This is absurd. Society can't function if knowing things about suspects is off limits. What are we children?
There's laws against crime of the sort you imply. We know the guy did something and that he exists. If people can't handle learning details about someone's background without doing something illegal, those people deserve to be behind bars too...not dictating information censorship for the rest of us.
I think that it’s bad to amplify extremist views (see the number of shooters who glorify the Christchurch killer). In this case I don’t think that’s a huge risk, though.
I believe the idea is to prevent the perpetrators of such crimes from benefitting from the publicity caused by their crime. There's been a big movement to try to get news organizations to focus more on the victims of crimes.
(I have no personal expertise to judge whether this is an effective approach or not. Just expressing what I suspect may be the reasoning.)
Looking at his website it seems like the attacker was a mental break looking for a place to happen. His entire about me was the embodiment of the "I am an atheist" meme.
Feel bad for the victim, couldn't imagine just going about my day and then getting stabbed out of nowhere.
Of course, that meme exists because there's plenty of "I am very smart" self-proclaimed atheists out there that don't run amok like this guy apparently did.
I find it unlikely that somebody randomly shanks someone a dozen times just because of stress, in a workplace environment.
Surely these two gentleman either knew each other and something had happened, OR the attacker knew the victim and there was some sort of issue, romantic or something like that to where he would've been angry enough to try and kill this other man.
Of course Microsoft is going to say "Oh, they didn't work with each other or know each other as far as we know, this is just a crazy thing that happened" because they want to be left out of this as much as possible. Which is probably fine. I doubt the MS Teams experience is bad enough to kill over, bad as it may be.
I pasted it because this is from a different, newer article than the link that described the attack in more detail and identified the victim. Sorry for the confusion.
If the web page linked in another comment is authentic, the attacker was in a very bad mental state. I don’t think we can completely rule out previous contact, and the attacker was unhappy with his team members, but random chance also seems possible.
I lean towards authentic because a) the journal document is much too long to have been produced quickly, b) the text isn’t lifted from other sources, and c) the website was captured by archive.org in 2019. That last is most important since it’d be relatively trivial to train an AI to produce the kind of disassociated text we see there. Yay, 2022.
And just to get out in front of it: while there are all kinds of conspiracy theories and some racism in that document, I don’t see any ideological consistency and I don’t see accelerationist tendencies. I’m not a professional extremism researcher, mind you.
This one is fairly tasteless but it’s not clear to me whether or not it’s extremist. If the description said you were chasing Anne Frank down, that would be one thing. As is, it’s explicitly framed as pushing the limits of free speech which strikes me as a dumb kid thought exercise.
And it wasn’t important enough for him to list on the standalone games pages.
Now, Prophet Shooter is unambiguously anti-religious, so maybe there’s something there? And he’s got a Trump parody game. I’m not 100% sure here, just leaning against it. It’s also certainly true that sometimes extremism is the result of mental illness looking for some kind of framework to cling to.
Making an Anne Frank game while also praising "Adolf Hitler's bolstering of Nazi Germany in the 1930's" is pretty unambiguous, I'd say. Nothing that a random 8chan user couldn't have come up with "for the lulz" of course, but that website has also been associated with violent acts.
Huh. That honestly struck me as irony, given that it’s in conjunction with his grandmother’s departure from Germany. But I do see your point.
Note that the dates may not be accurate; according to a quick bit of genealogical research, his grandmother Paula married his grandfather in Bavaria in 1955 < https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/b/i/s/Robert-S-Bishop/BOOK-000...>. Could also be that she left Germany and then returned for the wedding, of course.
Paula’s mother’s surname appears to have been Ketzler, which doesn’t tell us a ton about ethnic background. Not that it would tell us much about the attacker in any case, even if that was why she left Germany.
Edit: he had at least a bit of 4chan activity, as per his journal.
Where is that narrative coming from? It doesn't seem to be what the article is pushing.
The perp seems like a nutjob who had a violent melt down, no need for a grander narrative. This sort of thing happens thousands of times a year all across the country, the only reason this case is on HN is because of who they worked for. If this were about a Redmond retail worker stabbing another, in the same town, it wouldn't be here.
Most likely nobody looked at it. As an interviewer I'll scan someone's GitHub or project if linked on their resume but won't generally do an extensive search for their online presence.
I’ve worked with HR departments that recommend against Googling to avoid bias, which I think makes some sense, particularly when it comes to politics. I don’t really want to know if a candidate cares deeply about (say) abortion one way or the other.
It’s easy to say now that this was a sign of mental illness, but that’s confirmation bias.
Plenty of people have done or said insensitive stuff, especially when young, without being violent or mentally ill.
Also we don’t really know anything about this particular case.
The other option you mention is they perhaps grew up in a red state? Do you suggest this as a legitimate reason for firing a person?
>Plenty of people have done or said insensitive stuff, especially when young, without being violent or mentally ill. Also we don’t really know anything about this particular case.
What differentiates boys like this from plain bigots is they think they can put it next to their resume. A gut feeling is all you need to tell. It's the "quiet kid in class" energy.
>The other option you mention is they perhaps grew up in a red state? Do you suggest this as a legitimate reason for firing a person?
I was suggesting that being around accepted hate may make one feel more comfortable putting this thing out there.
Heh, in red states where unconditional support for Israel among white evangelical protestants is more popular than in the Jewish-American community itself? Where every other car seems to have a bumper sticker featuring the Israeli and American flag depicted together in unison? Hating Jewish people is very fringe in any American state, the mainstream will ostracize you for it anywhere in the country. Obviously so in blue states, but also in red states as well. Speaking out against Israel is a good way to get yourself banned from most red state businesses, and as many red states as blue states have passed anti-BDS laws.
> where unconditional support for Israel among white evangelical protestants is more popular than in the Jewish-American community itself?
Dominionist support for Israel can easily coexist with (arguably, is grounded in) anti-Semitism, and non-Dominionist right-wing support for Israel is often more grounded in Islamophobia than positive feelings about Jewish people, and is itself compatible with anti-Semitism.
Support for Israel when it comes to American foreign policy doesn’t mean positive, or even neutral, treatment of Jewish people, particularly those immediately present around the Israel-supporter.
The wacky derivations of their beliefs doesn't change the fact that most businesses in red states would kick you straight out the door for antisemitism or any criticism of Israel. Anti-semitism is far outside the mainstream anywhere in the country you choose. The closest you'll find to mainstream overt antisemitism is probably Idaho, but even there it is very fringe. You'll be hard pressed to even find a church that accuses Jews of killing Christ, while a century ago this was common doctrine. The American public at large no longer tolerate this sort of thought.
In practice, right-wing support for Israel boils down to "God hates anti-Semites. God loves His chosen people." You'd think that ought to be pretty hard to square with a Jew-hating attitude, but politics is the farthest thing from rational thinking so at the end of the day anything is possible. It's nonetheless the case that most people in right-wing states are not anti-Semitic.
... as it relates to "if I saw something like this on someone's profile, should I automatically disqualify them for hiring" ... absent any other information, "Never ascribe to malice ..."
I didn't dig out the guy's profile but he sure looks quite young. Depending on where he grew up, who is teenage influences were and what he was dealing with at the time he was maturing, it could be a sign of immature teenager rather than a sh!thead adult. I wouldn't want to be held responsible for the foolish decisions I made in my youth. Of course, in this case, that man appears to have had a lot going on.
A bit deeper thinking, though. You're carrying around two pieces of information "Microsoft hired this guy to do an important job that would, hopefully, require a mentally stable individual" and "This person was so mentally unstable that he stabbed a dude who's, basically, a stranger[0]." We can play a little modernized Ayn Rand and say where you see a contradictory result, check your inputs. There's enough we don't know about this guy and the circumstances around it that jumping to any conclusion related to his hiring, requirements of his job, his personal life (i.e. he's odd/moderately unstable but can fake it well enough until he has a mental break ... he's young enough that something similar may have never happened in his life ...).
> Or just live in a red state?
*eyes roll* ... My parents were extremely conservative, my Dad a business owner with employees. He actively spoke out against discrimination, hired with only regard for the ability to do the job, spoke frequently* with his children about how ignorant, uninformed, and evil racism, sexism and the like were -- in the 80s -- in an area that doesn't run anything but Red candidates on the local ballot because they can't get elected. I don't recall my mom or dad, once, making a joke about homosexuality -- at a time when it would have been extremely* permissible, otherwise. Growing up in my Red territory, I was shocked in fourth grade when a kid "who wasn't black"[1] used the "N-word".
I have attended rallies for both Red and Blue candidates (with massive crowds) -- nobody holds up signs to burn gay people or seize the means of production[2]. Some on the fringes carry opinions that are not much better than that but it's wildly unfair to make an assumption that ones political party indicates whether or not one is bigoted/biased in any way toward race, religion, or sexual orientation.
Personally, I've been part of both parties, part of neither and apolitical, now (Libertarian most often). It's weird attending a rally for a candidate who's positions you detest, but I've done it a few times, now ... both parties (technically, various). Milling about in the crowd revealed a that I had a whole hell of a lot more in common with the people who were voting for this guy than I didn't. Sure, I felt more aligned with my specific values and it didn't change my vote, but it stopped the whole "these people are evil" error. I'm not saying "go do that" but if you do, attend a mainstream rally for a Republican in a "non-fringe" part of America[3].
When it comes down to brass tacks, I've never heard someone articulate why "Voting Republican or Being a Republican Candidate" is racist. I've heard every variation on "David Duke and some evil organizations[4] support/are Republican", therefore, everyone in the party must be racist. I attended a KKK counter rally. My understanding is NAMBLA supports Democratic candidates -- should the fact that an organization advocating pedophilia supports a Blue candidate have any impact on whether or not an average voter in America supports a Blue candidate? I've heard nearly every Republican candidate get asked to denounce "David Duke" since about the early 90s, but I haven't heard anyone insult a Blue politician with any similar "guilt-by-association" questions (unless they are non-controversial policy things).
So many travesties/evils, including the Holocaust, and every form of racism begin by dividing up the "us"'s and the "them"'s. Nowhere does that exist in a bigger way than political affiliation. I've met people "who won't hire liberals" and people who are afraid to admit their conservative leanings for fear of being fired/isolated. Personally, I won't work at a place that would do either. It speaks to a huge organizational blind-spot.
/end-rant
[0] Is this known, for sure?
[1] It was red-and-yellow-black-and-white back then, after all. The girl, incidentally, would have been considered minority being 100% Albanian speaking no English until first grade.
[2] Not entirely true; in one case a guy showed up wearing a Nazi symbol on his shirt at a Trump rally (didn't attend, it happened in a parking lot a half-mile from my home) -- there's always an a$$hole -- only thing I can think was he was a plant -- my neighbor said he watched him take an over-shirt off, he was noticed, Boos started followed by people hoarding him and the police intervened shortly thereafter, arresting him. ... and I attended Blue governor's rally with a hard-line communist who held up a sign. (yeah, there's that).
[3] We're looking for a "fair perspective" not one that reinforces confirmation bias, so Cletus McCoy's re-election for the 34th House District Somewhere in Appalachia is out. Try suburban areas in Ohio, Michigan or Indiana.
[4] I was always taught it's wrong to remain silent/ignore evil. Yeah, when there's 7 KKK people and a megaphone against 20 gajillion college kids, all you end up doing is giving them a national headline. There's a time to "stop showing up for these clowns" to rob them of their audience. Or show up silently, face away from them and let them talk -- nothing makes the case against racism like the listening to the 7 idiots with enough mental health issues to think it would be fun to show up screaming racist things in a city not a stranger to race riots.
Empirically, there is a high propensity of Anne Frank simulator fans to also stab their coworkers, which is usually discouraged.
I mean… I can see HN arguing how it’s a great free speech endeavor to turn a Holocaust victim into a „fun“ adventure game, and how doing so says absolutely nothing about the creator.
But here we have pretty good evidence that it DOES say something about the creator.
for me it would fail the the nebulous "culture fit" aka "works well with others". this is not satire or transgressive art-- it's the puerile use of taboo imagery for the sole purpose of provocation. someone who proudly attaches this to their resume would very likely exhibit some of that provocativeness when working with other so it would not be worth the risk to hire
> Aim to offend yet test devotion to the pillars of humanity's most sacred in this endless, speedy 2D shooter parody [..] 11 caricatures of enemies including Jesus
Counterstrike is one of the most popular games ever and is about a group of terrorists planting bombs. As far as I know both the creator and the players are pretty well adjusted. I certainly wouldn't pass on hiring either.
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