181–190 of 211 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have asked that people consider that I deserve neither total condemnation nor total exoneration. This seems to be an admission of responsibility to me.
It seems about the weakest one possible, in that it allows accepting either only tiny amounts of responsibility, or almost total responsibility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does the mental illness part of this matter at all? He is at any time liable to go out of his mind and ruin people's lives, given a platform to do so. It doesn't make any difference about why that happens; he shouldn't have a platform. I don't care what's wrong with his brain, I care what's wrong with his actions and mitigating the effects of them. A blind person should not be driving, regardless of how "ableist"…
> Why does the mental illness part of this matter at all? Because as it turns out mental illness is part of a protected class, and that's a big deal in employment law. The solution here isn't limiting his freedom of speech, it's accommodating with a fact checker of some sort.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love deBoers writing when it's about _something_, but the navel-gazing gets old really quick. Yikes! If he truly feels sorry, he just needs to move on. He seems to understand what he did was foul. Well then, move forward, be a good man to all the new people in your life. Instead, he craves absolution (and, reading between the lines, acceptance). No human being can be cajoled into extending that. It's truly foolish…
Can you hit me up with your favorite examples? I'm just hearing about the guy now and the first article of his that I found was kind of a pseudosciencey wall-o-text that I won't be finishing.
But it's true that his writing seems to drift between extremes -- some sober, well-researched and very interesting, and others almost as if a different person was writing it.
> But in fact I had not intended to cancel Harris; I hadn’t intended anything at all. I would have attacked him, physically, had he been present, over a pure delusion, which I say with shame I can’t put into words. But I was not thinking that I would hurt his reputation. I was not thinking of cause and effect in any conventional way. I was not in a mental state where I was capable of understanding long-term consequen…
The author should know that this attitude does absolutely nothing for anyone. Throwing blame back on other people for not understanding your hardships is self-serving and a fundamentally dismissive attitude. Mental issues do not absolve actions. You feel that you are not fully responsible for your actions and that is actually fine - but as a person who caused harm you should own your ACTIONS, full stop. "I fucked up.…
> I did something very wrong, and the complication of my mental disorder should not excuse me entirely from blame for those actions. The degree to which any individual weighs that complication will have to be a matter of their individual ethical sense. Everyone has the right to make up their own mind about whether I should be forgiven or not. These issues are very complex, and I have had to wrestle with my culpability for my actions when manic for a long time. It’s not easy. It’s perfectly legitimate to weigh my mental illness as context and still conclude that I deserve to have social ties severed. I did in fact lose some real friends over what happened, they made their decisions in full light of my condition and history, and I can only respect that stance and hope that one day they might reconsider.
> ...
> I have not asked for absolution; I have asked for forgiveness. I have asked for forgiveness knowing that only guilty people have the right to ask such a thing. I am guilty of doing something terrible, and I know that some will always judge me harshly for it. I cannot ask them to do otherwise if they are moved to do so by their conscience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why does the mental illness part of this matter at all? Because as it turns out mental illness is part of a protected class, and that's a big deal in employment law. The solution here isn't limiting his freedom of speech, it's accommodating with a fact checker of some sort.
I'm not a government, so I don't care about the protected legal classes in whatever country he's in. His employers are morally obligated to come up with whatever fake excuse allows them to legally not hire this guy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your account has been rate limited. At some point, you did something wrong, and noone in administration could even be bothered to warn or tell you about it. That cryptic error message is what gets shown to you instead of anything descriptive. The only way to get it lifted is to email them and pinky promise never again to do the thing they didn't tell you you did in the first place. See this thread: https://news.ycomb…
Could it be that I use a VPN frequently?
Certainly I'd like to think there's a special place in hell for those who accuse innocent people of sexual abuse; there's not much worse that one can be accused of. Mental illness or not, there's no excuse for these kinds of false accusations. It's certainly understandable given Freddie's condition. But us understanding why it happened doesn't ethically justify their actions, and it also doesn't relieve the perpetrat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Malcolm Harris doesn’t say what commitments DeBoer is breaking. He would be more credible if he did.
The linked Twitter thread includes Harris saying, > I would def settle for never having to think about it again, but clearly Freddie isn't going to "go away" like he first promised he would, so I'm sorta stuck here with that while he cashes in on self-pity. And, if you click on the 2018 link, Harris quotes DeBoer writing > I have abandoned all social media permanently. I have stopped freelance writing. I have in gene…
It’s fairly obvious that expecting someone to exile themselves from public view for the rest of their life is absurd and unreasonable.
Even if DeBoer said he would do that, it doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for Harris to expect it.
If Harris thinks 12 months is not enough, he can say that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The linked Twitter thread includes Harris saying, > I would def settle for never having to think about it again, but clearly Freddie isn't going to "go away" like he first promised he would, so I'm sorta stuck here with that while he cashes in on self-pity. And, if you click on the 2018 link, Harris quotes DeBoer writing > I have abandoned all social media permanently. I have stopped freelance writing. I have in gene…
It's worth emphasizing the specific commitment to "permanently remove myself from online life." Rather than live up to that commitment and allow Harris to move on, Freddie has decided not only to remain Extremely Online but to keep re-hashing the situation over and over again. It certainly undermines the original apology, and make Harris look like a chump for being so graceful about it.
This is an unreasonable commitment for deboer to have made. Yes, he made it. No, that doesn’t make it realistic.
> make Harris look like a chump for being so graceful about it
There is nothing graceful about Harris expecting DeBoer to do this unreasonable thing.
It was a bad agreement. DeBoer should never have made it, and Harris should never have accepted it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Malcolm Harris doesn’t say what commitments DeBoer is breaking. He would be more credible if he did.
Deboer deleted his apology from the internet and then wrote this mealy mouthed drek of an article indicates that he hasn’t lived up to his commitment to move on. He means to fool small minds with meandering language, confusing the herd so they let him regain the status he desperately craves.
Believing you can read someone else’s mind is a diagnostic criterion for psychosis.