It’s “fringe” but if this was our response to every time someone did this shit our mental healthcare facilities would be overrun like it was peak COVID. Plus, if this were some kind of treatable mental illness they’d be going absolutely nuts about curing it being some kind of liberal brainwashing. But it is an epidemic.

Seriously, what the flying fuck are you talking about?

People who commit acts of violence like this are quite clearly psychotic - whether it’s a mother murdering her children, a teacher threatening to murder a student, a gunman on campus, or someone who gets into fight after fight in bars. There is something broken in their brain.

Let me walk you through this, since your background in the subject is lacking. I will bet you $1000 dollars that if we were to do a neuroimaging on this man, we would see that his amygdala - the part of the brain that senses threat and engages the rest of the brain in a threat response is hypertrophied. His limbic system, which controls emotional response, is primed to react to a level of stimulation so small that probably neither you nor I would notice. His prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pushing back on those signals through rationality and long term planning is hypotrophied. It is decoupled and unable to do its job. This is the same as we see in violent individuals throughout the prison system.

There are a number of ways this can happen. Having been abused as a child is one. Having been malnourished. Having grown up experiencing social abuse and rejection. It’s more likely than average he suffered a traumatic brain injury at some point in his history. TBIs are about ten times as common in the violent prison population as in society as a whole.

This man’s clinical condition dictated his interpretation of himself, which includes his religion. It’s the same for the gunman. It’s the same for the child abuser.

You will find the same in the brains of Hamas and IDF combatants. You will find, in a time series study, that these conditions become more extreme as a result of combat stress and ptsd. The Palestinian children who are being subjected to this massacre will display these same symptoms. The inner city kids in the US who grow up in a culture of systemic racism and violence show these same symptoms.

If you’re the kind of person who ascribes this kind of behavior to someone being an “evil” person or having an “evil” ideology, I strongly suggest you read some textbooks on neuropsychology and behavioral science.

I’m going to pretend your question was serious.

Should we allow people with diagnosed psychoses to vote? People with schizophrenia or other psychological conditions?

In the traditional good-and-evil model of the prison system as it exists in the US today, I am very much in favor of allowing prisoners to vote both while in prison and after having served their time. I believe that because I believe that the prison system is fundamentally unjust, that innocent people are jailed, that there is significant racial prejudice constantly driving the system, and that there’s no scientific evidence driven justification for what we do and how we do it. Rubin Carter should have been able to vote. Leonard Peltier should have been able to vote. Until we fix the criminal justice system, I think it’s wrong to deny prisoners the right to vote, and I think we need to make sure their votes are made without coercion and properly registered.

But should we allow someone with a clinically diagnosed psychological condition like schizophrenia to vote? They are wracked by delusions, what does their vote mean? For me, it goes down to the assumption of rational agency being part of the justification of a democratic system in the first place, versus the obvious fear of weaponized medical diagnoses being used for political purposes.