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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (3722)	10/11/1999 2:54:00 AM
From: nihil	Respond to of 6418

He was an absolutely first-rate mathematician when young, but that's no guarantee of human or academic success. He was a poor teacher and published only a few articles and Berkeley let him go. Schizophrenia often sets in in the early 20's (thus Dementia Praecox). Paranoid ideation sometimes overwhelms schizophrenics completely and even brilliant people become systematic murderers. Few of them can be repaired. I expect that detailed brain life histories of people like him starting from their first attacks will make it possible to identify and eventually to treat people with his type of brain defects. I think this syndrome is organic and to a degree heredity (recessive) or at least a birth defect. Other serial killers may be sociogenetic, the result of violentization or a particular reaction to child abuse. It will require multidisciplinary study over long periods to understand the varieties of killers. I believe killing is an unusual trait, and most people don't carry it. It is IMO not a little bit too much of propensity to kill that makes the killer but different in kind from most people. I believe that most of us can be turned into killers by bad experience and training, but it is not as easy as one would guess. Many fighter pilots never fire a shot despite combat, many dive bomber pilots in WWII never dropped a bomb. Most cops never fire their pistols on the job. A few do it repeatedly. Pickups of battle guns show many were never fired (SLAMarshall). There is a deep-seated aversion even to righteous killing in most people, I believe. We need to know a lot more.