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

bbc.com

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

#911

Post by keymone »

henvic wrote: post #854
RIMR wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax evasion isn't victimless. It is a civic duty to pay into the system that you benefit directly from. Freedom isn't free. Tax evasion is theft from the public. Tax evaders steal from you .

No. The state is a criminal racket, and you have no obligation to sponsor it (if something, you're morally obliged to try to avoid being a victim). And this is not only because 99% of whatever you pay in tax doesn't come back in terms of services that actually have any value, but because it's rotten at its very foundations. No wonder in the 20th century 8 million people were victims of murder by mundane crimes commit…

> You only think this because you were brainwashed by statism ever since you were a kid.

This can be flipped back to you without much effort:

You only think this because you were brainwashed by your preferred flavor of anarchism ever since you started reading those propaganda web sites on the internet.

Making such a claim doesn't bring any value to the conversation and only serves to estrange you from this community, which is a form of self-ostracization and self-censorship, which in itself is quite funny and ironic.

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

#912

Post by i_am_new_here »

Theory5 wrote: post #785
canada_dry wrote: post #759

Interesting tweet by Kim Dotcom... (fuel for the conspiracy theory): https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1407805522175094785 “I wan’t to build an anti surveillance phone Kim. With air-gapped cam & mic, open source OS with VM and the most secure crypto wallet. That will piss the mass spying US govt off. Want to help me?” — John McAfee Shortly after he was arrested on “tax charges”. RIP John.

Oh look, another conspiracy theory! That didn't take long. Does this one tie John in with Epstein too, like another comment's conspiracy theory does?

To label/dismiss something that might be true (>0%) a "conspiracy theory" doesn't give it justice.

"All conspiracy theories turn out to be true" reverts it to "100% true", then.

Where are we now in the discussion?

Did we make (any) progress?

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

#913

Post by greyhair »

h0h0h0h0111 wrote: post #903
purplevendetta wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you have to agree on politics to like someone? Comparing someones ideologial stance with a severe addiction is pretty messed up, dude. Are you so sure your stance is the absolute right one?

OP didn't specify an ideology, and I think their statement stands for both people holding extreme and non-extreme views if they are held very strongly. EDIT: I'm no doubt the angry alcoholic archetype who doesn't want to discuss it when my Windows-using friends try and tell me it's better than my Linux setup. Then again, I know my stance is the absolute right one ;)

Running Windows 10 with Ubuntu 20.04 running within WSL, and that all works pretty sweet. Corporate apps and Linux consoles on the same desktop. And yes, command line consoles are the only thing I interact with within Linux.

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

#914

Post by binarybanana »

kiney wrote: post #898
fastball wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, Germany uses fines much, much more as a punishment than the US, which can easily be seen as a regressive punishment – it is a punishment which is much worse for the poor than it is for the rich. Meanwhile prison is something both the poor and the rich want to avoid equally.

fines in germany are completely ineffective against criminals on welfare. (and that's a problem)

That's not true for criminal offenses at least. You have to pay them or you go to jail. If you're on welfare and have 400€ to live on they generally expect you to pay 100€ a month. From what remains you have to pay everything but rent, so energy, Internet, and other fixed costs you might have as well as food. I wouldn't be surprised if this actuajly forced a lot of people into crime just to not go hungry.

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

#915

Post by jjk166 »

fatbird wrote: post #745
jjk166 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a logical standard. You can't prove a negative (ie that you didn't do something and thus are innocent), so the burden of proof must always be on those making a claim to show that it is true. While it might not be as dangerous for the gossip column to employ fallacious reasoning as it would be for a court of law, that doesn't stop it from being wrong.

It's not a logical standard, and you can prove a negative. For example, I can prove that I'm not dead, that there's no elephant in the room with me as I type this, and that my wife is not having sex with someone else right now because I can see her on the couch. I wish people would stop saying you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you didn't do something by proving something else that logically excludes you…

That's not what I'm talking about. You can't prove an arbitrary negative. Or even more rigorously, just because you can't prove a negative doesn't make the positive true.

You could have programmed a script to make this comment. The elephant might be invisible. That might be your wife's identical twin sister. You can always come up with a more elaborate explanation. You haven't proved your negatives, you've just made it harder to prove the inverse. And while specific examples might be easy, in general this is hard if not impossible to do.

It would be absurd to assume your wife is cheating at every moment where you can't see with your own eyes that she isn't - no the default assumption must be that the claim is false and evidence must be presented to the contrary.

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

#916

Post by i_am_new_here »

automatoney wrote: post #89

Should the title be changed to the more journalistic "died by suicide", or just "died" with suicide left to the article body? "Committed suicide" is generally not the recommended phrasing largely due to associations with criminality - see https://reportingonsuicide.org/recommendations/ as well as https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/2018/10/04/a-guide-to-res... and https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/June-2018/Why-Sui…

It would be good journalistic practice if they would not jump to conclusions too quickly, try to influence the public opinion with (their) assumptions or just try to heat the debate by taking a side too early ("suicide"). We are on Hacker News: The upvoted article usually has a high quality/standard, which is a quite positive thing.

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

#918

Post by i_am_new_here »

prvc wrote: post #116
jszymborski wrote: post #2

From DeepL: > McAfee anti-virus founder John McAfee commits suicide in a Barcelona prison > The antivirus founder was arrested at El Prat airport and was awaiting extradition to the United States for tax evasion. > The founder of McAfee antivirus, John McAfee, has been found dead this afternoon in his cell in Brians 2 prison, in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires (Barcelona), according to police sources. The Mossos are invest…

Is there currently any information out there as to the cause of his death?

It probably was suicide by hanging himself.

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

#919

Post by jjk166 »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #729
jjk166 wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a logical standard. You can't prove a negative (ie that you didn't do something and thus are innocent), so the burden of proof must always be on those making a claim to show that it is true. While it might not be as dangerous for the gossip column to employ fallacious reasoning as it would be for a court of law, that doesn't stop it from being wrong.

Outside the courtroom everybody makes judgements based on the balance of evidence, because we can’t possibly know enough facts to pass the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.

Nothing I said relates to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard

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

#920

Post by pengstrom »

belter wrote: post #884
Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, this is what they mean when they say it's almost impossible to know who the real sociopaths are. The true ones are so charismatic and good at manipulation that, unless you are extraordinarily close to them or get on their bad side, they just seem like the sort of person that everyone likes. Interestingly, a minority of people seem to be somewhat able to see through the facade. I have ADHD and a brother who's…

Always though ADHD was not about being able to have unbiased sense of a person. Instead much more about the inability to interact and be perceptive about the world and persons around you.

Might be true, but it's complicated by mental illness being defined in terms of ability to participate in society. This includes various deeply irrational behaviours.
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