Did anyone else read this paragraph wonder wtf really happened...
"Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)"
The kind of tenancy laws I read in articles like these, sound absolutely idiotic. If you let someone into your home, and they aren't on the lease, you should be able to kick them out anytime they overstay their welcome. If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven't paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out.
As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.
> I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever
That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.
And giving people housing is important, that's why the laws often favor the person renting, not the owner. The laws is a risk you have to take if you want to rent out your place. Price it into your rent. Or just don't live in "mortal fear" by not being a master tenant..
If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven't paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out.
I hear this and I think "You probably don't know what it's like to be in that situation."
It's often temporary, so a little flexibility fixes the problem.
But yes, sometimes you're right. You just phrased it in a bit of an inhumane way.
In the UK if the landlord lives at the same place (i.e. you live with the landlord) then you have far less rights as a tenant. Including a very short notice period.
Where I live it's pretty common to have multiple tenants in housing zoned for single-family residential use (I imagine this is true of much of the US). I'm curious whether that makes it easier or harder to evict someone.
The author of ZeroMQ wrote a book on recognizing people like this, and more importantly how to get yourself out of prison they’ve put you in. The action plans have helped me.
The lucky ones in the NYmag article here did many of the things he recommends.
Free PDF here, look for the hard to find “read” button.
Thanks for the pointer to the book, quite interesting so far.
The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful.
I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations.
If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't.
EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it.
EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.
One of the books that I liked was: In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People and Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People
I just lived for my last semester of undergrad with two people like this who really got on each others' nerves (all three of us just needed a semester of housing to finish school). They'd both brought their own toasters and just wanted theirs out and the others in a cabinet. I think they had less than 5 conversations in person, instead putting all their incredibly minor complaints in a group text so I'd have to see it. The bathroom just had two towel hangers and they both wanted to hang two towels and would put the other's on the floor even if it was just wet. One would go away for the weekend and try to calculate that they should pay 5% less in utilities for the month because of that. They'd buy something like paper towels and announce that we each owed them $1.50 for that. We had a mail slot and they'd pick up their mail off the floor when they got home and then step on everyone else's.
My only solace is that these people must be incredibly unhappy all the time.
I’ve never had problems like this. I had a policy with flat mates which was. If you put food in the fridge, expect me to eat it, if I put food in the fridge, I expect you to eat it, I’m not going to argue about fridge space or who bought what. It’s not worth the time and effort.
One of the most important tools we have for social encounters like interviewing a stranger as a potential new roommate is our "gut" reaction, which is our hard-won evolutionary instincts warning us of potential danger -- warning that something is off about the person or their situation.
I completely disagree. I think our "gut" is infinitely biased. No one is immune. If you believe you do not have racial, ethnic, and gender biases you are wrong.
And, if you read the article, everyone's gut reaction was that this man was an unassuming, down to earth, great guy, and they got along with him very well at first. The article makes clear that their gut reaction failed them.
One rule of thumb that's served me well: the sooner someone brings negativity and hard luck stories into your interactions, the more negativity they'll bring into your life.
I was just reading "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Jung who argued for somewhat of the same attitude in his book.
What you are calling the "gut" he called the unconscious and his argument was that the unconscious was composed of primitive brain structures that evolved over millions of years for good reason and that provide valuable intuition.
It's remarkable how much the "rationalist" side of HN responding to you coincides with critics he described in his book who fail to understand the value of intuition.
Just the thought of being forced out of my house, or even having it invaded confrontationally by someone like this who is relentless and antagonistic, immediately gives me the gut reaction that if I take a baseball bat at night, catch him while he's sleeping, and beat him badly enough to the point where I can safely call the cops and claim I just defended myself after he tried to drag me into his room and I grabbed a bat, what's his recourse? I play a convincing victim of assault, and he's got what to counter it, a serial history of manipulation while recuperating in the hospital? I might even call the cops a few times leading up to the big night with fake domestic violence complaints just to butter it up even better in preparation for it. I can't be the only one who thinks along these lines.
Huh, as I started reading I was thinking "I've had some pretty bad roommates, I wonder if this is worse." About a quarter of the way through I realized this is way worse.
About three quarters of the way through I was filled with dread as I was pretty sure it wasn't going to end well.
It's crazy how people who were terrorized by this guy blame themselves for the fact that he turned out to be a murderer, and couldn't take the punishment. Must have been a master at gaslighting.
i think this is due to two human traits/biases, 1) seeing something wildly out of the norm leads to doubts about one's perceptual abilities immediately after the fact (in other words, did I just see that happen, I know I saw it, but that can't have been what just happened...) and unless you write down careful notes immediately you will doubt that it actually happened. 2) people want to be right because it makes them feel safer that the world they know is the world they live in, hence people will hold out hope that all the weirdness can be explained away (and sometimes it can).
Most people aren't psychopaths. The man was crazy, but he was still a person and didn't deserve to die.
You should celebrate the fact that even people who he antagonized were upset by his death. Even if they reacted irrationally, at least they reacted at all.
Imagine being his brother. Yikes. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to feel a sense of familial duty toward such a person. Those tenants were entrapped for sure, but I get the feeling none of them were as trapped as his brother was.
I housed a guy temporarily who was eerily similar to this. Reading this article rings too many bells. Very good looking. Mysterious past, including pretending to have a law degree (he had taken a bunch of law classes and rambled as if he were an expert). He was being chased by the Columbians and the Jews with a truly absurd story behind it. Used encrypted phone apps. Stalking his ex girlfriend at an expensive nightclub once a week. I could go on. Things got a little old after awhile but we had quite a few fun adventures together and he wasn't (at least then) violent. I would be highly unsurprised if he eventually turns violent when he gets older and he questions his own delusions of grandeur.
Moral of the story: be very careful of who you let into your home and personal life. It sounds easy until you find out the hard way for yourself. Trust your instinct if it's good, if not, always make sure close friends and family are aware of any strangers you're bringing into your life, even if they seem innocuous at first.
"... they handed him the Rubbermaid bins and Abigail. But Bachman was enraged when they declined to give back Zachary — they had sent him to live with a woman in the suburbs, and the judge had permitted her to keep him. "
God, that hurt. I actually do feel sorry for this man.
[+] [-] subroutine|8 years ago|reply
"Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)"
I looked into it...
The Times Shreveport, Louisiana 31 Jan 1976
https://goo.gl/E7za2q
[+] [-] whack|8 years ago|reply
As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.
[+] [-] maaaats|8 years ago|reply
That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.
And giving people housing is important, that's why the laws often favor the person renting, not the owner. The laws is a risk you have to take if you want to rent out your place. Price it into your rent. Or just don't live in "mortal fear" by not being a master tenant..
[+] [-] sillysaurus3|8 years ago|reply
I hear this and I think "You probably don't know what it's like to be in that situation."
It's often temporary, so a little flexibility fixes the problem.
But yes, sometimes you're right. You just phrased it in a bit of an inhumane way.
[+] [-] dalore|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrischen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffreyrogers|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philfrasty|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wilberto|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danielvf|8 years ago|reply
The lucky ones in the NYmag article here did many of the things he recommends.
Free PDF here, look for the hard to find “read” button.
https://www.gitbook.com/book/hintjens/psychopathcode/details
[+] [-] nwatson|8 years ago|reply
The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful.
I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations.
If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't.
EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it.
EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650682
[+] [-] monksy|8 years ago|reply
One of the books that I liked was: In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People and Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People
[+] [-] blablabla123|8 years ago|reply
In any case Pieter Hintjens is genius!
[+] [-] kinleyd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_4321|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PascLeRasc|8 years ago|reply
My only solace is that these people must be incredibly unhappy all the time.
[+] [-] quickthrower2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|8 years ago|reply
Did you even read the article?
[+] [-] ryguytilidie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0x7f800000|8 years ago|reply
Trust your gut.
[+] [-] mtgex|8 years ago|reply
And, if you read the article, everyone's gut reaction was that this man was an unassuming, down to earth, great guy, and they got along with him very well at first. The article makes clear that their gut reaction failed them.
[+] [-] smelendez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r3vo|8 years ago|reply
What you are calling the "gut" he called the unconscious and his argument was that the unconscious was composed of primitive brain structures that evolved over millions of years for good reason and that provide valuable intuition.
It's remarkable how much the "rationalist" side of HN responding to you coincides with critics he described in his book who fail to understand the value of intuition.
[+] [-] lr4444lr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artificial|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] M_Bakhtiari|8 years ago|reply
http://archive.is/K9s6G
[+] [-] Grangar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SuperNinKenDo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrunkel|8 years ago|reply
About three quarters of the way through I was filled with dread as I was pretty sure it wasn't going to end well.
Excellent writing..
[+] [-] simen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itronitron|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdfjkhiuj|8 years ago|reply
You should celebrate the fact that even people who he antagonized were upset by his death. Even if they reacted irrationally, at least they reacted at all.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|8 years ago|reply
edit: but way crazier. Good grief.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EdgarVerona|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghthor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aje403|8 years ago|reply
Moral of the story: be very careful of who you let into your home and personal life. It sounds easy until you find out the hard way for yourself. Trust your instinct if it's good, if not, always make sure close friends and family are aware of any strangers you're bringing into your life, even if they seem innocuous at first.
[+] [-] QML|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creep|8 years ago|reply
God, that hurt. I actually do feel sorry for this man.
[+] [-] jsl1212|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] js2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dannylandau|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rweba|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LearnerHerzog|8 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/qXUq2eX.jpg
[+] [-] imjk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benatkin|8 years ago|reply
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