This man is seriously unwell. This wasn't just normal politics - This was deep conspiracy theory nonsense. The fact that he thought others would appreciate the message is further proof that he is in the midst of a serious crisis. He has completely lost touch with reality.
Unfortunately, being a wealthy ex-CEO and ex-pat living in another country, away from his former social circles, has likely removed all social support and peer group balance against his decline. When you're that wealthy, you can afford to surround yourself with people who won't challenge your ideas or suggest that maybe you're not well. The yes-men don't want to risk being ostracized by saying the wrong thing, so they go along with it.
I hope someone can talk him into getting the help he needs. That doesn't excuse what he said, obviously, but I doubt this issue will resolve on its own.
Hopefully this case will turn out better than Tony's tragedy, but it is also important to remember, just because Bateman is mentally ill doesn't mean he should get a pass for spreading hateful and harmful ideas. You can be mentally ill (paranoid even) without developing a hatred for a particular marginalized group.
I agree with everything you said and it was all thoughtful, with the one caveat that I think this exact style of writing and object of concern is now in the realm of the "normal" political spectrum. Yes, that may mean that being emotionally/mentally unwell is a part of the "normal" political spectrum, though small - but it seems to be true.
Is that where he is currently living? Puerto Rico is proper American territory and they're all American citizens there, so I definitely wouldn't call it another country (source: I'm Puerto Rican.)
Vitriol against Jews has been around since the Middle Ages at the very least and pops up in almost every culture I can think of. The Nazi leadership were obsessed by it, just to name one obvious example. I'm generally very optimistic about humanity, but this is really our heart of darkness.
I am Jewish and I have a Jewish cousin who thinks more stupid things.
Jews are out to get us! And they have been trying to do so since Moses! They want to sacrifice people for gods because gods like the smell of burning blood!
Last time I met this person was 2 years ago. He was obsessed with Trump. Back then I thought in 10-15 years he is gonna be into many conspiracy theories but this time i met him he sounded completely insane.
And I hate that for this guy everyone is saying its because he is rich. There is plenty of dumb conspiracies that people in the US are believing en masse across all classes and ages. Its sad that we can just sit around and do nothing.
>This wasn't just normal politics - This was deep conspiracy theory nonsense.
A woman who believes Jewish space lasers create widlfires was elected to the House of Representatives on behalf of a movement that believes the Democratic Party is a secret cult of Satanic pedophiles. A movement following a President who, among other things[0], believed Barack Obama was a secret Kenyan Muslim Marxist extremist who founded Al Qaeda.
This is what normal is now. This is the Overton Window starting to move right from talk radio scale crazy after 9/11 and not stopping even when it hit the batshit insanity of QAnon. Mere anti-semitism is quaint in comparison to what the mainstream believes nowadays, and so common as to be banal. This guy was just stupid enough to say the quiet part out loud.
Oh, and of course it's tied in to vaccinations because... of course it is.
Yeah I've never heard of him but saw that he was retired as CEO and wondering how old he is. Could be a sign of dementia or Alzheimers. Something has gone wrong in his head.
So, perhaps some other kind of mental illness. It was telling that he basically doubled down with a sort of "sorry, sorry, but it's still a Jewish plot" in his apology.
Edit: He's likely 42 or 43, based on some old (2002/2003) stories about founding the company after dropping out of BYU.
It seems likelier he’s just adopted (or felt emboldened to give voice to) extremist views. But it’s also possible that some mental disturbance is behind the behavior.
There's an entire subculture that promotes and amplifies this kind of thing for political ends. Is it really so hard to believe that maybe the guy is just a closet nazi? It's not that uncommon for people to make very bad decisions about internet activity under the influence of alcohol or recreational/abused prescription drugs.
I'm not going to join on the outrage/mental illness bandwagon based on the media's interpretation of an email they are not releasing.
I'm guessing that the email is indeed anti-semitic, and I'm guessing that the media doesn't want to legitimize anything he's saying by publishing the entire email.
...but I'm not going to throw stones without seeing the evidence myself. This is the trade-off. Unfortunately, the media knows full well that accusations alone are all it takes these days - evidence is optional.
Again - we are judging him on an email he sent. ...yet that email is nowhere. All we have is the media's impressions of an email they have not released.
Your links ALSO do not disclose the original email this is all about.
I'm not going to judge this guy without the actual evidence. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills being the only one in this thread demanding to see the evidence against him.
1. The first link contains, at minimum, a significant portion of the original email.
2. The individual in question has resigned without releasing the full email.
3. The individual's statement on the matter is nearly as bad as the portion of the email we've seen.
4. The second link shows a pattern of similar behavior.
> I'm not going to judge this guy without the actual evidence.
There appears to be a treasure trove of evidence against this individual, and no attempt has been made by anyone to dispute it. It's rare that we get this much evidence. If you really want the full email, just ask the people who received it--they sound as though they're eager to hand it to anyone who's interested.
This is a tactic the soviets used. They would call someone mentally ill, and take them away to the mental word.
Interestingly enough, without casting any judgment on the claim. Canada put a doctor that claimed a rise in vaccine related still births in the mental hospital recently, and treated him with psychotic medication.
Having just read it, this sounds like a mental health issue to me. It's well outside the bounds of opinion, even a ridiculous or hateful opinion.
I worry that people are running to mock this guy because they want to portray these views as the kind of things their opponents actually think, while in reality there is clearly something wrong with him and he may need some compassion. This is not a fringe opinion, there is some problem that's causing him to behave like this.
You do realize that a non-trivial amount of politicians have publicly made similar claims about the Jews? It's not like this is some isolated incident.
And these are just the outright ones, there is plenty of this stuff at rallies and protests that help fund politicians - there are hardly any condemnations unless it's so blatant it hurts their war chest.
Sen. Wendy Rogers's quote was not about Jews at all. It was about latino migrants (not that that's better).
Ron DeSantis spokeswoman isn't, what I would call, a politician - and her quote was specifically about the Rothschild family. Although it's not clear which conspiracy theory she's refering too - many of them (while all irrational) are not anti-semitic. It also doesn't seem to be a serious comment.
Your other two links are for a candidate, not an active politician.
There is no direct antisemitism, only some sort of wink-wink dog whistle accusations.
>Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers
Demographic concerns are common across the world (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_threat). There is really nothing special about it. And there are always fears of "voter importation". It is not comparable to "Jews want to exterminate others with vaccines".
>Ohio US Senate candidate Josh Mandel
I guess if he weren't Jewish, he would also be accused of antisemitism because he mentioned Soros? Thankfully for him he ticked the right box when he was born. And yeah, this seems to be the only person who openly articulated conspiracy theories. But again, that's your run-of-the-mill "deep state is puppeteering social movements to keep power", it doesn't look like "similar claims about the Jews".
If it is a mental health issue, then that issue affects a very substantial double-digit percentage of the population, something approximating the count of vax refusers. They don't believe in the same nuttery, but they do subscribe to one of the many flavors of anti-science aggression.
What is most fascinating and frightening is that there are many who, rather than understand that the world has serious random phenomena, or at least phenomena that are not yet fully explained (or the explanation is beyond their understanding), would choose to instead of believing scientists who spend their entire lives trying to sort it out, instead believe that there is some evil cabal of people responsible for the misery in their lives.
This is generalization without substance is very likely part of the road that lead him develop such believes.
There are cabals among scientists that need to be questioned. On fossil fuel, tobacco, medical topics and a lot of other issues. Germany had a lot of science on why Jews are inferior. Even scientists have an agency that does not have to align with public interest. Your comment suggests blind faith which is certainly not a good idea.
> cabal of people responsible for the misery in their lives
conservatives, liberals, rock musicians, the church, homosexuals...
The generalization has a lot of substance, I'm just trying to be general in order to avoid political flamewars here on HN. I'm referring to the set of right-wingers who are going down the Qanon rathole, and their like in cult-like evangelical groups who are so willfully ignorant as to insist on believing easily disproven conspiracy theories such as flat-earth, chemtrails, antivaxxers, Big Lie, etc.
I am absolutely not expecting any kind of blind faith in science, but an understanding of science. I'm talking about genuine debate, not anti-science aggression with the goal of destroying the notion that truth can be known.
Voltaire got it right long ago: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Those people who willfully ignore science for conspiracy theory, etc. are the targets of the leaders of that political wing and other media and online manipulators -- they are being happily led to believe absurdities, and will commit atrocities. One example was exactly one year ago today. There is no reason to expect it will be the last or the least.
Understandable that you reject the beliefs of Qanon, that is quite easy actually, but arguing against them is a waste of time and leaves your more elaborate opposition ignored. At some point this opposition will be firmly against you because there is no way for political discourse and no way to hold people representing your political opinion to account.
There will only be fronts that become more and more polarized. That is also true for yourself, at some point you start to believe that any objection to your position is a flat earther. Of course they are not, these beliefs aren't relevant to the tiniest degree. Same would be true for QAnon if people didn't get themselves riled up.
Again, that flat earthers or QAnon are relevant or indicative of everyone of your political opposition is indeed an absurd belief. If you look hard enough, you will find them, even in high places, out of the question. Even wackos can have success. But I am sure you would also agree that it isn't right to leverage intelligence agencies against your opposition with slanderous dossiers. I think it is understandable that this can be more concerning than someone running around asserting the earth were flat.
I am not fomenting polarization, I am recognizing that it exists, and why.
You overlook several key factors
1) the polarization has already been created and is being deliberately magnified
2) this is being done by a set of RW leaders, authoritarians, and some media, each for their own reasons
3) A primary tool that is being used is amplifying perceived grievances & racism and spreading desinformatsyia and distrust (where the goal isn't necessarily to get people to believe the BS, which is a nice bonus, but to get ppl to think the truth is unknowable because you can't trust anything).
>>at some point this opposition will be firmly against you because there is no way for political discourse
Have you bothered to look around? Coming from the right wing movements in US, Hiungary, France, GB, etc, is nothing but firm opposition. If you are not with them, you are the enemy. Just look at what comes out of Fox News in the US - who is the biggest enemy? Liberals. Not totalitarian states who murder their own citizens at home and abroad -- liberals, and independents who are not with them, even in The Big Lie that the loser of the election was the winner.
>>at some point you start to believe that any objection to your position is a flat earther.
No, that is an utterly false and reprehensible accusation. I'm happy to openly discuss anything, and have even done so with flat earthers.
The fact is that if a party to a discussion rejects facts, or is aggressively anti-science, i.e., anti-facts and anti-reality, there is no real basis for discussion.
More importantly, this is NOT some kind of balanced failure of both parties, but specifically the fault of party rejecting reality who is making real discussion impossible.
Merely recognizing a fact such as that does not make me or anyone else the cause of the problem. In fact, your failure to recognize the problem contributes to enabling it.
I am happy to attempt to talk to even the most extreme on any side. I have in fact repeatedly attempted to do so, including with people in my own family. But when the fact is that they refuse to accept objective reality — not that they don't have the intelligence to know, but they actively remain willfully ignorant — it fits a good definition of insanity to not recognize that fact.
>>at some point you start to believe that any objection to your position is a flat earther. Of course they are not, these beliefs aren't relevant to the tiniest degree.
Again the first sentence is false. And more importantly, the beliefs like "flat-earther", "NASA is a hoax", "chemtrails", "antivaxxer", etc. are anything but irrelevant.
The spreading of these beliefs is the exact tool used to breed distrust and polarization. It leads the followers to believe that truth cannot be known, so to blindly follow their leaders, and to believe that anyone not "in" on the beliefs is an enemy.
With this group and its leaders, ordinary political discourse is not possible, as there is not even a shared reality, and no argument is ever made in good faith.
Recognizing that this is already a fact is not furthering the polarization, it is recognizing reality, and is the first step to finding a remedy.
We can say "what person is saying is very wrong" simultaneous with tryign to point that person towards medical care.
Mocking someone for bad behavior could have some upside (e.g., maybe it discourages them and others from doing the same). But if we imagine mocking someone with a debilitating illness, that image of ourselves should make us reconsider.
It's not like he was caught by a hot mike or something. This guy widely sent out an emotional email to politicans and others pleading them to consider his "discovery". This in a world where you are advised to never say "you guys".
Same, I thought this was going to be a boring “casually racist grandmother at thanksgiving” situation. Instead it was closer to my grandmother on thanksgiving…Sigh…
Ah... Yet More Proof(tm) that "intelligence" is multi-dimentional. And that you can be very bright indeed in some dimensions (evidence - he was a tech executive), yet far dimmer than a box of rocks (has any box of rocks ever committed career suicide via anti-semitic rant?) in others.
A Modest Proposal: Mr. Bateman needs a 72-hour involuntary admission to a good psychiatric hospital. His recent behavior might be caused by a fast-growing brain tumor, or congenital malformation of the cerebrum, or abuse of high-risk recreational drugs, or be the first clear symptom of a late-manifesting major psychiatric disorder. It's for his own good, really.
(Though such bizarre and self-destructive behavior is a red flag, and medical testing & psychiatric evaluation are quite reasonable. PragmaticPulp's comment kinda covers that.)
Yes, I know the USSR's history. In current-day America...the guy's chances of being forced into a psych. hospital by the government for this seem about as high as his chances of being tried for publicly insulting George III's honor.
>Ah... Yet More Proof(tm) that "intelligence" is multi-dimensional
I thought of Mel Gibson when I read the story, who had some similar over-the-top crazy Jewish conspiracy tirades. But has done quite well, particularly as a movie director. And seems witty under the right circumstances, to me.
No conspiracy, but I think we are seeing the results when the professional class gets to rule. And I think its turning out bad.
Imagine if you were forced to follow the advice of you Doctor, Lawyer, and your Teacher every hour of the day. They all might mean well for you. But its turning out that its gets pretty bureaucratic and despotic very fast.
But on the other hand, if a super villain wanted to rid the world of people, an anti vaccine might be one way to do it.
I dunno. If I wanted to kill a bunch of people would it be easier to…
1. Wait for a pandemic, simultaneously develop multiple bogus vaccines at competing pharmaceutical companies, fake clinical trials at multiple in multiple countries, pass fake data through multiple regulatory agencies, and keep all of it secret.
2. Run some Facebook ads telling people not to protect themselves during a deadly pandemic?
In Ontario, the vaccinated are getting infected at a higher rate than unvaccinated. Which seems a very strange effect for a vaccine to have.
On the conspiracy side, you can't really rule out a coordinated effort at this point. This video goes into how spreading confusion and fear, to create a state of public mass psychosis is a tactic employed by authoritarians in the past.
Vaccinations reduce the severity of the disease. If you get exposed, vaccination will prompt your body to deal with the infection more quickly when there's less of the virus. This can, but doesn't necessarily, clear the infection before it's detected. You can see the protective effect in Ontario by looking at different severities.
- Population 12+: vaccinated = 88%, unvaccinated = 9%
Yes, but this is snapshot at this current time, in a changing situation. The hospitalization rate for the vaccinated has gone up by a lot in the last month.
Long term we don't really know how things will go, and if there will be more vaccinated people in hospital in ICU than unvaccinated.
One plausible explanation I heard is that the immune system does not recognize the virus, but rather the cells infected by the virus. The immune system uses T-cells to destroy those infected cells. The drop in effectiveness of each successive vaccine, suggests a diminishing ability for the immune system to recognize the infected cells. And its not really clear if repeated boosting will solve this problem. I think of it as a ai that's been over optimized to recognize only the training data.
Don't really have a background to evaluate if this is a valid explanation of why we are seeing this inversion.
Does being rich make people go crazy? And think that nothing can happen to them? I wouldn't even type this kind of thing into a private Google Doc, let alone send a mass email.
Probably the other way around. Obsessive behavior leads to high achievements when channeled into the right activity. Before it gets misdirected at Jews.
I hate to point this out but at least in the USA a high percentage of CVOID deaths are among unfortunately republican voters.
I think we could better face things if we loved ourselves more as when we do that our desire to attack others goes down and our desire to make things goes up. Just something that I picked up in getting my ADHD under control.
I liked the Bill Burr take on this 'vaccine is to wipe us out' conspiracy.
The better logic is this invisible hand would not want to wipe out the vaccine takers as they are the 'sheeple' who are controlled. These powers would want to remove the trouble makers, the people that dont do what they are told. So a more likely conspiracy is the secret plan would be to release a second virus to kill the non-vaxed once the sheeple are vaxed.
Obviously this is a joke but it's a good spin to present to people that believe in the conspiracy of vaccination.
>These powers would want to remove the trouble makers.
That is indeed a good argument.
I do not believe covid vaccines are intentionally killing people. The chance of that being the case is maybe 1 in a (m/b)illion who knows.
(is it too much or not much risk to mandate it on everyone given the alternative(everyone gets infected etc)?)
There exist groups however who would decrease population no matter what, because they think that is the only way to "save the planet", right?
There are other possibilities where the vaccines are preferred by evil conspirators, but I won't go into it because figuring out how evil people would think is not making me happy at all.
This is not a mental health issue. It's a result of misinformation and conspiracy theories being spread most likely on social media and people believing them. So many people just blindly trusting information being spread without properly fact checking or checking their sources. This is what's going on. It starts with bias towards a specific group, then they start searching for any evidence that can support their bias.
When a privileged white male has this bias towards Jews it's not a mental health issue, it's antisemitism which is a form of racism. Call it what it is.
I genuinely believe that these people see "the Jews" and "Jewish people" as two entirely separate concepts in their head. One is the group of people they may know, hang out with, be friends with, and one is the concept of evil brought up by conspiracy nuts that get associated with murdering babies and widespread paedophilia.
I've read an article, linked here during the Trump administration, about people of Mexican origin being deported from American towns. The townsfolk were upset that their friend or neighbour was being deported, but they still believed in Trump's promises. They didn't want this to happen, they only wanted "the bad ones" to get out, whatever abstract concept of "the bad ones" meant to them. The people they knew were always "one of the good ones".
Obviously, no group of people is uniform, but the human brain loves to think in groups. The groups can overlap and they don't need to make sense; they exist purely to attach some kind of judgement or prejudice onto. Probably a great feature of the human brain if you're a primate trying to make it to adulthood, but, in modern times, humanity's worst flaw.
> I genuinely believe that these people see "the Jews" and "Jewish people" as two entirely separate concepts in their head. One is the group of people they may know, hang out with, be friends with, and one is the concept of evil brought up by conspiracy nuts
One can only imagine that many people in, say, 19th-c. and early 20th-c. Germany held similar notions and views. This if anything makes such conspiracy nuttery even more dangerous.
I saw a video about this years ago by some racist idiot defining the “bad jews” as part of “international ‘Jewery’” and that he has no problem with Jewish individuals.
You have to go to one of those laser time share meetings. Not sure it's worth it. It's like the whole afternoon and they say you're going to get tickets to Broadway but at the end it's just a screening of Santa inc.
yeah I followed that paulgraham thread or twitter war on this w/ I think the cloudflare founder of all things.... where he's basically saying ---95% is having a place to crash without fear of being homeless... and maybe luck...than actual having a good idea and work ethic.
Well he did say God said it. We're generally not allowed to question what God says.
To be honest, "God" has been saying all sorts of anti-semitic things for almost two thousand years. It's funny how the standards of sanity shift and sway over time. And we're talking Utah here.
Logically it doesn't make much sense, since Israel is one of the most vaxxed places. You'd think God had better control over scope, if the vaccine is the conspiracy by the Jews. You wouldn't see God turn the vaccine on them.
Well, logically one could have two different vaccines. Where conspiracy theories fail is not a basic logic usually. They fail at the reason. There is no reason to decimate the US population in case you want to rule the world, that simply creates nothing but less wealth and more Eurasian influence.
It's perfectly okay to be pro-free-speech while acknowledging people like this exist. Plus the guy resigned, not hounded into quitting by a Twitter mob.
Plenty of resignations, firings, bans and other things have been denounced as "cancel culture" by the free speech brigade which didn't involve a Twitter mob hounding anyone. But the article says he resigned after "condemnation throughout Utah's tech community." Surely that's cancel culture? The chilling effect of the mob, the jackboot of censorship?
The only reason no one is standing up and giving a full-throated defense of this man's right to speak his mind without consequence is that they're only willing to defend heinous speech in the abstract. Give them a concrete example and suddenly they discover the existence of nuance and sit in the corner whistling Dixie.
I support complete free speech and also law. If some speeches are very bad for society make a law and enforce it. Otherwise it gives random group powers to accuse and persecute without a just trial.
All laws are human made and can be changed if society agrees. Even some kind of "canceling " can be part of law, if society wants to keep the absolute free speech.
From outside, if such emails can create violence then as a society we need to figure out how to develop more non violence in our culture other wise we will be just treating the symptoms and not the cause.
Edited part below:
On more thoughts, if a person is making an accusations without substantial proof, a similar accusations can be made against that person without substantial proof. I think that is fine. However will like that to be in the law and done by proper procedure. Allowing groups to act as mob is dangerous.
Unfortunately, being a wealthy ex-CEO and ex-pat living in another country, away from his former social circles, has likely removed all social support and peer group balance against his decline. When you're that wealthy, you can afford to surround yourself with people who won't challenge your ideas or suggest that maybe you're not well. The yes-men don't want to risk being ostracized by saying the wrong thing, so they go along with it.
I hope someone can talk him into getting the help he needs. That doesn't excuse what he said, obviously, but I doubt this issue will resolve on its own.