"Crazy hobo of HN"? I've been on HN for more than 3 years now and let me tell you: I would find it infinitely less distressing to have to read through his comments (were he not hellbanned) over and over again in every discussion than to see your unnecessarily uncivil comment only once.

He at least has a good reason why his comments are the way they are. You have no such excuse and I'm ashamed that your comment has not been downvoted into oblivion.

I'm sympathetic to the guy, but I don't think I agree with you (though I upvoted your post because I agree with your sentiment if not your particulars).

A lot of LoseThos's previous posts have been ranting about Jews, Muslims, black people, et al. and while it may be a touch uncivil of me to say it, there's much less value-add than value-subtract there. He certainly has a reason for his behavior, but I hesitate to call it an excuse (and I note that you didn't, but you compared it to the lack of an excuse for the post you replied to) and I strongly feel it shouldn't be tolerated regardless of reason.

Because he's schizophrenic. He's spoken about it before.

He should be fucking locked up then.

As a schizophrenic myself (fine now with medication) it makes me sad when I see comments like this. The stigma is immense, I've yet to tell someone I know without being treated completely differently by them.

Edit (just thought I'd expand a bit on the comment): Schizophrenia's a ridiculously wide disease, if you ever look at the symptom list in the DSM you'll see just how many symptoms are possible, personally I spent 2 years doing essentially nothing (i.e barely any social contact, no programming etc.) and only hallucinated a few times. The problem with treating schizophrenia's mainly the drugs that can help (antipsychotics) are a) expensive and b) really hard to comply with due to the side effects (personally I can easily sleep 12 hours a day due to mine and you're always at risk for tardive dyskinesia).

It'd be nice to live in a world where having a mental illness wasn't seen by a lot of people as a personal failing of some kind, but we're nowhere near there yet.

I bet you get that question a lot, but I just read http://lesswrong.com/lw/e25/bayes_for_schizophrenics_reasoni... and was wondering if it was possible for a schizophrenic to tell whether he is hallucinating. Also, would be really nice to hear your thoughts on that article. Thanks!

My worst hallucination was when I thought people were breaking into the house I was living in at the time. For me at least there was absolutely no difference between the people I was seeing who weren't there and the police I called because I thought people were breaking in. Eventually the police ended up essentially walking me around my house proving to me there was no one there and even then I was still "making up" lamer and lamer pieces of evidence for the break in in my mind.

I told them several times I wasn't hallucinating and I think they were pretty freaked out about the whole thing until they found my meds and realised I wasn't high or abusing some other drugs.

Retrospectively it's pretty easy to see the point where I started seeing things but at the time (at least for me) it was a really slow and insidious process.

I read the article but luckily for me I was never really delusional for very long at all, aside from a couple of incidents like the one above I wasn't really hit by the hallucination/delusional side of schizophrenia so I'm not really qualified to talk about what it's like but I've read before that (sort of like bipolar patients) a lot of schizophrenia patients simply refuse to believe anything's wrong at all, which is one of the big challenges when trying to gain medication compliance.

This woman called-in to a radio show on abortion. She said how glad she was not aborting her downs child. Then she said really awful things describing her life.

You should get a job at Unshackled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_drama

It disgusts me to see that kind of response. It's a mental illness, yes. It can be disruptive, yes. But what has he done to you to deserve a nasty response like that?

Schizophrenia patients are rarely put in long term inpatient care any more - whether voluntary or not - in any case, because it is rarely necessary.

Try reading this:

http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/133179.html

It's a comic about Schizophrenia.

No, he should be treated.

CIA doesn't want other operating systems. CIA==KGB

Duh! You think they would let another operating system exist! ROFLMAO Win8

You can have your starry eyed view of the US.

Back in 2001 when I made SimStructure, the CIA made SimStructure. I learned my reality is a joke like the 1960's the prisoner. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRPDO63rI1E

I get no emails, except FBI.

There are worse things people can be...