Eurydice Dixon
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
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Post subject: Eurydice Dixon | |
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For those who've been under a rock, a young woman was attacked and killed while walking from the CBD to Carlton, alone at night.
This time, there's no serial bad guy who should've already been in gaol except for bail magistrates, a 19 year old with (some degree of ) Autism and no prior record has been charged with rape and murder.
How do we react to this?
Some of the usual shriekers have already jumped on blaming "Toxic violent men", throwing all people of that gender into the bucket of potential murderers and rapists.
Others have made comments about the need to feel safe at night which, on the surface is a fair expectation, but is it genuinely realistic? In my opinion anyone walking alone at night in a dimly lit area with few people around, is taking a risk. Not just rape or murder but also of general assault. You could find yourself bashed for your phone and wallet because some junkie wants cash for a hit.
I read that there will now be a 24/7 police presence around Princes park, but we all know that won't last, it's a temporary knee jerk to be seen to be doing something.
Is there a solution or is this just how society is and we need to adapt to it? _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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I think we should probably spend more of our resources identifying potential serious offenders and giving them the mental health and other interventions required to prevent such crimes. I don’t have particular expertise in the relevant fields but I really struggle to accept that a teenage boy who is capable of raping and murdering a girl in a park is not going to have raised a few concerns along the way. I’m happy with video surveillance etc in such places but suspect it won’t be very effective.
It certainly is a “male violence” issue, in the sense that, statistically, this was always more likely to happen to Eurydice than me. However, I’m not sure that does much more than put a practically useless label on the problem. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
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A "Practically useless label" used by some to paint all males as at fault.
I'm male, so are you.
I've never Raped, murdered or assaulted anyone, sexually or otherwise, nor molested my children and I suspect neither have you.
The thing is, we aren't unusual in that, the mast majority of males could say the same thing.
So it's a small minority of people who do these these, the majority of them happen to be male. Saying that "men need to change" is also IMO a useless but demeaning statement as the vast majority don't need to change and the few that do, won't or can't.
I suspect in time more will come out as to the circumstances of this case. I suspect that it will prove to be different than the predatory behaviour displayed in the Meagher case and that there may be very few signs that could have been picked up. It's all quite sad. _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
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Pies4shaw wrote: | I think we should probably spend more of our resources identifying potential serious offenders and giving them the mental health and other interventions required to prevent such crimes. I don’t have particular expertise in the relevant fields but I really struggle to accept that a teenage boy who is capable of raping and murdering a girl in a park is not going to have raised a few concerns along the way. I’m happy with video surveillance etc in such places but suspect it won’t be very effective.
It certainly is a “male violence” issue, in the sense that, statistically, this was always more likely to happen to Eurydice than me. However, I’m not sure that does much more than put a practically useless label on the problem. |
Well said on all counts, P4S. Random crimes like these are always horrifying, and of course something that no free society should tolerate. The real question is how to prevent them, and I agree 100% that the biggest single factor in stopping this kind of violence is identifying potential perpetrators and giving them the support they need to not go down this dark path. There's probably a bit of cultural change needed too, though, but I think that's over-egged. All the "hey men, don't rape" stuff is certainly just an empty slogan; what we really need to be addressing is why men who have been constantly told not to rape and understand that it's wrong still have the inclination to do it. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
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^
Why do people who know it's wrong to lie, steal and kill still do it? _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
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^ Precisely. We need a more sophisticated approach. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
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A more sophisticated approach to what? detection and prevention, education or punishment?
People are complex critters. They do things all the time that they know they aren't supposed to. "Education" by belting people over the head doesn't work. See the latest quit smoking add for an example, which says "nagging doesn't work"
With psychopaths and sociopaths as exceptions, people do things because of consequences, either positive or negative. Risk v reward. I'm willing to bet that when the facts come out in this case there will be little that in hindight that would have tagged this young man as a potential rapist/murderer, yet here we are. _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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thesoretoothsayer
Joined: 26 Apr 2017
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Location: Between London and Melbourne
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It is indeed a horrible crime and a heartbreaking outcome. I understand the helpless anger that women feel at having to be afraid, but if men stereotyped women the way public women do men over matters like this, the outrage would be ear-splitting. One of the subtle deformations in thinking over the last fifty years or so, is the oily desire to ascribe responsibility and characteristics to groups of people, rather than to individuals. There are a range of reason for this, mostly to do with power-seeking and virtue-signaling.
We don’t know the circumstances of the alleged perpetrator, here, but if he did it, then he is responsible : not society, not men, not social services, not Eurydice Dixon. All of those agents might have changed the context in one way or another to make it less likely, but it is the crime of one man, who should feel the strongest sanction for it. The individual soul is the only moral agent that really matters, and if we minimize that idea, we make it easier for such people to justify terrible actions to themselves.
Could more have been done to assess the likelihood of him committing this offence, and to interdict it ? Possibly, but another of the fallacies of modern life is that criminal conduct is predictable. Psychologists have fostered this illusion because it suits them to do so, but in truth there is no way to reliably know what someone might be capable of, unless they have done it before. Even if you can put a probability on it based on past patterns of behaviour, it’s debatable whether we have any body of theory or practice which could divert it - measuring things that didn’t happen is a classic problem of knowledge. I understand the worthy impulse to rehabilitate in advance, but I suspect it is a great deal harder and less likely than it sounds.
Finally, this is another case of public-space rape and murder of a young woman within, what, four or five years ? At some point we have to consider that the rootless, relativist, sexualised, atomized society we have created urges some night-ridden souls to act like this. A glance at notorious murders like this shows how frequent they are now, relative to the pre-libertine past. _________________ Two more flags before I die!
Last edited by Mugwump on Fri Jun 15, 2018 6:19 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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Good then you can explain it to me. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003 Location: Andromeda
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stui magpie wrote: | A more sophisticated approach to what? detection and prevention, education or punishment?
People are complex critters. They do things all the time that they know they aren't supposed to. "Education" by belting people over the head doesn't work. See the latest quit smoking add for an example, which says "nagging doesn't work"
With psychopaths and sociopaths as exceptions, people do things because of consequences, either positive or negative. Risk v reward. I'm willing to bet that when the facts come out in this case there will be little that in hindight that would have tagged this young man as a potential rapist/murderer, yet here we are. |
If all things are causal, then there is no such thing as a spontaneous action (and any disposition toward committing apparently spontaneous, extreme acts would, in any case, itself likely need to emerge from a serious pre-existing condition). Otherwise, every murder and violent rape must be the culmination of a long process, at points during which certain sentiments (for instance rage, loneliness, humiliation, misogyny, sexual or emotional unfulfilment) must coalesce into a motive, an opportunity must present itself and a motive must solidify into a decision to act. Through that process – which might take weeks, months, years), there are opportunities for intervention.
Our society isn’t as bad as others, but it’s still one that abandons people. I want that to be brought to an end. There should be resources to ensure that people have access to basic needs, and having a regular mental health check-up is as vital as maintaining physical wellbeing – not to increase diagnosis, but to increase access to vital services. If people are so angry or miserable that they’re at risk of taking it out on someone, that’s a problem society as a whole has a responsibility to address. _________________ All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Location: Between London and Melbourne
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^ it sometimes seems, David, as though your solution to everything is to add more public resources. The trouble is that we live in a world of scarcity. If we add more pastoral suport to everyone that is “angry enough”, we have to take it from somewhere. Accepting that there is a limit to the amount of money you can filter out of the packets of the poor devils who have to get up for the alarm clock every morning, how do you know that this is a better use of public money than the many other places it can do good ? How do you know it’ll make any difference at all ? Do we really have any insight into the minds of people who could do something like this,let alone how to change them ? Is it really a problem of “basic needs” or even “mental health”?
We used to have a pastoral system that looked after people in a way that no state can ever hope to. It was called the family. It was not perfect, not at all, but at mass scale, it was real-time, highly interested and effective. We have subjected it to enormous stresses - from easy divorce, to the need for two incomes, to mass single parenthood. Where it once stood, we have planted the state - always remote, fundamentally uninterested, and miles behind the facts. And yet socialists always want more of its wonders.
More social workers and psychologists and state help in such extreme and individual cases seems to me like an expensive version of looking for your car keys under the light when you know they were lost in the dark. _________________ Two more flags before I die! |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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Well, it isn’t. The world is full of stupid people who can’t think subtly about anything and prefer their universe to be paved with neon slogans. We don’t have to play with them in their sandpit. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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Signs point to yes. |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005 Location: In flagrante delicto
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Post subject: | |
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David wrote: | stui magpie wrote: | A more sophisticated approach to what? detection and prevention, education or punishment?
People are complex critters. They do things all the time that they know they aren't supposed to. "Education" by belting people over the head doesn't work. See the latest quit smoking add for an example, which says "nagging doesn't work"
With psychopaths and sociopaths as exceptions, people do things because of consequences, either positive or negative. Risk v reward. I'm willing to bet that when the facts come out in this case there will be little that in hindight that would have tagged this young man as a potential rapist/murderer, yet here we are. |
If all things are causal, then there is no such thing as a spontaneous action (and any disposition toward committing apparently spontaneous, extreme acts would, in any case, itself likely need to emerge from a serious pre-existing condition). Otherwise, every murder and violent rape must be the culmination of a long process, at points during which certain sentiments (for instance rage, loneliness, humiliation, misogyny, sexual or emotional unfulfilment) must coalesce into a motive, an opportunity must present itself and a motive must solidify into a decision to act. Through that process – which might take weeks, months, years), there are opportunities for intervention.
Our society isn’t as bad as others, but it’s still one that abandons people. I want that to be brought to an end. There should be resources to ensure that people have access to basic needs, and having a regular mental health check-up is as vital as maintaining physical wellbeing – not to increase diagnosis, but to increase access to vital services. If people are so angry or miserable that they’re at risk of taking it out on someone, that’s a problem society as a whole has a responsibility to address. |
I'm afraid I agree with very little of that. People are indeed capable of spontaneous actions, often out of character. Just because there is a somewhat standard number of recipes, it seems, to create a murderer or rapist, doesn't mean that you can't make one from different ingredients.
People operate in a risk / reward matrix, but what is a reward or risk to each person is individual.
I'm making the assumption (I'm really not sure why) that this guy didn't follow her with intent to rape and/or murder her. It just happened. We'll see what comes out to see whether I'm on the right track or way off. _________________ Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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