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'Evil' behaviour and ideas of what it means to be human

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People are animals. Or more preciesly, people are a species, a sub-set, of the larger animal group.

 

While 'evil behaviour' is often rewarded by nature and by society, 'good behavior' can often be to the detriment of a person. So it is only natural for people to behave in an 'evil' way, there is no incentive for good behaviour, so why should people be good?

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Originally posted by Jamie

People are animals. Or more preciesly, people are a species, a sub-set, of the larger animal group.

 

While 'evil behaviour' is often rewarded by nature and by society, 'good behavior' can often be to the detriment of a person. So it is only natural for people to behave in an 'evil' way, there is no incentive for good behaviour, so why should people be good?

 

actually there are lots of rewards for 'good' societal behaviour and natural punishments for acting against the society (or pack or whatever).

 

But I don't think kathy is talking about selfish/non selfish survivalist behaviour (ie competition for scarce resource). She's talking about inflicting pain or suffering for the sake of it (as an example). There is no advantage to be gained by behaviour like that.

Most animals kill only for territory, food, or self protection, humans have transcended that, we kill (or can) because we feel like it, and we might choose to make the dying take a long time.

This behaviour is only very loosely linked to anything from our evolutionary history, and more to do with our conscious minds and the ways they can go 'wrong'.

 

In some ways it does absolve them, but it also allows us to do things like execute them or (a popular one on here) castrate them.

If they are less than human then it's no more wrong for us to that to them than it is to neuter a dog.

 

It's the easy option I suppose, acknoledge that they are human and we need to look at the cause behind what they did, and god forbid that the do gooders might want to treat them and actually modify their behaviour, that doesn't satisfy our urge to punish and get revenge.

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Well that's a different issue then, to the one I was commenting on Cyclone.

 

What to do with those of us (and yes, they are 'us') who don't conform to the social norms ....

 

Do we just kill or punish them ?

 

Do we look at the issue and try to understand the reasons why people behave in such a way, and then address those problems.

 

I don't know, and don't care to debate it right now, I'm going to go have my power nap, and leave it for the rest of you. Good luck.

 

:P

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Well the list below is the most notorius serial killers in england. we can either try to understand why they did what they did if you look up about them you will see they all have different up bringings or you can condem them as monsters which is more comforting cos it means you dont have to think why?

 

Cos it uncomfertuble to think that sociaty could have some thing to do with it that may be that kid you once bullied finaly snapped or the outsider you would not talk to we all have things in our past that we think if only i would have acted different EVERYONE as an influance on other peoples actions think about it what ever it is that makes the evil side of a person come through its the experiance that person has through life.

we all have the capabilaty to kill some one but we would have to be pushed to the very exstreams of our self to do it but put a lot of bad things together most people get the feeling of deprestion or suicidal tendancys but with some it must lead to feeling dejected and wanting revenge to get there own back on the world that as mistreated them leading them down the path of evil

but they probably dont think it is its there way of saying i am not going to get sh*t on again it my turn to crap on the world so we take comfort in labeling them anything but human so we can feel like there actions are not something humans are capable of.. this is only my view i know some of you will not agree..

 

UK

Beverley Allitt - an Angel Of Death. Paediatric nurse who killed four patients and injured at least nine others, convicted in 1991

 

Mary Bell - 10-year old killer, who killed two

 

Robert Black - schoolgirl killer

 

Ian Brady - one of the Moors Murderers, with Myra Hindley

 

Peter Bryan - mental patient who killed three and ate the brain of his second victim

 

John Childs - burned the bodies of his six victims, jailed 1980

 

John Christie - the necrophile, who lived at 10 Rillington Place

 

Mary Ann Cotton - British Victorian killer, said to have taken more than 20 victims

 

Thomas Neill Cream - the Lambeth Poisoner, began his killing spree in the United States before moving to London

 

Peter George Dinsdale - also known as Bruce Lee, the prolific Hull arsonist

 

Kenneth Erskine - the Stockwell Strangler, jailed in 1988 for murdering seven pensioners

 

John George Haigh - the Acid Bath Murderer or Vampire of London

Anthony Hardy - the Camden Ripper

 

Myra Hindley - one of the Moors Murderers, with Ian Brady

 

Colin Ireland - the Gay Slayer or Fairy Liquidator

 

Jack the Ripper - unidentified Victorian killer

 

Michael Lupo - the Wolf Man, originally from Italy

 

Patrick Mackay - confessed to killing 11 people

 

Robert Mawdsley - serial killer of four. Killed three in prison and dubbed Hannibal the Cannibal

 

Peter Moore - businessman who killed men at random in Wales.

 

Donald Neilson - the Black Panther

 

Dennis Nilsen - British serial killer of 15 (possibly 16)

 

Mark Rowntree - 19 year old psychopath who killed 4 people at random

 

Harold Frederick Shipman AKA "Dr Death" - British doctor convicted of 15 murders. A later inquiry stated he had killed at least 215 and possibly up to 457 people over a 25 year period

 

John Straffen - child-killer and Britain's longest serving prisoner (some doubt exists over his conviction).

 

Peter Sutcliffe - the Yorkshire Ripper

 

Fred and Rose West - the House of Horrors murderers in Gloucester

 

Graham Young - the Teacup Poisoner, (1947-1990) who killed three

 

all sick and bad but still humans pushed to the edge forced to do what they thought was getting back at the world but some more than likely did it for the notarioty my spelling is so bad!!

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I was under the impression that only Harold Shipman met the criteria for serial killer in the uk???

 

and your post is very difficult to read, try some punctuation.

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Originally posted by talktofrank

Dennis Nilsen - British serial killer of 15 (possibly 16)

 

He killed people because he was lonely and wanted company, which is terrible and sad/tragic at the same time.

 

I don't think he was "evil", perhaps very disturbed and socially inadequate, or just mentally ill, but not evil.

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well i understand he want some one as he said he could keep with him but if you look at what is bellow it sounds evil to me.

 

its not like he did not know what he was doing but the whole point was that it had been some thing in his life that had shaped him that way..

 

Dennis Andrew Nilsen (born November 23, 1945) is a British serial killer who lived in London. During a murderous spree that lasted five years, he killed approximately fifteen men.

 

Nilsen was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire to a Scottish mother and a Norwegian father. His father was an alcoholic and his parents divorced when he was four years old.

 

His mother remarried and sent her son to his grandparents, but after a couple of years, he was sent back to his mother again.

 

Nilsen claimed the first traumatic event to shape his life came about when he was a small child, when his beloved grandfather died. His strict Catholic mother insisted that he view the body before burial. Whether this incident, or his mother and stepfather's lectures on the "impurities of the flesh" helped shape him into what he was to become, no one really knows.

 

In 1961, Nilsen enlisted in the British Army and became a cook in Aden, Cyprus and Berlin. He left the army in 1972 and served briefly as a police officer. From the mid 1970s, Nilsen worked as a civil servant in a jobcentre.

 

He had a series of superficial, transient relationships with men, but they did not help to placate his profound isolation and loneliness. Like Dahmer, he sought somebody "who wouldn't leave." He wanted a corpse.

 

All his victims were students or homeless men whom he picked up in bars and brought to his house either for sex or just for company.

 

Nilsen strangled and drowned his victims during the night, waking up with little memory of what he had done. He used his butchering skills, learnt in the army, to help him dispose of the bodies.

 

Nilsen had access to a large garden and was able to burn many of the remains in a bonfire. In 1981, however, Nilsen moved to an upstairs flat. As his murders continued, he found it difficult to dispose of the remains and had suitcases full of human organs stored in his wardrobe, and plastic bags with human remains under the floorboards.

 

Neighbours had begun to notice the smell. When he tried to dispose of the bodies by flushing them down the toilet, he blocked the sewerage of his house in Muswell Hill (23 Cranley Gardens), north London. When a company was called to unblock the sewer system, they first found the drain to be packed with a flesh-like substance. The drain inspector then called his supervisor to assess the situation; however, this was not to take place until the next day, by which time the drain had been cleared.

 

This aroused the suspicions of the drain inspector and his supervisor, who immediately called the police. On closer inspection, some small bones and what looked like chicken flesh were found in a pipe leading off from the drain; these were later discovered to be of human origin. Dennis Nilsen was arrested in 1983 on suspicion of multiple murder. He apologized to the police for not being able to tell them the exact number of people he had killed. When his house was searched, they found three heads in a cupboard, and they found thirteen more bodies in Nilsen's former place of residence at Cricklewood at 195 Melrose Avenue.

 

During the trial at Old Bailey, Nilsen was cold and distant, and seemed utterly unaffected by the fact that he had murdered fifteen people. He was sentenced to life in prison. Nilsen's minimum term was set at 25 years by the trial judge, but the Home Secretary later imposed a whole life tariff, which meant he would never be released.

 

But after the Home Secretary was stripped of his powers to set minimum terms in November 2002, Nilsen could be freed on life licence in 2008 because of his original 25-year minimum sentence. In 1993 he was given permission to give a televised interview from prison.

 

[edit]

The murders and attempted murders

Murder 1: Nilsen's first murder took place on December 30, 1978. He met his first victim (who was never identified) in a gay bar. Nilsen strangled him with a necktie until he was unconscious and then drowned him in a bucket of water.

Between the first and second murders, Nilsen attempted to murder a student from Hong Kong he had met in the West End. Although questioned by police, the student decided not to prosecute, and Nilsen was released without charge.

 

Murder 2: The second victim (on December 3, 1979) was Canadian student Kenneth Ockendon. During their sexual intercourse, Nilsen strangled him. Ockendon was one of the few murder victims who was reported as a missing person.

 

Murder 3: Martyn Duffey was a sixteen-year-old homeless boy from Birkenhead. In May 1980, he accepted Nilsen's invitation to come over to his place. He was strangled and subsequently drowned in the kitchen sink.

 

Murder 4: Billy Sutherland was a male prostitute from Scotland. Nilsen could not remember how he murdered Sutherland; however, it was later revealed that the victim had been strangled by someone using their bare hands.

 

Murder 5: The fifth victim was another male prostitute; however, this one was never identified. All that is known is that he was probably from the Philippines or Thailand.

 

Murder 6: Nilsen could recall very little about this and the following two victims. All that he could remember about number 6 was that he was a young Irish labourer that he had met in a bar.

 

Murder 7: The seventh victim was what Nilsen described as a starving "hippy-type" he had found sleeping in a doorway in Charing Cross.

 

Murder 8: Nilsen could recall nothing at all about his eighth victim.

 

Murder 9 and Murder 10: Both were young Scottish men, picked up in pubs in Soho.

 

Murder 11: The eleventh victim was a skinhead Nilsen picked up at Piccadilly Circus who had a tattoo around his neck saying "cut here". He had boasted to Nilsen how tough he was and how he liked to fight; however, once he was drunk, he proved no match for Nilsen, who hung his naked torso in his bedroom for 24 hours before he was buried under the floorboards.

At some point between murders 6 and 11, on November 10, 1980, a potential victim of Nilsen's woke up while being strangled and was able to fend off his attacker. Although he called the police almost immediately after the attack, no action was taken by the officers who, it is reported, considered the incident to be a domestic disagreement between two homosexual lovers.

 

Murder 12: The twelfth victim (and the last before Nilsen moved home) was a man called Malcolm Barlow. He was murdered on September 18, 1981. Nilsen found him in a doorway not far from his own home, and took him in and called an ambulance for him. When Barlow was released the next day, he returned to Nilsen's home to thank him and was pleased to be invited in for a meal and a few drinks. He was murdered later that night.

After moving to a new house in Muswell Hill in October 1981, Nilsen met a student in a bar in Soho and invited him back to his new home. The student awoke the next morning with little recollection of the previous evening's events, and later went to see his doctor because of some bruising that had appeared on his neck. The doctor revealed that it appeared as if the student had been strangled and advised him to go to the police. However, afraid of his sexual orientation being disclosed, the student decided not to.

 

Following this attempted murder, Nilsen met a drag queen in a pub in Camden. After passing out from strangulation, he came to while Nilsen was trying to drown him in a bath of cold water and managed to fight off his attacker.

 

Murder 13: John Howlett was the first to be murdered in Nilsen's Muswell Hill home, in December 1981. Howlett was one of the few who was able to fight back; however, Nilsen had taken a disliking to him and was determined that he should die. There was a tremendous struggle, in which at one point Howlett even tried to strangle Nilsen back. Howlett was eventually drowned, however, after having his head held under water for five minutes. Howlett's was the first body to be dismembered, and the various body parts were either hidden around the house or flushed down the toilet.

 

Murder 14: Graham Allen was another homeless man that Nilsen met in Shaftesbury Avenue. After dying in the usual way, his body remained in the bath for three days while Nilsen decided what to do with him. Eventually he was dismembered like the last victim.

 

Murder 15: Nilsen's final victim was a drug addict called Stephen Sinclair. They met in Oxford Street and Sinclair managed to scrounge a hamburger off Nilsen, who then suggested that they go back to his place. After dropping into an alcohol and heroin fuelled stupor, Sinclair was strangled and his body dismembered. It was Sinclair's dismembered remains in the drain outside Nilsen's home that first alerted the police to Nilsen's murders.

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sorry cyclone i am not known for my great puctuation or spelling but i will try better next time i promise i am a bad person and will fill out a hundred lines with puctuation too.

 

well i hope you got the point of what i was trying to say though..

 

:help:

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Originally posted by talktofrank

sorry cyclone i am not known for my great puctuation or spelling but i will try better next time i promise i am a bad person and will fill out a hundred lines with puctuation too.

 

well i hope you got the point of what i was trying to say though..

 

:help:

 

I don't think bad punctuation qualifies you as evil or less than human though.

 

I gave up half way through your post to be honest as trying to keep track of where I was was too difficult.

 

Just put in some paragraphs, full stops and commas, it's that easy.

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i will do from now on i feel bad now so i am truly sorry i did put kinda too much any way.

 

but i will be more carefull when i post.

 

:(

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Originally posted by talktofrank

i will do from now on i feel bad now so i am truly sorry i did put kinda too much any way.

 

but i will be more carefull when i post.

 

:(

 

don't worry, people normally just abuse me when I make a comment about a post being hard to read :D

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Rewinding slightly to addess Kathy's question of why we feel the need to 'dehumanise' people who commit such atrocities... (I realise some people have answered already but I'd like to share my views):

 

It seems to me to be because the alternative (i.e. to accept that it was a human being who did this wicked thing) means we have to accept that WE are capable of exactly the same things. Just because we wouldn't, doesn't mean we couldn't, especially if our own circumstances were massively different. This concept would unsettle a great many people.

 

The sad (and somewhat scary) truth though, is that this is what humans are capable of. People wish to deny this, and therefore they demonise the perpetrators, saying they're not actually human; that humans are better than that.

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