The atheist community is buzzing about this story: a popular host of the Recovering From Religion podcast, Scott Smith, has died. I have briefly met Smith but didn’t know him at all well; the founders of Recovering From Religion, Darrel Ray, Nathan Phelps, and Jerry DeWitt are very well known. Most of what I’m seeing about his death is shock and dismay and testimonials about what a good guy he was. I didn’t know him well enough to say whether he was a good guy or not, but the facts of the story tell me that he was NOT a good guy at all. This is a terrible story of an awful person who apparently had a lot of people fooled.
Authorities have identified the man and woman who were found dead in a North Side San Antonio home after a suspected murder-suicide shooting.
William Scott Smith, 54, is believed to have fatally shot his wife, 46-year-old Jennifer Smith, before turning the gun on himself. Their three young children were at school during the killing.
Though William Smith’s motive is still unclear, court records indicate that Jennifer had filed for divorce earlier this month.
Let’s get this straight. This man was facing a divorce, and his wife wanted to be free of him.
So he murdered his wife.
He murdered a woman, full stop. Because she wanted to be free of him.
He murdered someone for the crime of wanting her independence.
There is nothing that Smith could have done in his life that could possibly atone for the criminality and inhumanity and selfishness of the circumstances of his death. His behavior was reprehensible and unforgivable. That he killed himself afterwards was not an act of atonement, but of cowardice.
Further, he orphaned three children, who get a life’s dose of trauma and grief right now. This, too, is unforgivable and irresponsible.
Don’t grieve for Scott Smith. Grieve for his victims.
His facebook page now has a brief memorial note at the top:
We hope people who love Scott will find comfort in visiting his profile to remember and celebrate his life.
Nope. Don’t celebrate the life of anyone who ended it with the murder of his wife, the mother of his children. Jennifer Smith is the one who should be remembered.
I read the first paragraph and thought “OK, PZ, I’m usually glad for you tearing down idiots, but the day his family mourns, really?”
Then I read the rest.
Yeah, why let the fact that he murdered a woman get into the way of celebrating him as a “good guy”.
*puke*
Also, dudes, if you ever consider whining about how unfair it is that women don’t trust you, remember this day.
That is pretty horrifying.
And no, she was not his property to dispose of as he wished. She was a living, thinking, feeling human being who deserved her own future. So did the children. Even if “dad” (being able to produce sperm does not necessarily make you a worthy parent) wanted to off himself, the children should never have been put through bing orphaned.
But apparently it was all about him. Apparently, he DID think that his wife and children were his property, to dispose of as he wished. Sorry, but I have no respect for such selfishness.
“bing” should be “being”. Sigh.
Having lost my oldest friend to a murder-suicide I have a mixed reaction to this event. I may be wrong, but I see psychotic rage more than deliberation behind this sort of crime. There seems to be a degree of derangement on the part of the perpetrator in these cases that makes it hard for me to presume a rational decision making process was in play. That is not to exonerate anyone; my contempt for the woman who murdered my friend will remain as long as I live. However she was psychotic, and practically everyone who encountered here could see it. She was also spurned, and came back with an all too easily obtained weapon.
^here^her
It sounds like there was definitely deliberation to it. He called the police department a while before he shot her and himself to tell them that he was going to do it, and then he did it when they arrived.
I’m so pissed about this. Scott should have known better, he should have gotten help to deal with his anger. He should have known his wife didn’t belong to him. He was a selfish, cowardly bastard who should have stopped himself.
Good thing he kept that gun in the house. Probably saved them from dozens of burglars over the years, I’m sure.
I just realized that I know the cohost of that podcast. I’m sorry for people’s loss of who they thought Scott Smith to be. It’s harder to feel sorry for Scott himself.
Yet another caitiff who couldn’t manage to kill himself without taking someone with him. Those poor kids. He didn’t give one fuck about them. All about him, and people will keep it that way.
I feel so badly for the children.
I see that we are pausing for the facts and context here in our rush to judgement.
If he was indeed psychotic, as seems likely, then it’s easy to imagine he was perhaps a good guy when not psychotic. Deliberation does not rule this out.
facts:
-He shot his wife
-He shot himself
WHAT FUCKING MORE FACTS DO YOU NEED?
If you want to off yourself and others, please do everyone a favor and do yourself first. (I wrote a morbid song about this once, called “Leave the World a Better Place”.)
I find it odd that the word “psychotic” keeps getting tossed around here, as though it explains the murder of Jennifer Smith.
It does not–because there is nothing inherently violent about hallucinations, delusions, catatonia, or thought disorders WHICH ARE THE ACTUAL SYMPTOMS OF PSYCHOSIS–nor do I see any evidence that Scott Smith was diagnosed with psychosis.
A woman has been murdered. Children have been orphaned. Can you possibly refrain from needlessly throwing the mentally ill under a bus in your rush to honor the memory of a fucking murderer?
Jesus christ stop using the mental health excuse. He shot because she was his property and he wasn’t going to let anyone else have her
Mike Smith, #13
Go on.
Andrea Yates drowned her five young children in a bathtub to save their souls from the devil. She was psychotic. I expect a lot of people here would call her a selfish piece of shit or something like that. To say that someone committing a violent act is mentally ill is not “throwing the mentally ill under the bus to honor the memory of a murderer”. Some are mentally ill as Yeats was deemed in her secondary nd trial.
hotspurphd, Andrea Yates was alive and diagnosed based on the evidence of her mental state, not on the fact that she committed a horrific act. I have yet to see any evidence that Scott Smith was experiencing psychosis.
What I do see is a lot of people holding up his violent act as evidence of his mental health. It is not. Many men without psychosis murder their wives when their wives try to leave them.
Could all those wonderful people who are diagnosing a dead man they never met in order to excuse his killing of an innocent woman please explain on what factual basis they are coming to the conclusion that “he killed her because he was mentally ill” is more likely than “he killed her because she was filing for divorce”?
Remember my comment #2: this is why we don’t trust you. We get raped by men, we get murdered by men and you go and side with those men.
I see that we are pausing for the facts and context here in our rush to judgement.Like the “fact” it is oh so fucking romantic to literally choose death over a life without his wife? And not only his own death, but also hers? Yeah, that would totally change my view. /s
Sorry for the blockquote fail.
In a rush to condemn hasty judgment, a fool overlooks the addition of facts and the widening of context, fails to recognize the very nature of the post itself and its belowthread discussion. Like raaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnn on ya weddin’ day.
I find it increasingly disturbing that we are being instructed who and why to damn here at Pharyngula, and a claque of furies has developed to support such judgements.
So many atheist communities fall apart as they become increasingly subject to judgementalism.
My current suspicion is that Atheisim has no pragmatic methodology for dealing with complex issues. For example, no principles of exculpation or forgiveness. Nothing like “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Which leaves only focus on specific crimes, which creates a false dichotomy of good/evil as judgements of complex people. This forces atheists to hypocritically pretend that they are free of sin lest they too be damned by the ever more puritanical factions.
In my life, I have hurt people and helped people. And I’ve tried to improve. I would not want to face trial by this blog. I suspect that NONE of the writers here have been so squeaky clean all our lives that they would get off easily by trial in this blog.
mikehuben Well, that is one reason why virtually everybody on this blog is in favor of independent judiciary. Nobody is arguing for sentencing people without proper judicial process (not that this is relevant in this partivular case, since Smith already killed himself) but we don’t have to accept the centuries old excuses for murder of women either. So there you go.
*particular
@Mike Smith, mikehuben
And not a lick of detail. Just feelings. Mine are that you can go fuck yourselves. Nothing that directly connects to any substance outside of themselves as they try to minimize the murder of a woman and the orphaning of children. Nothing respect worthy.
@knut7777, hotspurphd
A problem with ablism I’d that it’s a vulnerability. In addition to smearing the mentally I’ll with your literal prejudice it leaves you unable to articulate what you feel negativity about.
I have no confidence in your ability to think about crimes like this and expect to see:
1) specific diagnostic criteria tied to
2) specific samples of behavior (communication is behavior)
3) the reasoning and logic that demonstrates a connection between 1,2 and the crime.
Anything else is unacceptable and mockworthy as it’s irrational prejudice and discrimination as bad as any racist, sexist or homophobe.
mikehuben, #26
That’s all quite nice and I agree.
But why are you saying that in a comment thread where people are speaking negatively of a man who murdered his wife and orphaned three young children?
I’d like Mike Smith and mikehuben to articulate what kind of facts and circumstances they think we need to know to come to a less rushed judgment. Insanity would be such a circumstance to be fair, but there is no sign of insanity here, and until now it is only used as an ableist excuse and just one more reason for us to be pissed off.
@mikehuben
Come on, no one is “being instructed on who to damn”.
This is a blog post in which the author shares the opinion that he doesn’t think a guy who murdered a woman and orphaned three children was a very nice person. Most commenters agree.
That takes you to the conclusion that this is too judgmental and is one of the causes of the fall of atheism. I think it’s the opposite: the hesitation in pointing out terrible behavior (like, say, murder) in otherwise nice atheist “leaders” is what will doom the movement.
If this how these people feel about men literally murdering women, imagine where they stand on things like street harassment and microaggressions.
@Brony
A perfect example of the self-righteous furies who are happy to be divisive. We may agree on 99%, but oh! That 1%! That’s plenty for hatred. And if we don’t focus on your 5 minute hate, if we try to step back for a moment to look at a bigger picture, we are impure and must be censured. And to accuse “they try to minimize the murder of a woman and the orphaning of children” is bullshit. I’m trying to address a different question: the problem of people like you, who casually throw around accusations to attempt to shut down the opinions of others.
@rietplum
Yes, we’re all in favor of an independent judiciary. And we’re all feminist enough to see through the excuses, as PZ explained very well. But for making up our own minds about a person and his life, there seems to be no model here except purity; ANY transgression taints everything in a whole life.
@hotspurphd
All talk. Not one solid connection to my words. Your first comment was addressed to a community and did not point to anything specific. At least you are now pointing at an individual, but still you have nothing but feeling.
Tie some objects to those feelings or remain a gossip useful for nothing but attempts to elicit action with no consideration or introspection.
C’mon that’s a grave exaggeration. Smith is not being judged for pecking his nose for Gawd’s sake. He is being judged for fucking killing his wife. What’s that for purity?
@ lesofa
“Come on, no one is “being instructed on who to damn”.”
Oh really? PZ writes:
“Don’t celebrate the life of anyone who ended it with the murder of his wife, the mother of his children.”
And I won’t bother listing the commenters statements.
@ Saad
“If this how these people feel about men literally murdering women”
You’re another example of the claque competing to see who can be the most pure in their condemnation of people who defy the false dichotomy of good/evil.
Along the lines of my original complaint, PZ writes: “the facts of the story tell me that he was NOT a good guy at all”. There are no facts besides the murder/suicide. The entire rest of the guy’s life is ignored. This one act trumps ANYTHING and EVERYTHING he ever did, according to that statement.
I don’t think PZ really thinks that, even though he wrote that. But it feeds into the absolutism that destroys atheist communities (and innumerable religious communities) so often. We atheists seem to lack mechanisms for holding groups together.
@hotspurphd
My mistake, you do have a quote there. It’s still used to point to you when supposedly you have a problem with us. It’s easy to miss when it does no work with respect to your first comment, it just does not stand out as useful info.
@hotspurphd
I have to work so I’ll get a bit more specific, training wheels for you. There is no direct connection established between the quote you presented and the catastrophic conclusions you presented. You just assert it.
Do you expect everyone to simply accept what you say because you say it?
I love that for mikehuben holding men the standard where the must murder zero women is a purity test.
You also have an objection to perhaps one of the most uncontroversial and reasonable statements a person can make: “Don’t celebrate the life of anyone who ended it with the murder of his wife, the mother of his children.”
I don’t know what to say. I mean… we don’t need to be saying anything. You’re doing quite a number on yourself.
Let’s try that again without the missing words this time:
I love that for mikehuben holding men to the standard where they must murder zero women is a purity test.
Along similar lines, “absolutism” when it comes to zero-tolerance of murder is somehow a bad, uncharitable thing. What is with these men who care not a fig about the life, passion, ambition, and accomplishments of the victim? And then there’s this concern-trolling, hand-wringing over what this means for them, them, them, and their precious community. Anything to avoid talking about a woman in a way that validates and acknowledges her humanity. It’s so ghoulish, it almost goes past irredeemably cruel to something approaching funny, if you happen to like the taste of tears in your laughter.
Okay, let’s all remember how good the guy was at playing his guitar. He also killed his wife.
Better?
In the responses to the posting on Al Franken, PZ wrote:
“My concern is that we only have an all-or-nothing response: you fuck up, you’re totally out. We need some action we can take that really, really hurts but doesn’t totally eject people who can still make a positive contribution.”
I agree with the problem of the “all-or-nothing response”. Not necessarily with the “really, really hurts”. I know from personal experience that as a victim of bullying, years later I was elated by a sincere and unsolicited apology during a chance re-encounter a few years later.
The basic problem is stated by the aphorism “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” PZ recognized it in his discussion of Franken (and then walked it back later as he learned more, which is a judgement call.)
As was pointed out in the Franken responses, making judgements resemble trolley problems. They are complex and have multiple justifications for each alternative. Where they differ is that trolley problems are binary choices, and we have such a huge array of alternatives besides praise/damn.
If you will pardon my religious reference, here we seem to have a huge lack of “hate the sin, love the sinner”. Too many people scream “you have to hate them both”, with no time limits, compensating factors, etc. It’s easy to be righteous and not weigh the effects on other people.
mikehuben, #37
Bzzzt. Wrong again. Stop the strawmaning, for fuck’s sake. I have created no false dichotomy and I’m not calling Smith evil. I’m calling him a misogynistic murderer and orphan-maker of his own children.
Your purity accusations are also horseshit. I don’t believe expecting everyone to disapprove of harassing women, raping women, and killing women is a quest for purity. It’s a very, very low bar to set and for decent people, it’s quite uncontroversial.
Yes, imagine that. Imagine your charity work and kindness to animals being overshadowed by your murder of your wife and orphaning of your children. What a bummer!
Since there’s no reason to think that mental illness or some bizarre case of self-defense (after which he couldn’t live with what he did) were factors in what happened, there’s no reason for me to reconsider my stance. Those are the only two reasons that would change my view on this case. Not whatever else he did in his life.
So what would be an offense at which you’ll say “fuck this group thing, that’s too much!”
For the record, I love holding groups together. For example, I love belonging to the group that has a zero tolerance policy on men murdering women. There’s still quite a few of us left, thankfully.
They actually think we’re enjoying mourning a dead woman, preening over her corpse. They’re so removed from humanity that they’re always paranoid that someone else, spontaneously expressing emotion, is getting the better of them. Everything is a contest to prove that their worldview is correct, that the sheeple are wrong. Up to and including armchairing an actual murder. But it’s we who are divisive and the authors of deep rifts. Like their company is something any normal person wishes for. So desperate to be special and iconoclastic and Vulcan-y that they swoop into Well, Actually a completely normal discussion about why a murderer ought not to be valorized or pitied. Everything is about them being heroic skeptics, careful to defend the honor of any strange man they happen to hear about. But it’s other people who are self-righteous.
Sure thing, boys. Pull the other one and add a fart noise for good measure.
A free ride when you already paid
Some good advice that you just can’t take
@mikehuben
A man murders a woman. Some people are celebrating the murderer’s life while brushing off the brutal murder he committed. A blogger says “hey, maybe don’t do that, that guy was not nice”. Your reaction: “such judgement! Don’t instruct me on who to damn! You are destroying the community!”
This is such a strange situation. A respected atheist celebrity literally murders a human being and some people take issue with a blogger that writes that the murderer was not a nice person. What’s happening?
@Saad
“I love that for mikehuben holding men to the standard where they must murder zero women is a purity test.”
I pointed out that PZ was making murder a purity test for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the man’s life. That would include all the happiness in his life, raising children, and yes, playing the guitar.
But Saad, you should recognize the error in logic that you used to twist my meaning to one convenient for you to denounce me. You did not state a contrapositive. I should not have to defend myself for such a misrepresentation. You’re exactly what I was complaining about. You’re no better than the right wingers and others we complain about: you use the same rhetorical techniques of denunciation based on misrepresentation.
Let’s get this straight: killing his wife was wrong. There are always alternatives which are better. But there are a large number of steps omitted between that statement and “This one act trumps ANYTHING and EVERYTHING he ever did”.
Evidently the claque is offended because I make a distinction between judging a one-time bad action (which is all we know of) and judging an entire human life( which is what they and PZ are doing.) And they snottily say things like “They’re so removed from humanity” (snuffcurry) to demonize anybody who doesn’t want to rush to extreme, ideological and public judgement they way they do.
Then we get people like lesofa who try to gloss over their condemnation as saying “not nice”. That’s bullshit too.
I think the children will weep for both parents. But their emotions would be condemned here by the standards Saad and lesofa have promoted.
mikehuben
You are right, one can never be too nuanced. Men murdering their wives can be very nice guys too. Let’s celebrate how nice Smith was before he murdered his wife! Hurray!
Now fuck off please.
Usually the party is over once the body is found. Some prefer to dance around the corpse, apparently.
Nothing has improved. Maybe by my next break.
Taking bigotry and it’s real-world consequences seriously is apparently socially disruptive, I guess the social disruption caused by the bigots and their actions just doesn’t meet their standards. I guess they’re above petty things like political compromise with people that face inherently divisive and antisocial behavior while demanding the same. They can enjoy persuing their political goals without me.
@ mikehuben:
In the responses to the posting on Al Franken, PZ wrote:
“My concern is that we only have an all-or-nothing response: you fuck up, you’re totally out. We need some action we can take that really, really hurts but doesn’t totally eject people who can still make a positive contribution”
When you end your life by killing another person, you’ve written your own final commentary on that life. I mean, that is an odd PZ quote to pull to use with reference to someone who is not going to be making any more positive contributions.
ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the man’s life. That would include all the happiness in his life, raising children, and yes, playing the guitar
Well, I think any good he did raising his children has to be balanced against his killing their mother and father. Do you think that’s a net positive or a net negative?
When did “claque” and “clique” come to mean the same thing?
Does anyone remember a guy named Joe Paterno? Really good football coach, supported the school, donated much of his multi-million dollar salary back to the school anonymously (okay, he made sure that, eventually, the donor would come out, which made it a win-win for him), received credible testimony that a man was raping a child in the schools showers and did the bare minimum — reporting to his supervisor? And does anyone remember the people coming out of the woodwork to defend him? Forget enabling child-rape to continue for a decade, look at the good stuff he did in public?
The key may change, but the melody does not.
mikehubin, change your melody. Please.
Yes, sometimes one act (or, in this case, since we learned, in this thread, that Smith had been brought up on domestic violence charges, multiple acts) really are enough to outweigh whatever good a person has done during his or her life.
mikehuben, #49
What exactly do you mean by “trumps”? Are you saying we should condemn his horrible murder but also mention that he was kind to puppies and gave to Doctors Without Borders? If that’s what you’re saying, why? Why should we do that? What point is that making exactly?
Uh, what an awkward and bizarre condemnation of the murder. You make it sound like murder was still on the table and on the spectrum of choices, just not the best choice.
Now, let’s address some real misrepresentation from you:
Where the fuck did you get that from? I have zero input and zero judgement for how his children feel about the loss of their mother and father. If they’re devastated they lost a father who played with them and cared for them, I feel so sorry for them. I have the privilege of not even being able to imagine what that would feel like. Having said that, that damage to them is also caused by Smith. He deliberately made them orphans. That’s a fucking fact.
@rietpluim
“Now fuck off please.”
No thank you. I do not follow the advice of assholes, even if they say please.
@lefdasmom
“When you end your life by killing another person, you’ve written your own final commentary on that life.”
While you may feel that way, and while it may apply to this murder, Arlington National Cemetery is full of counterexamples, including my father.
“Well, I think any good he did raising his children has to be balanced against his killing their mother and father.”
That’s one binary model. People need to be allowed to have mixed emotions because they DO have them. That’s why “hate the sin, love the sinner”, and “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” are such a powerful tools.
@Ogvorbis
Ah, the anything wrong is Hitler approach, with Paterno as exemplar.
Which comment brings up domestic violence? I couldn’t spot it.
@Saad
“Why should we do that? What point is that making exactly?”
Because it is true. Different people experienced different facets of the man’s life. Blanket condemnation is STUPID and ignores such facts.
“You make it sound like murder was still on the table and on the spectrum of choices, just not the best choice.”
Killing is always on the table because there is no absolute right, wrong, or morality. Remember, there’s no god or natural law to say otherwise. Using the term “murder” may be accurate in this case, but what it really means is that there has been a moral judgement already. That’s begging the question.
“Having said that, that damage to them is also caused by Smith. He deliberately made them orphans. That’s a fucking fact.”
And it’s a fucking fact that he was their father all their lives. People need to be allowed to feel conflicted emotions about the facts, because they will no matter how you push to make an absolutist judgement. Judge the killing as wrong in very stern terms, yes, we can agree, even the children would likely agree. But the children (and many friends) will also likely agree that he had a good side: their model would be more sophisticated than yours.
In summary, the claque needs to have a more sophisticated model than a binary good or evil judgement for a person’s life. That sort of childish absolutism reminds me of Piaget’s concrete/abstract development of thinking. Grow up.
I apologize. Domestic violence had not been mentioned. I blame cold medicine and a crossover from something happening with my son’s fiance’s family. My bad.
And Paterno is Hitler? I really don’t think I wrote that. I pointed out, though, that lots of people (not you (of which I am aware)) were implying, or stating outright, that all the good he did in his life meant that we should ignore enabling child rape for a decade. (And Hitler did a lot more than one really bad thing.)
Yeah, Smith did some good shit. No question. How does one weigh the good he did in his life against the fact that, when facing a divorce, he killed his wife, killed himself, and orphaned his children? You seem to be claiming that there is no weighing involved, that the good must be remembered and the bad shit ignored. Am I wrong?
One of the few articles so far that said anything about jennifer Smith, the murdered woman: http://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/husband-wife-identified-in-murder-suicide
“Vicki Gettman first met Jennifer Smith about a year and a half ago.
Within minutes of meeting someone, Gettman says Smith could make a stranger feel like a best friend.
“She was always thoughtful,” said Gettman. “She tried to take care of everybody. She was very intelligent she had a job in IT.”
Gettman says the job Smith enjoyed most was being a mom.
“She would’ve never left her kids for anything,” said Gettman. “She was so devoted to them.” ”
In an interesting and infuriating coincidence a comment thread on Patheos on this same subject devolved into a derail on how unfair it was for anyone to speculate that this might possibly have (“might” have) been a case of domestic violence taken to it’s extreme conclusion. The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is when she is trying to get out of the relationship. Many abusers are friendly and charismatic to everyone in their public life.
This is NOT to say that is what happened in this case but it’s also not outside the realm of possibility.
This could have been a case of being upset about the divorce and having too easy access to a loaded gun and the willingness to use it. Not sure anyone is ever going to know.
I keep thinking of the Margaret Atwood mis-quote: Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them…
mikehuben, #58
You didn’t answer the question. What point is that making about the murder (which is what’s being condemned)? Just because it’s true that he loved puppies doesn’t mean it needs to be mentioned. He might also hate brown shoes. Does that need to be mentioned too?
You are utterly failing to tell me what is wrong with “blanket” condemning his murder.
And to think you had the nerve to accuse others of misrepresentation. The children should be able to feel what they feel and remember him however they desire. Stop repeating this strawman that I’m against that.
He definitely isn’t a good father though, because good fathers don’t deliberately orphan their young children by murdering their mother. Being nice to your kids for 7 years and then murdering their mother and killing yourself when they turn eight matters. “But he was nice to them for 7 years!” doesn’t cut it. That you’re having trouble understanding this is very disturbing.
Oh, so you’re much worse than you were letting on so far. Enjoy your atheist group. I’m glad the good atheists are distancing themselves from the bad ones like you. That’s a dichotomy definitely worth having. Fuck you.
Well put.
[Still not Michael Barton]
Hey, mikehuben, can be any worse?
I mean, you must be trying hard to be the most evil misogynist fucker to post here in a while, and that says something.
Really, nit murdering your wife is too high a standard? What’s next, the classical “Hitler was good to his dog” defence?
Go fuck yourself. You’re right, I have a purity test. Not murdering women is on that list.
But it comes increasingly clear that there is nothing men do to women that other men will not excuse.
mikehuben, is there a particular reason why you’re insisting that murder be treated as merely some personality flaw, rather than… you know, murder?
@ the two Mikeholes in this thread, across multiple comments:
People often wonder out loud why it is that women stay in relationships with abusive men. It’s because we know we live in a world where men can straight up premeditated murder us for trying to leave them and other men will still fall over themselves pushing to the front of the conversation in order to caution about too hasty a rush to judgment.
@Ogvorbis
I wasn’t asking for an apology for that, but thank you for your generosity.
Yes, you are wrong about what I think. I think both good and bad things should be remembered. The bad should be denounced and the good praised. There’s room in our complex skulls to do both things.
I don’t think we really ought to be in the business of weighing people’s lives except when
* we need to make a judgment for a sentence
* we need to decide who to exclude or disassociate from due to persistent bad behavior
* repeated, extreme and clear cases such as Paterno or Hitler or Manson or Saville.
My father was raised a Nazi. He was a Hitler Youth. He can’t be faulted for that: we can’t be faulted for being raised in an environment and conforming to it. He had the fortunate turn that he was sent to the US at 14, then drafted at 18 and sent back to Europe to fight his own people. He likely killed some enemy, but I know he persuaded a whole regiment of Germans to surrender to him when he was their prisoner near the end of the war, probably saving numerous lives. He was a model citizen the rest of his life. He cheated on my mother and his second wife, told stereotypical racist and sexist jokes with abandon, was liberal and never taught me to be racist or sexist.
I, like PZ, was raised in a sexist era. Fighting was normal for boys. Sexual aggressiveness was normal. Patriarchy and rape culture was normal. We can’t be faulted for the environment we developed in. Some of us have had a chance for education to the newer, more benign norms of feminism, etc. But I view the job of feminism as not teaching hate of enemies but rather of teaching the new generation a new set of norms and freeing victims of the old norms. Hating and dehumanizing enemies is not the nonviolent route to healing. The progress in young cohorts for women’s rights, GLBTetc rights, civil rights, racial equality, etc. is not due to teaching them to identify and hate enemies. It’s due to showing them what’s right and wrong so that they can support the right things.
That’s why I have problems with the 5 minutes of hate that I’m seeing more frequently here.
30 years ago, when I started my Critiques of Libertarianism effort (Usenet), the first decision I made was not to criticize libertarians, but their ideas. I can agree with some of their ideas, and disagree with others. Same kind of thing.
should anyone be interested
https://www.gofundme.com/HelpTheSmithGirls
And I’d like to go on the record here–
Yes, if you murder your wife when she tries to divorce you, I am very comfortable stating that TWO DAYS LATERS the fact that you have murdered a human being does overshadow everything else you may or may not have done in your prior life. Good deeds done at the age of nine don’t retroactively cancel out the murder you committed yesterday, boys. Sorry.
As someone else said, “nobody has more respect for women than me” and “I am the least racist person you know”.
@Giliel
“Go fuck yourself. You’re right, I have a purity test. Not murdering women is on that list.”
Wow, you really are tone deaf. Go ahead: cite one word where I excuse the killing. I don’t: it looks to me to be flat out wrong. But I won’t judge an entire person’s life by one final act.
Assholes like you pretend you read minds, when you find it convenient to demonize people to support your views. Shit like “you must be trying hard to be the most evil misogynist fucker to post here in a while”. That’s bullshit, plain and simple. You’re another example of the claque I was talking about, each trying to top the others in denunciation of the impure.
@Saad
“Oh, so you’re much worse than you were letting on so far. Enjoy your atheist group. I’m glad the good atheists are distancing themselves from the bad ones like you. That’s a dichotomy definitely worth having. Fuck you.”
You’re another gaslighting asshole who’s spouting bullshit to support your ideological belief. You accuse me of a strawman about you: but it was not about you: it was about the facts of what the children will feel. Learn to read: it’s not all about you.
Then you go on to repeat your blanket condemnations of the PERSON, not the killing. Twice. You just don’t get the message that the two are not the same.
@Mak
Insisting that I tautologically identify murder as murder doesn’t do anything. My point is that this killing is not the entire life of the man, and that judging the whole man’s life on this basis is as stupid as the idea of mortal sins condemning somebody to hell for eternity.
@Onamission5
“other men will still fall over themselves pushing to the front of the conversation in order to caution about too hasty a rush to judgment”
Judgement of what? The killing? No question for me here: if he was still alive, I’d want him convicted and sentenced. Judgement of his entire life? There’s where PZ, you, and the annoying claque wants to hastily rush to judgement. A person is not his crime.
That said, I agree with you: there are a significant number of men who will defend premeditated murder of women. We all agree that is unjust here, and I’m not one of those men.
Done.
@ Onamission5
” the fact that you have murdered a human being does overshadow everything else you may or may not have done in your prior life. Good deeds done at the age of nine don’t retroactively cancel out the murder you committed yesterday, boys. Sorry.”
Once again, this is a very poor model for judging a life. And nobody is suggesting the rest of the life somehow cancels the murder: that would be using your simplistic “weighing” model. Apples and oranges. Nor does your model have ANY defined method of assigning weights: at best you are suggesting murder=infinity. And in the case of Al Franken, groping=infinity.
@Giliel
You’re wrong again, and apparently also have no reading skills. I was talking entirely about what my father did not do, no statement about my position. Please learn about ad-hominem arguments and strawmen.
It appears as if you (and some others) are just looking for people to hate on in front of your childish peers. Grow up.
@Giliel
“But I won’t judge an entire person’s life by one final act.”
Sorry, you seem to still have bad reading and reasoning skills. That is not excusing the killing. The killing is not an entire person’s life. Do I need to name the fallacy for that too?
Yeah, you’Re one to complain about tone here.
You saying the same sentence that your father was a liberal (whatever measure suffices these days) but, hey, he also cheated on women and told racist and sexist bullshit galore, yet magically that didn’t teach you that these things were kinda OK (as obviously evidenced in this thread).
Cupcake, it ain’t my reading, it’s your writing, and I’m going to take the piss out of you for as long as I please. I mean, why would I want to hate men who murder women, right?
oh, btw, mikehuben
Maybe get my name right before complaining about other people’s literacy skills, will you?
And yes, it fucking does excuse the killing, as you say that other things in his life may have been of such a quality that the act of murdering an innocent woman may not overshadow these good things, as if we’re talking about some religious belief where the good deeds are put into one side of the scale, and the bad deeds into the other side and if only there are enough good deeds, they will outweigh the murder.
That’s disgusting, and given the gendered nature of the crime, misogynist.
You are the person here spending a lot of time chastising women who are abhorred that yet another one of us has been murdered by a man who decided that she was his to destroy.
Here’s the GoFundMe for the children.
Ha!
In their first comment mikehubin nonspecifically calls things in a post condemning a murderer and pointing out reputation damage “judgementalism” complete with religious allusions, but they’re not excusing the killing. They’re only acting like we shouldn’t tie horrible crimes to people that commit them in a way that effectively sticks in our collective memory and appeals to a sense of reputation. They’re only preventing someone from posthumously receiving the consequences of their actions regardless of intent, but they’re not excusing.
Oh wait, that’s exactly what excusing is.
Shorter #70: Yes yes, it’s a crime, but for god’s sake committing that crime doesn’t give us the right to impugn a man’s character! *insert mansplaining of what feminism is* My god, you’re all so irrational!
@mikehuben
I didn’t say anything about identifying it as anything; obviously simply calling it a murder doesn’t do anything. I asked why you’re treating it as a mere human imperfection, as if we’re quibbling over the fact that he doesn’t use turn signals during a merge or something. Or why you act as if the guy just had some ~misguided ideology~ about treating his wife as his personal property to claim and dispose of as he pleased, as if feeling the need to wipe her existence off the face of the earth is anything comparable to libertarians and their opinions about public spending.
Is there a particular reason for this?
And yet you’re putting an awful lot of effort into trying to shame people for insisting that murdering women through entitlement to them is a bad thing to do, and implying that Smith couldn’t help doing what he did because… I don’t know, boys will be boys and it’s normal for men to kill women? Which is something that you’re okay with, apparently???
I mean, if nothing else, you seem way more offended that people are calling out Smith as a cold-blooded murderer than the fact that Smith is a cold-blooded murderer.
Since when is “it’s disgusting and wrong to murder women because you feel personally entitled to their lives” a bullshit ideological belief, and why don’t you buy into it?
That’s kinda how murder works, dude…
@mikehuben
Name any number of things in Scott Smith’s life that could possibly make up for the fact that he snuffed a unique, irreplaceable human being out of existence because she attempted to deny him what he felt he was entitled to, that being an ownership of her as property.
What is the value of Jennifer Smith’s life, to you?
@mikehuben
“That is not excusing the killing. The killing is not an entire person’s life.”
Ok, there was a murder at my kid’s high school a few years ago, a 16 year old boy asked a 16 year old girl to the prom and when she said no he stabbed her to death. He was recently sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder.
For everyone who knew and cared about the person he killed that murder IS his entire life. He ended anything that girl might have been or done or accomplished. She was her mothers only child and he ended every birthday, graduation, or family dinner.
I’m perfectly happy considering someone who MURDERS someone to be a bad person. I don’t care if he did any kind or charitable acts. If you murder, you’re bad. Trying to say that donating to an animal shelter or charity somehow balances against MURDER just makes you a bad person too.
So yeah. I’m judging you mikehuben. You are a bad person, and you should feel bad.
mikehuben, #49
You know, this is really fucking personal and upsetting but hell: There was a murder-suicide in my family. I have comforted family members grieving a man who killed his wife and then himself. The children in this case were adults, at least, but that’s like saying the shit sandwich was a very small one. The murderer’s children and other family members still loved him, still grieved. But you know what they did not do?
They did not breathe a word of what a great guy he was. The horror he had caused and the loss of another person they loved overshadowed his entire life. Their complicated feelings, their sense of loss for the man they thought he was, were matters to be sorted out in therapy. People who shared blood with this murderer, who had a far greater relationship with him than you being a fan of some guy’s podcast, were able to process their complicated feelings without demanding others remember how well the murderer played his guitar.
I don’t know who you think you have to save the reputations of murderers for, but it’s not the people who actually loved them. They are among the living people most deeply injured by the crime.
mikehuben #73
For the person murdered, it was the entire rest of her life. For those left behind, it’s going to taint every memory for the rest of their lives. That children’s birthday party when you gave him a hug? Chilling now. The Christmas gifts he gave? You can’t pick them up without thinking of death. The time he taught you how to shoot targets in his backyard when you were ten? Oh shit. I can’t fathom how much worse it has to be for the children themselves. The trauma permeates every facet of your life, shaking your faith in your own memories and emotions, chipping away at your own sense of self. It is a wound to an entire family that cuts it down to the core.
Only someone emotionally removed from the situation could actually look past the murder. And doing so does absolutely no favors to those who loved, and were betrayed, by that murderer.
Ah, the traditional piling on by the furies that I mentioned in my first response. Disagree with their absolutism, and they will squawk endless ad hominem while repeating the same stupid argument over and over.
A person is not their crime. We judge them separately. Models that weight a single crime infinitely against everything else in a life are stupid. None of the squawkers have refuted any of these, and their condemnation of the entire life of the man is clearly unjustified by these.
And there is an endless series of strawman assertions of my beliefs:
@Mak: ” I don’t know, boys will be boys and it’s normal for men to kill women? Which is something that you’re okay with, apparently?”
Bald faced ad hominem. Really, can’t you find an actual argument?
@Mak: “Since when is “it’s disgusting and wrong to murder women because you feel personally entitled to their lives” a bullshit ideological belief, and why don’t you buy into it?”
The answer is that you haven’t read what I said. I agree with that statement. But the crime is not the entire life of the man.
@Onamission5: “for god’s sake committing that crime doesn’t give us the right to impugn a man’s character!”
A classic misrepresentation: quote me. Of course you have a right to impugn his character. I’m just pointing out that you’re stupid to do it by condemning his entire character, and that people like his children would probably disagree with a blanket condemnation.
Then you get the people who deride opinions without a rationale:
@Onamission5: “insert mansplaining of what feminism is”
And what was WRONG with my opinion? Do you seriously want to say that men are excluded from explaining a philosophy of sexual equality?
@Azkyroth: “That’s kinda how murder works, dude…”
Actually, no. Ask somebody who has finished serving their sentence. Why not explain to me HOW that works, rather than assuming it?
@Brony: “Oh wait, that’s exactly what excusing is.”
Ah, anything short of absolutism is excusing. Giving a murderer anything short of death by the most excruciating torture possible would be excusing. We must conceal all knowledge of anything good he may have done previously, or it is excusing. Excuse me.
And then you get Giliell (sorry, excuse the prior misspellings) who so relishes smiting the wicked that she writes “Cupcake… I’m going to take the piss out of you for as long as I please” despite the fact that she is embarrassing herself repeatedly. She’s still trying to turn statements about my father into ad hominem about me. She writes:
“as you say that other things in his life may have been of such a quality that the act of murdering an innocent woman may not overshadow these good things”
No I don’t say that. I say exactly the OPPOSITE of that, but you don’t have the brains or reading skills to recognize that. Quote me.
Oh, nor does she address prior refutations. Like any creationist, she just moves on to the next specious argument.
Really, this claque has pretty much all the arguing behavior of the right wing and fundamentalist nutjobs, except maybe not the guns or threats. I’ve argued electronically for more than 40 years, and I’ve never seen these techniques used so much elsewhere in the sites I’ve liked. I’m not asking that you change your overly simplistic positions: just that you make good arguments. What I’m seeing here from you is comparable to the pointing and ululating in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. I don’t think you’re doing PZ or most of his readers any favors.
MikeHuban, quit pretending you are the smartest person in the blog. You aren’t. I see nothing to learn from your inability to understand you pretending to persuade us with your presuppositional thinking. Your mention of group think, etc. confirm your bias.
Do everybody, including yourself, a favor and let it go. Show us you are smart enough to quit when you are in a hole.
mikehuben
No, we don’t.
Pretty is who pretty does, as Samwise Gamgee noted. The opposite is just as true. I don’t believe in some “true self”, that nice and decent person that everybody who has been caught being an asshead claims to be, and whose bad deeds somehow shouldn’t reflect on their character.
As Maya Angelou said: when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People are what they do. There is no “nice and caring person” who is somehow separate from the man who murdered a woman. They are the same. BTW, if the crime is not the person, why should the charitable act be?
Obviously because you say so, because you have not given any evidence why that should not be the case.
@The Mellow Monkey
That is a very insightful comment (unlike the other commenters here.) But I disagree to some extent with your analysis.
You said: “But you know what they did not do? They did not breathe a word of what a great guy he was.” But why not? Perhaps because of the same sorts of social pressures that keep women from speaking out against their oppressors: a family member who did speak about good aspects might be hated. The same way I’m getting all the hate right now. You know why people sort their feelings out in therapy? To avoid that sort of oppression. They don’t go to therapy for the therapist to tell them that their father’s entire life and being was bad. The flip side was did they all talk about how his entire life was evil? The way the claque here would have them do? Or did they just fine themselves to condemning the crime or not speaking at all about him? All these things are possible.
And we should remember the victims and families of church bombings that forgave the murderers: that too is another alternative to the simplistic bad/good dichotomy that the claque keeps harping on, no matter how many times I tell them life and judgement need to be more sophisticated than that.
“Only someone emotionally removed from the situation could actually look past the murder.”
I’m not doing that. I’m considering BOTH the killing and the person as a whole.
“For those left behind, it’s going to taint every memory for the rest of their lives.”
No, it won’t, because that’s not how people really work. Taint is a very loaded word, and suggests a model of how people think and feel that is much too simplistic. People compartmentalize and have numerous other strategies for coping. Understanding based on the imagery of “taint” is very poor, and also happens to be characteristic of much right-wing thinking according to Lakhoff’s “Political Morality”. Will they always carry the bad memories? Likely yes. Will those always affect every other memory? No.
I’m not trying to “to save the reputations of murderers” except in the sense that we should not create FALSE reputations of total evil for their entire lives. Yes, they did something very bad. But that doesn’t make it right to claim they were entirely bad. Fallacy of composition.
@mikehuben
I see you skipped the part where I rhetorically described the excusing in more words than my little summary at the end.
We can add lack of courage to your reputation. Oh wait, that’s cowardice.
Mike,
You keep insisting on being factually correct, we keep pointing out that you are still completely missing the point.
A man is not one of his actions. We know that, thank you. Nevertheless, we will remember Smith as we do, and the memory we have is shaped by his last, cruel act. You cannot convince us otherwise because memories are not shaped by argument.
Yes, you are arguing very logically. Very intelligent, my compliments. But you are using logic in a situation where logic does not apply, like screwing with a hammer. And your insistence on using a hammer while we are desperately trying to make you see a screwdriver would be more convenient only pisses us of worse.
You are being disrespectful to Smith’s victims and to the many other victims of domestic violence. No argument can change that.
So yeah, fuck off please.
@Nerd of Redhead
I don’t need to be the smartest person in the blog to rebut the stupidity of some members. Thank you for your snarky “advice”, but I’ll do as I please. Oh, and I’d like to point out that you too are acting as if you are a member of the groupthink (you brought it up), trying to get m to shut up. Nor do you present ANY argument to show why I’m saying anything wrong, besides disagreeing with a bunch of jackasses that you seem to agree with.
*looks for people saying that someone is entirely bad, only sees mikehuben saying it.*
I guess some people have problems dealing with the that reputation includes what first comes to mind about a person, what parts of a person we give weight to and why, and what parts we don’t choose to talk about and why. I’m sure mikehuben has done some nice things, but the reputation they’re creating here has certainly affected how I will remember them.
Wow. Now people praising the good of murderers are just like women who are being oppressed. The murderer’s best friend is just like the rape victim. Thanks for some dude explaining this to women, while at the same time talking down to them, calling them names, and mansplaining them how they’Re all wrong in saying that a man who murdered his wife was a bad person just because he murdered his wife.
Besides, mikehuben is just like all the other guys who think that they must be right because people vehemently disagree with them. Some logic that is.
@89
Oh, poor little Brony! Did I ignore some of your precious little message? While arguing with at least 5 others? Do you really need so much attention?
Grow up and make an argument.
@rietpluim
You may remember him by his last action BECAUSE YOU DID NOT KNOW HIM AND ONLY HEARD ABOUT THAT LAST ACTION. And that’s all you want to use to judge him in a binary fashion. That’s what’s technically called a low-information heuristic. I don’t judge that way. That heuristic is enough for me to label him a killer, but not enough for me to condemn ANYTHING and EVERYTHING in the man’s life. People who knew him will remember other actions in addition, and may make different, more accurate judgements.
You suggest that logic is inappropriate. I’d suggest that your immediate emotional reaction is also inappropriate because it is based on so little data. That’s why we have courts of law and juries to decide when such questions come up: we trust them to do a better, less emotional, more logical and more normative evaluation. Instead of the lynch mob attitude we have here.
“You are being disrespectful to Smith’s victims and to the many other victims of domestic violence. No argument can change that.”
No more so than insisting that a suspect go to a court rather than be lynched. We know that justice is not easily, emotionally, and immediately found, and so we have trials. But you and a number of others think you have a shortcut to accurately judging a man’s entire life in a trial by internet lynch mob.
“So yeah, fuck off please.”
You were doing so well until that. No thank you.
Evidence where anybody has done that?
What we’re saying is: he cannot have done anything that would in some way make the fact that we murdered his wife any less bad. If he fed stray dogs in 73 that was still a nice thing to do, but it doesn’t make him less of a bad person, because killing an innocent woman sort of flips a switch.
Okay Mike, once again: what fact or circumstance I do not know already would change my judgment?
@mikehuben
Ad hominem nothing. How ’bout you learn what the fallacy actually means before throwing it around at people? Pointing out the concerning implications of your statements is not ad hominem. Saying that you’re wrong because you’re sexist and gross is ad hominem.
Sorry mate, but when a person commits the act of murder, they are, by definition, a murderer. I don’t make the rules.
You know, the funny thing about this is that I actually do think it’s possible for a murderer to be redeemed, provided their remorse is suitably genuine and they take sufficient steps for reconciliation, something that isn’t possible in the religious “mortal sin” analogy that you keep bringing up over and over and over again, which makes your accusation inaccurate.
Obviously no number of actions can bring back or replace a life that was taken, but it does a lot to redeem the murderer’s humanity, as far as I’m concerned. (Though whether the victim’s family agrees with me is another matter entirely, of course.)
This is something that can only be done after the fact and not retroactively, because… you know, kinda hard to be genuinely remorseful and then go on and do it anyway. And, unfortunately, Scott Smith offered neither remorse nor reconciliation, and has ultimately forfeited any future possibility of redemption due to the fact that he’s fucking dead.
Which now leaves @mikehuben in the uncomfortable position of tallying a retroactive list of mundane acts and/or monetary payment and weighing them against a woman’s life to see whether she’s been suitably “paid for”, and how dare anyone speak an ill word until that’s been done.
So I ask again, @mikehuben: What’s the value of Jennifer Smith’s life to you?
Mike Huben:
All the stupid I see is named Mike Huben. A single crime? This was not a single crime, and it wasn’t a case of shoplifting or something which could be easily ignored in the light of a life.
Jennifer Smith is dead. All her dreams, all those days ahead she so desired to see, dead. All those who loved her are now weighed down with incalculable grief, and that grief will continue, because of the children. They have it beyond bad right now. 10, 20 years down the road, if any one of them marries, or has a child, guess what? There’s that grief again, because their mother won’t be there, and she should have been. That’s the thing – people can mourn the murderer, but he took a life which was not his to take; and he took that life away from his children. His last act was his decision, and it does indeed taint every single fucking thing he has ever done.
Those children he was supposed to love have had their lives ripped apart like you cannot believe, and that might eventually scar up, but it will never stop hurting. They will always know that in the end, anger was more important to their father than their lives, or the love he had for them. Their lives will never be what they should have been. It’s no simple or single crime, and you are beyond a fucking doucheweasel for insisting that the murderer is still oh so noble and worth mourning. *spits*
@Giliell: “Now people praising the good of murderers are just like women who are being oppressed.”
You really are expert at fallacious reasoning. I was talking about the social pressures, not saying that they were like each other in any other way. You are extending my statement beyond what I said to make a strawman. Oh, and now anything I say is mansplaining. Fine: by that standard, anything you say is assholery.
” mikehuben is just like all the other guys who think that they must be right because people vehemently disagree with them.”
Ah, your super cynic ESP powers are too mighty for my mere arguments! Able to create ad-hominem strawmen in a single bound! I think your powers must be compensating for a lack of other skills, such as argument or reading comprehension. Try making a real argument, “cupcake”.
All right, my Mike’s logic we cannot call Timothy McVeigh a bad person. Or Charles Manson. Or anybody. Calling somebody a bad person is somehow erasing every good deed they may have done. So next time we judge someone, make sure we have a complete list of every detail possibly relevant.
Dude, that’s not how it works. Someone who kills his wife for wanting to leave him, we call a bad person. He is a bad person by every reasonable definition.
@84 Mellow Monkey: Jesus. I’m really sorry.
@mikehuben
Are you seriously actually telling someone who has personal experience in this that their experiences are wrong? Do you really think your opinion as an outsider matters enough that you can ‘splain at them about their own experiences in any meaningful way, instead of just a whole lot of condescension?
Is there a ‘splain label for this??
mikehuben #88
The goal is to help the survivors of the murder-suicide process their feelings and be functional, not to “avoid oppression.” This may involve looking at the situation from multiple perspectives, this may involve talking about the conflict between happy memories of the murderer versus the horror of what he did, but there’s no reason to try to build up some comprehensive mental model of the entirety of the murderer. That has nothing to do with processing your own feelings as a surviving family member. It’s therapy centering the needs, feelings, and experiences of the client. It’s not a meditation on the murderer and whether or not he was evil.
Who the murderer was and whether or not he gave to charity has very little to do with helping the surviving family members. Centering a dead murderer makes no sense from the perspective of the health and well-being of the surviving family. He isn’t the client. He isn’t the one being helped. He is dead. Whether the client views him as evil or good or a combination thereof is secondary to the client’s personal well-being, which is the point of therapy.
Someone could come out of therapy perfectly happy to say, “My father was a bad man, I don’t care about any good things he ever did, and I never want to think about him again,” and if they were otherwise okay, that’s a successful outcome for therapy. Because it’s not about him.
mike, really, learn what an ad hominem is.
Wrong, you unsalted block of butter*.
You had absolutely NO reason to bring up the plights of an actual marginalised group except that you wanted to compare their plight caused by an actual structural and personal oppression with that of people who only get told to shut up because praising the good qualities of the person who murdered your loved one is beyond pale.
You were making the point that they are, on some level, the same, hoping that the sympathy we usually extend to victims of oppression may rub off on them.
No, the pressures that keep women from speaking up against oppression are not the same as those that allegedly keep people from praising murderer’s.
For example, you can’t seem to shut up.
*That’s just an insult, btw.
rietpluim
Maybe there is a new list for the Indulgences?
Mike Huben,
So, here’s the thing. Murder is irreversible. You can’t take it back. You can’t make it right. Now, if you can come to terms with that, do your time and come out a changed human being determined to do whatever good you can with the years left to you, then maybe, just maybe, you can accomplish enough that that single act will not define you.
But if the murder is the second to last act of your life, and the last is to off yourself so you don’t have to face the consequences of your actions, it’s kind of hard to redeem yourself. And your previous good works don’t do much to undo or compensate for the last acts of your life. Nothing can undo the fact that the last acts of your life were stupid, cruel and pathetic.
The fact that Hitler liked dogs doesn’t do much to compensate for his murder of 12 million people and waging a war that killed 40 million.
@Giliell #87
QFT.
Onamission, thank you. I can’t recall if I’d mentioned it on FTB when it happened or not. Certainly, it’s not something that’s comfortable to talk about. And not because of “oppression.”
@Giliell
“Evidence where anybody has done that?”
Read the thread: I cited PZ in my original complaint, and some others have also volunteered that judgement. You are lazy or forgetful too.
@rietpluim
“what fact or circumstance I do not know already would change my judgment?”
Your judgement is not worth shit unless you know the guy. Even if only by reading about him in detail.
@Mak:
“Ad hominem nothing.”
Accusing me of being ok with murder is ad hominem.
“Sorry mate, but when a person commits the act of murder, they are, by definition, a murderer.”
I am reminded of “The Pirates of Penzance”. The pirate king says “We are all single gentlemen.” And the Major General responds “Ah, but what else are you?” You are simply trying to slip in an assumption that being a murderer is everything of importance. Disgraceful.
“I actually do think it’s possible for a murderer to be redeemed… something that isn’t possible in the religious “mortal sin” analogy that you keep bringing up ”
Wow, can you really be that ignorant of Christianity and the idea of forgiveness of sins?
“So I ask again, @mikehuben: What’s the value of Jennifer Smith’s life to you?”
You tell me how it should be evaluated, and I’ll consider it. But of course then we have to ask if other people valued the life of Scott Smith. Was he a good friend, employee, boss, soldier? Did people feel he helped them escape religion? Are these values commensurate in some way on the same scale? Or would that be comparing apples and oranges?
“Are you seriously actually telling someone who has personal experience in this that their experiences are wrong?”
Do you think personal experience is always correct? You are going to have a very difficult time with the personal experience of fundamentalists then, since much of their belief is rooted in personal experience. My own personal experiences tell me otherwise, as well as various readings in psychology.
@Caine
“you are beyond a fucking doucheweasel for insisting that the murderer is still oh so noble and worth mourning”
Now there’s some nice, frothing hate! Based on misrepresentation of everything I’ve written.
@rietplum
“All right, my Mike’s logic we cannot call Timothy McVeigh a bad person. Or Charles Manson. ”
You haven’t been following this thread closely enough In #66 I explicitly listed Manson in the list of when I thought it might be reasonable to judge a life as a whole. I don’t mind that you missed that: what I mind is that you are making hostile, incorrect guesses as to how I think about this issue.
“Someone who kills his wife for wanting to leave him, we call a bad person. He is a bad person by every reasonable definition.”
Wow: more argument by repetition. He committed a bad action. That does not make everything about him bad. What else was he besides a murderer?
@The Mellow Monkey
“…therapy… [is] not a meditation on the murderer and whether or not he was evil.”
I thoroughly agree. I meant to explain that INDIVIDUAL therapy helps avoid oppression by other family members, and that is a reason to use it rather than group therapy. However. somebody could also come out of therapy saying “my father was basically a good man who snapped horribly at the end.”
@Giliell
“learn what an ad hominem is”
Here’s from Wikipedia:
“an argumentative strategy whereby an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument”
and you wrote:
“mikehuben is just like all the other guys who think that they must be right because people vehemently disagree with them.”
That’s a clear example. I think you need to learn something. No, a great deal.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
That’s a very nice emotional appeal. But you still haven’t presented a model that is non-binary. You still insist that murder trumps every good thing you’ve ever done in your life. So black and white, so one dimensional. One action, even a horrible one, is not your entire life. What else is your life?
Mike Huben,
1) Accusing you of being OK with murder might be hyperbole. It might be insulting. It might be unfair. It is NOT and ad hominem. An ad hominem is a logical fallacy that appeals to the listener to ignore the point a speaker/writer is making because of some undesirable association. To say that you condone murder is not an ad hominem. To say that we should ignore everything you say because you condone murder IS and ad hominem. Clear?
2) Like it or not. There are some transgressions that are unpardonable. Murder can be one of them, particularly when the final act of your life is to
a) take away from someone else everything that they are or could have been
b) that person had reason to look to you for protection (after all, they did have children together)
c) you then take your own life to avoid responsibility for your actions and coincidentally leave your children orphans.
Are you willing to pardon genocide because a person was a great artist? Are you willing to pardon Bernie Madoff because he gave to the arts. Are you willing to pardon Hitler because he liked dogs and passed some of the first environmental laws in the industrial world?
I believe in redemption, but some acts are irredeemable, especially when they are your final acts.
@mikehuben
Nah. Your original complaint was an assertion absent any means of tying feelings to specifics. My comment you just responded to noted that you avoided the substance of the conclusion you chose to focus on.
You are not worth the effort. I’m focusing on the audience as I respond to you since this is politics. If you go back and change things I might consider it depending on the quality.
mikehuben
Dodging the question and ad hominem: two fallacies in one sentence is not good for someone who considers himself more rational than his opponents.
So you’re being inconsistent. Okay.
I don’t mind that you missed that: what I mind is that you are making hostile, incorrect guesses as to how I think about this issue.
I did not. I just followed your line of reasoning to the inevitable conclusion.
:eyeroll:
Dude, that’s not how it works. You just don’t seem to grasp the concept of calling someone a bad person. Virtually all of us have acknowledged Smith must have had his good sides. In the light of the current affairs, we just don’t give a fuck. Why do you insist that we should? Why do you care so much for his image?
A misogynist. What more do I need to know? I’m not writing his eulogy or something.
@Giliell #87
“People are what they do.”
That is beautifully consistent with how brains make minds. It feels good reading it.
Sorry, forgot a Q tag.
Also forgot to tell Mike to fuck off.
@mikehuben
lol No it isn’t, especially when your statements imply that you’re okay with it, or that you at least think it’s at least not a good enough reason to paint someone as a despicable person, which is pretty much the same thing.
I’d say to the victims of the murder, it probably is everything of importance, but yeah, I do think whether or not someone FUCKING MURDERED somebody out of the desire to possess them as property is a pretty darn important thing to consider.
What’s disgraceful about it? Why should I do anything according to your moral standards? Give me one good reason why I should. “I’ll call you names if you don’t” isn’t a good enough reason. Neither is “I’ll make spurious comparisons to these people that I presume you don’t like.” You’ve already proven that I don’t have to care a lick about your opinion of me or take your accusations seriously.
Can you really be that ignorant of Christianity and the idea that those who go to Hell never escape from it? That there are unforgivable sins? Are you really so dishonest that after accusing everyone here of behaving just like fundies, you’re going to turn around and act like that actually wasn’t what you were accusing us of?
You’re the one insisting that we weigh one Smith’s life against another. The burden is on you, bud.
Yeah, that’s what I thought. Sorry, being nice to people and creating atheists don’t make up for the life of an innocent woman being stolen away out of a disgusting assumption of ownership. I’m sorry that you value women so little.
Do you think that if it isn’t always correct, then it’s never correct? This is a funny thing to say just before throwing accusations of black and white thinking around in the same exact post.
Someone who has personally experienced an event is going to be able to more accurately evaluate their own reactions and thought processes in reaction to that event than some lightweight who thinks being able to shart on a keyboard makes them an authority who can dictate what other people actually think and feel.
Suffering a murder/suicide, by the way, is a far cry from someone thinking they had a personal experience with jeebus because some perty music gave them goosepimples.
Why should anyone care?
Why does your judgement matter at all?
Asshole Huben:
So, he was your best fuckin’ friend forever, was he?
You’re digging one hell of a hole here. You have the gall to dismiss TMM’s experience with a murder/suicide, but you don’t know them, do you? Nor do you know anyone involved in that particular situation, yet you are happy enough to make one stupid fucking judgment after another, about people you do not know.
It’s a pity your brain is so damn petrified, you’ll never even understand what an asshole hypocrite you are, will you?
Also, Mike Huben, if our judgment isn’t worth shit, why on earth don’t you just dismiss our irrelevant opinions, rather than repeating yourself like a deranged parrot?
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
“To say that you condone murder is not an ad hominem. To say that we should ignore everything you say because you condone murder IS and ad hominem. Clear?”
Are you saying that everybody here at Pharyngula is too stupid to catch the dog whistle and make the inference that’s what’s meant? If you don’t write an argument as a syllogism, it isn’t an argument? Please, spare us.
“There are some transgressions that are unpardonable.”
That’s bullshit. Unpardonable by whom? Legally, there are pardons. Many groups pardon transgressors routinely, even for murders. There’s even reconciliation after genocides as a means of moving forwards. Maybe YOU feel that way, but it is not a fact for people in general.
@rietpluim
You are wrong about both fallacies. It’s not dodging the question to point out that your judgement is based on no knowledge of the guy. The inference is that with more knowledge, your judgement might change. And that’s not ad hominem: it is a general principle that applies to everybody who makes judgements without knowledge. You just don’t like what I said, and that is not ad hominem.
“So you’re being inconsistent.”
Nope. I’ve consistently distinguished between the criminal act and the life as a whole of the criminal. You just haven’t been paying attention.
“Virtually all of us have acknowledged Smith must have had his good sides.”
That’s bullshit. #83, #68, #61and of course the original post. But you don’t really care about that. You write: “A misogynist. What more do I need to know?”
MikeHuben…were you a fan? or someone who knew him personally? Why is this so important to you? Whats the fuck did I even read actually? Someone who thinks there’s more to a murderers life than the murder? No shit. We just don’t care. This is not purity politics. Some people dont need defending.
Mike, some actions are like the Rubicon–once you cross, you can never go back. I have been faithfully married to my wife for 25 years. If I were to sleep with another woman, just once, I would be an adulterer. Nothing could make me a faithful husband ever again. I am painfully aware of this because I occasionally have dreams where I have slept with another woman, and become aware that that line cannot be recrossed–and most unfair of all, the sinning is all in the past tense. All I get in the dream is the regret.
But if examples and logic won’t get you to see, perhaps a joke will. Now a caveat before I tell this joke: It must be told in a Scottish accent. It loses something if you do not. If you absolutely cannot do a Scottish accent, perhaps you could use a Wyoming accent, or at least a passable John Wayne imitation. OK, here goes:
There was an American guy who made a trip to Scotland and drove all around the highlands. He found he was particularly drawn to the pub culture. On the day his flight was supposed to leave, he started his drive to the airport early and thought to himself that if he saw an interesting pubs, he’d stop for a pint.
Sure enough, he arrived at a small hamlet by a raging river with a quaint, old pub. He walked in, and as it was early, it was just him and the proprietor–a big, hairy Scotsman in a kilt. He sat down at the bar and raised his glass to the Scotsman. The Scotsman poured himself a pint and gazed philosophically at the head on the beer.
Finally, he said, “I tell you, lad. It’s a strange world we live in.” He drinks a swig of beer and then shouts, “Do ya see this bar, laddie?” and brings his fist down with a blow that shakes the walls of the pub. “I built this bar. I built if with my own two hands. And do you know what they called me?” He looks up and pauses, “Angus McCaskill, the bar builder. Aarrrgghhh!” He drinks some more beer as the American guy thinks he might have made a mistake.
Then the Scotsman blurts out, “And did ya see the stone wall you drove past? I built that wall. I built that wall with my own two hands. Laid every stone myself, not an ounce of mortar between ’em. And do ya know what they called me?” He looks up, anguish in his eyes. “Angus McCaskill, the wall builder. Aarrrgghhh!” More beer.
“And did ya see that bridge over yon bonny stream? I built that bridge with my own two hands, hewed the timbers myself. And do you know what they called me? Angus McCaskill, the bridge builder. Aarrrgghhh!!”
The Scotsman take a bid swig of beer and then says, “But, ya fuck one sheep…”
Some things you can’t recover from.
logicalcat:
It would appear that Mike doesn’t perceive a difference. His podcasts were good, by gods! He brought people to atheism, dammit! People should be talking about that, ’cause he was good guy, what does it matter if I didn’t know him, I was a fanboi!
Mike likes to have heroes, I guess. Too bad this one turned out to be a selfish, controlling asshole who was also a supreme coward, and decided to leave a legacy of murder to family, friends, and fans.
Jennifer Smith was murdered. Her three daughters were orphaned. Their entire extended family has been traumatized.
Jennifer was forty-six years old. Many people say they were her friends and they remember her fondly as very warm and easy to get to know. Friends describe her as thoughtful, brilliant, and a devoted mother. She worked in IT and was said to be very helpful to those around her. Jennifer filed for divorce on November 7th, from a man who would later prove to be lethally violent.
Jennifer was a full, vibrant human being with her own individual interests, feelings, and hopes for the future. She had a life, which was hers alone, and which was stolen from her.
Jennifer Smith was murdered.
Why is it not her memory that is being fought for?
@Mak
You are simply lying when you say my statements imply I’m OK with murder. Quote me. And that’s part of your ad hominem stratagem to demonize me.
Being a murder is hardly the only thing of importance in a person’s life. It is disgraceful to think otherwise. And it obviously implies that there were no things of importance in the life before the murder or that somehow magically the things of importance are no longer important after the murder. You explain.
“Can you really be that ignorant of Christianity and the idea that those who go to Hell never escape from it? That there are unforgivable sins?”
You are confusing redemption during lifetime with after death. Unforgivable sins is a very inconsistent idea in the Catholic church, which contains contradictory doctrines on it. Wikipedia. You said mortal sins could not be redeemed. You were wrong, but won’t admit it. Per usual.
“You’re the one insisting that we weigh one Smith’s life against another.”
Wrong. Quote me.
“I’m sorry that you value women so little.”
Bullshit. You are making things up again.
“Do you think that if it isn’t always correct, then it’s never correct?”
Why are you asking me to make such a stupid logical error? If the personal experience of somebody contradicts what is known from psychology, then I think it is likely to be erroneous. You’re really grasping at straws to make stupid responses.
“Someone who has personally experienced an event is going to be able to more accurately evaluate their own reactions and thought processes in reaction to that event than some lightweight who thinks being able to shart on a keyboard makes them an authority who can dictate what other people actually think and feel.”
Once again, tell that to the fundamentalists who base their beliefs on their personal experience of Jesus. Then see if you can convince them of atheism. I’ll sit on the sidelines and laugh at you. People believe LOTS of stupid things about their own experience. The skeptical literature is full of examples, drawn from experimental psychology and other sources.
“What else was he besides a murderer?” “Why should anyone care?”
Your poverty of imagination is pathetic. As I’ve pointed out, other people DO care about such things. Start with his children. Their attitude might be “Yes, he killed her, but we loved them both!”
“Why does your judgement matter at all?”
Ooooo, deep philosophical question! If you think judgments don’t matter, then you might as well shut up about them. I get to make mine anyway, whether it does or does not matter to others. And it matters to me to develop, examine and test my own ideas. They hold up pretty well against the claque here.
mikehuben
Exactly! I couldn’t care less what the good sides of the misogynist murderer were. If they are not to change my judgment, why would I need to know?
@mikehuben
Why do you need this? You need us to speak of the deceased in a certain way. I can respect that in the sense that we both have a personal interest in how the deceased are spoken about.
But the people here have needs too and this is politics, I will focus on winning (seeing my desired changes in society come about) as well as well as reason, logic and consistency with reality. I can parse insult from insulting characterization and include both as readily as relevant content (your ad hom confusion lies here). Which I use is up to you. If you can’t be useful to people they will not change behavior for you. I will not alter my behavior.
I’ll make you an offer, if you are willing to provide real world examples of the [things in brackets that you are typing about] and I’ll turn down the intensity on the things I add to win as well as be correct. I’ll consider what you need despite the fact that you have insultingly characterized and accused people without having the decency to quote them, and acted like their needs should be replaced with your needs with your general disposition. It’s functionally gossip and I know that’s insulting, and a characterization.
Your first comment.
>”I find it increasingly disturbing that we are being [instructed] [who] and [why] to [damn] here at Pharyngula, and a [claque of furies] has developed to support such [judgements].
So many atheist communities [fall apart] as they become increasingly subject to [judgementalism].
My current suspicion is that Atheisim has no pragmatic methodology for dealing with [complex issues]. For example, no principles of [exculpation] or [forgiveness]. Nothing like “hate the sin and love the sinner”. Which leaves only [focus on specific crimes], which creates a [false dichotomy of good/evil] as [judgements of complex people]. This forces atheists to [hypocritically pretend that they are free of sin lest they too be damned] by the ever more [puritanical factions].
In my life, I have hurt people and helped people. And I’ve tried to improve. I would not want to ]face trial by this blog]. I suspect that NONE of the writers here have been so squeaky clean all our lives that they would [get off easily by trial in this blog].”
I meant what I said. Your first comment was literally inadequate with respect tying your characterizations to the real world examples you are opining about. I don’t care if it’s three commentators in a clique, or a blogging community, or whatever. If you can characterize with feelings you can show me the objects the feelings are attached to so people can actually see if your feelings are justified I’ll play nice as well as fair in the political environment we find ourselves in.
Murder is bad.
@mikehuben
I said:
Are you now denying that you think murder isn’t a good enough reason to paint someone as a despicable person?
All you’ve done is repeat an assertion, which does nothing to support it. Why is it disgraceful, and what is just as, or more, important than the fact that someone murdered a woman out of a sense of entitlement to her life?
I think that feeling so entitled to a woman’s life that you kill her for it is a disgusting act that no good deed can fix without bare minimum sincere remorse. Offer me an alternative. Anything at all. Any single or combination of events in Scott’s life that could possibly allow me to call him a good person after feeling entitled to a woman’s life and then snuffing it out when she wouldn’t give it to him.
Please, tell me how I’m irrational for valuing a woman’s life and the irreversible and unimaginable suffering of her loved ones over a dead man’s dignity and the feelings of other folks who are willing to overlook violent and lethal misogyny because he was nice to people he valued more than his wife’s humanity.
No, sparky. People deserve Hell no matter what good deeds they commit in life, remember? It’s only asking forgiveness before they die that saves them from it. After they die it’s too late. Scott is fucking dead. There is no chance of redemption.
I’m talking about blasphemy of the holy spirit, as is listed in the fucking bible, you tool.
Mortal sins require forgiveness BEFORE death, and it doesn’t matter how nice and good someone was in life. Kinda like murdering people. Geddit?
And really, you were the one that brought up mortal sins leading to Hell, which is why I mentioned it in the first place:
Of course this is wrong, anyway. The victims of a mortal sin are nothing but the offense of an imaginary being and perhaps his followers, and Hell is an imaginary punishment that no one will experience no matter how deserving of it they may or may not be.
A murder, on the other hand, is a real thing that affects real people in real ways. Significant ways. Irreversible ways. Whether or not you feel the need to minimize it or twist it into outrageous contortions for your personal pontificating.
Oh come on, your entire reason for being here is to shame us for thinking someone is disgusting because they murdered a woman, because they might have been a nice person when they weren’t busy being a fucking murderer. ~~NICENESS~~ doesn’t make up for misogyny so deep that it’s fucking lethal, unless you think a woman’s life is worth less than a man’s dignity. Are you familiar with the “Nice Guy” phenomenon? Do you understand why “Nice Guys” aren’t actually as nice as they want us to believe?
“Maybe someone who experienced a thing knows more about their own responses and motives than you, someone who didn’t experience it, do.”
“OH SO PERSONAL EXPERIENCES ARE ALWAYS CORRECT? WELL WHAT ABOUT JEBUSANITY HUH?”
Gee, it’s like you already made the stupid logical error and I was pointing out that it was a stupid logical error.
This is what was said to you, by someone who had personally been there:
This was your response:
No offense, but I highly doubt your qualifications as any sort of authority in psychology, and so your theories don’t mean shit, and you don’t get to lord them over the lived experiences of another human being. And now I’m pissed all over again at the audacity and arrogance it takes for you to say that after TMM spilled their guts over how they and they people they knew were affected by it.
Other people also think women who are murdered “had it coming to them” and that folks like Smith are the true victims in all this.
Why should WE care.
Are you going to answer the question, or are you going to posture like a fluffed-up turkey? Give me one good reason to agree with you.
@125
That reminds me!
mikehuben said:
Granted I’m not a writer here or anywhere (unless they mean, like… comments), but I can state completely and with 100% confidence that I’ve never, ever murdered someone out of a sense of owning them as property. And I’m willing to bet at least most of the folks here can say the same.
“Your poverty of imagination is pathetic. As I’ve pointed out, other people DO care about such things.”
Yea no shit. We’ve seen it before when Jerry Sandusky was charged with child rape. Dumb ass assholes using the exact same horrible disgusting logic you are using choose to focus on his life outside of child rape. Because child rape is not all there was to the man right?
Its not that our imagination is limited, its that we have seen this garbage before.
QFFT
mikehuben @123 and elsethread:
You know who apparently did think Scott Smith’s crime (killing his former wife) outweighed all the good (actual and potential) he might have done in his life?
Scott Smith.
If he thought his actions were defensible, he could have brazened it out, gone to trial, defended himself to the jury, to his family, to his friends and neighbours. He could have chosen to remain alive, and face any punishment coming to him like an adult. He would have been able to bring out all that stuff you think is so important, all the good things he did in his life, all the positive stuff he’d been responsible for along the way, as a mitigating factor in his sentencing, and who knows, maybe the judge might have agreed with him.
But he didn’t choose to do this. Think about that. Scott Smith, instead, killed himself.
Clearly he believed his actions were indefensible. That one act of murder was enough to judge himself by for the rest of his lifetime. Then he chose to make “the rest of his lifetime” as short as possible.
So while I don’t blame you for what you’re ostensibly doing[1][2], and I’m not going to condemn you for trying, what I am going to say is this: you’ve picked a very poor target for this particular argument, since the subject you’re trying so valiantly to defend apparently didn’t agree with you either.
[1] Attempting to address a tendency toward judgemental behaviour on the part of a community you haven’t, to the best of my knowledge, actively contributed to previously (I’m willing to accept correction on this last – point me to a thread or two where you’ve been a participant).
[2] As opposed to, for example, trolling to cause trouble in a community you’re not a member of in order to feel appropriately persecuted and oppressed when you head back to where you usually hang out to complain about our terrible behaviour.
You’re talking about two different levels of reliability there. Your fundamentalist is absolutely the only authority as to whether they perceived Jesus talking to them. They are not an unimpeachable authority as to whether he actually did. A person experiencing an event is the only authority as to their feelings about the event, by definition. They may later misremember some of those feelings, or be unable to comprehend the force the feelings had (it’s difficult, at least for me, to understand why I acted as I did when in the grip of overwhelming passions), but there is literally no better authority.
Despite all the wrangles we have had on this blog, I never thought I would see a person arguing against the proposition that murdering the person with whom you had an intimate relationship kind of requires the reevaluation of your moral standing.
Also, mikehuben, while there may be people here who hold the opinion that any killing in war is equivalent to murder, I am not one of them. Don’t think I didn’t see your slimy little insinuation up there. You knew exactly what I was talking about and you chose to dishonestly scoot sideways in what you undoubtedly thought was a clever rhetorical move. You may fuck off.
This linear thread has grown unmanageable. Reddit’s tree-structured threads would make things easier to respond to.
Over all, I view this thread as symptomatic of conservative-style tribal affiliations: the same kind that lead to conservative voters voting for Trump or Moore because he’s THEIR bastard, not the Democrat’s. It requires the same adherence to tribal ideology, the same competition to display purity and to smite dissenters. And I see the same grotesque illogic, oversimplification, reactionary attitude, hostile misrepresentation of opponents and other common conservative strategies that I’ve observed in over 40 years of electronic discussion. I’ve been watching this grow in Pharyngula for quite a while, and while I appreciate that such cliques can provide a refuge for some of you, I think you damage discussions the way libertarians tend to, by injecting your ideology at the least opportunity and piling on to denounce anybody who doesn’t submit.
That’s enough for this thread. I’ve seen the noisiest commenters and gotten a feel for their low level of argument and misconceptions.
That is some gigantic projection you’ve got there, dude…
Oh shit man, I hear conservative right-wingers like ice cream, too. Guess I’d better give it up!
Oh no! Most people disagree with me! How unfair! Oppression! Sectarianism!
mikehuben
I did indeed. You still need to bring up specific quotes that support your argument.
It is for the person murdered, a person whose humanity, whose accomplishments, whose potential you are constantly brushing aside by your insistence in speaking good of her murderer.
Besides, let’s talk about that life before he murdered his wife because he thought that she was not allowed to leave him.
Him murdering her because he thought her property was very unlikely to have been the very moment he first had that idea, right? It’s pretty unlikely that a good man who respects women in general and his wife in particular as independent human beings decides that fuck that shit, she’s his and if she won’t stay with him he’ll kill her within like two weeks of her filing for divorce. It is the most reasonable to assume that he had such ideas long before, that he did not treat women in general and his wife in particular with respect.
There is even a pretty big likelihood that his behaviour towards her contributed to her filing for divorce, that indeed his behaviour may have been the reason for that divorce.
So, what was so important about his life before the murder again? Or is that another thing we should ignore in favour of looking at his podcast?
This is actually sad, because no, what you quoted is not an ad hominem. It’s not even an insult, which I am fond to use. It’s a character judgement. You may feel that you’re unfairly judged, but that’s not what ad hominem means. The person in dire need of learning here is you, shortbread (again, not an ad hominem, just me calling you creative names)
It’s a pretty fucking significant thing and the thing that makes “being a good person” virtually impossible. It’s not like you can rack up positive credit beforehand* so that when you murder a woman this gets somehow balanced against this.
*”Redemption” may be possible if somebody is seriously sorry and tries to do good after a deed. He himself decided to write the final chapter of his book and that is that he’s a misogynist murderer.
You’re a complete idiot. If you go by “tribal affiliations” then Scott Smith would be “our bastard”. We’d be rooting for him, no matter what, which is actually what you are doing.
Of course it’s also possible that by tribal affiliation you mean “women and others who think that murdering women is fucking indefensible” vs “sure, he murdered a woman, but he was also nice to puppies”
If you see “don’t murder women” and “don’t celebrate people who murder women” as purity tests then yes, I can live with that. It’s personally think it’s a terribly low bar to pass, but who am I? Just a woman who’d like not to be murdered.
Mak
Quoted for motherfucking truth.
mikehuben
Ah. I see.
133 comments is ?
at Pharyngula?
BWAAAAHAHHAAAHHAAAAA
This is surreal to the point of bizzare. Somebody actually objects to this article? Unbelievable.
I mean, I totally agree that people should be given an opportunity to make amends after transgresions, I believe that a rehabilitative justice is better than retributive justice. I also have seen people (here, including PZ) to react too harshly, to judge too strictly, to engage in all or nothing black and white thinking and I disagreed on occasion with both PZ and commentariat, but this is not a case of any of that.
If a man finished his life by murdering his wife and orphaning his children in order to prevent her from leaving him, it is perfectly reasonable from available evidence to conclude that he was not a good person. At the very best he was maybe good at pretending to be a good person. Many sociopaths who abuse their partners are exactly like that – that is one of the reasons why sometimes even family members do not believe victims of abuse straightaway, becasue “he is so nice and charming”!
He murdered his wife and he evidently premeditated and planned said murder including a sure-proof way of how to avoid any consequences for himself. That is the very deffinition of a bad guy and no ammount of prior puppy loving and guittar playing can redeem that.
He wrote the final note in his life in a discord, not PZ or commenters here, for f’s sake.
Note to self: stop feeling surprised at the depths the “atheist community” can and will sink to. What’s left? How can this thread be real, how can we seriously have more than one person arguing that hey, murder might be bad but atheist evangelism might outweigh it?
I could almost see a way to steelman this argument, if we were to ask something like “should RFR take down all of the podcast episodes in which this man participated?” A question to which, incidentally, I think the answer is almost certainly “yes”, but I could imagine a reasonable argument being had about it. Other people contributed substantial work to these podcasts, and I’m sure there is content of value in them; I’ll even concede that Smith himself may have contributed valuable work. But does any of that value outweigh the cost of continuing to promote the voice of a murderer? And probably a misogynist murderer at that, considering the nature of the specific crime? What effect will that have on the Smith girls? Or on women considering leaving religion more generally, if they discover that a major voice “helping” them is a misogynist murderer?
(It’s very similar to the question people keep asking themselves about artists and media personalities, the Woody Allens and Kevin Spaceys and Johnny Depps and so on, and how ethical it is or is not to continue to consume and appreciate their work in the context of what we now know about them.)
But asking a practical question like that is very different from what the Mike squad here seem to be doing, which is to say “How dare you taint the man’s legacy by condemning him for things he actually did?! Surely he’s done good things! Why are you going back to reinterpret everything he’s done informed by the newly-revealed information that he’s a murderer?” Jennifer Smith is dead. Their daughters are orphaned. Because of what Scott Smith did. And if people are this willing to make excuses for a man committing murder, what else are they making excuses for when men do them? How can anyone value the reputations of arbitrary men so highly merely because they’re men (and perhaps because they’re atheists)? How have we reached this point?
You can offer to the righteous all the good that you have won
But down here among the unclean your good just comes undone
Seems to me there’s only one person in this thread making the argument that sure, he’s a murderer, but he’s OUR murderer.
And this has been posted a couple of times, but let’s not lose sight of the surviving victims.
A good starting point in determining the legacy of a husband/father is to do a quick check to see if he murdered his spouse and orphaned their young children.
I can see that the chickenshits come out to denounce people after they’re gone, when they will not face criticism.
But I can’t resist answering one simplistic bullshit comment.
@Saad
You may think so, but that’s not the way the world works. For example, see: 10 Horror Stories of Famous Writers Who Committed Terrifying Crimes. A tiny bit of google searching reveals how stupidly wrong you are. The article has both male and female murderers.
The rest of you are just as vulnerable for your nonsense.
Shorter mikehuben at 143:
“Women do it, too, so ha ha you’re wrong and I’m right!”
As if that makes you any less of a shitty husband and father if you murder your wife and orphan your children.
Call us right-wingers again before you go. That’ll sure show us.
This time with emphasis:
A good starting point in determining the legacy of a husband/father is to do a quick check to see if he murdered his spouse and orphaned their young children.
mikehuben #143
What do you mean by “after they’re gone”?
This thread is still open and active. If you chose to stop reading it, no one else can know that.
Could someone take Mike Huben’s shovel away from him before he hits a mantle plume? Thanks.
Not murdering your wife and not making your young children orphans are necessary conditions for being a good husband, a good father, and a decent person.
Chigau
I think he’s referring to Smith, whom we only denounce for murder suicide now that he’s dead and can no longer defend himself.
Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous, but what can you do?
1. Your link doesn’t work
2. The category is “good person, father and husband”, not “famous writer”. If the people committed horrible crimes that means they were not good people.
Mike Huben:
People are still discussing what’s been said in this thread. You do not get to declare a “people must stop talking about all the shit I spewed all over” because you flounced the thread.
Yes, that is how the world works. Bet I know one name on that list: Anne Perry. Why do you think she got herself a different name, and kept her past damn quiet for a long time? Because people tend to get rather upset when they find out someone is a murderer.
This is not about other people who committed crimes, terrible or not. This thread is about Smith, a cowardly misogynist who murdered his wife, and left his children orphans, you dumbfuck. You’ve obviously run out of ways to defend Smith, so now you’re coming up with off the wall shit which does not apply here.
Please, shut the fuck up and go away. You aren’t going to find any converts to the “Smith was a great guy” idiocy.
mikehuben,
Talent isn’t a criteria for whether someone is a decent person.
C’mon. You can do better than this. I thought you’re supposed to be good at rational thinking.
…since the context was Smith’s legacy as a spouse and parent, that doesn’t make any sort of valid point. Do you think being famous or being talented with words is the same thing as being good? Smith murdering his wife and orphaning his children doesn’t negate that he may have had a podcast some people liked and maybe he was kind of popular, but his podcast and popularity are of vanishingly small import here.
Fame has nothing to do with being a good person. Lots of very famous people are really awful. Fame or talent doesn’t bring with it some kind of moral boost. Yes, there are real people in the world who are very grumpy that Kevin Spacey has been revealed to be a sexual predator because that’s interfered with a TV show they like, but those people have bad priorities. Taking the smallest step back from myopic fandom makes this clear.
I wonder how many symphonies the BTK Strangler needs to compose to be considered not as bad as if he hadn’t composed any symphonies. Is it a complex formula or is it as simple as one per victim?
Saad
Indeed. How many baseball championships for one raped kid?
I’m not at all sure he shot himself to escape consequences. Perhaps he decided to kill himself as soon as he learned that his wife was trying to get divorced, because he .
But before he shot himself, he shot her. I think he did that as punishment for a crime against him. If I’m right about that, he was unbelievably* arrogant enough to 1) define what a crime against him was, 2) decide what the appropriate punishment was, and 3) execute that punishment himself. Legislator, judge, jury and executioner all at once.
This kind of arrogance is a personality trait that doesn’t grow overnight. It must have been present for a long time. I can’t imagine how horrified his children must be to figure that out (if indeed he had managed to keep it hidden all this time). As far as I’m concerned, this personality trait poisons everything the guy did for decades.
That’s why I agree that has nothing to defend here.
* Unbelievable except, of course, for the fact of how often it happens. *headdesk*
Nested threads make it much harder to keep up: they force you to scroll through the whole page every time you visit to make sure you haven’t overlooked something. In this linear thread, you simply go to the last comment you remember, and then you read on from there.
As for responding, you’ve barely even tried! You just say “nope, wrong, fallacious, wrong, stupid, wrong” without explaining how you reach those conclusions.
A creative flounce. As transparent as any, though.
So, a question for you, . You’ve talked about a “community”. How do you propose to build one that thinks iudices in causis suis are just hunky-dory? I’m writing this in the original Latin because it’s what TV Tropes calls Older Than Dirt, and because it is that for a very good reason.
phew. i’m pretty late to this disappointing party, but i just wanted to delurk to say:
mellow monkey @#84: i am so incredibly sorry that you and your family were affected by such a terrible event. my partner lost both of his parents in a murder-suicide; his father killed his mother and then himself. i wanted to second everything you said about the way that such an act cascades through a family and through their memories; and i wanted to affirm that, at least in my partner’s personal experience, that final, horrendous act does indeed “taint” the 30+ years of memories of his father from before it; memories which, absent that final act, would otherwise be considered good. people do, in fact, “work that way”. the murderer was a man who did indeed have some severe mental health problems toward the end of his life that were most likely contributing factors – which doesn’t look to be true of mr. smith – but there are still no excuses. the fact remains that for my partner and his brother, their father is a *murderer*. their mother was *murdered*. and no amount of therapy, no amount of forgiveness or understanding that they may have/will ever come to, is going to change those facts. they have lost both of their parents for the rest of their lives; his brother’s children will never know their grandparents; my partner is himself reluctant to have children for fear of passing on the trauma surrounding the whole idea of parenting that he still feels so deeply due to his father’s final betrayal. the fact that his dad was a pretty good dad for most of his life – an intelligent, hardworking man who spoke many languages, loved to travel, went for a run every morning before breakfast – isn’t something he can promote as his father’s true legacy without effectively, even if only partially, eliding the murder. and the fact that he didn’t and doesn’t do that – didn’t and doesn’t spend his time trying to rehabilitate his father’s reputation – should maybe give pause to all the people in this thread attempting to do just that, for a person they don’t even know.
so basically i just wanted to say to mike that i’m pretty sure the children of the murderer being discussed in the OP wouldn’t appreciate you using their personal feelings – which you actually know literally nothing about – as some kind of rhetorical cudgel to score points against folks who are rightly condemning a misogynist murderer for being a misogynist murderer. i know my partner wouldn’t. the fact that people who knew and loved a murderer might struggle mightily with their conflicting feelings in the aftermath of the heinous act he committed doesn’t mean that other people, who were not in fact close friends and family, and just knew the guy through a podcast, somehow aren’t allowed to make their own judgment calls about what kind of person could commit such an act. especially when, as in the case of mr. smith, there does not appear to be any extenuating circumstance of, say, mental illness, but there DOES seem to be a *compounding* circumstance of extreme misogyny/how dare she want to leave me/if i can’t have her no-one can, as well as *premeditation*.
please stop weaponizing the personal feelings of those who have been orphaned by murderers to support your thesis that actions and people are separable in some meaningful way, or to assert (wrongly) that unlike those oh-so-nuanced orphans, people in this thread who think murderers are bad are somehow unaware that murderers are also human beings who have done things other than murder in their lives. thanks.
It has been suggested here that saying that someone involved in a violent act is mentally ill is “ throwing the mentally ill under the bus”. It is not. Some who are mentally ill do commit violent acts. Nothing wrong with pointing that out. Someone also said that saying this guy is mentally ill is excusing him. It is not. Andrea Yeats was eventually found guilty but insane.
While there is no evidence that this guy was mentally ill, often the perpetrator in murder suicides is mentally ill. A simple fact. My father was killed by my sisters ex-boyfriend who then tried to kill her, thought that he had shot her and then blew his head off with a sawed off shotgun. I have it on good authority(I am a clinical psychologist BTW ) that the guy was psychotic at the time. No doubt about it. To say this is not to malign the mentally ill-sometime mis s they do the hint like this- will sdo melody admit this please? It is also not to excuse his behavior. AND IT DOES NOT RULE OUT THAT IN PREVIOUS TIMES, WHEN HE WAS NOT PSYCHOTIC HE WAS A GOOD GUY. This seems incontrovertible to me. I do hope someone here will admit the truth of these statements though I don’t expect any of those who have been arguing against it to do so. Hard to admit it when you are wrong. Anybody?
hotspurphd #157
If you addressed the commenters by name, it would be easier to sort out what your issue is.
Also, preview is your friend.
As a clinical psychologist, you should know that most people find it even harder to admit they are wrong when they themselves do not think that they are wrong.
But, since you have invited it, let me do a quick Fisking:
Not very persuasive; it is equally true that ‘Some who are mentally ill do not commit violent acts.”, but people (e.g. you) don’t generally therefore argue that therefore the person is not mentally ill on the basis they committed a violent act. Whence this asymmetry?
Perhaps consider that you have essentially claimed someone can be a “good guy” except when they are mentally ill — which is to say, it was the illness that made this person not a “good guy”. Sure seems to me like you’re blaming the illness, not the person.
Perhaps your very first comment should have been “If he was indeed psychotic, as seems likely [because often the perpetrator in murder suicides is mentally ill even though there is no evidence that this guy was mentally ill], then it’s easy to imagine he was perhaps a good guy when not psychotic.” Because that’s what you have now clarified is your actual claim.
Well, it’s perfectly clear you’re not excusing him on the basis of his purported psychosis.
(That was sarcasm)
hotsphurphd @157:
The existence of a mentally ill person who commits violence does not effectively cancel out the social consequences of assuming every person who commits violence must be mentally ill. Those consequences are that people hear “mental illness” and assume “violent” when statistically someone who is mentally ill is more likely to be victim than perpetrator, or to harm themselves instead of others. This is hard for you why?
It’s so unfair to judge Charles Manson based on his horrible actions without mentioning that there exists a date after the date of his birth up to which he had been a decent human being.
I feel I’ve made a significant point by making that observation. I have no ulterior motives or underlying bias and agenda.
Atheism has made me a disembodied, unemotional observer of the universe.
mikehuben @58:
We can see that you intended to valorize your father here, but in this context you’re actually stating that your father is a suicide-murderer, and there are several others at Arlington National Cemetery. (I mean, it is the American military cemetery, I’m not confused about the imagery here? Furious flag wanking, foreigners need not apply, right?)
I’d never be accused of being friendly to American army-boys, but this description? Uncalled for.
@ mikehuben
You know, I don’t think a murderer is automatically a bad person. I’ve known and loved at least a couple of people who I’m pretty sure were murderers, who I would not have labeled evil. Of course, the important factors in the case of these murderers were: why they murdered, the circumstances in which they murdered, and who they murdered.
Now, I don’t know why the murderer in this case killed Jennifer Smith. She wasn’t, so far as anyone has put forth, a death camp guard or something similarly heinous, so there seems to be no plausible justification for her murder in ‘who.’ And since nothing I’ve read brings forth any reasonable suspicion that this might have been self-defense or a horrific accident, it seems unlikely that there is a mitigating circumstance in play. No, given what we know, it appears that the murderer killed Jennifer Smith because she was leaving him, a disturbing common crime that does, in fact, mean the killer is a horrible fucking human being.
It’s a crime reeking of petty entitlement, one which is almost the exclusive domain of highly privileged men. It says that the killer believes others exist only to serve him, and that he believes he has the right to destroy anyone who does not. It’s an evil act, committed by evil men. Whatever good they might have done before committing an atrocity like this is irrelevant.
He murdered a woman, who was his wife and the mother of three young children, and then killed himself. He doesn’t get to be remembered as a ‘good guy.’ No one who does this kind of shit does. He chose to leave the world a far worse place than he found it, especially for his children, family, and others who knew him personally.
So you see, not everyone here believes that a murder erases every good deed the murderer ever committed. In fact, I doubt most of the people here believe that every murderer is forever an irredeemable monster. It depends on a lot of factors. But someone who does what this murderer did? Bad guy, who did some now-pretty-damn-irrelevant good things once upon a time.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that I’m saying all this as someone who is (while not a murderer) an evil man. I do not claim “free from sin,” as you put it @26; far from it. Just because I’m a bad guy doesn’t mean that I don’t know right from wrong, or how these things fit into a person’s character.
Hotspurphd
Now, I’m not going to repeat what John Morales did beautifully already.
I just got a question.
What’s the percentage of people who only commit suicide who have mental health issues?
So many comments here. I knew him and his wife and won’t speculate about why he did this insain act. If all of you are so horrified at his actions and his orphaned children you should give. Turn your hate to help.
Fund for the Smith girls on gofundme.
gdhand:
Please be aware that you did just that by your very phrasing, even though unintentionally.
Thank you.
mcbender
I think you’ve just touched a very important thing here. People like mikehuben lack the empathy to see why this is important. To them, being a misogynist murderer and an atheist voice are Completely Different Things. Which is, as I’ve stated before, factually correct and completely missing the point.
@hotspurphd
I repeat my first comment. Without this you look like a person who has no idea how to describe what they feel negatively about.
I have no confidence in your ability to think about crimes like this and expect to see:
1) specific diagnostic criteria tied to
2) specific samples of behavior (communication is behavior)
3) the reasoning and logic that demonstrates a connection between 1,2 and the crime.
Anything else is unacceptable and mockworthy as it’s irrational prejudice and discrimination as bad as any racist, sexist or homophobe.
Seriously, conservatives do it with mass shootings, misogynists do it with accusers of sexual harassment and assault, and now we have it here. This is socially toxic behavior.
@mikehuben
How does it make one a chicken shit if they discuss your comments after you have left? You are looking more and more like someone who does not want us discussing bad reputation for unstated reasons.
If I’m wrong you seem to have missed my comment requesting precisely the information that can fix this.
Simple Desultory Philip
Let me just tell you that I’m sorry for your partner. I’m glad they have you.