(EDIT: Deleted my original reply because I made the mistake of trying to reply to the text in earnest despite your complete disregard for what I said in all of your replies so far. This is still said in earnest but I won't bother trying to continue the game of talking past each other and instead address the elephant in the room directly.)
> You want these people out of prison and moved right next door to me and my family.
Now, ignoring that this barely even counts as a strawman because it bears so little resemblence to anything I ever said, this also jumps out to me as an interesting point: you're demonstrating a high level of aggression to me as a perceived threat despite nothing you accuse me of saying being what I actually said and you instantly frame it as protecting yourself and "your family".
Reiser was hardly a family man but what led him to murder his victim was her decision to leave him with their children which he also had been neglecting. In other words, he reacted with immense aggression to a perceived threat to "his family" even though it was specifically his (ex-)wife, a threat from within. As I pointed out elsewhere, he still refers to his victim as "my wife", thus clearly re-asserting his framing of his relation to her and her role in "his family" despite her demonstrated wish to end this relationship. Just as murdering her served to establish his authority and control over "his family", her death now continues to be used by him to maintain this fiction despite his status completely removing him from "his family".
I'm not saying you'd kill your wife if she'd try to leave you and take the kids. I'm saying while you're afraid of me because you catastrophize about imagined scenarios I might advocate for, women are afraid because of people who talk like you do.
Intimite partner violence is more widespread than stranger danger. Most sexual abuse happens between acquaintances or in relationships. Most child abuse and child sexual abuse is inflicted by close relatives. The greates predictor for Antisocial Personality Disorderd (ASPD, which is colloquially often called "psychopathy" or "sociopathy", which are themselves not formally defined conditions) is early childhood abuse, sexual abuse and parental emotional neglect and authoritarian overprotection.
I can't change the US penal system. Neither can you. I can point at statistics and research and other countries implementing more humane systems with better or comparable levels of recidividism and lower crime rates and I'm sure you can derail them or shoot them down by appealing to moral outrage and telling me to kill myself in as many words, again (because yes, that's what telling me to surround myself with untreated violent criminals you think are habitual reoffenders after explaining how "my" way of thinking leads to people ending up in a ditch after implied sexual abuse, is).
But what I can do is tell you to treat your children as humans, not inferiors. Their brains don't work right yet and that's fine. They need what humans need and they want to be treated like humans want to be treated. Think of them as you would think of yourself (or your spouse if you already think of them like you think of yourself) after a brain injury and with more limited mobility. You don't want to have arbitrary rules imposed on you that you don't understand and that change seemingly at random. You don't want to be held down or hurt or yelled at, especially when you don't understand why. You want to feel safe, not through displays of violence and threats against others but by being accepted for who you are and held and knowing you won't be hurt. They're your children but only in the sense that they depend on you and your care, not that they owe you anything or that you own them in any sense of the word.
There's so much fear and evilness in the world, let's not bring it into our families, not even under the guise of protection. Learn to let your guard down and genuinely love people. Allow yourself to be human and to see the humanity in others, not just as a hollow phrase. Accept your spouse and your children as genuinely human persons with their own internal lives and desires and accept it when they make choices you disagree with. It's okay to go against your children's wishes when they're too young to understand the bigger picture but let them live their lives and be who they are. Make sure they know they're safe to come back to you when they screw up rather than trying to lock them in figurative cages and trim their wings.
I'm not saying you would kill your spouse if she left you. I'm saying you sound like the person I would be afraid of doing that. Most femicides happen in relationships. Men are rarely well-equipped to handle rejection, especially by intimate partners. Most child abuse happens in families. Life can be stressful and viewing children through the lens of discipline and obedience deeply poisons any chance of a healthy relationship. Most family abuse is carried from one generation to the next. Let's break the cycle, even if the abuse is subtle enough others might dismiss it as "traditional parenting". Keep them safe and be safe for them.
Heh, okay, there's a lot to unpack there. It's a lot of facts but lacking in wisdom.
The fact that you equate a person warning you about the dangers of toxic people with barely being better than one themselves means you personally need this knowledge more than anyone. You are very much at risk and certainly not from me, I can assure you. Calling out your naivete on the matter is not aggression. Far, far from. I suppose I'm guilty as charged in not having much empathy left for the Cluster B individuals of the world. Virtually everyone who has had their lives ruined, their (often overflowing) empathy weaponized against them, and their belief that people are fundamentally good destroyed, tend to end up that way. And that's one of the hardest things in recovery: most people simply can't understand it until they've had it happen to themselves personally. After all, perhaps the psychopath is the real victim here. They certainly play the part very well. Believe whatever you want about me, an internet stranger, but this is coming from a genuine place of empathy and (hard) love. So, lets try something a little different.
There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't. Suddenly, somehow, the owner's face is inside of the pitbull's stomach, their tracea is in the neighbor's yard, or their child is lifeless on the floor in a pool of blood with the dog "smiling" at them. Everyone is shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you. How could this have happened?
Your empathy is not going to fix psychopaths. Not at a personal level or a societal level. No amount of love is going to give them a functioning conscience. Whatever happened to create them (no matter how awful) never justifies what they do to others. Personally, I don't give a damn about Reiser and wouldn't trust a single word that comes out of his mouth about anything. I used his filesystem once back in ~2004 and that's the most positive thing I have to say about him.
Oh, cool, so you just go on ignoring what I say and responding to a strawman of things I did not say (like empathy fixing ASPD or victimhood justifying harm against others or that therapy will always be successful and everyone can be a free member of society to the fullest extent).
> (hard) love
Yeah, there's my concern. That's literally a concept only abusers use to justify their abuse as "love". You may think you have empathy (after all you feel strongly about ASPD individuals so you can't be that) but I question to what extent you do genuinely love if you have internalized the idea that "hard love" is a thing.
> There's a certain catharsis in some Cluster B abuse recovery circles in passing around stories of the well-meaning idiots that go to dog rescues centers to adopt trained fighting pitbulls. They believe all the dogs need is a good, loving home and all will be well. Often, this is actually the case... right up until the moment that it isn't.
It says a lot when your path to what you see as healing is paved with schadenfreude. That's not a story of the folly of being a good person. That's a story of ignoring past trauma. Trained fighting pitbulls are traumatized. You wouldn't hand a gun to a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Dogs have natural lethal weapons. Handling an animal that can kill you must be deliberate. You can not reason with a dog so you must treat a traumatized dog as the loose canon it is. When people die to trained attack dogs, they die either because they didn't know about its past or because they (no longer) took it into account in their interactions.
I'm not concerned with psychokillers who want to wear my child's skin as a costume only because I'm far more concerned with the equally unempathetic billionaires, politicians, lobbyists and investors who don't even consider my child as their actions threaten their health and future. Our economic system encourages "sociopathic" behavior. The psychokiller (or the far more likely abusive partner) is just too impotent or incompetent to acquire a position of real power and their behavior is far more likely to get them in trouble.
The thread has rightfully been killed so I'll just say this: kiss your children good night. And maybe think about why you feel the need to frame those deepities as "hard truths" instead of considering that if you're a victim, you're traumatized and you're coming from a place of hurt and your pre-existing beliefs cloud how you can make sense of it all. If you find catharsis in the suffering of others, that should give you pause.
> You want these people out of prison and moved right next door to me and my family.
Now, ignoring that this barely even counts as a strawman because it bears so little resemblence to anything I ever said, this also jumps out to me as an interesting point: you're demonstrating a high level of aggression to me as a perceived threat despite nothing you accuse me of saying being what I actually said and you instantly frame it as protecting yourself and "your family".
Reiser was hardly a family man but what led him to murder his victim was her decision to leave him with their children which he also had been neglecting. In other words, he reacted with immense aggression to a perceived threat to "his family" even though it was specifically his (ex-)wife, a threat from within. As I pointed out elsewhere, he still refers to his victim as "my wife", thus clearly re-asserting his framing of his relation to her and her role in "his family" despite her demonstrated wish to end this relationship. Just as murdering her served to establish his authority and control over "his family", her death now continues to be used by him to maintain this fiction despite his status completely removing him from "his family".
I'm not saying you'd kill your wife if she'd try to leave you and take the kids. I'm saying while you're afraid of me because you catastrophize about imagined scenarios I might advocate for, women are afraid because of people who talk like you do.
Intimite partner violence is more widespread than stranger danger. Most sexual abuse happens between acquaintances or in relationships. Most child abuse and child sexual abuse is inflicted by close relatives. The greates predictor for Antisocial Personality Disorderd (ASPD, which is colloquially often called "psychopathy" or "sociopathy", which are themselves not formally defined conditions) is early childhood abuse, sexual abuse and parental emotional neglect and authoritarian overprotection.
I can't change the US penal system. Neither can you. I can point at statistics and research and other countries implementing more humane systems with better or comparable levels of recidividism and lower crime rates and I'm sure you can derail them or shoot them down by appealing to moral outrage and telling me to kill myself in as many words, again (because yes, that's what telling me to surround myself with untreated violent criminals you think are habitual reoffenders after explaining how "my" way of thinking leads to people ending up in a ditch after implied sexual abuse, is).
But what I can do is tell you to treat your children as humans, not inferiors. Their brains don't work right yet and that's fine. They need what humans need and they want to be treated like humans want to be treated. Think of them as you would think of yourself (or your spouse if you already think of them like you think of yourself) after a brain injury and with more limited mobility. You don't want to have arbitrary rules imposed on you that you don't understand and that change seemingly at random. You don't want to be held down or hurt or yelled at, especially when you don't understand why. You want to feel safe, not through displays of violence and threats against others but by being accepted for who you are and held and knowing you won't be hurt. They're your children but only in the sense that they depend on you and your care, not that they owe you anything or that you own them in any sense of the word.
There's so much fear and evilness in the world, let's not bring it into our families, not even under the guise of protection. Learn to let your guard down and genuinely love people. Allow yourself to be human and to see the humanity in others, not just as a hollow phrase. Accept your spouse and your children as genuinely human persons with their own internal lives and desires and accept it when they make choices you disagree with. It's okay to go against your children's wishes when they're too young to understand the bigger picture but let them live their lives and be who they are. Make sure they know they're safe to come back to you when they screw up rather than trying to lock them in figurative cages and trim their wings.
I'm not saying you would kill your spouse if she left you. I'm saying you sound like the person I would be afraid of doing that. Most femicides happen in relationships. Men are rarely well-equipped to handle rejection, especially by intimate partners. Most child abuse happens in families. Life can be stressful and viewing children through the lens of discipline and obedience deeply poisons any chance of a healthy relationship. Most family abuse is carried from one generation to the next. Let's break the cycle, even if the abuse is subtle enough others might dismiss it as "traditional parenting". Keep them safe and be safe for them.