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Freedom and equality
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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Your empathy towards the family is blinding you. The crime committed is irrelevant. Perhaps you are right this person did join with the intention to rape and kill. But it's still worth realising that for a person to believe rape is acceptable requires a severe level of alienation. They likely grew up in a low income area, witnessed extreme levels of domestic violence and was probably a victim of domestic violence too, resulting in a conservative view on gender. They made friends with other like minded kids, further consolidating their orientation, its very easy to continue falling down the rabbit hole once it starts. People are never born monsters.
This is just a question for you now: At what point does a child go from being a victim/witness of domestic violence to an unreformable perpetrator that should be sent to prison for life or penalised by death?
This kind of thing results in me considering if people are always a victim of their own conditions how can anyone be blamed for anything? A question I'm not really mature enough to answer.
Interesting how "likely" is doing all the work in the first half of your comment thereby underscoring just how fragile your claims ultimately are, but I get it.
I get the Marxist tendency to judge behavior by its conditions and circumstances.
It's however a completely separate thing to make up a person's life story to make it fit with the Marxist theory of alienation. That's working backwards from a conclusion and not very Marxist, much less psychoanalysis.
As for your question, I don't share its underlying assumption. Yes, people are products of their environment, but that in of itself doesn't equal victimhood, let alone in cases of rape and murder. Marxism, after all, accounts for agency just fine.
I wasn't really talking about Marxism, I was just talking about my own opinion I haven't really read any theory yet. I'm not sure what I think about agency, physics literally denies it.
And of course I don't know the backstory of this person but I'm sure we can both agree that he almost certainly did not have a normal life. Yes I'm still hedging with "almost" but whatever.
I could've sworn you're at least somewhat familiar with Marxism the way you talk about alienation as well as your defense of China, but that's okay, and yes, I agree that the rapist almost certainly did not have a normal life, but there's also a possibility he grew up in a perfectly loving environment and still ended up raping and killing, because sometimes no amount of nurture can change one's nature.
Ok I mean I am somewhat familiar with Marxism, I mean that just happens by existing on this instance. I do consider myself a Marxist and I like bringing up Xinjinag because I have done a lot of personal research into it. Although I don't know much about how Marxists describe or define alienation, I just use it as a convenient way to describe why I think people act in certain ways.
That's an interesting thought. If I'm being honest I have no idea how much people's "nature" differs from person to person. My brain has kind of made the irrational decision to pretend nature doesn't exist and everyone is born the same because it's so much easier to think of things that way. And regardless you still can't blame someone for their nature either can you?
It's funny how my argument has just turned into asking questions but I would be grateful if you had some thoughts on this.
I think the nuance is that you can't blame someone for their nature, but that you can hold them accountable for how they choose to act in response, because for practical rather than philosophical reasons I do believe in agency. Otherwise everything is predetermined and there's no point in contemplating anything.
Then even our exchange on this app becomes absurd, which again I have no problem with philosophically, but isn't very practical. Everything hinges on us entertaining agency.