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this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Seriously, what the flying fuck are you talking about?
People who commit acts of violence like this are quite clearly psychotic - whether it’s a mother murdering her children, a teacher threatening to murder a student, a gunman on campus, or someone who gets into fight after fight in bars. There is something broken in their brain.
Let me walk you through this, since your background in the subject is lacking. I will bet you $1000 dollars that if we were to do a neuroimaging on this man, we would see that his amygdala - the part of the brain that senses threat and engages the rest of the brain in a threat response is hypertrophied. His limbic system, which controls emotional response, is primed to react to a level of stimulation so small that probably neither you nor I would notice. His prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pushing back on those signals through rationality and long term planning is hypotrophied. It is decoupled and unable to do its job. This is the same as we see in violent individuals throughout the prison system.
There are a number of ways this can happen. Having been abused as a child is one. Having been malnourished. Having grown up experiencing social abuse and rejection. It’s more likely than average he suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in his history. TBIs are about ten times as common in the violent prison population as in society as a whole.
This man’s clinical condition dictated his interpretation of himself, which includes his religion. It’s the same for the gunman. It’s the same for the child abuser.
You will find the same in the brains of Hamas and IDF combatants. You will find, in a time series study, that these conditions become more extreme as a result of combat stress and ptsd. The Palestinian children who are being subjected to this massacre will display these same symptoms. The inner city kids in the US who grow up in a culture of systemic racism and violence show these same symptoms.
If you’re the kind of person who ascribes this kind of behavior to someone being an “evil” person or having an “evil” ideology, I strongly suggest you read some textbooks on neuropsychology and behavioral science.
Honest question: are you in favor of all (spontaneous?) violent crime being treated as a psychological problem, rather than a judicial one?
It sounds like you might, which I'm not necessarily against. I'm mostly asking because it I and probably others initially read your first comment as this being an exceptional case that should be treated differently. That made you sound to me like you were explaining things away. But from reading more of your comments I'm not so sure that's the case, it seems to me like you may just have some underlying principles that do not align with the current system. This would be a very different interpretation of your comments, that if true, I'd like to understand.
Edit: I just read the only comment of yours I hadn't read when I wrote this, which seems to confirm that you want it in general. I'm all for rehabilitation being the main goal in the justice system. Apparently I just didn't get that that was what you were arguing for to begin with.
Thank you.
Yes, that’s exactly what I am saying. Violent crime is a brain thing, not a moral failing. It is true in every case.
In this man’s case, his condition latched onto his self identity as Jewish. If this man, same brain, same background, same genes, had been raised in Alabama, he’d instead be carrying an AR-15 to church and threatening to shoot up drag shows. He might have driven his SUV through a crowd of protestors. He might even have shot up a synagogue. If he were born black in Detroit, and had the same issues - and again, I am talking about physical brain issues because there is nothing psychological that does not have a physical manifestation in the brain - he’d probably be dead before he hit 18.
He reacted to the words of a preteen girl as if it were a violent and existential threat. Those words hit his brain and it went into fight mode instantly. It wasn’t a conscious reaction. The “sane” response, the one we’d expect if we were to put ourselves as a teacher into that situation, would have been to sit down with the girl and talk to her. If she said something like “Israel is a racist nation,” he could have talked to her, acknowledged the complexity and need for understanding and compassion, and used it as a teachable moment. If she said “All Jews should die,” it might have merited a trip to the principal, a visit with parents, and so on. Instead, he reacted with absolute fury. It’s the behavior of the vet with ptsd who becomes physically violent in his sleep. It’s the behavior of a person who tortures animals.
You can’t punish a person out of having a hypertrophic amygdala. You can’t do it to a Jew who hates Palestinians, or a Muslim who shoots up the Pulse nightclub, or a white guy who shoots up a synagogue or black church, or the white woman who tries to cause death by cop because a black family is having a barbecue.
We get a dopamine hit when we have revenge fantasies about things like that. I have that, too. It’s tough to see a video with homophobia or transphobia and not think “I’d like to beat that guy.”
The right way to fix it, though, is to go after the actual causes. We know - and I mean that in the scientific sense of the word - that child abuse leads there. We know that poverty leads there. We know that malnutrition leads there. We know that societies that reward toxic masculinity and honor culture lead there.
And if you can’t solve it there for all cases, you can at least acknowledge that the condition is phenomenologically closer to an epileptic seizure than demonic possession or an “evil” person choosing to do evil. They need their brain chemistry evened out. They need self-detection and coping mechanisms.
They certainly do not need to be out on the street, nor do they need to be locked up in an American style prison.