Comment by mroman
18 years ago
That journalist is an arrogant and ignorant asshole, he reaches conclusions - that he then states as if they were fact - about Reiser's personality as if he were a trained psychologist/psychiatrist, and as if he has studied and analyzed the subject.
Every bone in my body wants to projectile vomit upon reading that crud.
I find it to be just another case of math envy, the imbecile KNOWS that he could never in a million years achieve 1% of what Reiser has achieved, however Reiser is now a convicted murderer, thus the idiot can now feel better about himself, and hurl contempt and scorn on Reiser.
I also find the general tone of the article to be awful insidious.
Contempt and scorn are appropriate feelings to have for murderers.
I thought this article was interesting because the author had spent a lot of time watching Reiser in court and might be speaking some truth about Reiser's personality.
Is there anyone here that knew Reiser more intimately than this journalist, and could give us some feedback?
"Contempt and scorn are appropriate feelings to have for murderers."
Oh really? What about those trained to kill? Such as those in the military?
This is a tangent, but I'm curious...
The definition of murder as "the unlawfully killing of a human with malice aforethought" is a good one that applies well to Hans Reiser and shows the importance of motivation in determining whether or not someone is a criminal.
When soldiers are learning to kill an enemy that may not even exist, they have very different motivations when compared to someone that is planning to kill a personal enemy.
I believe that both individuals and nations have the right of self-defense, so I don't hold contempt for anyone that is learning to kill in order to defend himself or the people he has a responsibility to defend.
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I find the motivation behind his contempt and scorn to be not that of someone who despises a murderer, but that of someone who is envious of someone's superior intellect.
Notice how he attempts to belittle Reiser, how he throws in the "genius" word . . .
I have been the focus of that sort of envy before, and it is written ALL over that nitwit's piece.
He's pathetic.
Assuming some basic threshold of intelligence, it's much more important to most people how pleasant someone is to be around than how smart they are. If you do fit into this "antisocial genius" archetype (which you're tossing around every bit as loosely as the author of the article), chances are good that how people treat you has nothing to do with envy, and everything to do with how you treat them.
Just saying, is all.
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The article tells us nothing new about Reiser except that the author interviewed him and didn't like him very much. The author even tells us why he wrote it:
"I had written a book, and his story was crucial to it, but the book was really about me."
He interviewed Reiser purely for material for his book about what he thinks of murderers (spoiler: murderers are bad). Given this, it's not surprising that he would sell a chapter to Salon for money and publicity. The article is not journalism, it's part of an autobiography largely unrelated to Reiser that nevertheless capitalizes on the publicity surrounding his trial.
Hey, I hear Mussolini made the trains run on time.
Hans Reiser is merely a wife-beater, liar, sociopath, and murderer. He's completely worthy of the writer's utter contempt and scorn.
I will dispute the sociopath observation. Even if you happen to be a trained mental health care professional, you have not sufficiently observed and analyzed the subject in question.
That really gets under my skin, people who play armchair psychologist/psychiatrist. Why? Because I have been victimized at work (back when I used to be an employee) by that very same type of ignorant joker.
"Oh, he has PERSONALITY problems."
RIGHT, I have PERSONALITY PROBLEMS, simply because I am not a lying, cheating, backstabbing, envious little slacker like the majority of the sheeple at the office.
Sigh.
Ok, I admit I have become emotional about this, but my original point still stands: non mental health care professionals have NO business voicing "diagnosis" about ANYONE'S mental health (or lack thereof)
I call bullshit: this is like saying that people who don't have teaching credentials have no business teaching anyone anything, or without barber's licenses cutting hair, or programmer's licenses writing code.
Note the experience of the psychologist who tried the experiment of getting himself committed by impersonating a schizophrenic to doctors at the ER, who then took quite a while to get released: all the patients knew he was sane, but the doctors, once he had been labelled, were very hard to convince otherwise.
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