The pig farmer...

[fajrdrako]

So Robert Pickton has been ruled guilty. Is anyone in Canada surprised? He's been found guilty (so far) on six counts of second-degree murder.

Interestingly, according to an article in The Ottawa Citizen that quotes from a letter he wrote, Pickton said he did it because God told him to rid the world of evil.

The levels of irony in the comment amuse me.

Comments

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

What segment was it?

Transients. And nominally homeless people, with no extended families.

The Black Dahlia was a woman with that as a tattoo on her back or shoulder, found murdered and cut into pieces, in Los Angeles in the relatively innocent 1930s. There was a TV movie made in the 1980s, and I think a theatrical movie more recently. People are so fascinated by such things....

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Fascination with murder seems only normal, I think: there but for the grace of God, it could be any of us.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think of that now and then. Can't even trust a cop, how bad is that?

I spent several years studying serial killers, and actually came to feel satisfied that I understood them. It would take pages to discuss what I concluded, but... I no longer feel the need to spend a lot of time thinking about such things.

Also, regarding "there but for the grace of god"...: Think of this -- how much effort does our society put into making things stay the same all the time, hm? Traffic laws, rules of conduct, even business hours of shops and so on are all standardized, so that daily life can be utterly predictable, if one so chooses. On the other hand, it deprives people of the unexpected -- and, when you think of needing to catch a train to make an appointment in the city and the train schedule is all haphazard and your only available train leaves two hours before you arrive -- well, that "unexpected" is indeed to be avoided. On the other hand, think of a child who wants to linger and play in the water instead of simply washing her hands and face and then getting back out to do whatever it is the adult wants her to do. Is it not a good thing for the child to play with water and learn for herself, through her natural scientific curiosity, something about fluid dynamics and so on? yes, I say. On the other hand, it throws off the adult's schedule -- bad, bad, bad! And things are not predictable. And the child is punished. But--!

This sort of slavery to daily expectation might end up depriving people of their innate ability to learn to think critically in unusual situations.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Can't even trust a cop, how bad is that?

My ex-husband used to say that the personality profile of a cop is pretty much the same as the personality profile of a criminal - they just express it in different ways. I would agree that there are overlapping character traits.

I think it's all part of the eternal balance between order and chaos. As an adult, one gets to choose - every minute of the day - which one prefers at any given time. I'm the kind of person who in many ways prefers chaos - it's seductive - but order is much better for me.

[walkingowl.livejournal.com]

Chaos is indeed fun. (Hm, that came out oddly!) I pretty much live in it all the time; at the same time, I not only see patterns of order within it -- amounting to almost-have-it levels of equilibrium over and over throughout our collective day -- but, like you, need order in order to live well.

What a complicated little paragraph that turned out to be!

As for copt -- considering that a fair estimate of the sociopaths among humanity is one in 25 people, they have to go somewhere, no? And if they have a strong sense of needing external accolade, they'd go to be cops. Or, if they just wanted to be bullies with permission, they'd go to be cops.