Still, if you asked me about my own sins, I might say similar things: I accept responsibility for acting like a jackass, I'm using the skills I've learned from mentors and through meditation and mindfulness, etc. etc. I'd be completely earnest about all that. I've behaved poorly in the past, decided I wanted to be a better person, and genuinely try to do that. If I want people to take me at my word and believe that I'm trying to be better, I have to take him at his word until proven wrong.

(One of my sins was unnecessary cynicism. I have the luxury of it not mattering to me whether he's sincere or not, and I think it's a healthier mindset for me to accept stories like his at face value than to default to mistrusting everyone. I'm not naive, though. The people in his life need to weigh that a lot more carefully than I need to.)

This is true; but it also struck me as being very similar to things I've heard from recovering addicts going through 12-step programs -- I'm an addict, I'm sorry for all the harm I caused through my addiction, I'm learning skills to help me overcome my addiction, etc. -- so my hunch is that it's there as a result of the anger management program he's going through in prison.

That is, while we're talking about a specific person here, that person is someone I have zero connection with. I hope all the Hanses around the world are working on themselves with good intent. That's obviously untrue, but I can still wish it.

The books were purchased after the deed was done.

A crime of passion can be covered up without making it premeditated.

That's one of the problems with all of the Reiser defenders: they are usually unaware to what degree Reiser has incriminated himself.

The guy strangled his wife. I don't think that's the kind of thing you premeditate. He's also a liar; I wouldn't read too much into his attempt to manipulate his later civil jury. The crime-of-passion narrative would still find for the plaintiff, so he made up some nonsense that the jury saw right through.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/software-guru-ordered-pay...

"His defense essentially was that he killed his wife to protect his children from her."

That he made up different stories at different times is besides the point, the point is: you can't believe a word he says either way so any defense of a crime of passion is just as baseless as this one, though this one is actually much more believable and fits the evidence available. All of it points to a very smart guy who killed his wife because he thought he could get away with it but failed at that (and not for lack of trying) and who now thinks he can present himself as 'a changed man' when really he isn't.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser

I do not read this as planned, but as "Handlung im Affekt", dunno the English term.

Hell, i dont know. Maybe there are no good answers in the face of such things.

The biblical advice to "judge not, that ye be not judged" seems relevant here. It's pretty obvious to me that it refers to a person's heart, that is, their internal desires and motivations that no one but them can truly know. If that motivation leads to a person acting the way I'd like them to, and they claim it's for reasons I agree with, and I'm not on the parole board or one of their family members where I have a need to look deeper, then fine.

You really need to come up with actual evidence for that if you keep repeating it everywhere.

I wholly believe psychopaths can be redeemed and live a fulfilling life without hurting anyone if given the proper support and guidance. I don't for a second believe the US legal system is equipped to do that, especially the prison system.

I'm interested if this really is your approach for "being the change you want in the world" though. When you think something could be improved somewhat do you play out an elaborate cargo cult interpretation of what you think would work better despite having no resource or professional qualification to pull it off? How has that been going for you?

It's not like there aren't any organisations you could get involved with to advocate for reforms to the US legal system. You don't even have to go whole hog and try to start at the top, a lot of the underlying structures are cultural. If you're a parent, trying to treat your child as a dependent human rather than an inferior (i.e. care, not control) would be a start to building a healthier society where carcareal punishment doesn't feel like the obvious solution to societal problems.

But if making assumptions about strangers and mocking them for saying things could be improved somewhat is what makes your life more bearable, nothing I can say or do will change that. I hope you find what you are missing.

You are asserting that people without a conscience and a proven violent criminal past belong back in general society after some hypothetical rehabilitation program. Further, you are asserting that it is the US prison system (and by extension, the US itself), that is somehow failing these supposedly misunderstood people. The reality is that there is no fixing a lack of conscience and giving these people social skills training only gives them more tools to exploit people by. Literally every mental health professional will tell you that. Those that deviate from this position have a strong tendency to end up strangled in a ditch somewhere with their underwear around their ankles. That is why I tell you to shelve your virtue signaling until you actually understand what you're advocating.

You want these people out of prison and moved right next door to me and my family. I merely want you, since you've made it personal, to try dealing with them first... ideally firsthand. Barring that, maybe look into the reality of the situation first. The good news is that if you do manage to fix them, there's a Nobel prize waiting for you and you will be remembered as the greatest psychological mind in history.

Sounds better than what the US has now: exactly the same but replace the words "hypothetical rehabilitation program" with "sitting in prison for an arbitrary number of years".

You're also making a lot of assumptions. First of all, crime statistics simply do not match your idea of what the US prison population looks like (after all, it's also the largest of the world both in absolute numbers and, if you exclude countries with lower eight digit populations or less, per capita). Most convicts are not in prison for violent crimes and thanks to mandatory minimum sentencing laws some convicts serve life sentences for nonviolent crimes.

Secondly, prison sentences literally mean someone will be put in a place where many other unhappy people charged with various crimes are concentrated and often treated aggressively by staff and other inmates on a daily basis and then dumped on the street with nothing to show for themselves except the contacts and connections they made while in prison. I don't know about you, but I'd put more trust in people specifically trained to understand broken brains than random prison guards when it comes to "fixing" criminals.

> You want these people out of prison and moved right next door to me and my family.

I don't know why you reflexively feel the need to make up statements for me out of whole cloth but again: I never said any such thing. But again you demonstrate that you seem to somehow believe that people who go to prison just disappear into thin air and never come back, i.e. as if there were no other punishments than life without parole or death - which even for the kind of violent crimes you don't want to be inflicted on your family is a stretch. Heck, if you're worried about your spouse or children being sexually abused, the perp is more likely to be a male relative than Rapey McRapeface from prison, even though the convinction rate for sexual abuse and rape is appallingly low (and even worse if you consider the low likelihood of charges being pressed in the first place or the case going to trial).

> try dealing with them first... ideally firsthand

You keep insisting you're being realistic but you don't seem to understand the idea that a random stranger on the internet sitting at home is not a good data point for the efficacy of therapy. I don't know if this is a general distrust in mental health as a concept or merely licensed therapist for whatever reason but it sounds like you don't think psychology works or has any value at all.

> The reality is that there is no fixing a lack of conscience and giving these people social skills training only gives them more tools to exploit people by. Literally every mental health professional will tell you that. Those that deviate from this position have a strong tendency to end up strangled in a ditch somewhere with their underwear around their ankles. That is why I tell you to shelve your virtue signaling until you actually understand what you're advocating.

Also, you're again conflating various things. Since you seem to be only concerned with violent criminals (which, again, is a minority of the prison population): do you genuinely believe that every violent criminal has "no conscience"? And do you genuinely believe that "having no conscience" is a qualified psychological assessment a mental health professional would use? Even "sociopathy" and "psychopathy" are primarily pop psychology jargon that have little to do with the actual science of psychology.

And if you're so specifically concerned with people "with no conscience", whom do you trust more to have a realistic understanding of when they are truly showing a change of character rather than just "exploiting people", a judge, jury and parole committee or a team of licensed mental health professionals experienced in specifically treating people with Antisocial Personality Disorder (i.e. the kind of person most likely to be the "burned the family dog as a child before murdering prositutes as an adult and wearing their skin as a dress" criminals you're thinking of). Also a fun fact "literally every mental health professional" would also tell you: one of the greates predictors for ASPD is childhood trauma, i.e. emotional and parental abuse and neglect in early childhood.

Again, this is literally me saying things could be improved somewhat and you going into a panic spiral by catastrophizing an imagined strawman largely tangential to what I said. I'm not sure if this is a dishonest debate strategy or a genuine stress response but you might want to calm down a bit and actually read what you reply to before you start typing.

EDIT: You're not even barking up the same tree - dare I even say you're barking in the wrong forest altogether. I literally replied elsewhere that I don't think Reiser has changed given the extent of his crime and the way he still refers to the victim as "my wife" (i.e. re-asserting his relationship to her when the killing was clearly motivated by her seeking to end their relationship) and that his random calendar quote of MLK at best exists to impress his next parole hearing. That's just the kind of stuff I catch as a layperson who hasn't actually studied or practiced psychology and psychiatry.

If you think mental health professionals would perform worse and let him loose that's a an interesting topic worthy of discussion of its own (i.e. why are they that bad in the US, what could be done to improve them, what structural problems result in their low quality, etc) but it's at best tangential to the question if the carcareal system that largely exists to punish and hide people is superior to an explicitly rehabilitative system that addresses the factors that lead the criminal to commit crimes and gives them tools to function in society and deal with their own issues, if they can. Maybe it's just me but having the isolation from the rest of society happen in an environment that acknowledges the criminal's humanity and has the duration be determined by a professional prognosis and the record of their development over time sounds more like a qualitative change than a quantitative one unless you assume the only solution to most crime is life without parole or death.

The fact that you equate a person warning you about the dangers of toxic people with barely being better than one themselves means you personally need this knowledge more than anyone. You are very much at risk and certainly not from me, I can assure you. Calling out your naivete on the matter is not aggression. Far, far from. I suppose I'm guilty as charged in not having much empathy left for the Cluster B individuals of the world. Virtually everyone who has had their lives ruined, their (often overflowing) empathy weaponized against them, and their belief that people are fundamentally good destroyed, tend to end up that way. And that's one of the hardest things in recovery: most people simply can't understand it until they've had it happen to themselves personally. After all, perhaps the psychopath is the real victim here. They certainly play the part very well. Believe whatever you want about me, an internet stranger, but this is coming from a genuine place of empathy and (hard) love. So, lets try something a little different.

There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't. Suddenly, somehow, the owner's face is inside of the pitbull's stomach, their tracea is in the neighbor's yard, or their child is lifeless on the floor in a pool of blood with the dog "smiling" at them. Everyone is shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you. How could this have happened?

Your empathy is not going to fix psychopaths. Not at a personal level or a societal level. No amount of love is going to give them a functioning conscience. Whatever happened to create them (no matter how awful) never justifies what they do to others. Personally, I don't give a damn about Reiser and wouldn't trust a single word that comes out of his mouth about anything. I used his filesystem once back in ~2004 and that's the most positive thing I have to say about him.

> (hard) love

Yeah, there's my concern. That's literally a concept only abusers use to justify their abuse as "love". You may think you have empathy (after all you feel strongly about ASPD individuals so you can't be that) but I question to what extent you do genuinely love if you have internalized the idea that "hard love" is a thing.

> There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't.

It says a lot when your path to what you see as healing is paved with schadenfreude. That's not a story of the folly of being a good person. That's a story of ignoring past trauma. Trained fighting pitbulls are traumatized. You wouldn't hand a gun to a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Dogs have natural lethal weapons. Handling an animal that can kill you must be deliberate. You can not reason with a dog so you must treat a traumatized dog as the loose canon it is. When people die to trained attack dogs, they die either because they didn't know about its past or because they (no longer) took it into account in their interactions.

I'm not concerned with psychokillers who want to wear my child's skin as a costume only because I'm far more concerned with the equally unempathetic billionaires, politicians, lobbyists and investors who don't even consider my child as their actions threaten their health and future. Our economic system encourages "sociopathic" behavior. The psychokiller (or the far more likely abusive partner) is just too impotent or incompetent to acquire a position of real power and their behavior is far more likely to get them in trouble.

The thread has rightfully been killed so I'll just say this: kiss your children good night. And maybe think about why you feel the need to frame those deepities as "hard truths" instead of considering that if you're a victim, you're traumatized and you're coming from a place of hurt and your pre-existing beliefs cloud how you can make sense of it all. If you find catharsis in the suffering of others, that should give you pause.

All the known facts are congurent with someone who acted in the heat of the moment and then tried to get the best result for himself considering the very bad situation he got himself in. Trying to cover up the act and mislead the court is certainly not very ethical but it is a far cry from the murder itself being premeditated.