out the myopic sense of morality. It’s so popular, too popular if I must say, among people these days.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#739
post #470

The sad thing is that our government seems to make a point of screwing with kooks. I don’t care if McAffee owed some taxes - leave the guy alone, he’s obviously unstable, has major problems with drug and alcohol addiction and all they can do is try to bring him even lower. Poor guy had major problems even before the “heroes” of the FBI or the IRS or whatever started screwing with him. Let the poor guy ride off into t…

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman I've always used this as an excuse for what might be considered being weird (at least that's what my family tells me).

There are lots of weird and unreasonable people in the world who are not tax cheats, rapists, or murderers. Many of them are wonderful people deserving of praise. McAfee is not.

Re: John McAfee found dead in Spanish jail after court approves extradition to US

#740
post #3

Good or bad, what a sad ending to a colorful life. The guy was troubled and had many shortcomings, but he was colorful and also achieved success and arguably was one of the seminal figures in the nascent AV industry. Sad to see his fall from grace and into a world of extravagance, deceit and cheating (taxes) and, if allegations true, even worse; then to end it on the floor of a jail -all by his own hands.

He tweeted in preceding months and years that if found dead it wouldn't be suicide. He got "whacked" tattooed on his arm to prepare for this situation.

I don't think we can just uncritically accept that it's 100% a suicide

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