Background for people who don't know what this is about like me:

> DeBoer is a blogger of what I would call the “dissident Left.” I would describe him as a committed socialist who is also a committed civil libertarian and has often had sharp critiques of the Left as well as the Right. He’s on the SlateStarCodex blog roll and he often pops up as a point of discussion (or even as a commenter in the replies) on SSC.

> About a year ago (after the accusations) he announced he was leaving writing for a while, as we discussed on this subreddit.

> Finally, Malcom Harris, the man he falsely accused, has responded here.

It’s kind of a shit lot in life, but you get good at making new friends. Eventually you can get it under control enough to build a life that works. But it’s a messy process to get there.

People with bipolar disorders are essentially two very different people. You'd be foolish to trust someone in the middle of a manic episode, but and they can be great friends and very trustworthy when in normal-mode.

The problem is that you have to know which mode they're operating in.

In general, I think trust is the wrong rubric for living with humans. It's better to have faith. In reality, people make horrible decisions and do monstrous things all the time, especially neurotypical people, and if you can only trust people who will not make terrible choices, you should trust no-one. History proves that the vast majority of people, in the right circumstances, will do astonishing and awful things.

It makes more sense to treat it as a moral good in and of itself to trust other people, no matter if they let you down or not. That's the key insight of having faith in the people around you. Maybe they will let you down, maybe they won't, but suffering for an overabundance of faith is a worthwhile kind of suffering.

Social media are clearly magnifying the negative consequences of mental health issues. The problems the author describes are compounded by the fact that many other people know what happened.

What I'm curious about, though, is the opposite. To what extent are social media increasing the severity of mental health issues themselves? I can imagine a kind of positive feedback loop, with social media triggering aspects of an illness, and acting out through social media amplifying the damage caused.

It is a double edged sword. The internet serves to amplify the extremes. At least that is the conclusion I draw.

But in total, I would say some social media platforms are worse than others. I long for the calmness and organization of the old MyBB forums.

I have no desire to converse with certain ideological groups on certain sides of certain issues but to silence (in relative terms) the ones arguing their side effectively endangers the community's ability to think critically.

> I'll write something, it will accumulate a couple to several upvotes, and then, those upvotes all go away over the course of a few more hours, sometimes to be replaced by net downvotes.

Maybe your initial upvotes come from one type of user and the later downvotes come from another type?

Starting about six months ago, I noticed that a lot of low-quality comments were getting voted up on HN. I feel disappointed. Previously, I would spend my downvotes on comments that tried to contribute but contained some error of analysis or logic. I would add a reply explaining the problem, or upvote an existing reply that did that. Nowadays, I spend my downvotes on comments that are low-effort: jokes, opinions with no explanation, knee-jerk reactions, ignorant positions, baseless assumptions, and emotional appeals. I dislike reading those kinds of comments.

I looked over some of your recent comments. I think some of them are low-effort. Example:

> Whoever thought not fixing a remote code execution bug just so they could use it to do something as trivial as tell the difference between their client and others should have been fired.

I think you're initially getting upvoted by people who are OK with low-effort comments. These folks spend a lot of time on HN and refresh to see new comments. They vote up your comment because they like reading comments. Then later, busier people read the story and downvote the low-effort comments. I think this is why you're getting initially upvoted and then downvoted.

Even if true, it doesn't explain why it suddenly started happening some weeks ago and wasn't happening before.

With relation to mental illness, this issue becomes exacerbated. The anomie, or separation from the human race, is almost intolerable on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. All of it feeds into the grinder of selling more widgets and moving more product.

Is this truly the case, or is it that there we less average people in online communities in the past? Online scams, lying, and deceit have been a thing since online was a thing-- why else would we have nigerian prince, rickrolling, or the term "trolling" otherwise?

As an analogy, I consider photosensitive epilepsy. It is unlikely that the genetic cause of epilepsy is somehow a recent mutation; we can assume that an average human a thousand years ago would have been approximately as susceptible as a human today. But for nearly the full history of humanity it would have been relatively rare for someone to suffer an episode of photosensitive epilepsy, because of the lack of environmental triggers. It's not impossible for a flame from a fire or a candle to trigger an episode, but the irregular frequency of the flickering flame means the risk is much lower. It wasn't until electric lighting, and later television, that the environment was suddenly primed to interact with a condition that had quietly existed in humanity for untold ages. To some degree, the modern prevalence of photosensitive epilepsy was a direct result of technology.

So it may be with social media. I wonder if there was some predisposition to madness that had lain dormant in human brains for thousands of years, and is only now coming to the fore as a direct result of the environment that we have created with our technological advancements.

Note that he nearly got arrested for unrelated conduct. It was not social media issue.

All that’s to say: you’re right, but with social media the problems are exacerbated because the incentives demand it.

Throwing blame back on other people for not understanding your hardships is self-serving and a fundamentally dismissive attitude. Mental issues do not absolve actions. You feel that you are not fully responsible for your actions and that is actually fine - but as a person who caused harm you should own your ACTIONS, full stop.

"I fucked up. I had a mental break and caused hurt to others.I am sorry for those actions and I am working to better handle my mental issues."

Since they ask at the end what people want, it is simply that. Accept that you are the person that did these acts and hurt others. Forgive yourself for doing it, (internally) but don't deny responsibility.

If it helps, blame your Public Self for being an asshole while your True Self can empathize with those hurt by Public Self. Right now you can't empathize because you are so concerned about deflecting blame from yourself. But blame is shitty and doesn't help anything - ignore blame and accept responsibility for your actions.

Things can't improve until you do that first.

This seems to be an admission of responsibility to me.

> I did something very wrong, and the complication of my mental disorder should not excuse me entirely from blame for those actions. The degree to which any individual weighs that complication will have to be a matter of their individual ethical sense. Everyone has the right to make up their own mind about whether I should be forgiven or not. These issues are very complex, and I have had to wrestle with my culpability for my actions when manic for a long time. It’s not easy. It’s perfectly legitimate to weigh my mental illness as context and still conclude that I deserve to have social ties severed. I did in fact lose some real friends over what happened, they made their decisions in full light of my condition and history, and I can only respect that stance and hope that one day they might reconsider.

> ...

> I have not asked for absolution; I have asked for forgiveness. I have asked for forgiveness knowing that only guilty people have the right to ask such a thing. I am guilty of doing something terrible, and I know that some will always judge me harshly for it. I cannot ask them to do otherwise if they are moved to do so by their conscience.

> I am saying that it is a lie to say that I had a particular outcome in mind because I was operating under the antilogic of psychosis. I know because I’m me and I was there. I’m sorry if this is inconvenient for your efforts to develop simplistic moral readings about what happened, but I assure you my psychotic disorder is harder on me than it is on you...You have no idea what was happening in my brain and no right to speak as if you do.

This is the self-serving part that makes the apology meaningless to those who have been affected. It doesn't help that it is full of blaming ("it is a lie", "You have no idea") and condescending language ("I'm sorry if this is inconvenient...") This is a defense response and isn't an attempt to de-escalate the situation, respond with empathy or take any real responsibility.

If I ran over your dog with my car I wouldn't say I'm "a little bit responsible" but "actually your dog shouldn't have been running in the road", right?

People are entitled to form their own opinions about deBoer's credibility, and he is not entitled to set conditions on how they do that.

A lie is "[leaving] out the important context"

The most effective way to lie is to use facts. Selectively

But I also wouldn't rule out the idea that even if our speaking about people as a single consciousness is a gross over-simplification it might be a better strategy for society at large.

(Disclosure: currently reading A Thousand Brains and Society of Mind and very much under the influence of the many minds idea at present)

It's a hard thing to accept, but if you're wronged by someone in a state of psychosis, there is no true malice.

Does it change everything? Certainly not.

Change in trust in particular is a hard thing to determine here. You should trust that they're experiencing what they say they are. You should not trust that their statements are factual.

Change in response? It's the difference between if you should seek to get them help or muster some compassion versus whatever you might do if it was a healthy person acting out of malice.

That being said, mentally ill people can still be assholes, and can still act out of malice. So there's that. And that makes situations even more difficult to figure out.

Context matters. The facts matter. Not just, "did you do this or not".

> I don't have to consider that counterfactual, since deBoer himself stated clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them

My understanding of that was that you saw the fact that “ clearly that he knew the accusations he was making were false at the time he made them” as a reason to disregard the counterfactual. Can you explain what you meant by that other than the suggestion that the latter half of that sentence was sufficiently inconsistent with schizophrenia as to render the comparison meaningless?

When it comes to psychosis, your knowledge and your actions can become completely disconnected. For my manic episodes, I'm fully conscious and aware of what I'm doing, with no ability to stop what I'm doing. I'm in the passenger seat of a car driving off the cliff.

And I have to admit I’m curious about what line you’d draw with other situations of omitting information to make one’s argument more persuasive. Do you feel writers are honest when they emphasize the increased rate of myocarditis cases in teens who take the COVID vaccine, while not including the fact that teens who get infected with COVID have even higher rates? I think you’re setting a pretty high bar for considering something misinformation in a way that is highly detrimental for forming accurate world views.

Sometimes you have no choice.

Are you suggesting that he may not even be bipolar?

I don't know what conditions he's set, he's just asking people to include context. Context which completely changes how most people would view that incident.

Maybe "unambiguously a lie" is a too strong and you can't tell a lie by taking an action out of context, but if you can this is it.

In many cases it is simply a lie - of the exact kind he complains about here.

That’s the condition that he set!

But it is certainly misleading to make these claims about deBoer's actions without context. If this is intentional, then it is intentionally misleading. I wonder if there's a word for that.

People who suffer from psychosis do not behave in a reasonable manner. A psychosis is a medical emergency. It's like complaining that someone caused a traffic accident without mentioning they had a heart attack.

(Disclaimer: I have never heard of deBoer before, and for the sake of discusion I am going to assume he did in fact suffer from a psychotic episode)

What if I don’t believe his narrative _AT ALL_? Am I a liar then? All I’ve read here is a guy insisting that it’s unfair to dislike him. I certainly don’t trust his intellectual honesty, why on earth would I be compelled to believe his narrative simply because he insists that it’s hurting him that I don’t?

Whether some individual is actually doing what he describes has a lot more room for ambiguity.

>we should all be able to agree

If we were all able to agree, this conversation wouldn't be here.

Coincidentally I've been discussing this very issue the past week. I asked the question "when is it lying to say something that is true?"

The example I gave someone was this: You sleep in and arrive late to work. When asked "why are you late" you respond with "traffic was terrible, there was a crash and a backup" which is actually true on that day. The statement is true, but it may in fact be a lie. If you overslept so much that you would have been late regardless of traffic then what you've said is "I'm late because of traffic" which is a lie because you would have been late regardless of traffic. Excuses are often this kind of lie. Sometimes a true statement is a partial truth, but not the larger one that is being concealed while saying it.

Another example: A friend is a therapist and someone in his office died and they're sending all the deceased clients (patients) to others in the office. They've been instructed to tell the patients that their therapist no longer works there as a reason for the change. Is that a lie? I think so even though it's technically true. They fear some people will be too upset at the truth. But IMHO therapists lie too much already and when this "lie" comes to light the clients will be even more devastated than just telling them the truth. My recommendation of course is not to follow those instructions - have some integrity.

TLDR: When is it a lie to say something that is true?

The difficulty is in agreeing on or proving what those words were in that specific context, and whether the speaker knew it. It could instead of a case of mismatched assumptions based on different cultural backgrounds, which you see addressed in a lot of advice about working in other countries.

All of them? Every single one? Wow, harsh.

I kid, of course; my point in taking your words of context is to say that context always matters. People may be "entitled" to form a negative opinion of you based on my misleading out-of-context quotation of your words, but it seems pretty unambiguous that they'd be wrong to do so.

That said, it would be nice if Freddie had been responding to a specific person, whom he quoted, so that we could tell whether he was taking them out of context.

I'm going to rankly speculate you did this because, "I am a Hacker News and I can condemn anyone for any reason I goddamned please," while a valid counterargument, would have been a bad look.

> People are ..not entitled to... do that.

Externalities matter.

Inner peace is whether those families can come to terms with what happened and be happy, or whether they will live in emotional turmoil forever.

But when he say his “psychotic disorder is harder on me than it is on you” it sounds a bit like the guy who beats his wife while saying “it hurts me more than it hurts you.”

Destigmatization should not be a license for communism/cancel culture.

For context, bipolar is one of the highest suicide risk diseases due to this. When you come out of a manic episode you tend to feel intense shame and guilt for your actions. For reference, 1 in 2 bipolar will attempt suicide in their life. 1 in 5 will successfully end their life in the long run. So it is important to take his real admission of guilt and request for forgiveness into account.

Mental illness or not, there's no excuse for these kinds of false accusations. It's certainly understandable given Freddie's condition. But us understanding why it happened doesn't ethically justify their actions, and it also doesn't relieve the perpetrators from the consequences of their actions.

"To those of you who are not people I harmed in my psychotic episode in August 2017… what is it you think I owe you?" - What I'd like is to simply not hear from this person in public again. I don't want them to have any sort of public social power, given their capability to totally ruin an innocent person's life.

Get a job, like most of the rest of us, and stop being a public figure. That's what I'd like

My point here is that there are many life destroying accusations. And they have been used against variety of people.

> What I'd like is to simply not hear from this person in public again

You're perfectly free to wear headphones in public, and stop reading anything authored by them.

>Get a job, like most of the rest of us

Nice ableism. Do you understand that severe mental illness can be a disability? Would you tell a person without legs to walk up the stairs like the rest of us?

How nice it must be atop your pedestal.

We don’t let people with severe mental disorders work with guns because they’re a risk to others. While I would not agree with having the law involved here, if he is really sorry, one would expect him to not place himself in a position where he can cause severe distress to others would he fail again to manage his illness.

> Nice ableism. Do you understand that severe mental illness can be a disability?

We are still talking about someone writing for the NYT, he is probably well able to write professionally in other fields like marketing.

A blind person should not be driving, regardless of how "ableist" this opinion makes me. Likewise, a mentally ill man with a history of life altering slander should not be writing for a public platform.

Because as it turns out mental illness is part of a protected class, and that's a big deal in employment law.

The solution here isn't limiting his freedom of speech, it's accommodating with a fact checker of some sort.

Who are ones that ruin an innncent person's live? It is one who falsely accused, or those who immediatey accept such accusations instead of wait for result of investigation?

In some sense people of sound mind who uncritically accept such accusation and act on that have more responsibility for their actions than a person who did the false accusation during a psychotic break.

> Get a job, like most of the rest of us, and stop being a public figure. That's what I'd like

This seems a bit harsh. Are you saying that anyone who has done something wrong should be permanently shunned and no longer deserves a voice in society? Should he also fully isolate himself and stop having friends and just not say anything ever again?

Can you imagine being given a drug without you knowing, like meth, which caused you to act bizarre? Everyone would understand that. And it is the same thing with these mental illnesses. But for some reason it is always our fault and we have to apologize. I think Freddie deBoer is self stigmatizing and it is unhealthy.

"In August of 2017 I made totally baseless accusations of sexual misconduct against the writer Malcolm Harris on social media. "

Can anyone provide more (specific) context

I also have zero background knowledge here. Maybe this article just doesn't target us.

In a stand alone 2.5K word article I would expect more than 20 words detailing the transgression.

It's fine to write articles that require knowledge of a controversy. Though, in such cases, I won't have much to say if I don't have that prior knowledge. It does seems a bit odd to have such an article hit the front page.

This. In a lot of circles I move there is a tendency to "total condemnation".

We can be better to each other. When we do not deserve it is when we need it the most.

Peace, love, respect foster peace, love and respect. "Total condemnation" might make the condemner have some temporary good feelings, but does no good for anybody beyond that.

The basic irony of the intellectual community responding to the symptoms of bipolar disorder by carrying out the behavior that is the most characteristic feature of bipolar disorder can't be lost on anyone.

Which, ironically feels more like a bipolar approach to resolving a problem. Are they good, or are they bad? Is it legal, or is it illegal? Are they right, or are they wrong? Do we punish, or do we praise?

There seems to be this strange generalized assumption that people are bipolar, and they are the problem. Completely ignoring the fact that society itself demonstrates some seriously bipolar tendencies. Many times, suggesting "either/or" solutions to problems that would really benefit from more nuance.

Sometimes the best answer is: ¯\_(?)_/¯

Is Freddie DeBoer still worthy of condemnation?

As an uninvolved party, I think the wisest answer for me to give is: Meh ¯\_(?)_/¯.

There seems to be this tendency that people who only learned about something 5 minutes ago get outrage and demand retribution. Like it's a reflex.

The mob has vigilante tendencies. Let's go write an email to someone's employer and demand that they fire them. Millions of people band together and demand justice. For what?

Some of the angry people have been there whole time and are actually the ones having to deal with it.

He does? I'm not seeing that in any of the posts by Malcolm Harris that have been referenced in this thread.

Retweeted recently

It looks to me as though he is a victim of a bunch of social vigilantes who have nothing to do with the original situation.

The ‘original victim’ would be better off if these vigilantes weren’t involving themselves in the situation.

This is what "original victim" retweeted again, like yesterday.

> who have nothing to do with the original situation.

Speaking about lies, you made that up. It is assumption based on what you want to be true.

> Speaking about lies, you made that up. It is assumption based on what you want to be true.

What did I make up? Are you connected to the original situation? If so, please explain your connection. If you are an interested party in this, it would be honest for you to explain that now.

And/or for the likes/retweets/upvotes.

Makes me wonder how much of the wild conduct we see online is mental illness and if more empathy would help. Or at least calling in a mental health check up.

Some excerpts: "Crucially, despite my mental state at the time, I knew when I sent those tweets that they were untrue. I am responsible for having made those false allegations, and that makes me a liar, it makes me guilty of slander, and it makes me someone who undermined the profound seriousness of rape allegations."

". I have abandoned all social media permanently. I have stopped freelance writing. I have in general tried to permanently remove myself from online life and from the world of political writing in which Malcolm resides and I once resided. These changes are not attempts to make up for what I’ve done, really; they are just matters of self-preservation as I try to build a life where I do not cause harm to people anymore. I have fully committed to constant treatment, and I have fully committed to going away. I am so profoundly sorry"

I remember reading this at the time and feeling the pain through the screen. He seemed genuinely ashamed.

Here's Freddie's more recent explanation for why he tried to remove his apology from the internet: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/statement

He says he doesn't care if we find it on the wayback machine, but someone had to go out of their way to exclude it (https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://fredrikdeboer.com/2018...)

Here's Harris' contemporaneous reaction: https://twitter.com/bigmeaninternet/status/10471296316970475...

My feeling is that the initial apology has been undermined by a) trying to memory hole it and b) writing all these blog posts quasi-defending himself. Would be nice if Freddie and his IDW friends displayed such forbearance and grace for the college students and journalists they make their living attacking. Perhaps those people are going through some mental issues as well.

The good news is, Freddie seems to be doing better than ever. He got a fat advance from Substack and even just had an op-ed published in the liberal New York Times.

You're wide of the mark there. De Boer was never part of the IDW. He might criticize some of the things they do, but he's coming from a different starting point entirely.

https://mobile.twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/status/1372530096...

He is not appreciating what DeBoer does now and don't think he follows amends he promised.

> I would def settle for never having to think about it again, but clearly Freddie isn't going to "go away" like he first promised he would, so I'm sorta stuck here with that while he cashes in on self-pity.

And, if you click on the 2018 link, Harris quotes DeBoer writing

> I have abandoned all social media permanently. I have stopped freelance writing. I have in general tried to permanently remove myself from online life and from the world of political writing in which Malcolm resides and I once resided. [...] I have fully committed to constant treatment, and I have fully committed to going away.

So, I mean, yes, Harris absolutely says what commitments deBoer is breaking. That you had to take the extra 60 seconds to follow the links is not a failure on Harris's part. :)

Now, there are all sorts of questions this raises about "how long of 'going away' is enough" and "is expecting permanent exile from public life reasonable." As near as I can tell, though, deBoer decided that the correct answer to "how long is enough" is "about 12 months." It doesn't seem unreasonable to me for Harris to be looking at that a bit askance.

This is an unreasonable commitment for deboer to have made. Yes, he made it. No, that doesn’t make it realistic.

It’s fairly obvious that expecting someone to exile themselves from public view for the rest of their life is absurd and unreasonable.

Even if DeBoer said he would do that, it doesn’t mean it’s reasonable for Harris to expect it.

If Harris thinks 12 months is not enough, he can say that.

Now DeBoer is actively repeatedly bringing Harris thing up, doing opposite of getting away from Harris life.

He can’t control what other people do, and if they keep bringing it up, it’s not unreasonable for him to respond.

> It's absolutely a failure on Harris's part.

Let me be clearer: Harris stated exactly what you said he didn't state. You either failed to click the link or dismissed it. That you do not agree with what Harris said does not mean he didn't say it.

> If Harris thinks 12 months is not enough, he can say that.

It's obvious he thinks that, and I'm pretty sure you know that, even if he didn't use those literal words. You're implicitly criticizing Harris for an ungenerous reading of deBoer's commitment ("obviously it's absurd and unreasonable to expect he really meant 'permanently' when he wrote 'permanently'"), which I don't object to -- but I do object to you not in turn extending the same generosity to Harris.

For whatever it's worth, I doubt "permanent exile" is reasonable, either. But barely a year later deBoer was writing for the Washington Post and the New York Times, publishing a best-selling book, and starting a newsletter that now brings in a six-figure income. Barely two years on and deBoer is writing, in so many words, "I've already apologized, why won't all you cancel-culture jerks leave me alone".

So, yeah, sorry: if I was Harris, I would probably be tempted to make a few tweets questioning just how sincere deBoer was about the whole apology thing.

He means to fool small minds with circuitous language, confusing the crowd so they let him regain the status he desperately craves.

Believing you can read someone else’s mind is a diagnostic criterion for psychosis.

If he truly feels sorry, he just needs to move on. He seems to understand what he did was foul. Well then, move forward, be a good man to all the new people in your life. Instead, he craves absolution (and, reading between the lines, acceptance). No human being can be cajoled into extending that. It's truly foolish to expect people can be argued into extending that.

In fact, what he really needs to do, is that he himself needs to forgive the people being mean to him, who have rejected him. When he can do that, only then he can free himself from this burden.

Good luck Freddie!

But it's true that his writing seems to drift between extremes -- some sober, well-researched and very interesting, and others almost as if a different person was writing it.

The article you linked is bizarre. He's actually arguing against himself in places. Interesting, and thanks for the link.

2. He does extend empathy to others. Have you read his writing?

3. Freddie is repentent of his sins, whereas many in the PC/woke crowd are not. There can be no real forgiveness where there is not first repentance.

I’m not familiar with this guy or the 2017 incident but based off of a cursory Google it looks like he’s kind of famous for having ~edgy opinions~ about race and intelligence.

It’s entirely likely that people dislike him for this reason and not because of some old tweets. This piece is some amazing performative bullshit that somehow accuses anybody that dislikes him (or doesn’t care to read his writing) of being insensitive to mental health issues. If you don’t like his opinions, you’re actively victimizing everyone with bipolar disorder! There’s no other possible interpretation!

I've been on the receiving end of someone with mental health issues slagging me undeservedly who at some point got the help they needed. And part of that was asking 'forgiveness' from those they'd wronged. When they asked me I had to 'think deeply' about it and in the end I couldn't simply say "sure, we're good". Because the mental health thing might have been the 'reason' or 'excuse', possibly even 'mitigation', but it doesn't in any way fix the damage done. It doesn't fix a damaged reputation. It doesn't change the opinions of the people you convinced I'm a bad person in one of your 'episodes'. This whole thing reads like "Hey...I know I burned down your house, killed your dog and stole your car and I own that...but I was going through a rough patch and you're a bad person if you don't just let it go. Oh...and never tell anyone about the arson, theft and the rest, because, you know, couldn't help myself and if you do you're the bad person".

I do want to be sympathetic to someone whose done wrong, has gotten help, and wants to own past transgressions. We all have things we should atone for. I just don't think that's what this article is really asking for.

What I find curious is the trend to isolate some condition and how it is not part of some self-defined 'normal me,' thereby abating the guilt for the whole of 'me'. Unfortunately, in my view, mental conditions like this are very much part of a person (that's precisely why it is so difficult to get rid of such conditions) and thus there is no reduction of said guilt for the 'me'.

I recall the age-old defense of abusive behaviors: "it's the hormones, not me." No. Those hormones are very much part of you. And they are your moral and physical responsibility.

Nevertheless, my intellectual model of what constitutes a self does not preclude me from extending my sympathy and condolences to the author. I wish him embrace and tame the inner demon. I wish him peace.

Fair enough. I revoke my opinion that he had any agency. Further, I revoke the my notion that at any moment he had agency over his actions, including the drafting of this particular article.

It is a horrible disease that takes away the I-ness of I. I am in relationships with the deeply mentally diseased. It takes all I have.

In the case of Mr. deBoer, the most energy I can muster henceforth is to actively ignore everything so that I do not have to unwind everything later. I will save my willingness to unwind my trust for the people in my life who truly need it from me. Mr. deBoer certainly has enough attention without mine.

As the GP indicated and other commenters pointed out, he's trying to play on our sympathies for mental illness in an incoherent attempt at regaining social status.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29270427

I’ll start: I think his opinions are wrong and bad, and I sincerely doubt that the people that take issue with him do so explicitly because of what to place in 2017. This strikes me as a deliberate misdirect to enable his victimhood.

And to answer his question: “What do you want from me?”

Answer:

“Nothing. I want nothing at all from you. I want to stop hearing racist dogwhistle bullshit from big publications (even if the racist dog whistle bullshit is written by somebody that suffers from mental health issues.) My issue isn’t with you, it’s with the folks that pay you.

Will I go out of my way to undermine your career? No. I will probably not think of the Poor Abused Race Scientist ever again after today, but should I somehow come across your writings on the future, I’ll decline to read it. It’s kind of sad that you view this opinion as some sort of hate crime, but that’s not my problem.”

I asked his defenders if they support his views on race science, and brought up the possibility that people dislike him for reasons other than the 2017 event.

Your position is that it’s impolite to bring up a writer’s body of work because… why?

Edit: It’s kind of hard not to interpret your post as “I believe in race science and it makes me uncomfortable to be asked a question like that so plainly, so I will fall back on calling you rude.”

No, just that one topic. It has this uncanny ability to produce unconstructive discussions where people talk past each other and accuse each other of all manner of things they didn't say...

Also, I don’t think “the whole race/IQ debate” is a real thing that people engage in for germane reasons, so you didn’t do a stellar job not answering the question :)

It’s fascinating that you cannot actually respond to my original post at all, yet are compelled to post nonetheless. I admire your sense of civic duty, because it’s definitely not some silly nonsense meant to avoid discussing the subject matter that I’ve brought up in order to carry water for an apparently quite-popular race scientist.

Let’s try a fun experiment:

Can you respond to this question?: “Considering the fact that the guy that’s whining about not being liked enough happens to write about race science, do you think maybe that that could contribute to people not liking him?”

To clarify, it’s a yes or no question as to whether or not you’re capable of answering that question in the negative or affirmative.

Also I didn’t call you a racist, I implied that you may (for a kaleidoscope’s worth of possible reasons) be going out of your way defending one. There are plenty of reasons that people carry water for racist kooks that don’t involve being in the club! I’m not sure what you’ve gotten from this interaction aside from maybe scoring points with some folks that don’t take issue with race science.

Not everybody is a full blown racist, there are also enthusiastic lackeys for those that are. There are people that will defend horrible shit because it makes them look cool in their social groups, hoping to gain points with folks that will literally never notice them, for example.

Edit: it’s genuinely hilarious in a non-ironic actual belly laugh way that folks can show up and pretend to be Above It All when it comes to little details about their brazen statements in support of their uh, beliefs? Required line of discourse from an employer or hopeful friend?

You showed up, gave me unsolicited “advice” to make sure I don’t get downvoted, and you got mad when I pointed out that I never asked for that advice.

And you still literally cannot answer a yes or no question. I wish you well in the future, particularly about your behavior and allegiances :)

My question was literally posing a yes or no question, then asking whether or not you were capable of answering that yes or no question. It’s a trip that you’re someho we incapable of answering whether or not you’re allowed to answer the yes or no question (I didn’t require that you answer the other question. I just asked if you were allowed to answer it in the first place. )

It’s a simple question: What do you think about this race science guy that you’re defending? “Good” would be an answer, “Bad but I support his speech” would be an answer, but a refusal to respond at all while still attacking me kind of reads as “I agree with race science but do not want to admit so publicly”

But you’re way smarter than me, so clearly your response is something so fancy that not even text posted on the internet could convey your nuanced definitely-not-racist opinion. It’s so fancy and nuanced that only folks of your… “caliber” could understand?

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It’s genuinely not a hard prompt to follow

I also think that you are unreasonably dismissing the possibility that people take issues with him for reasons other than his opinions. Your contributions in this thread seem to argue that one can either think his mental illness is a cunning distraction and irrelevant because he is such a bad person OR his opinions are good. It is a bad argument.

He publicly holds very polarizing (and ridiculous) views on issues that directly affect people’s day to day lives, but I’m not thinking straight because I don’t immediately buy the idea that he’s _just_ being bullied for other reasons?

Maybe folks that he victimized during his psychotic break could also hate him for his opinions, but that’s not really a possibility that he mentions. The tone of good article is such that he implies that the main thing that contributes to people not wanting to consume his writing is a singular event 4 years ago. People seem really averse to admitting that maybe, as a human being, he’s not only a victim of bullying from an old event, but also just experiencing the predictable professional fallout from having ghoulish ideals and peddling truly harmful nonsense.

Or am I supposed to care more about the arbitrary, possibly imagined bullying than the plain-as-day “yeah I can see why folks would hate this guy” thought that occurred to me as soon as I read his stuff?

This whole blog post is a petulant child stamping his feet and crying out that it’s unfair that he’s not as well liked as he feels entitled to be. Sorry if that’s not something that I feel overwhelmed with the urge to capitulate to.

Did we read the same post? I see someone acknowledging that there are real and valid reasons to dislike him. The main thrust is a request for accuracy when spreading information about those reasons.

My bad! I didn’t know that I was criticizing the one and only arbiter of truth. Why wasn’t that fact included in the title?

That's what they expect, what they demand. But this guy can't say "I learned" or "Here's my case for why I am ready to be trusted again." Not honestly.

In my past (thankfully not recently) I've had to do a somewhat dishonest apology where I said I had "learned" that X was wrong and I wouldn't do it again, when really what I had learned was that I needed to manage my depression more carefully so that I wouldn't get into a state where doing X seemed like the only bearable option even though I knew it would disappoint people.

In my case, it was possible for me to insulate people from dealing with my depression directly, by translating my apology into terms that were comfortable for them. I could recite the script they wanted to hear, because I could honestly say the important parts, "I learned, and I'm ready to be trusted again," because the trajectory of my depression is something I understand pretty well. I was just replacing the true details with the details they expected.

This guy can't really do that, so he can't conform to the script. He can't "learn" that it's bad to have a psychotic episode, he can't "learn" how not to do it, he can only learn not to ignore his psychiatrist and not to go off his meds, and I think deep down he knows that if the effectiveness of his medication drops, because of a change in his underlying condition or some other factor, his judgment may be impaired to the point where he can't be trusted to keep taking it.

I think what probably rubs people the wrong way is that he won't say he's responsible for what he did in the way they want him to say he's responsible. It makes sense to me that he won't say it, because that would be claiming that he is capable of being responsible in a manic state which is a potentially dangerous and damaging lie. I understand him not being willing to say that, even under duress.

I think that's part of why the mental health acceptance movement is quite tricky, and not super-successful.

Trusted to have a job? Get invited to dinner parties? Live without surveillance? Be in a position of responsibility over others, or to influence others?

It seems like we profoundly don't have answers to this from diverse groups like former felons, those with some record of prior bigotry/misogyny, mentally ill, those with divergent ideologies and more.

However, you can be held responsible for failing to manage your known mental illness.

I've worked with several people who have mental illnesses. I don't hold a grudge against them for things they said and did when experiencing a paranoid delusion. I do hold them responsible for managing their illness in the future.

Tell what were you thinking, and people will judge for themselves.