Ask Lemmy

I did. A boomer guy, he must be in his late 70s, early 80s now. He owned a construction company that killed 20 people in the 1999 earthquakes in Turkey, including distant members of his extended family. The guy did shoddy construction work, did not use proper concrete and dressed up a damaged building to look ok. The result was 20 dead lives when the building came down on November 12, 1999. (the building was damaged in the first quake in august and collapsed in the second one in november) The name is Hamza Cebeci, and a quick internet search today shows that his family business is still in the construction business.

I met the guy almost 10 year after the earthquake (and almost 15 years ago from today) at an event where he spoke. From outside you would not guess that he has the blood of 20 people on his hands. It was the purest example of the 'Banality of Evil' that I have ever seen. I'm orginally from the same small town (Düzce) where all this happened and knew the story well.

News article from those days: https://postimg.cc/HctXCVFT

Worked with this quiet dude for a couple years. Other than an excessive amounts of tattoos all the way to his face and neck, seemed like a pretty normal machinist / mechanic working at the factory with us.

Later, someone found a local news article from about 5 or 6 years ago. The cops had gotten called to his place over a suicide attempt and when they got there they found like a treasure trove of Nazi and Aryan nation shit, guns, knives, swords, fucking bomb making materials like acetone paint thinner and gun powder, diaries and notebooks full of fantasies about killing robbing and torturing people including minorities, teddy bears he bled on, drugs and paraphernalia

I guess his dad is a state trooper and got him off the charges, go figure.

I've done a fair amount of customer service jobs so heard my fair share of complaints. Like once, an alcoholic threatened to bottle me if I didn't sell him vodka. He wasn't evil or even a bad guy. Just a good guy having a bad day.

There was this one guy however - another completely different job - who complained the wifi wasn't working. Instantly gave me the heeby jeebys. Shouting, threatening without actually threatening violence, dead eyed, just gave off really psychotic vibes. He was a bully but there was something else going on there.

Turns out he was a successful local businessman who was known for his psychotic behaviour and being someone you don't cross. He'd obviously gotten to where he was because everyone was terrified of him.

Edit: another guy I encountered while he was drunk - made really creepy jokes about sexual things, one being 'incest is the game the whole family can play'. I'm 100% sure they weren't jokes - he meant what he was saying.

yep, a guy with a history in law enforcement, had a job where he investigated claims of misconduct of employees, he seemed to use that to serially sexually prey on the people who he ended up investigating

can't be more specific for legal reasons unfortunately

not sure he was inherently evil per se, but what he did I would consider evil

I have a couple of examples, but here's one that's close to my heart (and that, sadly, hurts my heart).

I know someone who overheard the following conversation in a workshop on global policy. In one of the tables, there was a prominent doctor and one of the richest people on Earth.

The workshop went on as normal, until at some point the discussion turned to poverty and malnutrition. The rich person asked "What do you mean, malnutrition?" and the doctor politely explained the basics of acute hunger and chronic malnutrition. At the end of the explanation, the rich person asked "How can you believe any of that?" and explained that malnutrition was made up by "envious leftists" to steal from the rich.

The doctor tried to explain that malnutrition was real, and even pulled up their phone to search for a picture of a malnourished child. When the rich person saw the picture, they said "Well, I don't know about this, but if you're hungry, wouldn't you just go to a store and buy food? If someone can't figure that out, they're just not cut out to survive".

At that point, the conversation was cut short because the workshop organizers required them to move on.

You might be wondering who this rich person was. Here's what I'll tell you: their family extracted a lot of wealth in colonial times and, since then, they have used their power and wealth to remain powerful and wealthy.

As a psych nurse I've only met two people who actually unsettled me, both turned out to be serial murderers. I used to work forensics specifically (the "criminally insane"), so I've met lots of rapists, murderers, and a ton of pedophiles. Most of them are just either pathetic and trying to not go to prison where they'll get their shit kicked in, or did something real stupid while not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground. As long as you follow some basic rules you'll be fine (don't be alone with them or within arms reach if you can help it, bring a buddy if you do, and never let them between you and the door, etc.) and honestly half of that is more for their safety than yours (you'd win the fight, but you'd be in a lot of trouble).

But both of these dudes just gave me an instant back of the neck prickle. All you can do is interact as little as possible, exit every situation as soon and as smoothly as you can, protect your newer workers who don't know better, and hope the doctor discharges them ASAP. There's no fixing that and all you can do is escape and hope they quickly go somewhere they can be contained properly (ideally a max security prison).

My ex wife was abusive, manipulative, and just turned out to be an awful person all around. Like her whole personality changed on our wedding night and she went from being one of the kindest people I knew to fearing she would stab me in my sleep over the course of a year after knowing her for 3.

I had a nazi say to my face that they wanted to kill me and hang me from a wall.

I suppose that counts to be a real pos.

I'm not sure about pure evil so much as sociopathic. I worked briefly in door to door sales, got taken to some high performer award celebration nonsense and was standing in one of those group circles as people were recounting war stories. "Give her the discount? Hell no. And then I realized she was too old to read what I was writing so I just added an extra year on to the contract!" Huge round of laughter, light applause.

To make it more gross... The discount was standard, we got no extra commission for having or not having it, was purely a free promotion to grease the wheels. He just didn't because, well, the old lady he'd scammed was too trusting.

I quit shortly after.

I'm with Hannah Ardent on this, true evil is banal and its ubiqutious.

I'll buy some bullshit coffee and not donate that to MSF, I'd classify that as evil writ large, I have seen evil and its in the mirror each morning.. Spend money.on Spotify or save a life ?

An example, its estimated 600,000 children have died since US Aid was cut and an estimated 22 million deaths by 2030, how many before it's a holocaust? Think about the weight the deaths of 600,000 children (so far) should carry, vs the weight of what it actually carries. Then you need to start to question what evil actually is.

Aside from proeslitization, is the averge person that different to your swastika tattoo'd interaction ?

For example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_Hands_with_the_Devil_%28book%29?wprov=sfla1

Im an atheist, the quote on the inside the cover of Romeo's book ... Paraphrasibg "I know god exisits, because i have looked into the eyes of the devil, sat across from him and shaken his hand"

I knew a guy in grad school who was a hard-core Trumper back in 2015/16 who thought I was too because we both owned guns and were white I guess.

Anyway - I was talking to him one day about an epidemiological analysis I was leading a team on for HHS. I'm a geographer, and our group was analyzing the demographic, spatial, socioeconomic, and temporal distribution of cases of gonorrhea in a major metropolitan area.

I explain that we're doing multivariate analysis on the demographic stuff because of all the issues caused by covariance showing "fake" correlation between gonorrhea and other variables. I explained that while the strongest indicator of gonorrhea in univariate analysis was whether or not you were black, that was actually an artifact from the fact that being black had a strong covariance with other variables like low income status, low employment rate, low education level, high population density, poor access to preventative healthcare, etc, and that when you took all the covariance into account there was no actual statistically significant correlation between gonorrhea and being black.

He then said something that was etched into my memory:

"It's just you and me here, [chilie]. You don't have to be all PC about thisbshit with me. We both know that just like how there's stupid breeds of dogs, there are stupid breeds of people, and it's a fucking disgrace that you can't study that honestly here."

That racist motherfucker has a Master's degree.

My grandmother used to bait a have a hart trap to catch local cats. She would let them finish whatever morsel she tempted them with, asked if they enjoyed their last meal, and would throw the trap in the pond. She would then call my cousin to come drag the trap out of the pond and bury the cat.

Is that evil?

I guess I could tell a story about the worst person I ever met. I don't know exactly what criteria elevate someone to the level of "evil" versus just being an awful, horrid person, so I'll let readers make that judgement.

It was 2010. I was 20 years old and needed a job. Through family networking, I was able to land a brief stint working with a distant cousin of mine who I'd never met before. Let's call him "James". I'm scheduled to work with him for about a week, traveling out of state to a small town in Virginia to do some maintenance on pools and such. Seems like a simple enough gig.

He pulls up to my house in his pickup truck to pick me up. Keep in mind I've never met this guy before in my life. We're not 10 minutes down the road when he starts dropping every racial slur you can think of talking about Obama and minorities and such. Guy was like a thesaurus of epithets.

Fast forward 5 or 6 hours that we've been driving. During this brief window of time I have heard this guy scream at his girlfriend over the phone about how she "better not be at the bar" or "hanging out with her friends". He has road raged at every inconsequential inconvenience, making multiple reckless, dangerous maneuvers to save virtually zero transit time. He has pinned every misfortune in his life on black people, immigrants, gays. Anyone but himself.

After this harrowing trip, we're finally at our destination and we can get to work. To say this guy was an abusive boss would not do it justice. His preferred method of communication was yelling. He'd light up a joint and smoke it very brazenly when there were children not particularly far away from us (one of the pools we worked on was at a community center where lots of kids would play). I don't have any problem with weed, but c'mon.

Each day when we were done with work, we'd pick out some place to eat. During this week-long stay in this small town, I witnessed multiple random acts of kindness by strangers. James had nothing but angry, hateful things to say about every single one. I saw a guy let some veterans cut in front of him in line at a Bojangles. "What a kiss-ass," James says. One day at a KFC, an elderly woman gives me and James a big bucket of chicken and biscuits because they got her order wrong and told her to keep it. "Old bitch," says James after she walks away.

Every night after dinner he'd be at the bar getting hammered. Picking fights with other patrons and generally being a miserable pile of shit. One evening James gets up from the bar to go take a piss. A big biker guy James has been fucking with comes up to me and says, "Your friend's got a big mouth."

"Not my friend," I reply. "He's my boss, unfortunately. But if you and your biker buddies wanna drag him out back and beat the piss out of him, you ain't gonna hear me complain." Biker guy gives a big laugh and pats me on the back in an understanding way.

On the last day of the job, we've begun the drive back home. He sees a hotel with a pool that we're about to pass and unilaterally decides we're gonna try to fleece some hotel owner by doing some "maintenance" on the pool. He convinces this old man that the pool needs inspecting and the guy agrees to purchase our services. James fucks around for an hour doing virtually nothing to this pool and then charges the guy several hundred dollars. Brow beating and bullying him the entire time.

And to wrap it all up, he didn't pay me what we'd negotiated. Unfortunately I wasn't good at advocating for myself at this time in my life, so I just put up with it.

The silver lining to all this is I haven't seen or heard from him since then. He drove away and has never darkened my doorway in the 15 years since that dismal week. Good riddance.

I knew a guy who was, by all objective standards, a musical genius. Brilliant songwriter and lyricist, prolific, could master an instrument in weeks, took to sound production and engineering like a fish to water. In a sane world, he’d have easily flourished in the music business and possibly even made it big, as he had the drive. He had a razor sharp wit and a relentless sense of humor, and in his lucid moments, was a blast to be around.

Except he was an irredeemable and unapologetic pedophile. He had previously done ten years for making and distributing cp by the time I had met him. When I brought it up he vehemently defended himself and his vice as being completely normal and natural, and even bragged about his “work.” He insisted that he did nothing wrong and seemed to genuinely not understand why people didn’t accept it.

Shortly after we parted ways, I learned that he got caught again hoarding thousands of pictures and videos. He’s currently in prison and will spend the rest of his life there.

I have two very irresponsible parents, and in one case they took a loan from my eldest brother (that I ended up helping them repay) because he involved a lawyer to compel them to act responsibly in paying him back.

I consider that a little bit evil.

I have another older brother. My parents signed their house over to him in exchange for $10,000 to pay some back taxes, on the verbal agreement that they can reside there until they pass away. (They're elderly.) Fast forward five years, and now I have to beg for money via GoFundMe to help with their legal defense because he's literally trying to render them homeless. (Thankfully we won.)

I consider him legit evil. Throwing your parents out into the streets is a legit evil thing to do, even if they are a pain in the ass. (And they are, they're 21 months into me "loaning" them my car so they can drive for DoorDash.)

My older brother used to run around with a young man that was raised by racist bikers. The guy killed someone during a house robbery. And still I'm not sure that that person was irredeemably evil.

But I've also done time in prison. And was celled up with an old man that hurt a little girl. No acknowledgement, no remorse. Smiling, outgoing. But at the time I had no idea what he had done. And I had no idea that he was a sociopath until he opened up to me about cutting crow's tongues when he was young, because he had seen a talking crow at a circus. No empathy. As 'nice' as he seemed.

Looking back, he had that same look in his eyes that you can see in cult leaders and other sociopaths. When I watched the Nixium documentary with my partner, it was like that. A charismatic predator.

I knew a kid when I was growing up that was evil. He would talk people into doing things that were not okay, and then he would immediately turn on them and get an authority figure to get them into trouble, all while laughing and then retelling the story to anybody who would listen. He repeated this pattern throughout the entire time I knew him (many years), only escalating the entire time.

I'm guessing he's probably caused a death or two in his life by now, either directly or indirectly.

Someone called me evil in their suicide note once, and ever since then I've been wondering if they were right.

I'm not the person to have enemies but we live for a long time so we meet awful people eventually even if you avoid it.
So only a few people took advantage of me or have screwed me badly over the years.

I have never needed to take revenge since I seem to have some kind of guardian devil that does the work for me in an extreme way.

1 mean duo of girls: mental institution and death by brain tumor.

Ex GF: bad car crash

Ex friend that took my GF: some random guy punched out all his teeth, later became homeless.

So I guess, don't fuck with me evil people.