> McAfee anti-virus founder John McAfee commits suicide in a Barcelona prison
> The antivirus founder was arrested at El Prat airport and was awaiting extradition to the United States for tax evasion.
> The founder of McAfee antivirus, John McAfee, has been found dead this afternoon in his cell in Brians 2 prison, in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires (Barcelona), according to police sources. The Mossos are investigating what happened, and everything points to a suicide, according to the Department of Justice. McAfee was pending extradition to the United States after being arrested by the National Police at El Prat airport.
> McAfee, 75 years old, was being held in Module 1 of the Brians 1 penitentiary center. The prison guards, who found him dead in his cell, and the prison medical services intervened to perform resuscitation maneuvers, according to the Department of Justice, but were unable to save his life.
> The controversial antivirus founder was arrested on October 3, 2020 at the airport of El Prat, when he was about to take a plane to Turkey. The arrest came at the request of the US justice system, which accuses McAfee of evading millions of dollars in taxes from profits allegedly obtained from activities such as cryptocurrency trading. The judge of the Audiencia Nacional José de la Mata ordered his imprisonment, and his extradition to the United States was already planned.
Good or bad, what a sad ending to a colorful life.
The guy was troubled and had many shortcomings, but he was colorful and also achieved success and arguably was one of the seminal figures in the nascent AV industry.
Sad to see his fall from grace and into a world of extravagance, deceit and cheating (taxes) and, if allegations true, even worse; then to end it on the floor of a jail -all by his own hands.
hand wavey
Tasered is not torture, else surely cops wouldn't use it? And he poisoned 4 dogs, people get rather angry about their pets.
But yea, killing over it is extreme.
Still, seems an odd thing to extradite him for. Maybe more to the story which we will never know.
No it doesn’t mean that. He didn’t automatically lose because he didn’t show up. The court, specifically the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, allowed the Faull estate to petition for a default judgement due to McAfee’s continued failure to respond and due to the merits of the case presented. They did not, and would not, allow a default judgment on a meritless case.
Meritless cases don't even make it that far (the court refuses to hear the case), so while true this seems like an unnecessary quibble. Yes, the suit had enough to actually be heard by a court, but the reason for the judgement is due to McAfee's refusal to even participate. Said another way: if McAfee had participated, this is not the judgement that would've been reached. McAfee may have still be found responsible by the court, but not for the same reason.
It is certainly not the normal level of proof people take a court decision as being.
Actually, John killed his own dogs after he believed they were poisoned by his neighbor. Were they really poisoned, or was that just one of his psychotic delusions(like his claim that Belizean officials were out to kill him but killed Faull by mistake)?
We'll never know. But we do know that his dogs were allowed to run free in a giant pack and attacked at least 6 people (probably more, but they may be locals and not ex-pats/tourists whose claims are more likely to be reported on)
He claimed that he gifted laptops to the Belizean government pre-loaded with spyware and alleged to have found evidence that multiple top officials were engaged in drug and human trafficking.
If true, would certainly be a motive for those officials.
Weird he never provided any proof of his claims about that. You would think that if he was invested enough to put his own life in risk(according to him) to find out the extent of corruption among officials in Belize, that he would, perhaps, release the information in some manner instead of just pretending like it never existed.
And what was the thinking of the officials who allegedly received the laptops? "Oh no, the man who gave us free laptops has been reading everything we've done on these laptops. Let's plan his murder on these laptops now. Don't worry about finding his address, it's just some home north of San Pedro right? Just go kill a guy and it must be John"
This is how conspiracies are created. There's no evidence and strong motive for him to create this conspiracy.
I'm a big fan of Occam's razor and in this case the simplest explanation, in light of _evidence_ of which there was plenty in the documentary, is that he was not truthful.
> He claimed that he gifted laptops to the Belizean government pre-loaded with spyware and alleged to have found evidence that multiple top officials were engaged in drug and human trafficking.
So he was looking to take out his competitors? Because he boasted of having sold 25KG of psychotropics in the previous year, so let's not mistake him for some vigilante.
He shot his dogs and buried them on his property (allegedly, because he thought they were poisoned). The last I heard of the dogs, the police had taken their corpses to see if they were shot with the same gun that murdered Faull. But odds seem low since it was known that John had a ton of guns and armed guards in Belize.
Had a net worth of several hundred million in a country where the cost of living was 23% of the US might not be a "megayacht and private 787" lifestyle, but it would do pretty well.
He owed a lot of money in back taxes because he made a point of specifically refusing to pay them, not inability to do so.
His net worth peaked at $100M right before the 2008 financial crisis, which apparently decimated his investments.
If you spend a lot of money without paying your taxes, you still owe those taxes, which means you have significantly less money than you think you do. So when his aforementioned wealth peaked at $100M, the real value (i.e. minus taxes) was probably much lower.
Not withstanding the amount, I'm willing to be corrected there, but the latter part makes little sense:
Say I have $1M in the bank (or in Bitcoin), but I owe the IRS say $300K.
I leave the country, and take my money out of the reach of the IRS.
My "net worth" on an accounting statement might be $700K, but if I'm making a point of avoiding and biting my thumb at the IRS, I still absolute have access to $1M, regardless of moneys owed or claimed. And if I have no intention of paying those taxes, I'm certainly going to use that money. And McAfee was very actively saying "I'm keeping that owed tax and doing whatever the hell I like with it".
Given that McAfee himself claimed he had assets seized by the feds and had nothing at the end, I don't think even McAfee was ever as far out of reach as you think he was.
The IRS can seize assets. McAfee wasn't sitting on $100M in hard cash, most was in property and investments.
According to [0] he was down to about $4M in net worth after 2008, which isn't nothing, especially in a LCOL country, but for context, if he made 200k per year and put 10% away for retirement from when he was 25, he would have had the same amount.
Suppose your assets lost 70 percent of their value soon after the tax year ended. Now your net worth is 300k while your tax bill is 400k, and you can only slowly get the over-payment back by deducting it against your current taxes.
We are assuming McAfee is just not paying taxes because craziness, but when you have volatile situation you can get burned by the rules pretty badly.
He seemed to like his dogs (which I get!), and was out for the little guys of the world. He didn't like authorities whom abused their power.
I found him refreshing compared to most wealthy guys.
I am sad he's gone. I wish it wasen't fear over the IRS though.
(I don't think anyone should do jail time over taxes. You can take their money, but no jail time. Oh yea, I don't care if he was doing drugs (prescribed, or illegial). I don't think anyone should have to go through withdrawls in a cell. That last sentence was not aimed at John. It never felt right hearing that people are expected to withdrawal from any substance while in jail. I see a constant help wanted in my local paper for a Psychiatry position at San Quentin. If I was in charge, every suspect would have a Psychiatrist they can talk to, and medicated if needed, with in a hour of being locked up for any offense. It's got to be one of the most stressful event in a person's life.)
We offered the McAffees a puppy shortly after they moved to TN; they came out and played with the litter for a couple hours in our front yard, and they were both very much "dog people".
Our pack wasn't aggressive, as such, but everyone found them intimidating. John was quite happy being chewed by multiple small hounds, and the rest of the pack was OK with the idea of him having a pup.
Alas, they weren't stable enough to give a good home to a dog at that time (and told us so before the pup was ready), so that puppy went elsewhere; but I was delighted to meet them both and found them decent people to spend a bit with.
According to news story: McAffee's dogs kept terrorizing people on the beach, neighbor poisoned dogs, McAffee hired hitman to torture and kill neighbor.
There were some very disturbing allegations against him --which is why I included his fall from grace and the good or bad.
I would just add some skepticism to the charges only because the police down there can be corrupt and or inept and subject to bribery and so on. I don't know if there has been an independent international inquiry into the matter.
Anyway, I think it's sad to see people when they throw away all the earned achievements in such a debauched way.
> I would just add some skepticism to the charges only because the police down there can be corrupt and or inept and subject to bribery and so on. I don't know if there has been an independent international inquiry into the matter.
A US federal judge found him culpable for a murder civilly.
> A US federal judge found him culpable for a murder civilly
False. A US federal judge entered a default judgement against him in a wrongful death suit. Murder is not a civil offense, the standards for civil wrongful death are not remotely the same as murder, and wrongful death liability (even based on a trial and evidence) doesn't indicate that one has even approximately committed murder. And, in any case the judgement was a default judgement because McAfee didn't answer the lawsuit, not a judgement based on evidence.
It establishes civil liability, but does not indicate anything (or even that anyone has reached any judgement) about the relevant facts.
That he was found culpable is irrelevant. That it was “of murder” is false. The grandparent was focussed on the discussion of culpability in the context of the segment that was quoted in the comment it responded to.
> wrongful death liability (even based on a trial and evidence) doesn't indicate that one has even approximately committed murder
This is true in general, but not true specifically for this case. A wrongful death case does not need to indicate murder, as wrongful deaths can occur for many reasons. But in this case, the award of the $20 million in punitive damages (damages to punish the defendant, not to compensate the victim) specifically were for the torture and murder, with intentional malice, of Faull.
>the judgement was a default judgement because McAfee didn't answer the lawsuit, not a judgement based on evidence.
No it wasn’t. He didn’t automatically lose because he didn’t show up. The court, specifically the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, allowed the Faull estate to petition for a default judgement due to McAfee’s continued failure to respond and due to the merits of the case presented. They did not, and would not, allow a default judgment on a meritless case.
The obvious point you're making is about a double standard -- rich people are unfairly given more slack than others. But an alternative framing amounts to evaluating a method by its results -- basically saying "I don't know why you're behaving that way, but for reasons I don't understand it seems to work for you." That obviously falls apart if you can cleanly separate their wealth/financial success from their behavior e.g. because they inherited the money.
It is interesting to watch dogs being treated like humans, almost like children and that sense of care does not extend to very human neighbours.
I don't get it. Probably because its a cultural thing. Anecdotally, where I am from a dog is a dog and will never get more attention than a person. It's not allowed in the house because that's where people live and if you feel lonely you call up a friend or sibling - not cuddle a dog.
One might get the impression that some cultures place more value in a dog than a person, which is bizzare since it is just an animal.
Western European culture has long placed a lot of value on dogs. The over embrace of dogs over humans recently though as you’re describing, is a sign of our societal collapse. People have gone absolutely bananas over animals and pets in general over the past 20 years. It’s the social upheaval and economic squeezing of the lemons. People are tense and always in fear and panic. So if you’re not very religious, you may find your non-human comforts in your pets. Especially because everyone else around you is also in constant fear and panic. It really started around here on 9/11. And it’s just a constant ramping up ever since.
> The over embrace of dogs over humans recently though as you’re describing, is a sign of our societal collapse
I think you've summed up ,quite succintly, my suspicions about western hegemony. The west is like the Empire in Asimovs Foundation trilogy. Wveryone is too busy looking at their phones to realise everything around them is crumbling.
It's not necessarily cultural, for some people dogs/pets are a substitute for human company and are held in higher esteem, since they don't have some of the negative behaviors humans do (such as dishonesty, etc)
Wolves have also a huge positive impact in our economy. If we exclude the humans, the wolf is the animal that had saved more human lives in the history, so is in a special category. Dogs and wolves belong to the same species.
> If we exclude the humans, the wolf is the animal that had saved more human lives in the history
Would you mind elaborating on this point? In what way has the wolf saved uncountable human lives? I've only ever seen it portrayed as a human and livestock predator.
EDIT: I've been reading up on the matter. Historically, the wolf has been associated with disease control, as they tend to remove the weakest, sickest members of a given herd from the genetic pool.
Arbitrary (and inconsistent) moral standards. I can’t wrap my head around how the same people who think killing dogs is bad are fine with eating meat from pigs and cows. How do you draw a line? Dogs are more intelligent? Dogs are better pets? Dogs are more fun and loyal?
Objectively, none of this is probably true (except the last).
I would agree that someone who intentionally killed a dog and doesn't regret it is a terrible person, but I still think you'd be a terrible person if you subject them to death.
I almost had to. A neighbor didn't think leashes or fences applied to his dogs and they cornered neighborhood children on more than one occasion and attacked one of them. The dogs went into another neighbors garage and attempted to attack him. He happened to have a rifle with him and gave them a warning shot. I'm not sure I would have, and I love dogs.
That was definitely a teachable moment for the owner had the dog been shot. It’s always the owners fault of course and not the animal’s but it’s pretty weird how some dogs are that aggressive and terrorize while others are no problem.
Without specific information, I'd expect that in any similar situation, both parties had reasons for doing what they did, and it escalated because neither of them would back down. Obviously it's not something that only rich people do.
And beforehand without specific information, I would've assumed that Paul was at fault and Gross was not, based on public images and politics. But it was seemingly the opposite.
McAfee is sort of given slack because he was bat shit crazy and kind of hilarious while also being a bit of a tech pioneer with a debatable legacy. Im personally not giving him slack, I'm just saying thats why...above him being rich at one point in his life. Also when you have a personal presence in general (through social media) people feel they know you and you are humanized more than some news headline or mug shot.
I don't think it has as much to do with wealth as it has to do with how interesting/accomplished the person is, the more slack we give them culturally. The more boring/ordinary a person is, the less slack we give them in western culture. A poor person whose life has interesting or compelling elements to it also seem to get a ton of slack culturally for crimes.
You're saying "likely" as a hedge, when in fact you are instead merely expressing an opinion, without any knowledge of the actual numerical likelihood of such an event having happened.
What is the value of the poster's feelings about this, when we can rely on actual information instead? Appending "likely" to the statement is just a way to dress up a baseless opinion in the garb of objectivity.
What subjective probability is at play? None of us were there, or even in court. Maybe something very traumatic to Mr. McAfee happened that day. Would that inform some of his later recklessness?
Knowing the "actual" numerical likelihood is not necessary to deem something "likely" or not.
I will likely take a shit tomorrow, but cannot say so with certainty and lack the "actual numerical likelihood."
MacAfee fled the country after his neighbor was shot, and was wanted by police for questioning. Let's not get cute with metaphysical discussions about hedging bets and "actual numerical likehoods" lol.
I believe that’s how most people in society invoke a numerically void word like the word “likely”.
Call my cynical, but time and experience has taught me that people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor.
It’s as if they want to express an opinion without doing the leg work or providing any citations.
Had he invested the time to calculate an estimate of likelihood, I’m willing to bet an estimate or confidence interval would have been parenthetically inserted into his remarks.
"people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor."
To be fair, how in the world am I supposed to calculate such things and provide a satisfactory number?
The vast majority of my conversations and discourse don't require or benefit from giving a range or specific value to such words. Would the preceding sentence be better if I said 90%, 95%, 99.5% instead of 'vast majority'? And to be honest, most people - especially myself - aren't at all accurate with probability estimates, let alone calculations.
It's a logical standard. You can't prove a negative (ie that you didn't do something and thus are innocent), so the burden of proof must always be on those making a claim to show that it is true. While it might not be as dangerous for the gossip column to employ fallacious reasoning as it would be for a court of law, that doesn't stop it from being wrong.
Outside the courtroom everybody makes judgements based on the balance of evidence, because we can’t possibly know enough facts to pass the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
You mean like people judging others on Twitter based on gossip and quotes out of context? Society could do a lot better by imitating the justice system standards a bit more. The system was created that way for important ethical reasons.
It was created that way because of the extreme consequences of criminal conviction. Civil suits, which deal in money or injunctive relief, have a much lower standard of proof. Social opprobrium rightly has a standard lower than that.
It's no longer mere "opprobrium". These days it's losing your career (or at least your current job) and getting incessantly harassed. The calculus has very much changed.
(I'm not claiming that I have a solution for the problem, besides people individually waking up and realizing that it's a bad idea to rush to judgement. No amount of censorship or similar tactics could possibly solve this problem even if our benevolent tech overlords wanted to)
I'd say the standard in civil suits is the lowest ethically possible in judging people. It merely requires the claim to be more likely to be true that not. Below that, you're saying the claim is most likely false based on the evidence, but for reasons of extreme caution you will presume it is true. I certainly agree that happens in social media where the outcome of letting a "guilty" person get away with something is judged to be more unacceptable than the outcome of destroying an innocent person.
I believe you about it having such a standard (we can call it presence of evidence or presence of suspicion), but not on it being right.
2) Preponderance of evidence makes sense on civil suits because they are kinda inherently simmetrical. Either A loses or B loses. We would probably do better in using the standard of evidence for, say, a traffic violation, in the case of social "lets get this guy fired and try to make sure he never gets a job again" -- might not be enough of a standard, but better
Did you mean to say "social opprobium" (aka, lets get this guy fired and kicked out of places) should have a lower standard of proof than "beyond a reasonable doubt"? Because reading your post I understood that it should be lower then the civil standard (i.e.: "preponderance of evidence")
Which I believe it *has*, but absolutely should not have
It's not a logical standard, and you can prove a negative. For example, I can prove that I'm not dead, that there's no elephant in the room with me as I type this, and that my wife is not having sex with someone else right now because I can see her on the couch.
I wish people would stop saying you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you didn't do something by proving something else that logically excludes you doing it--such as being somewhere else at the time.
What about people who can’t prove a negative but truly are innocent? If you can’t guarantee that 100% can prove a negative, then innocent people would be convicted.
What about people who can't prove a positive but truly are guilty?
In this fuzzy form of what "positive" and "negative" are, there is a symmetry that allows all arguments you have for one "side" to be easily flipped. Each positive is somebody elses negative. Not guilty? Not innocent? With that line of reasong you could not ever prove anything since it's "the negative" of something else.
Mathematical logic has a solution to this though. You may want to check out constructive logic. That's where the statement "you can't prove a negative" is reasonable but has very specific meaning.
In Aristotelian Logic, is said that you can't prove an Universal Negative statement. I guess at some point someone forgot the Universal part and ran with it, creating that misconception.
That's not what I'm talking about. You can't prove an arbitrary negative. Or even more rigorously, just because you can't prove a negative doesn't make the positive true.
You could have programmed a script to make this comment. The elephant might be invisible. That might be your wife's identical twin sister. You can always come up with a more elaborate explanation. You haven't proved your negatives, you've just made it harder to prove the inverse. And while specific examples might be easy, in general this is hard if not impossible to do.
It would be absurd to assume your wife is cheating at every moment where you can't see with your own eyes that she isn't - no the default assumption must be that the claim is false and evidence must be presented to the contrary.
You're confusing logic with epistemology in the context of legal proceedings and life in general. Epistemically, I prove there's no elephant in my room now because elephants can't be invisible, because I would feel it or hear it or smell it, etc. You can posit an endless number of additional premises to show that there may still be an elephant in the room, but you end up in logical paradox where any evidence of the elephant being present is inaccessible. At that point, what does it mean to say "there's an elephant in here with me that is completely undetectable, so lack of detection is not evidence of absence?"
In terms of epistemology, "proof" means reaching sufficient justification for considering a belief to be true, not validity according to an axiomatic system.
The system that most people here serve, and pay taxes to, is a mass human sacrifice ritual, and most of you, despite your years, still fail to grasp this.
McAfee was a free man. His sins (excluding tax evasion, which is righteousness, not sin), were tainted with nowhere near the same slavishness and stupidity as our sins of tax-paying complicity in this satanic system.
He tweeted in preceding months and years that if found dead it wouldn't be suicide. He got "whacked" tattooed on his arm to prepare for this situation.
I don't think we can just uncritically accept that it's 100% a suicide
The guy was fucking everybody around all his life. He was crazy af and very smart. And he absolutely hated authority. It would be a beautiful last social hack to make people suspicious of the authorities in his death.
He died in a Catalan prison, not in US. Even if the US government had really any reason to kill him, sending an agent to prison in a foreign country to fake a suicide, when he was going to get extradited anyway, seems a bit hard to believe.
The other explanation -that the policemen in the Catalan prison were useless enough to let him hang himself without them realizing- seems more plausible.
> sending an agent to prison in a foreign country to fake a suicide
In the US, police culture generally doesn't allow taking bribes or letting sketchy figures with improper documentation into prison cells to administer extra-legal punishment.
In the other countries, things might be a lot more relaxed -- I don't know about the police in this particular country, but I imagine there are a fair number of prisons around the world where the guards might let an assassin in and out, no questions asked, as long as the bribe is big enough, or even themselves have a little side hustle, providing the service of murdering prisoners who've made well-funded enemies.
Also, presumably most US government assassins are part of the CIA, and aren't supposed to operate inside the US.
Tbh, that sounds like something a person would say/tweet to make an eventual suicide look heroic and blame it on others.
Someone who firmly believes that he is always treated unfairly whenever someone poses a threat to him or disagrees.
I don't know much about the facts around McAffee's fate and this is admittedly pure speculation.
But it fits in very well with a person whose ego apparently was through the roof.
Just to be clear: We're saying it's admirable to kill yourself rather than face the consequences of your illegal behavior? That's what we're respecting in this thread?
The man was believed to have committed a litany of offenses including attacking other humans but "he was so respectable because he never let them convict him"?
"Bad rich guy kills himself in pathetic attempt to avoid justice" would be my preferred headline personally.
Hold on. I talk like this and I'm a free man with a good job, good friends, and a good life. Sure, it becomes even more apparent when you are in a cage. But it's true, everyone really is in a cage of their own making. Even worse, being in a cage of someone else's making.
He's so frequently called "colorful" and "successful". In fact, he was a nutjob who most likely did unspeakable things when he wasn't busy doing just terrible things.
From McAffee in 2019, "Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: "We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself". I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.
"
As cynical as it might seem, there is an alternative possibility: in spite of getting a tattoo saying he would not kill himself, and in spite of posting a tweet saying he would not kill himself, he went ahead and killed himself.
technically, everyone dies... the question should be, did he deserve to be killed, if he was (not saying he was) or did he deserve to think that was his only way out?
> or did he deserve to think that was his only way out?
Hm, "deserve to think"... We're all totally responsible for our own thoughts, aren't we? I mean, who else could be; how could anyone else be?[1]
If McAfee had addled his brain with drugs so as to suffer paranoid-delusional fantasies; or even without drugs, if he had pondered weird conspiracy theories to the extent that he self-induced a persecution complex... Who's to blame for that but he himself; how could one claim that he didn't "deserve" it?
___
[1 -- EDIT]: Besides "long-term brainwash" scenarios, that is. James Bond in a North Korean prison cell, a cowed and battered spouse / child(ren), members of an oppressive cult, shit like that. McAfee was none of those.
No, the best outcome would have been a trial with a fair outcome.
But he went down to South America, started making drugs, and got accused of rape and murder. The legal system should assume innocence before trial, though in my personal opinion he was an evil man.
I'm not the person you replied to, but, do you mean they got the continent wrong because Belize is in Central America, and thus technically North America? Seems like an unnecessary nitpick.
If you thought he mistook Spain to be in South America, then, maybe the guidelines here would be of help. From my own experience, it is better to not assume people know less than you.
Then again, maybe you are referring to something else, in which case it would be nice to know what.
Belize isn't just "technically" North America, and misplacing it in South America is a not a minor nit. It shows a fundamental unfamiliarity with the subject. In my experience, norteamericanos that refer to everything south of the US border as "South America" tend to lump it into a mental box of stereotypes.
I've spent a fair bit of time in Central America, and the people I met there generally took great umbrage at being referred to as "South America".
I honestly fail to see what your point is, and as an argument, it does not impress me much. You went off your way to argue a minor inconsequential detail (yes, given what was discussed, it was inconsequential), and at the same time suggest they were less knowledgeable about the topic (which I might remind you, was not geographical terminology of land regions).
You'll do yourself a favor to not insult people over technical details. The arrogant attitude does not give a good impression. If you wanted to make it known you knew something they didn't, you could have achieved much more with "Belize and Central-America for that matter is considered to be part of North America, and very explicitly not part of South America". There was no need to make a point of someone knowing less, or disparaging their argument that had little to do with this.
In any case, do not mistake my interaction here as some sort of personal investment. I do not care much. Take the advice from a stranger as you will.
You missed the point. Parent has very strong opinions ("evil man"), yet makes statements that expose lack of familiarity with the subject. I'm calling it out.
My desire: People with strong opinions should temper them. Or at least temper them in public. That's all.
If your objection was to him having a too strong opinion, which would be more than welcome, you would be better served by making your argument relevant to that, and not geography trivia. It's a form of ad hominem, of which all forms are annoying.
How exactly does what you pointed out -- "lack of familiarity with the subject" of geography -- constitute a "calling out" of their strong opinions on McAfee's character?
Total fucking non sequitur!
(Even trying it on paints you in an ever worse light. At least in my book, you'd have come out of this a lot better if you'd taken GP's advice and backed off gracefully one or two comments earlier.)
He was imprisoned awaiting extradition for tax evasion charges, so guilt wasn't really determined yet. He did flee the US to avoid these charges and has since racked up a considerable trail of charges from foreign governments.
We'll probably never see direct evidence of his death. But suicide is plausible, given his history, I'd certainly believe he'd contemplate suicide when faced with a life in prison.
Which poses the question - if you're absolutely sure you're not going to kill yourself, how could you make sure that everybody knows it and believes it? Is there a way?
You can't. That's the job of the prison. This is why people get upset when there is a "CCTV malfunction" when high profile prisoners supposedly kill themselves.
Well, unless you get taken to prison where you will be surveilled, but the surveillance will fail at exactly the moment you committed suicide, mysteriously, and all footage would disappear after a technician makes an innocent mistake while backing it up.
Correct, and the events that user described is exactly what happened to Jeffery Epstein, and yet somehow we have no public information about who is responsible, and the official story is suicide.
But is it? What kind of foul play - is it prison management hiding the fact they had somebody kill himself on their watch (which is professional incompetence), or the other one?
Or, non-conspiratorially, surveillance fails all the time, but no one cares or even knows if surveillance fails and there was no reason to go back through the footage.
Put someone in a room and prevent them from sleeping for a few days and I'm pretty sure you could convince anyone to kill themselves. There's no absolute certainty that can ever be provided.
yes true! but the point is also that the mind is malleable, there's no guarantee that anything I say today will be true tomorrow... there are endless circumstances
It is indeed an alternative possiblity, but the possiblity that he was murdered should not be discounted. Murdering those that challenge authority has been happening since the dawn of history and nothing has fundamentally changed. Well other than needing to make it look like a suicide since modern society likes to believe it's enlightened.
McAfee was an obviously unhinged lunatic peddling fringe nonsense. You can make an argument that cryptocurrency poses a threat to the state, but a 75 year old man who spends 16 hours a day rambling on twitter about fringe stuff does not. The available evidence points strongly to a deeply mentally ill guy facing life in prison and killing himself.
"obviously an unhinged lunatic". That's a very strong statement that doesn't add to the discussion other than to trigger fear of association among commenters here. Facts are always better than ad hominem.
I'm not sure ad hominem applies here. Based on the background facts from the article alone "unhinged lunatic" isn't an irrelevant insult on character which ignores the subject matter rather a relevant point of refutation that the guy was truly unhinged and that should legitimately play a strong role in considering his claims. Could you always add more background? Sure, but I think there is more than enough in the article to point to him being genuinely unhinged.
I read the same article as everyone else here and didn't see anything that qualified the label "unhinged lunatic". You should perhaps look up the meaning of ad hominem by the way - it absolutely applies.
> He also launched unsuccessful bids to become the Libertarian Party's candidate for the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020. In 2019 McAfee expressed his disdain for taxes, tweeting that he had not filed tax returns for eight years because "taxation is illegal." In the same year he was briefly detained in the Dominican Republic for allegedly bringing weapons into the country. McAfee never fitted into the mould of what a tech entrepreneur might look like. He was brash, reckless and never far away from the next scandal... McAfee was a visionary, but also hot headed. It was his temperament that got him into trouble throughout his life. In 2012 he was arrested in Guatemala, having been on the run in Belize where police were investigating the death of his neighbour... He will be remembered, rightly, as an important figure in the development of the technology scene of the 1980s and 1990s. But he will also be remembered as a deeply controversial figure, who at times seemed intent in taking a path in life that might lead to trouble.
Hinged people aren't remembered for running between countries with various felony charges across borders because they think taxes are illegal in their home country while simultaneously campaigning for office there. It's not even a matter of if you believe he did or didn't do all of these, that he seemed to constantly find himself in these situations around the world is telling.
> Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, some but not all of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion to some irrelevant but often highly charged issue.
Seems to match the understanding I gave in my comment not anything new - "Based on the background facts from the article alone "unhinged lunatic" isn't an irrelevant insult on character which ignores the subject matter rather a relevant point of refutation that the guy was truly unhinged and that should legitimately play a strong role in considering his claims".
But since we're this far with it already might as well add some additional facts to get past why we shouldn't consider his claims at face value since we're both here:
- "McAfee wrote on Twitter that he predicted that the price of one bitcoin would jump to $500,000 within three years, and that "If not, I will eat my own dick on national television." In July 2019, he continued to defend a prediction of $1 million by the end of 2020. In January 2020, however, he stated on Twitter that his previous predictions were simply "A ruse to onboard new users", and that bitcoin had limited potential because it was "an ancient technology"." the guy constantly lied about things he peddled, or at the very least was an inconsistent storyteller.
- He wrote of himself in Belize "My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed,” he wrote. “My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight."
- On 11 August 2020, McAfee fabricated a hoax that he was arrested in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic, after refusing to replace a lace thong with a more effective face mask. McAfee later posted a picture of himself to Twitter with a bruised eye, claiming that it occurred during this arrest.[81] However, the photo of the alleged arrest shows an officer with the German word for "police" on their uniform, so it could not have been an arrest in Norway. The Augsburg Police later confirmed McAfee unsuccessfully attempted to enter Germany on that day, but was not arrested.
> It's not even a matter of if you believe he did or didn't do all of these, that he seemed to constantly find himself in these situations around the world is telling.
This makes the false assumption that the system is correct and railing against it is crazy.
> Seems to match the understanding I gave in my comment not anything new
This implies "unhinged" and "lunatic" are used in ways that describe specific and precise conditions rather than as insults, which is, frankly, horseshit.
As for the rest of your comments, they are unrelated, irrelevant, and don't characterize him in a way that is much different from the average American, even if true.
Unhinged folks can be murdered by state actors outside the law too...
This is one of those situations which may well just be impossible to unravel in a satisfactory way.
In fact, if you're clever and in intelligence, a good way to cover your tracks and generally be nefarious is to provide a reason for your desired outcome to happen. In other words, do what you can to encourage the unhinged tendencies of your target so that they might actually do it themselves or at least it will seem more plausible that they did.
As a thought experiment I have wondered before what I would do if I suspected the government might want to suicide me.
It's depressing to think that I'd have to have perfect mental health and the appearance of perfect mental health to arise suspicion otherwise my suicide would be written off. This is, of course, literally impossible.
Even assuming I did, almost anything bad that happened to me prior to the murder (losing a loved one, going to prison, being unable to go home, being arrested, stories of how you mistreated your cat) could be used to push for the idea of it being a suicide on mental health grounds. If Snowden were offed tomorrow, for example, there would be a veritable chorus of believed people declaring him mentally unwell whether or not there was any clinical evidence for it.
Any additional "craziness" from my past (& most people have some) adds fuel to the fire. Any evidence that you considered suicide in the past then you're practically a write off.
The fact that even foreshadowing it by saying "I would never commit suicide" would be used as evidence that I'm crazy (because "normal" people don't do that) is truly depressing. I thought this would work but it appears it's too easily dismissed as somethihg only a kook would do because Occam's razor.
Assuming the other evidence can be dealt with quietly (videotape, autopsy, etc), state sanctioned murder of dissidents and whistleblowers this way seems fairly easy. Moreover, if you're a whistleblower or dissident with real mental health issues or god forbid have attempted it before a staged suicide is a very logical way of dealing with you. The public is primed to write it off without a second thought.
Narratives are generated out of thin air. The person could have been perfect and they still could make them look like a suicidal lunatic. Any additional help from past circumstances is lubricant, but not necessary.
> Unhinged folks can be murdered by state actors outside the law too...
Yeah, but the thing is the state usually doesn't need to whack them.
Like here: Why would the US have had McAfee killed; what would be gained from it that couldn't just as well be gained from letting him rot in jail, be it in Spain or the US?
And please don't try the old "to silence him / suppress the Secret Truths he knew!". A) The null hypothesis is that there are no such "Secret Truths"; and B) if anything, this "suspicious" death lends more weight, not less, to his deluded ravings. (As witnessed by much of this comment thread.)
> You can make an argument that cryptocurrency poses a threat to the state, but a 75 year old man who spends 16 hours a day rambling on twitter about fringe stuff does not.
Unless they are, e.g., also head of state and government, but that’s not an issue with McAfee, though its not unheard of.
Also of note - suicide in the US is extremely difficult if you've been identified as someone with intention. You get checked on every 15 minutes, including at night (which can be a torture by itself)
15 minute checks aside, I’m pretty sure every federal prison has enough amount of cameras to keep an eye out from the local central command station…especially in 2021. Still surprised there was no evidence of this sort for Jeffery Epstein.
I'm going to mention that this jail was not in the US. I'm not familiar with jail policies in Spain, and it might be easy.
As far as the US is concerned, you've quoted policy. I'm pretty sure that jails and prisons in the US are supposed to provide medical care, mental health care, food enough for decent health (without having maggots): There are plenty of examples of it not happening. "I didn't know they were suicidal" or "We've been short staffed, and I couldn't check on him" are easy excuses.
You gonna back that statement up with some evidence? It's evidence, perhaps not evidence you like or would work well in a court of law, but it's a type of evidence regardless.
What's "evidence"; his tattoo? What is it evidence of?
AFAICS it's evidence either that he was trying to make himself seem a martyr, or that he was just generally unhinged. Both, of course, at the time he got it -- now, around the time of his death, it isn't evidence of anything at all; now it's just a bunch of fading old paint on his arm that has nothing to do with what is happening now.
But that's all it is "evidence" of. Claiming it's relevant in any way or "evidence" of anything else is like reading tealeaves, seeing deep significance in the colour of the getaway car at some bungled heist: "It was green, as in the Green Party the accused is a supporter of! So this was an act of poitically-motivated domestic terrorism! I rest my case!" -- "The defence?" -- "Your honour, my client bought that green 1992 Plymouth Omni at Honest Joe's Great Car Bargains six years ago. It was green at the time, had been ever since it was built, and my client assures me he bought it not because of the colour but because it was the cheapest car on the lot. And the reason he joined in on a plan to commit armed robbery was not political, but because he still drives that 1992 Plymouth Omni that was the cheapest car on the lot six years ago."
Sure. But how many people in high places -- billionaires and top politicians -- had hung out with McAfee, on his yacht possibly sticking their dicks where they shouldn't have stuck them?
Feels much, much more plausible that Epstein was silenced than that McAfee would have been. At least AFAICR I haven't seen any even remotely credible reason why anyone would have needed McAfee silenced.
An unstable personality that hates the US saying the US government would stage a suicide is much more likely to actually kill themselves than your regular run-of-the-mill evil billionaire with powerful enemies saying nothing about how they will die.
I don't think Mcafee really thought things through enough to come to this conclusion.
It is also what folks with absolutely no intention of killing themselves would say. Sure, you could parse out situations where they might and you could probably make someone's life so unimaginably miserable that the would eventually turn to it, but these are fringes.
I mean, I haven't done the analysis myself but "I'll tell this story so that if I take the cowardly way out my reputation will still be protected and the conspiracy theorists will keep my legend alive forever" has a > 0% chance of being the motivator here.
He could have killed himself anyway--- that is obvious, but his past statements still need to be taken seriously, and extra care and doubt need to be applied to the reported story.
Unless you are very sure that McAfee was "clearly unhinged individual", it is a strong statement and ad hominem. Doesn't help add to the discussion than mere gossip.
The man said he would eat his own dick on TV[1] if Bitcoin didn't hit $500k in 2020. There are credible reports he paid women to shit in his mouth from a hammock. There is his entire twitter feed. I am very sure McAfee was a "clearly unhinged individual", and if you're not I'd like to know what kind of evidence you need.
We don't have to go any further than the tweet that started this thread: McAfee claimed to be "getting subtle messages" from officials in the American government threatening to kill him.
Right, it's about both. "The US government is gonna suicide me" is not a statement I would believe coming from the average person, and given McAfee's statements/claims/drug abuse/tax evasion/etc I would say he had less credibility than the average person.
> his past statements still need to be taken seriously, and extra care and doubt need to be applied to the reported story.
Why? The fact that he had a paranoid fantasy of being murdered by the US government doesn't make it so. I don't have to take extra care with the ramblings of conspiracy theorists with a long history of outright bullshit.
Why? Because the US government has a strong and long documented history of murdering dissidents, especially in south america. Side A is unhindged guy, Side B has a very long rap sheet for murder. McAfees relationship with the intelligence community should be further investigated by private parties, ignoring a rap sheet like that is just as fantastical as conspiracy.
> As cynical as it might seem, there is an alternative possibility: in spite of getting a tattoo saying he would not kill himself, and in spite of posting a tweet saying he would not kill himself, he went ahead and killed himself
In fact, if you have people who will believe you (either becuase of who you are or who your target is), and a beef against someone, and see a confluence of circumstances likely to lead to a place where suicide is your only way out, why wouldn’t you set them up to take the blame if it got to that point (especially if you blamed them for the situation driving in that direction, so you might feel that it was a lie in only peripheral details, but not grand narrative.)
Well, seeing as 2019 is when he fled the US to avoid prosecution for tax fraud, it's not like it took a lot of foresight to say "hrm, maybe the US government will catch me."
How is this a long con? It's two years. According to the indictments he was being extradited for, that's _not the longest con John McAfee has been involved in_.
> That would have been a very long con since he has been tweeting things like this since 2019.
He started doing that not long after (or maybe concurrently with) announcing he was on the run from the USG in relation to the specific charges that he was ordered to be extradited to immediately before actually committing suicide.
This. The guy was just some drug-addled tech industry has been that shilled crypto scams and dodged his taxes. I think all those bathsalts were making him paranoid.
If people had reason to kill him, it would likely be that he knew scandalous information. The public wouldn't really know that people cared about him or what that information was.
I have no idea if McAfee had such knowledge, but "I don't know any reason why someone would kill him" doesn't mean much.
Whatever McAfee would "reveal" would just be his word. Which isn't great. Unless he knows how to obtain evidence of things, what he "knows" is just rambling.
Movies have instilled in us this notion that simply knowing something is good enough. It's not. Let's pretend for a second that McAfee knew that certain public figures were, without a doubt, 100%, Satanic pedophile lizard people or whatever the flavor of the month panic is.
If his only proof of this is that he saw Person X devour a live baby while molesting children in the basement of a pizza parlor, it's kind of meaningless. It's not much better than just saying you know it because you believe it really strongly.
The information he would have to know would be specific to uncover something in a way that people could actually act on that information.
Otherwise, it's like what Bill Murray whispered in my ear after he painted my house last night, "No one will ever believe you".
> It's not impossible that his word could provide evidence, he may know where (possibly metaphorical) bodies are buried.
Yes, and even if not, testimony alone is evidence, even if it doesn't lead to other evidence.
It may or may not be evidence that a trier of fact views as credible or sufficient on its own to meet the applicable standard of proof, but it is evidence.
> he may know where (possibly metaphorical) bodies are buried.
Because founding and running an anti-virus company for a while gets you invited to all the big shots' murder rampages...?
Was he ever even a largish campaign contributor, or anything that might have got him hobnobbing with (people that later turned into) The Powers That Be? I've never heard anything such about him; have you?
I'll repeat myself by saying "I have no idea if McAfee had such knowledge." You just can't say he didn't have some knowledge because you are unaware of any important information or connections he had.
Hasn't "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence" been debunked enough already?
Yes, I can. He was no Epstein; he didn't extortionably frolick around on his yacht with underage girls and politicians, billionaires, and celebrities of science, media, and entertainment. The only commonality McAfee's sad "frolicking" had with Epstein's was that it was on his yacht. But it was with his ex-hooker wife, crew and servants, and Idunno what more-or-less temporary "friends" and other hangers-around he may have picked up. Sure, some of the latter may have been second- or third-rate celebrities in their Latin American or Southern European home countries. Do you think that's the kind of people who have the clout to have someone "whacked" (or even the reputation to need "I snorted bathsalts with John McAfee on his yacht" suppressed)?
I mean, sure, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that he might have had some "whackable" knowledge, after all... As soon as anyone presents even a shred of evidence for that. But as far as we know, he didn't have any inside knowledge that needed to be "silenced". That's the null hypothesis; it's claims to the contrary that need evidence in their favour so as not to be dismissed out of hand.
There was a ruling today approving his extradition to the US. US officials were about to get him and he was facing extremely serious charges. That's a really important bit of context to keep in mind before jumping to ideas that some shadowy "they" had him killed.
Though it is also highly notable that he publicly posted "I'm not going to kill myself, and if I do then I was probably assassinated" before his death.
I guess I discount the words of others pretty strongly, especially when it comes to conspiracy theories.
Instead of trying to look for evidence in someone's tweets, how about we look at the facts on the ground. Such as: was he on suicide watch? Is this jail reliable? Is there a history of conspiracy and/or corruption in this jailhouse?
Truly the latter. He was not a well-adjusted, grounded individual.
Also, what benefit is there to the US to kill him? They already won. Being able to kill people you have custody of is a weak message compared to "nowhere is safe from us".
Prisoners dont get to talk to press all that much. You are 100% of time under controll. And having him in prison for long sends even better message then maybe-murder-maybe-not.
He was literally tweeting up until a few days ago. What makes you think he'd need the press to "unveil" anything "they" "don't want him talking about"?
They don't want him in the press talking about what exactly? He didn't exactly come across as a guy that would flee to central america to keep decades-long secrets.
How would the reputation of the US government be affected? McAfee is not a popular international figure, and he's not a martyr for any kind of cause that people will rally around.
Everyone here seems to have some inside track on McAffe's mental state. It's so ridiculous presumptuous, when we barely have an understanding of the mental state of those close to us.
I'm not stating anything with certainty, but he said multiple times over the years that authorities were threatening him with exactly this, a staged suicide, to the point that he even got it tattooed on himself, because he knew the media would push a narrative claiming he was crazy and suicidal. People are going so far as to say that he killed himself to troll people. The lengths people will go to avoid facing the truth that their leaders are sociopathic gangsters is extreme.
Yeah, well... From where I sit it looks more like this: The lengths people will go to, to avoid facing the overwhelmingly probable truth that the old tax-evading murderers on the lam they still for some reason admire are sociopathic gangsters, is extreme.
Really, honestly, seriously. Have you even tried to consider it could be that way around? Occam's razor suggests -- no, it screams! -- that he killed himself:
* People get desperate and kill themselves in some situations. McAfee was in a typical such situation.
* Having killed himself -- or not, as some would have it -- at the moment McAfee is big news. People (such as yourself) are (literally) screeching bloody murder. If there is anything to find, investigative journalists now have lots of incentive to look for it. If he'd just been extradited, probably no one would have cared; there might have been a few short articles noting the fact, and that would be that. Wouldn't it be stupid, then, to kill him since that would only attract all this attention (that you and I are lavishing on it)? How plausible is it that any actor that has the resources to have someone "whacked" is that stupid?
* Lots of people (you possibly among them?) have suggested that he was killed because "they wanted him silenced". I have asked a few what, exactly he is supposed to have had on anyone that would warrant "silencing" him. So far nobody has had any suggestions. Do you?
So, yeah, it does indeed look like some are doing their best to avoid facing the truth: You all who see a conspiracy here.
Which raises an interesting question: can a conspiracy consist of a single person? How about if that person speaks to himself?
More to your point -- replacing one weakly substantiated theory with another -- there are still degrees of plausibility among unsubstantiated theories.
He had enough charges lined up (up to 5 years for every count, IIRC) that he would likely be imprisoned for life. Goes without saying but he was also an incredibly paranoid person.
Yeah, but federal sentencing guidelines are complicated and it's very unlikely he'd serve anything like the possible maximum sentence. Trial probably would have dragged on for a few years and he'd eventually plead to something and serve a couple of years in a minimum security prison.
That said, he was 75, so I guess even a few years could potentially be a life sentence.
> He had enough charges lined up (up to 5 years for every count, IIRC) that he would likely be imprisoned for life
Usually, without aggravating circumstances, federal sentences would run concurrently, though thr multiplicity might push them up within the range permitted. So, lots of nonviolent up to 5 years per count crimes with no particular extreme factors likely adds up to...about 5 years.
Which at his age might still be a sizable fraction of his life, and he wouldn't be the first person to act based on an unrealistic estimate based on what is theoretically possible rather than likely.
Unless McAfee has dirt on you, and getting extradited to the US with serious crimes against him means a high likelihood of him turning state's witness.
The timing does make me suspicious. I'm generally willing to believe he was "suicided" by some shadowy conspiracy. But if that's what happened, why would they do it on the day his extradition was approved?
If our secret ninja assassins wanted to take him out because he Knew Too Much or whatever, they could do that any old time. Why do it on the day his extradition was approved instead of some random day 6 months ago or something.
On the other hand, it seems much more reasonable that a man whose extradition to the US to face Federal Criminal charges was just approved might suddenly decide to kill himself rather than deal with that.
Unless of course the Secret Ninja Assassins knew that and decided to kill him today to make it look less suspicious. But then we're really getting into the weeds of conspiracy, where any crazy thing we could dream up might have happened.
You literally answered it yourself: you find the suicide more believable today. If you find it more believable today, and their motivation is obscuring the murder, this is the perfect timing actually.
> Gitmo is specifically not on US soil to avoid dealing with US laws.
“Camp Delta at Gitmo is used...” is more accurate here than “Gitmo is specifically not on US soil...”; Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950) was not a motivating factor in securing the lease at Guatanamo Bay (in 1903) but was a factor in siting the temporary (Camp X-Ray) and later permanent (Camp Delta) detention facilities for War on Terror detainees there.
If he got murdered the connection to the extradition hearing to me would be that people are afraid he will talk and they're less confident in their ability to get to him in a US prison than a Spanish one.
His body is probably not even cold yet and the conspiracy theories are piling up. On a Twitter thread, replies range from the usual RIPs to people claiming some dubious connection with Epstein, Clinton etc.
Not claiming that you are, but I suspect many will use this as proof of something nefarious. Which it might be, but at least I feel that it is unlikely.
It feels like everything now starts with 'it's a conspiracy' for no reason and somehow everyone has to prove it isn't a conspiracy ... or it is assumed to be.
Unfortunately like Shkreli, Trump, etc., he has amassed an army of angry young extremely online men who hung on his every word, and will now descend on the comments section.
I guess it depends on how you define "little." You can peruse the comments here before they're flagged; it's a lot bigger overlap than any other community I'm in, including some of the worse ones like miniature wargaming or Emacs users.
He's also a liar and a con artist. And he's always been obsessed with being the object of others' obsessions. Like when he would claim to be the zenith of hacking targets, nevermind the fact that he'd been irrelevant for decades.
Perhaps, but I doubt those secrets were secrets that "they don't want you to hear". He's never been in a position to get any governmental secrets and, AFAIK, he's not really known to have connections with anyone really important in government (ala Epstein).
It also makes little sense that the US government would kill him before extradition and not after when they have a lot more control over narrative and investigations. Killing him on foreign soil makes everything needlessly harder for the US.
>He's never been in a position to get any governmental secrets and, AFAIK,
Part of his career was at Booz Allen Hamilton, though not for too long. Also he was in a position where corporate or personal secrets may have been accessible, which could also explain why an extradition would lead to action.
I wasn't saying he was, just providing a possible response to the question in the comment I replied to.
It seems like HN is becoming more like Reddit and downvotes now indicate disagreement instead of being used to hide things that don't add to the discussion.
That's perhaps because so many of them, are like virtually all of yours, persisting in pushing "he was killed by the government!" based, as far as I can tell, solely on him saying "I would never commit suicide so if it looks like I did, the government must have done it." Why are we all dismissing that, right? We're dismissing it because we're looking at McAfee's history. The man loved to make grand, conspiratorial statements with absolutely nothing to back them up. Take a walk through his Wikipedia page, and don't go "pfft, Wikipedia" -- I'm talking about the parts with extensive supporting links here. In a very real way, McAfee loved being a troll. No judgement on him (at least for that), but I honestly don't see how anyone can deny it was a huge facet of his later life.
I don't doubt that at the time he said he wouldn't commit suicide, he meant it, but based on other tweets quoted among these comments, he was very clearly in a state of depression brought on by his incarceration -- and, for god's sake, he'd spent most of the last decade as a fugitive. This is a man who went to extreme lengths to avoid being in prison. So when you keep asking, over and over, "What makes you think he would possibly commit suicide to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison," the answer is "literally everything the man had been doing before he was caught."
Or perhaps it's a bunch of people with preconceived notions and reactionary clicking like yourself. I challenge you to find a comment by myself that insists he was murdered. And the comment I was referring to that I said was reasonable was not pushing any particular narrative, but positing a reason why someone might want to murder him. That's not the same as saying he was murdered.
There is so much reactionary outrage online that people accuse you of supporting a belief for simply discussing it even if you didn't push it and haven't committed to it.
Edward Snowden has published a book, appeared on every podcast and talked to every media outlet since the 2013 revelations. He's still alive (granted, in Russia, where he'll probably be stuck forever).
I seriously doubt a drugged-up 75yo who lived outside the US for much of the past 20 years somehow had a hotter scoop on the US government's doings.
Lots of bigshots did shit they shouldn't have been doing on Epstein's yacht. Is there any credible report that any such figure did any such thing on McAfee's?
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the theory most likely to be true remains the null hypothesis: He didn't have diddly-squat on anybody.
> Because whatever he says in a trial becomes public record and widely reported on.
I don't think John had any credibility left for that to happen. We will never be 100% sure but I lean %99.99 that he committed suicide. He was not the kind to spent time in jails. Boredom killed this man
> I have been imprisoned in Catalonia nearly 7 months. I speak no Catalan and little Spanish so human contact is limited. There are no entertainments - no escape from loneliness, from emptiness, from myself.
> This has been the most trying period of my life.
Turns out prison sucks after a while.
As for the food, he changed his tune on that, too:
In his last prison interview he said that all his money was gone, his friends had all abandoned him and yet he regretted nothing. Sure sounds like a last statement to me.
And in late 2020: "I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine."
This. Gonna be grand when he faked his death and paid off a couple prison guards 10+ BTC to escape and shows up elsewhere in a year or two. One can hope, anyway. Plus, he had to get out of eating his own dick.
I either responded to the wrong comment, or misinterpreted the one I replied to. I wrote that believing I was responding to a claim that it was a good thing that McAfee evaded arrest in Belize. He certainly shouldn't be made to eat his own genitalia, regardless of what he's done.
I have found that "I'll never kill myself. There's always something to live for" is something that is very easy for people who are safe and happy to say, and I pray that these people will always be safe and comfortable enough to not change their mind on this for their own sakes.
When you're sitting in a tiny concrete box and looking at the very distinct possibility of spending the rest of your life in such a box, either metaphorically or, in McAfee's case, literally, the thought process is quite different. Yes, McAfee has had run-ins with the law before, but maybe he figured he wasn't going to get out of this situation so easily, and he didn't have that many more good years left in front of him, concrete box or no.
Thus, I'm willing to accept this as a suicide unless and until compelling evidence otherwise surfaces.
Why does the box being in the U.S or Spain matter to him, he would literally be in a box anyway. From his twits it seems he already made peace with being jailed and even said that quote while in jail.
> I have found that "I'll never kill myself. There's always something to live for" is something that is very easy for people who are safe and happy to say, and I pray that these people will always be safe and comfortable enough to not change their mind on this for their own sakes.
Maybe it helps to remember having said it oneself? I mean, if you are so badly off that you contemplate suicide, then everyone else saying "there's always something to live for" may be easier to write off; like, "what do they know of my life?". But if you've used to say so yourself, then sure, you may now think "so obviously I was wrong then"... But still, you're you, so you do know a thing or three about your life, so you may perhaps still hang back and consider "but wait, maybe I'm wrong now, and not back then?".
Maybe. At least feels like it should have a better chance than other saying it. So, hey, let's all remember to repeat this to ourselves now and then, mmkay?
Anyone who believes that IRS or SEC sends a hitman to kill people because they evade taxes or run fraudulent crypto schemes, needs to examine their head.
McAfee was always paranoid. He was not a threat to the man. He also lied a lot and even admitted it many times.
The trait that carried McAfee furthest was, in hindsight, his incredible talent as a hype man. He effectively created an image as a larger-than-life figure who those in power were afraid of and wished to stop.
I have no trouble believing that people wanted him dead in general. He was credibly accused of both murder and sexual assault[1]. I am sure he was annoying to many officials, but most of the reports of death threats around McAfee were those experienced by the people he disliked.
I think that the simplest and most straightforward explanation is that this tweet (and tattoo) were another promotional stunt for someone trying to get out of the charges against him. It would be another in a long line of claims McAfee made on various topics which had the effect of, however briefly, centering himself in the eye of the public. He wasn't adverse to extreme actions and I have no trouble believing that he would both get that tattoo and decide later to end his own life.
What you have here is someone ruminating on and obsessing over themes of suicide. Sadly that’s exactly the kind of person who goes on to fall victim to that behaviour.
"But the strangest part of knowing McAfee was the time he wanted me to help start an AIDS-free sex club. I still remember how excited he was about his new, brilliant idea. Membership required a fee and an AIDS test. If the test came back negative, you were given a membership card, which you could then take to organized member parties, have lots of casual sex, and not worry about catching the virus."
I notice he stresses the first syllable of his name. Is "McAfee" always pronounced that way, also in England, Ireland and Scotland?
Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as /ˈmækəfiː/, like in the video. Is it reasonable to suppose that if lots of people pronounced the name differently then at least one of them would have edited the Wikipedia article to mention the other pronunciation?
What a strange life he lived. I'm not going to make a value judgement about whether or not he was a 'good' person, but I do applaud the fact that he dared to deviate from the norm.
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
I second the recommendation. I loved the book, though (to be honest) I did read it when I was pretty young.
It's not just about taking drugs, though plenty of drugs are taken. It's an outsider's look at just how weird society is. It's also absolutely hilarious.. but fully appreciating the humor may require experience with drugs.
That seems to imply that he lived a deviant life because he took drugs, rather than the other way around. This is precisely the type of judgement that the parent wanted to avoid. :)
Yeah. I don't see them either. There are probably very well-organized people out there with a crack habit. The ones I see are the dead-eyed fuckups on the street spreading misery to themselves and their surroundings.
But it cuts both ways. There's a phrase "high-functioning alcoholic", meaning someone who still holds down a job, wears respectable clothes and all that. I grew up with a drunk: "high-functioning alcoholic" just means the worms are well concealed inside the can.
Did you know him personally to be able to make that judgement. To me it sounds like lying on his taxes destroyed his life, or to be more charitable to him, the government destroyed his life
At least one of those rape accusations was made on camera, by Allison Adonizio. It's not a fuzzy Twitter rumor thing. She accuses him of drugging and raping her.
He was convicted neither of rape nor of murder (though he was apparently found culpable for the murder by a US federal judge in a wrongful death suit). I believe he is guilty of both, as is my right; you might disagree, as is your right.
My point is only that I refuse to judge people just because someone has said it in a specific medium. (Generally I try not to judge people much at all.)
I have dear friends that have been tarred and feathered by national broadcasters and I am supposedly one of the victims as are many of my closest friends and I can't relate to the story at all :-/
You are free to use your own experiences and weightings of circumstance to reach your own conclusions about McAfee. I find the accusations against him to be highly credible.
I feel like there are some obvious problems with celebrating successes without making room for what the person did to achieve that success.
As an example: it would be odd to celebrate Amazon's financial success without mentioning their labor practices. Agree or disagree with them, they are part of how Amazon is able to make money.
If people are more than the worst thing they have ever done, then they are also more than the best thing they ever did. Talking about either in isolation is deceptive.
I agree to a certain extent, but ... if the allegations are true, he murdered his neighbour, raped at least 1 woman, hired a small private army, and was possibly running drugs. For me, that dominates my picture of him, building an anti-virus company seems like a small detail in comparison.
We’ll never know for sure which of the allegations are true, but from what I’ve read/watched, my personal opinion is most seem pretty credible. If they are, I’d find it in poor taste to celebrate much about the man, given how much pain and suffering he’s likely caused.
Didn’t he have a pretty detailed site on “how to smuggle drugs through Central America and get away with it”? I’m pretty sure that was him. Can’t seem to find the site rn though.
This cancel culture thing where a few negative cancels all the good you could have done is really weird.
Voltaire is racist, Washington had slaves, this or that twiteroo said 10 years ago some kind of sorry thing, McAfee killed and frauded.
Look it's all kinda true and all kinda irrelevant. People are more than the 10% of the time they sinned. I sure have sinned, and I sure hope you'll still find me valuable as a human.
There's a big difference between cancelling someone for something offensive they said on Twitter (which I disagree with) and cancelling someone who committed murder and rape.
Yes, one heinous act can outweigh all the good someone did. That's why we lock up murderers. That's not "cancel culture", it's every functioning justice system on earth.
Nobody "is" anything. People do things. He did some good things, worth praising. He's also allegedly done some despicable things that we should condemn.
It should be noted that this Hunter S Thompson quote refers to Oscar Zeta Acosta. Acosta made a big difference fighting for the rights of poor and marginalized mexican-americans in east LA. He did something more with his life than just take a lot of drugs and be weird.
> did something more with his life than just take a lot of drugs and be weird.
Not everything about a person is their public image though. Summing up a persons life like that, even if you disagree with his public image, is just inhumane. Did you know him? Did you ever even see him once?
I'm a determinist- I believe that if I were in an identical environment with an identical brain, I would behave identically. Reading social media, I see a lot of value judgments on people that rub me the wrong way- this person should be hated, that person was evil, etc. Extrapolating from my premise, I feel like those judgments apply to me and it stings a little.
Reading history, I encounter statements about what people did and about what motivated them to do it in a way that is aligned with my deterministic outlook. I never find myself bristling at a historical biography the way I do in, eg., this thread. The author might want me to judge someone, but they don't tell me to do so or even express directly that that is their belief.
I don't think a rule like, "you can't say someone is good/bad if you didn't know them," would result in a change to any history texts I've read, though I expect there are exceptions that I have not seen.
I briefly met McCafee in this context right before he announced his candidacy. I was using the cowork space to get out of the house. He was there to meet with Kyle, the COO, and what appeared to be potential investors.
Had a conversation with his meth-mouthed bodyguard who started talking about ducking behind me if someone came in with a gun.
At that point I left for the day and didn’t renew my coworking membership. Eventually, what was obvious to me about the place came out. I used it because it was the only coworking option in Auburn-Opelika at the time.
Having been on HN, I figured it was probably what it was. But also accepted I might be wrong…a bias for the sake of using the space perhaps.
Never mind running a con, they were the sort of assholes who didn’t mind putting my life at risk.
FWIW, if HST is to be believed, I think McAfee and Acosta would have gotten along:
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250 lb Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach – but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of 33 – just like Jesus Christ – you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already 33½ years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure blood off the front porch every 30 or 40 minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.
This is true. But he did also do a lot of drugs and he was also weird. See Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas for examples where he was portrayed as Dr. Gonzo.
HST did a lot more than do drugs and be weird, but I wouldn't imagine a computer nerd who clacks on a keyboard to know much about Gonzojournalism or the effects it's had on American culture.
Just a note on a reason you likely got so many downvotes, beyond the tone: the parent was likely referring to McAfee with that remark, not to Thompson.
should also be noted that Oscar Zeta Acosta disappeared during alleged involvement with drug-runners, and defended groups and people who now-a-days would likely be considered domestic terrorists (like early Brown Beret members before their first dissolution in the early 70s).
I came across a Wired article on McAfee from 2012 describing his life in Belize, and it's quite a story. Starting an antibiotic lab, hiring armed guards with automatic weapons, trying to clean up drug crime in a small town, sleeping with 17-year-olds (one of which tried to kill him), pointing a loaded gun to his own head, getting raided by the police and jailed, lots of paranoia, and that's just the highlights. It's worth a read.
I always remember by Geography teacher correcting me on my incorrect use of wether instead of whether and explaining that the former meant a castrated ram.
someone posted a nice story in a different thread - before he started going really crazy with the lab and stuff, it looks like he first wanted to get away from a couple of pending lawsuits in the States:
"He was already facing a suit from a man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were out of the country, he'd be less of a target. And he knew that, should he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money if he lived overseas."
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/
From memory, his nephew had passed in a similar way to the person in the flight. It may be the same case. I don't think he was running away from paying a settlement, I think he was running away from the guilt he felt that he had facilitated his own nephew's death. It was immediately after that that his downhill spiral began.
Wired suggesting it was a financial move is just lowbrow journalism.
(You're roughly correct about the circumstances - his nephew was illegally piloting and crashed a plane killing himself and the passenger in McAfee's low-altitude flight program.)
I feel like a lot of people in this thread are forgetting he likely killed his neighbor in 2012 and has been on the run since.
I mean, sure he built some antivirus software a few decades ago, but I don't think he deserves the eulogies he's getting here. He's not tech's Hunter S. Thompson; he's a murderer who spent the last years of his life screwing over people with crypto scams.
Well we should probably take into account that the programme was made for entertainment purposes and not as evidence as part of a trial. Much in the same way that reality TV is edited to make it more entertaining, this was probably produced in such a way to emphasize outrageous behaviour and the truth would have been less important.
In general yes, but it takes on a different form when the person is an eccentric that has very publicly challenged powerful authorities and has been both the source and target of disinformation campaigns.
I enjoyed following the guy's adventures (if/when it didn't involve killing people), but what on earth might attract powerful authorities that would go as far as killing him in a Western jail? He's not Epstein and mostly posted fantasies and various minor scams.
He was accused of making bath salts, and he was reported to be involved with prostitutes and much younger women. His reported statements seem to confirm that, not deny that.
I probably won't describe someone as evil for committing victimless crimes. But MPDV is a hard drug that's connected to serious, graphic crimes. I believe he was involved with trafficked women in third-party countries, that's rape. So I easily believe both the murder and rape accusations.
> He was accused of making bath salts, and he was reported to be involved with prostitutes and much younger women. His reported statements seem to confirm that, not deny that.
Open and shut case then. So unattributed "reported" anecdotes on the internet are all it takes these days, huh. No wonder it's so easy to smear and bury people.
Everyone here on HN is so strict about online security and providence and yet assign truth to a story based on anonymous anecdotes.
1) Presumption of innocence applies only in court which McAfee purposefully avoided.
2) He was found guilty in civil court.
3) If he wanted to be judged by American standards he should've perhaps stayed in America.
4) You're acting like accusations of torturing and murdering your (yes actually dead) neighbor happen regularly to random people. Cancel culture, amirite?
"Innocent until proven guilty" is for the courts, who hold sway over one's freedom. It is perfectly acceptable as an individual to go, "yeah, he probably (because I, as an individual, aren't held to a 'reasonable doubt' standard, either) did it" just as it is perfectly acceptable to give some benefit of the doubt.
But as others have already pointed out, a court already found him guilty, and it's moot anyway.
It’s not just a legal standard, it’s a fair minded principled default. If you have information that didn’t make it to trial or that is not legally actionable, you can make up your own mind. If you saw everything the Jury saw and nothing they didn’t see, and still would have voted differently, fine.
Innocent until proven guilty is an admission to your own flaws in judging another person. You can live life without that admission, but they are still present within you.
He was found guilty in a civil suit, and has been actively avoiding a criminal trial.
"Likely" is a fully appropriate term, since all evidence points to that being the case, but (as you say) there has been no trial to subject that thesis to evidence.
The legal standard for guilt in a criminal trial is "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." There is a lot of room between "likely" and that very high standard. It is perfectly consistent to think someone more likely committed a murder than didn't, yet still have a reasonable doubt. So I really don't think there's any shame here.
Court of law has rules on what evidence can be brought in. Courts are not the arbiter of justice, they're a system of justice that has flaws and errors.
You are stating something as fact, something that happened in another country. You are so well informed you watched a documentary and read some news articles.
He ran for US president in the last few races. How was he on the run.
>McAfee announced via Twitter that he would be continuing his campaign "in exile", following reports that he, his wife, and four of his campaign staff were being indicted for tax-related felonies by the IRS. McAfee indicated that he was in "international waters", and had previously tweeted that he was on his way to Venezuela. The IRS has not commented on the alleged indictments. On June 29, McAfee tweeted that his campaign headquarters had been relocated to Havana, Cuba.
With a campaign slogan of "Don't Vote McAfee". And he failed to win the Libertarian nomination in either 2016 or 2020 -- he barely even placed in the 2020 nomination, winning a grand total of two write-in votes (out of over a thousand).
This was never a serious campaign. It was a publicity stunt.
> How was he on the run.
He conducted his "campaign" from a boat in the Caribbean, and described himself as "in exile".
> I mean, sure he built some antivirus software a few decades ago, but I don't think he deserves the eulogies he's getting here.
Surely having built an antivirus us corroborating evidence of evil intent?
I find it unlikely that the product he created less damage to computers and user productivity than what it protected them from, especially in the last 15 years or do.
The court of public opinion does not operate on the same rules as a court of law.
Most people still believe OJ "did it" even though he was found innocent. In a just judicial system, the accused must be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the general public are not beholden to such stringent requirements. People are allowed to evaluate the available evidence and come to their own conclusions. In the case of John McAfee, that evidence is pretty damning, and he's done nothing to temper its persuasion.
This is HN, not a criminal court. One can be all for due process, and propose one's opinion here that someone is guilty. "Due process" does not apply here.
Is your assertion that authority figures are to be trusted and fleeing them proves guilt? Is this deference to authority provided to China and Russia as well?
People aren't automatically innocent in the eyes of the public just because they successfully avoid seeing a trial for nearly a decade by fleeing the country they are wanted in. McAfee's behavior surrounding the charges does absolutely nothing to help his perception.
"Innocent until proven guilty" is really only applicable in the context of formal judicial punishment. Absent formal judicial proceedings, it is completely fair for people to draw their own conclusions from the available evidence.
Even when a court of law does come to a conclusion, it does not mean public opinion is required to agree with that finding (i.e. that time OJ Simpson killed a person)
> People aren't automatically innocent in the eyes of the public just because they successfully avoid seeing a trial for nearly a decade by fleeing the country they are wanted in
It's weird how many on HN have this attitude to McAfee, but not to Assange.
That is strange, I always saw both figures as being popular among the *ahem* politicized conspiracy theorist crowd that has become so prevalent online in the last 5-6 years.
All these pro/against witch-hunts remind me of Hans Reiser [short] episode. When the Reiser saga was unfolding, there was a lot of support from people that identified with the "nerd" group. I remember reading so many theories on why "he couldn't have done it", how "it is completely normal to remove the passenger sit form your car", or to buy books on how to clean a crime scene...
Not saying I sway one way or another with Assange or McCafee... just that, as in Reiser's case, I am sure there's so much information we don't know that running to make an armchair judgement is most likely bound to get you to the wrong conclusion.
I've seen plenty of support here that Assange was not guilty of rape but not on the basis "he wasn't legally convicted" rather other reasoning. I.e. the opinion of guilty or not guilty is different but that's not what the line you quoted is talking about, it's just saying the lack of legal conviction is not the same thing as evidence they didn't do the crime (which seems consistent for both McAfee and Assange).
There was a whole civil case about it in the US. So while that doesn't prove he committed murder beyond a reasonable doubt, it means the preponderance of the evidence suggests he did.
"Innocent until proven guilty" does not mean "Abandon critical thought until a judge tells you otherwise" — this guy caught himself up in crimes literally everywhere he went... and this was after fleeing from a $25m judgement against him.
It seems a bit daft to think "gee, he probably did nothing wrong" simply because of how the American legal system is designed.
> It seems a bit daft to think "gee, he probably did nothing wrong" simply because of how the American legal system is designed.
It's worse than that. People are saying "gee, he probably did nothing wrong" simply because he avoided seeing any trial by fleeing the countries he is wanted in.
It is absurd to apply that to individual, or even social, judgement. We don't actually pretend to be ignorant and blind of a person's probable or apparent misdeeds if they haven't been proven in a court of law, nor should we. If, for instance, I notice a couple small, expensive items go missing each time my cousin visits, I'm not going to say "oh well, better not tell anyone else he's probably a thief and I'd better keep inviting him over and leaving him unattended, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law after all". That'd be silly, and acting that way to such an absolute adherence to that principle would be downright anti-social. If he's later convicted and my family finds out I'd noticed years ago, but not warned them because he hadn't been convicted yet, and so he stole things from them because I didn't warn them, they'd justly be pissed off at me.
Or, what, are we suddenly not allowed to judge people's apparent behavior & deeds as soon as they're criminal, but free to before that? That doesn't make much sense either. But clearly we can form and share judgements about behavior that's not criminal, and that's fine. If it gets too serious, though, then we have to stop unless a conviction occurs? Huh?
You shouldn't discount the possibility that your kid has been stealing from you all along, making things disappear when your cousin visited everytime to throw suspicion on him. ;-)
You're absolutely right about this. Future-supervillain children framing others for their crimes must never be discounted when attempting to explain any phenomenon. That's just basic household safety. :-)
I am hoping it's a case of people just being ignorant of his life after exiting the software world. The guy left a pretty horrible path of destruction. Hope his victims have some small amount of closure from this, because they won't be getting it from the legal system anymore.
Folks want to make him out as a nerd/tech hero and pretend all of the downward spiral stuff that he did never happened just to keep their conscience clean.
At least Mcafee said Spanish prisons are like Hilton in comparison to USA ones[1], do you have the documentary name, it’s the one about Norway prisons? Just curious.
There were serious allegations of murder and serious corruption. I’m conflicted on how to feel about this. Probably would have preferred seeing him convicted or vindicated, definitely not dead.
Never followed his story but the translated article on NyPost only mentions his cryptocurrency pump and dump scheme.
Which naturally leads me to the question, why was McAffee pursued for this all the way to Europe but Elon Musk isn't even investigated while millions watched him do the same?
I am not loading this politically at all. I am not from the US and I am mostly apathetic to celebrities. But I am genuinely curious why is it OK for one guy to do it and very illegal for another one doing the same?
Musk was fined 40 million for his stock tweets but I don't think he technically ever engaged in any crypto pump and dump because I don't think he ever actually held (or dumped) any crypto. I assume you have to actually financially benefit from such a scheme to commit some sort of crime. Otherwise you're basically just shitposting about crypto.
did they actually dump their bitcoin? If yes I'd agree that it deserves attention but I don't think that's the case. Probably for that reason Elon actually posted in May or whatever that they have not sold their coins.
Unless you can show that he actually mislead users for financial gain I don't think you're going to get authorities involved.
I think he's pumping crypto in order to pump Telsa stock price. If Telsa falls out of the S&P500, it will probably descend into a death spiral.
Musk claims that Telsa never sold any of their bitcoins before the price collapsed when he reversed course on BTC, but who the hell really knows at this point?
Hmm I thought they had but apparently that was just the news being the news. (Although I'll note that Elon has lied on Twitter plenty of times before :) )
Either way, he has certainly gained financially from boosting Tesla's stock, which lying about crypto is part of...
Tesla sold bitcoin before their last quarterly report. They were about to underperform but thankfully their BTC announcement made sure they could dump and then beat earnings instead.
Weirdly, they announced they would no longer accept BTC (on grounds known for years) right after they dumped.
Well technically Musk said "Tesla will not be selling any Bitcoin" when the policy change was announced. I haven't seen anything where he claims he didn't sell _before_ the change was announced.
I have no idea if he dumped his Bitcoin before announcing the change at Tesla, but misleading a bunch of people while leaving himself a technicality escape hatch would be extremely on brand for him.
Neither do Musk, Bezos, Soros etc. They just manage to get away with it. I guess McAfee was just not rich enough and didn't have the right tax attorney.
There's a difference between legally paying no taxes despite being rich and illegally paying no taxes. The tax laws need to be reformed, but that's a separate issue.
In Spanish we use two terms, what McAfee presumably did was "evasión"(evasion) which is illegal while what Musk,Bezos, et al. do is "elusión" (avoidance) which is totally legal.
Because Elon Musk is significantly more sane and did not actually done very same thing. Having enough sanity to keep you schemes just on the safer side help. He is also not accused of rape and murder both of which make law enforcement look more closely on you in general.
Also, Musk is rich and powerful right now. That alone makes it harder to go after him as he will pay for better justice. McAffee is not that powerful.
I met John in an Atlanta airport lounge years ago[1]. I recognized him immediately as I've always admired him, and I decided to go up to him and tell him as much. He invited me to sit down, and told him about when I was a teenager in the 90s learning about tech entrepreneurs at the time, I always thought he was pretty cool and had good ideas. I told him I respected him, and that I was sure he'd lived an incredible life and thanked him for his contributions. He was clearly totally sloshed(inebriated) and insisted he called his wife so I could recount the story to her. I did. An hr later I had to leave to catch my flight, and i asked him where he was going - he said I'd find out some "pretty crazy shit" about him next week, and that "the doc was a bunch of BS". Two days later, I read Show Time had announced "Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee". In the brief time I spent with him, I have to say he had pretty positive energy for someone who was portrayed the way he was.
A healthy paranoia if you grew up with the internet.
When a link can compromise an entire machine, having a machine you can literally throw away with no consequence is nice.
Hell, I'd wager to say that containers wouldn't be a thing if it weren't for this kind of behavior. Looking for ways to build up and destroy VMs even faster.
Windows 10 pro let’s you bring up fresh sandbox with one click and about 5 seconds to boot, it’s really not such a burden.
Or maybe people just have temp VMs running anyway, and like others have said, if you’re browsing hacker news on your work machine you should probably do so with a healthy dose of paranoia.
Yes I've met a number of personable people who I completely disagreed with on politics and their actions, as long as you don't challenge their ideological stances. It's kind of like dealing with an alcoholic as long as you don't challenge their addiction everything tends to go well. It happened to me just last night on the phone. The human mind is a complex thing.
Why would you have to agree on politics to like someone? Comparing someones ideologial stance with a severe addiction is pretty messed up, dude. Are you so sure your stance is the absolute right one?
OP didn't specify an ideology, and I think their statement stands for both people holding extreme and non-extreme views if they are held very strongly.
EDIT: I'm no doubt the angry alcoholic archetype who doesn't want to discuss it when my Windows-using friends try and tell me it's better than my Linux setup. Then again, I know my stance is the absolute right one ;)
Running Windows 10 with Ubuntu 20.04 running within WSL, and that all works pretty sweet. Corporate apps and Linux consoles on the same desktop. And yes, command line consoles are the only thing I interact with within Linux.
Depends on what ideological stance is. I knew people whose ideological stance was that Jews rule the world and are dangerous. Including all the consequences including mild "holocaust was basically necessary". Perfectly charming people, super easy to get along with. Of course, unless you insist on claiming that Jews were treated badly and unfairly. When you oppose them about that specific point, they get quite aggressive.
It is easy to get along with people of various ideological positions, as long as you are willing to nod along, regardless of real world consequences of their ideological stances. As long as their opinion is the one ever said out loud.
> Why would you have to agree on politics to like someone?
There are some political stances that also imply a particular moral/ethical stance. I think it'd be pretty normal to not like someone if their morals are incompatible with yours.
I have found many people (though not most) can be fine and pleasant even when you directly challenge their ideologies. But that is only assuming you do so in a respectful manner. In fact most of my best friends have different stances and we often regularly challenge them in discussion.
What I have noticed in recent years is that people increasingly have little respect for those they disagree with and it’s largely on the basis of that disagreement.
Five other hits in the entire Google corpus, all of which are the same use from 1921. It's so uncommon it's literally a shibboleth until you ruined it.
Sloshed is a weird word. It means drunk but if you go through etymology, it started at slush and moved to slosh which was to splash around in slush. Then somewhere along the lines, 'slosh' meant to pour without care and make a mess. That turned into pour alcohol carelessly and become a mess.
Where I grew up in Scotland, sloshed very specifically meant you couldn't pour the booze straight anymore, more than just a bit drunk. However, it's also considered somewhat polite, I thought... more appropriate when speaking of the dead.
Hey friend, honestly thanks. That’s how my Grandma Beatrice used the term sloshed - her family came over from Glasgow and she inherited that phrase from her Dad. It’s hard to convey but it was always said with love. It was more gentle teasing than an accusation?
Seriously though, thanks for this memory. My Gram and I were very very close.
My interaction with McAfee was in the pre-internet '80s. I was called when a nearby international school got hit by a computer virus spread on floppy disks. Looking for sources of info, found the "Computer Virus Industry Association". Called, got a little bit of generic advice, and he mostly asked me to send sample disks. Turned out that the "CVIA" was basically a pretext of McAfee trolling for people like me to send samples for the anti-virus software he was writing.
Sure, mildly clever ruse, but I always felt that the way it was done was a bit off - could have been more straightforward. I guess he thought people would not help him if he didn't use the pretext.
Somehow the rest of the story does not surprise me. Making his millions seems to have given him no peace either.
I'd argue that making those millions turned his life upside down, made his life drown in hedonism, eventually taking his mind and any shred of dignity. Still, RIP John
The thing about spiralling out of control is that it's both awful and awesome. RIP John Mcafee, one of the rare people who have the balls to really live.
We got McAfee for DOS in the late 1980s, dialed up his BBS for updates. Gave out copies at the college because it was shareware at the time, you buy a registration code.
Realise that people can be super nice to you and cruel/evil to somebody else. The serial killer living next door might be a great neighbour. That doesn’t change the facts of what he/she is.
This kind of subjectivism is so lacking in nuance, though, that the good parts that one is seeing (and, in many ways, choosing to see) are a mere reduction of the whole truth, and isn’t the whole truth of a person
So a serial killer is a good person just because he’s a nice neighbor to you? If you’re hanging out with a friend in your inner circle of elites and that friend is nice to you but is very rude to waiters and other blue-collar workers, is that friend a good person?
I’m not making a judgment of McAfee’s character here, just pointing out the myopic sense of morality. It’s so popular, too popular if I must say, among people these days.
In fact, this is what they mean when they say it's almost impossible to know who the real sociopaths are. The true ones are so charismatic and good at manipulation that, unless you are extraordinarily close to them or get on their bad side, they just seem like the sort of person that everyone likes.
Interestingly, a minority of people seem to be somewhat able to see through the facade. I have ADHD and a brother who's very nearly on the autism spectrum, and both of those conditions seem correlated with this ability to have an unbiased sense of a person. Perhaps it's due to the way we are slightly detached from normal social interactions, or the highly analytical way our brains function. All I know is that there are definitely times I feel this. For instance, if you look online, there are tons of relatively recent videos that have special forces types (SEALS, rangers, etc.) commenting on movie scenes or so on. The comments are always full of people talking about how they seem like such a great person, or how funny/charming/positive/etc. this person is. Meanwhile, I just come away with this feeling of being very deeply unsettled by them almost every time. Everything about their demeanor unsettles me. Now I'm in no way saying every special forces operator is a closet sociopath. But the job does attract a certain personality type, and many of the ones on these videos are the most charismatic of the whole bunch.
Back on topic, John always seemed to be to be a pretty typical narcissist to me. He did some stuff that I found to be funny in kind of a black humor sense (that video of him supposedly telling you how to uninstall McAfee antivirus), but the idea that he was a truly positive person I just totally don't see. I mean, think about it -- the OP's story involves John having the guy call his wife and tell him how great he thought John was and how great his ideas were. That's pretty typical narcissistic behavior.
It's a slippery slope tbh, you can end up suspicious of everyone, thinking everyone nice is actually a sociopath, when in fact there's nothing sinister under the surface.
Not to mention that people on the spectrum who are trying hard to show emotions appropriate to a situation end up seeming just as unsettling.
Always though ADHD was not about being able to have unbiased sense of a person. Instead much more about the inability to interact and be perceptive about the world and
persons around you.
Might be true, but it's complicated by mental illness being defined in terms of ability to participate in society. This includes various deeply irrational behaviours.
Hyper focus is a benefit of ADHD. It just has to be interesting.
I couldn’t read people in teens. In 20s I decided to change that. Would stare intently at a person face and watch every muscle movement, tone, etc. read some books on body language.
Was absurdly exhausting for me. But I got very good at reading people. Eventually it went from intense analytical analysis to just “normal” paying attention.
I have to disagree about your veteran assessment. Almost a decade ago I accidentally got into the security integration industry (security cameras, gates and the software that runs all of it). That field attracts a lot of veterans, especially the higher echelon guys. I've got to know plenty of folks from the enlisted and up to a full bird. The thing with anyone from one of those specialty combat mission backgrounds, they're typically extremely grounded people. As in, do you remember being a teen or young adult before getting into a career field? You had all these folks blowing smoke up your ass about how great something is in that field. The whole unicorn, sunshine and rainbows about a job field. Then you always had one dude who was, "nah, that's like 10% of the job. 90% of the time it's like this." When you're young, you think the person with actual experience, the salty guy, is a party pooper jackass. When you're older, you realize that guy was leveling your expectations, warning you of pitfalls and trying to make you look out for the good and how to cherish it. Combat vets are kind of the same way. There's a good chance any moral or ethical theory people armchair postulate about when it comes to society... they saw the extremes actually played out in real life with consequences. Those that readjusted back to civvy life well have the best attitude towards life. They try living life to the fullest because, again, they've seen first hand how short and fragile life is. They dont sugarcoat it either, which I think is what a majority of people find so jarring. The amount of sugarcoating in general society is amazing when you see the contrast. The charisma they exude isnt really the sociopath, snakeoil salesman kind. It's far more worldly and more honest, mixed with zero fucks given what you think of them. That sugarless honesty is what most people, especially these days, are attracted to. But then it can come off as crazy because of how much it contrasts with "normal" bullshit. They're the most egalitarian and welcoming "demographics" I've ever met. On a whole, the tech industry is full of far more actual sociopathic and narcissistic assholes.
"Former Special Forces capitalizing on it to garner a Youtube following" is a very small and specific subset of Veteran. The GP post wasn't making a generalized statement about combat vets.
GP was even very careful to concede that the traits they think they've observed aren't necessarily a strong proportion of that specific niche.
I think people like that always have positive energy whether feigned or real. It's what attracts people (and money) to them. Famous celebrities, high level execs, politicians that I've met all had similar outward charm.
Umm, no. Plenty of people have outward personas that they can maintain through extreme intoxication.
Guy Burgess was well known when a British diplomat for protracted alcohol binges accompanied by all sorts of poor decision-making, but he never let slip that he was a Soviet spy.
That, and he was already wealthy by the point the OP ran into him. I’m still poor and every additional dollar I receive increases my happiness immensely. Dollars buy dignity and he had no restraints in life at all financially.
This works less and less as you earn more. At some dozens/dollars a day (I don't even mean homeless, I mean when you pay the rent and only have some crumbs left - I have a lot of experience living this way) every additional dollar makes you happier. As soon as all your basic needs are covered you (I) lose all the emotional interest in money and only feel interested in experiences, free time and increased security.
It may seem odd to some, but I think the world was better off with McAffee alive. I doubt he took his own life. He seems to be the sort of fellow who would in some way enjoy going to court, even if only to have his point of view heard.
1,170 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 457 ms ] thread> McAfee anti-virus founder John McAfee commits suicide in a Barcelona prison
> The antivirus founder was arrested at El Prat airport and was awaiting extradition to the United States for tax evasion.
> The founder of McAfee antivirus, John McAfee, has been found dead this afternoon in his cell in Brians 2 prison, in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires (Barcelona), according to police sources. The Mossos are investigating what happened, and everything points to a suicide, according to the Department of Justice. McAfee was pending extradition to the United States after being arrested by the National Police at El Prat airport.
> McAfee, 75 years old, was being held in Module 1 of the Brians 1 penitentiary center. The prison guards, who found him dead in his cell, and the prison medical services intervened to perform resuscitation maneuvers, according to the Department of Justice, but were unable to save his life.
> The controversial antivirus founder was arrested on October 3, 2020 at the airport of El Prat, when he was about to take a plane to Turkey. The arrest came at the request of the US justice system, which accuses McAfee of evading millions of dollars in taxes from profits allegedly obtained from activities such as cryptocurrency trading. The judge of the Audiencia Nacional José de la Mata ordered his imprisonment, and his extradition to the United States was already planned.
The guy was troubled and had many shortcomings, but he was colorful and also achieved success and arguably was one of the seminal figures in the nascent AV industry.
Sad to see his fall from grace and into a world of extravagance, deceit and cheating (taxes) and, if allegations true, even worse; then to end it on the floor of a jail -all by his own hands.
Maybe he hung out with Chuck Berry too much.
hand wavey Tasered is not torture, else surely cops wouldn't use it? And he poisoned 4 dogs, people get rather angry about their pets. But yea, killing over it is extreme.
Still, seems an odd thing to extradite him for. Maybe more to the story which we will never know.
The history of trying to define things like "torture" as what the "good guys" don't do has a long an storied past, none of it successful.
You know, a cop would taser you once for a few seconds. That poor guy got tasered repeatedly, including his genitalia. How is this not torture?
Most of the time. Cops are known to torture people with tasers in the US by using them for long periods of time or repeatedly.
That's just horrible...
You see a lot of Taser marks on people's genitals?
Cops have used clubs for years, that doesn't mean you can't torture someone with a club.
It is certainly not the normal level of proof people take a court decision as being.
We'll never know. But we do know that his dogs were allowed to run free in a giant pack and attacked at least 6 people (probably more, but they may be locals and not ex-pats/tourists whose claims are more likely to be reported on)
If true, would certainly be a motive for those officials.
And what was the thinking of the officials who allegedly received the laptops? "Oh no, the man who gave us free laptops has been reading everything we've done on these laptops. Let's plan his murder on these laptops now. Don't worry about finding his address, it's just some home north of San Pedro right? Just go kill a guy and it must be John"
YOUTUBE: Videos over 25MB require verification. Please click the link below to complete the Youtube verification procedure.
MCAFEE: <Dies>
I'm a big fan of Occam's razor and in this case the simplest explanation, in light of _evidence_ of which there was plenty in the documentary, is that he was not truthful.
So he was looking to take out his competitors? Because he boasted of having sold 25KG of psychotropics in the previous year, so let's not mistake him for some vigilante.
Quantity claims:
> https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafe...
I've never heard he killed his dogs. I did hear he thought the next door neighbor poisoned his dogs.
You are one of the richest people on the planet and you choose to be an armed bully on a small island with a lot of poverty to exploit.
He could literally have any lifestyle he wanted.
Definitely did not have enough money for literally any lifestyle, especially seeing as it appears he owed a lot of money in back taxes.
He owed a lot of money in back taxes because he made a point of specifically refusing to pay them, not inability to do so.
If you spend a lot of money without paying your taxes, you still owe those taxes, which means you have significantly less money than you think you do. So when his aforementioned wealth peaked at $100M, the real value (i.e. minus taxes) was probably much lower.
Say I have $1M in the bank (or in Bitcoin), but I owe the IRS say $300K.
I leave the country, and take my money out of the reach of the IRS.
My "net worth" on an accounting statement might be $700K, but if I'm making a point of avoiding and biting my thumb at the IRS, I still absolute have access to $1M, regardless of moneys owed or claimed. And if I have no intention of paying those taxes, I'm certainly going to use that money. And McAfee was very actively saying "I'm keeping that owed tax and doing whatever the hell I like with it".
According to [0] he was down to about $4M in net worth after 2008, which isn't nothing, especially in a LCOL country, but for context, if he made 200k per year and put 10% away for retirement from when he was 25, he would have had the same amount.
[0] https://www.therichest.com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/...
We are assuming McAfee is just not paying taxes because craziness, but when you have volatile situation you can get burned by the rules pretty badly.
He seemed to like his dogs (which I get!), and was out for the little guys of the world. He didn't like authorities whom abused their power.
I found him refreshing compared to most wealthy guys.
I am sad he's gone. I wish it wasen't fear over the IRS though.
(I don't think anyone should do jail time over taxes. You can take their money, but no jail time. Oh yea, I don't care if he was doing drugs (prescribed, or illegial). I don't think anyone should have to go through withdrawls in a cell. That last sentence was not aimed at John. It never felt right hearing that people are expected to withdrawal from any substance while in jail. I see a constant help wanted in my local paper for a Psychiatry position at San Quentin. If I was in charge, every suspect would have a Psychiatrist they can talk to, and medicated if needed, with in a hour of being locked up for any offense. It's got to be one of the most stressful event in a person's life.)
We offered the McAffees a puppy shortly after they moved to TN; they came out and played with the litter for a couple hours in our front yard, and they were both very much "dog people".
Our pack wasn't aggressive, as such, but everyone found them intimidating. John was quite happy being chewed by multiple small hounds, and the rest of the pack was OK with the idea of him having a pup.
Alas, they weren't stable enough to give a good home to a dog at that time (and told us so before the pup was ready), so that puppy went elsewhere; but I was delighted to meet them both and found them decent people to spend a bit with.
That was my instinct as well, after John told the story about paying his Belizean housekeepers to shit into his mouth from a hammock.
I would just add some skepticism to the charges only because the police down there can be corrupt and or inept and subject to bribery and so on. I don't know if there has been an independent international inquiry into the matter.
Anyway, I think it's sad to see people when they throw away all the earned achievements in such a debauched way.
The bad: murder and rape.
I don't think those things even remotely cancel each other out.
A US federal judge found him culpable for a murder civilly.
False. A US federal judge entered a default judgement against him in a wrongful death suit. Murder is not a civil offense, the standards for civil wrongful death are not remotely the same as murder, and wrongful death liability (even based on a trial and evidence) doesn't indicate that one has even approximately committed murder. And, in any case the judgement was a default judgement because McAfee didn't answer the lawsuit, not a judgement based on evidence.
It establishes civil liability, but does not indicate anything (or even that anyone has reached any judgement) about the relevant facts.
Hence the word culpable, and not guilty.
This is true in general, but not true specifically for this case. A wrongful death case does not need to indicate murder, as wrongful deaths can occur for many reasons. But in this case, the award of the $20 million in punitive damages (damages to punish the defendant, not to compensate the victim) specifically were for the torture and murder, with intentional malice, of Faull.
>the judgement was a default judgement because McAfee didn't answer the lawsuit, not a judgement based on evidence.
No it wasn’t. He didn’t automatically lose because he didn’t show up. The court, specifically the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, allowed the Faull estate to petition for a default judgement due to McAfee’s continued failure to respond and due to the merits of the case presented. They did not, and would not, allow a default judgment on a meritless case.
Pdf of the actual Decision. https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/03/20/mcafee-belize.pdf
― Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic
“killing your neighbor, bribing the police and never serving a single day for it? What an eccentric person you are”
E.g. he came at me with a fire axe. And I kicked him down the stairs.
Is that in the eccentric free pass list? Can you put the list on GitHub?
This is not a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious.
It is interesting to watch dogs being treated like humans, almost like children and that sense of care does not extend to very human neighbours.
I don't get it. Probably because its a cultural thing. Anecdotally, where I am from a dog is a dog and will never get more attention than a person. It's not allowed in the house because that's where people live and if you feel lonely you call up a friend or sibling - not cuddle a dog.
One might get the impression that some cultures place more value in a dog than a person, which is bizzare since it is just an animal.
I think you've summed up ,quite succintly, my suspicions about western hegemony. The west is like the Empire in Asimovs Foundation trilogy. Wveryone is too busy looking at their phones to realise everything around them is crumbling.
Unconditional love is valuable for humans.
Wolves have also a huge positive impact in our economy. If we exclude the humans, the wolf is the animal that had saved more human lives in the history, so is in a special category. Dogs and wolves belong to the same species.
Would you mind elaborating on this point? In what way has the wolf saved uncountable human lives? I've only ever seen it portrayed as a human and livestock predator.
EDIT: I've been reading up on the matter. Historically, the wolf has been associated with disease control, as they tend to remove the weakest, sickest members of a given herd from the genetic pool.
Objectively, none of this is probably true (except the last).
Every moral standard is arbitrary if you don't recognize the distinctions being made.
The kind against whom the same dogs are used as a terror weapon by a “colorful, eccentric” rich neighbor.
Or, Rand Paul: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/rand-paul-attacker...
Without specific information, I'd expect that in any similar situation, both parties had reasons for doing what they did, and it escalated because neither of them would back down. Obviously it's not something that only rich people do.
And beforehand without specific information, I would've assumed that Paul was at fault and Gross was not, based on public images and politics. But it was seemingly the opposite.
Like, sure public perception isn't immediately bad when someone is perceived as wealthy
But the immediate and long term consequences are very different whether people went along with it or not
People can have louder and wilder public opinions when they aren't beholden to current/future employment or even advertising dollars
Even convicted people that do not need employment are able to just go back to whatever they were doing. They are not marginalized.
Even before conviction they can pay fines and settlements and make it orders of magnitude more expensive for prosecution to even mount a case
Are you rich because you were eccentric and colorful?
Or just people find you eccentric and colorful just because they look at you now that you are rich?
I will likely take a shit tomorrow, but cannot say so with certainty and lack the "actual numerical likelihood."
MacAfee fled the country after his neighbor was shot, and was wanted by police for questioning. Let's not get cute with metaphysical discussions about hedging bets and "actual numerical likehoods" lol.
Call my cynical, but time and experience has taught me that people do not back up qualifying words with the appropriate level of mathematical rigor.
It’s as if they want to express an opinion without doing the leg work or providing any citations.
Had he invested the time to calculate an estimate of likelihood, I’m willing to bet an estimate or confidence interval would have been parenthetically inserted into his remarks.
That’s what my experience tells me. YMMV
To be fair, how in the world am I supposed to calculate such things and provide a satisfactory number?
The vast majority of my conversations and discourse don't require or benefit from giving a range or specific value to such words. Would the preceding sentence be better if I said 90%, 95%, 99.5% instead of 'vast majority'? And to be honest, most people - especially myself - aren't at all accurate with probability estimates, let alone calculations.
I take it you're not a Bayesian. ;)
(I'm not claiming that I have a solution for the problem, besides people individually waking up and realizing that it's a bad idea to rush to judgement. No amount of censorship or similar tactics could possibly solve this problem even if our benevolent tech overlords wanted to)
I believe you about it having such a standard (we can call it presence of evidence or presence of suspicion), but not on it being right.
2) Preponderance of evidence makes sense on civil suits because they are kinda inherently simmetrical. Either A loses or B loses. We would probably do better in using the standard of evidence for, say, a traffic violation, in the case of social "lets get this guy fired and try to make sure he never gets a job again" -- might not be enough of a standard, but better
Which I believe it *has*, but absolutely should not have
What do you think the highest and lowest standards of evidence should be for "social opprobium"?
And what is the maximum damage to ones life that "social opprobium" should ideally entail?
I wish people would stop saying you can't prove a negative. You can prove that you didn't do something by proving something else that logically excludes you doing it--such as being somewhere else at the time.
In this fuzzy form of what "positive" and "negative" are, there is a symmetry that allows all arguments you have for one "side" to be easily flipped. Each positive is somebody elses negative. Not guilty? Not innocent? With that line of reasong you could not ever prove anything since it's "the negative" of something else.
Mathematical logic has a solution to this though. You may want to check out constructive logic. That's where the statement "you can't prove a negative" is reasonable but has very specific meaning.
You could have programmed a script to make this comment. The elephant might be invisible. That might be your wife's identical twin sister. You can always come up with a more elaborate explanation. You haven't proved your negatives, you've just made it harder to prove the inverse. And while specific examples might be easy, in general this is hard if not impossible to do.
It would be absurd to assume your wife is cheating at every moment where you can't see with your own eyes that she isn't - no the default assumption must be that the claim is false and evidence must be presented to the contrary.
In terms of epistemology, "proof" means reaching sufficient justification for considering a belief to be true, not validity according to an axiomatic system.
McAfee was a free man. His sins (excluding tax evasion, which is righteousness, not sin), were tainted with nowhere near the same slavishness and stupidity as our sins of tax-paying complicity in this satanic system.
Rest in peace John McAfee, you glorious bastard!
I don't think we can just uncritically accept that it's 100% a suicide
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/131680121508322509...
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/120086428376625152...
The other explanation -that the policemen in the Catalan prison were useless enough to let him hang himself without them realizing- seems more plausible.
In the US, police culture generally doesn't allow taking bribes or letting sketchy figures with improper documentation into prison cells to administer extra-legal punishment.
In the other countries, things might be a lot more relaxed -- I don't know about the police in this particular country, but I imagine there are a fair number of prisons around the world where the guards might let an assassin in and out, no questions asked, as long as the bribe is big enough, or even themselves have a little side hustle, providing the service of murdering prisoners who've made well-funded enemies.
Also, presumably most US government assassins are part of the CIA, and aren't supposed to operate inside the US.
2- You have probably never been outside of US.
3- No... You cannot bribe your way into a Spanish (or any other EU country) prison in order to kill someone.
Don't be so sure, bro XD
Someone who firmly believes that he is always treated unfairly whenever someone poses a threat to him or disagrees. I don't know much about the facts around McAffee's fate and this is admittedly pure speculation. But it fits in very well with a person whose ego apparently was through the roof.
He literally died in jail.
I think this qualifies "dying free" in spirit since his death means objection to remaining in custody.
The man was believed to have committed a litany of offenses including attacking other humans but "he was so respectable because he never let them convict him"?
"Bad rich guy kills himself in pathetic attempt to avoid justice" would be my preferred headline personally.
John was "stuffmonger" on a drug forum here: https://www.bluelight.org/xf/threads/hello-and-an-mdpv-quest...
A good summary here: https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/8utitu/john_mcafe...
https://nypost.com/2021/06/23/john-mcafee-dies-by-suicide-in...
https://news.yahoo.com/john-mcafee-found-dead-spanish-193256...
Google translate.
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/120086428376625152...
"My friends evaporated through fear of association.
I have nothing.
Yet, I regret nothing."
I mean, that's kinda what happens when you don't pay your taxes and run from the government. He would've gotten a trial if he didn't commit suicide.
> did he deserve to die
No, I don't think anyone deserves to die. But, the most likely case here is he did kill himself, in which case, it's kinda on him.
technically, everyone dies... the question should be, did he deserve to be killed, if he was (not saying he was) or did he deserve to think that was his only way out?
Hm, "deserve to think"... We're all totally responsible for our own thoughts, aren't we? I mean, who else could be; how could anyone else be?[1]
If McAfee had addled his brain with drugs so as to suffer paranoid-delusional fantasies; or even without drugs, if he had pondered weird conspiracy theories to the extent that he self-induced a persecution complex... Who's to blame for that but he himself; how could one claim that he didn't "deserve" it?
___
[1 -- EDIT]: Besides "long-term brainwash" scenarios, that is. James Bond in a North Korean prison cell, a cowed and battered spouse / child(ren), members of an oppressive cult, shit like that. McAfee was none of those.
But he went down to South America, started making drugs, and got accused of rape and murder. The legal system should assume innocence before trial, though in my personal opinion he was an evil man.
Some guys are suicided, others simply decide to change their gender in jail. If you don't see how this works, then I have nothing more to say to you
I don't have much of an opinion about McAfee, but it bugs me a bit when people who know less than I do have stronger opinions.
I'm not the person you replied to, but, do you mean they got the continent wrong because Belize is in Central America, and thus technically North America? Seems like an unnecessary nitpick.
If you thought he mistook Spain to be in South America, then, maybe the guidelines here would be of help. From my own experience, it is better to not assume people know less than you.
Then again, maybe you are referring to something else, in which case it would be nice to know what.
I've spent a fair bit of time in Central America, and the people I met there generally took great umbrage at being referred to as "South America".
You'll do yourself a favor to not insult people over technical details. The arrogant attitude does not give a good impression. If you wanted to make it known you knew something they didn't, you could have achieved much more with "Belize and Central-America for that matter is considered to be part of North America, and very explicitly not part of South America". There was no need to make a point of someone knowing less, or disparaging their argument that had little to do with this.
In any case, do not mistake my interaction here as some sort of personal investment. I do not care much. Take the advice from a stranger as you will.
My desire: People with strong opinions should temper them. Or at least temper them in public. That's all.
Total fucking non sequitur!
(Even trying it on paints you in an ever worse light. At least in my book, you'd have come out of this a lot better if you'd taken GP's advice and backed off gracefully one or two comments earlier.)
Is there a coherent answer to this in the case of suicide?
I feel like we enter a liar's paradox since the entity who decides whether you deserve to die is yourself.
He was imprisoned awaiting extradition for tax evasion charges, so guilt wasn't really determined yet. He did flee the US to avoid these charges and has since racked up a considerable trail of charges from foreign governments.
We'll probably never see direct evidence of his death. But suicide is plausible, given his history, I'd certainly believe he'd contemplate suicide when faced with a life in prison.
Is that what happened here or are people believing what they want to believe rather than striving to perceive a fact-based reality?
Correct, and the events that user described is exactly what happened to Jeffery Epstein, and yet somehow we have no public information about who is responsible, and the official story is suicide.
But is it? What kind of foul play - is it prison management hiding the fact they had somebody kill himself on their watch (which is professional incompetence), or the other one?
Hinged people aren't remembered for running between countries with various felony charges across borders because they think taxes are illegal in their home country while simultaneously campaigning for office there. It's not even a matter of if you believe he did or didn't do all of these, that he seemed to constantly find himself in these situations around the world is telling.
> Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, some but not all of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. This avoids genuine debate by creating a diversion to some irrelevant but often highly charged issue.
Seems to match the understanding I gave in my comment not anything new - "Based on the background facts from the article alone "unhinged lunatic" isn't an irrelevant insult on character which ignores the subject matter rather a relevant point of refutation that the guy was truly unhinged and that should legitimately play a strong role in considering his claims".
But since we're this far with it already might as well add some additional facts to get past why we shouldn't consider his claims at face value since we're both here:
- "McAfee wrote on Twitter that he predicted that the price of one bitcoin would jump to $500,000 within three years, and that "If not, I will eat my own dick on national television." In July 2019, he continued to defend a prediction of $1 million by the end of 2020. In January 2020, however, he stated on Twitter that his previous predictions were simply "A ruse to onboard new users", and that bitcoin had limited potential because it was "an ancient technology"." the guy constantly lied about things he peddled, or at the very least was an inconsistent storyteller.
- He wrote of himself in Belize "My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed,” he wrote. “My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight."
- On 11 August 2020, McAfee fabricated a hoax that he was arrested in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic, after refusing to replace a lace thong with a more effective face mask. McAfee later posted a picture of himself to Twitter with a bruised eye, claiming that it occurred during this arrest.[81] However, the photo of the alleged arrest shows an officer with the German word for "police" on their uniform, so it could not have been an arrest in Norway. The Augsburg Police later confirmed McAfee unsuccessfully attempted to enter Germany on that day, but was not arrested.
- He was known for consuming copious amou...
This makes the false assumption that the system is correct and railing against it is crazy.
> Seems to match the understanding I gave in my comment not anything new
This implies "unhinged" and "lunatic" are used in ways that describe specific and precise conditions rather than as insults, which is, frankly, horseshit.
As for the rest of your comments, they are unrelated, irrelevant, and don't characterize him in a way that is much different from the average American, even if true.
Are we still talking about McAfee here? I am coveted.
This is one of those situations which may well just be impossible to unravel in a satisfactory way.
In fact, if you're clever and in intelligence, a good way to cover your tracks and generally be nefarious is to provide a reason for your desired outcome to happen. In other words, do what you can to encourage the unhinged tendencies of your target so that they might actually do it themselves or at least it will seem more plausible that they did.
It's depressing to think that I'd have to have perfect mental health and the appearance of perfect mental health to arise suspicion otherwise my suicide would be written off. This is, of course, literally impossible.
Even assuming I did, almost anything bad that happened to me prior to the murder (losing a loved one, going to prison, being unable to go home, being arrested, stories of how you mistreated your cat) could be used to push for the idea of it being a suicide on mental health grounds. If Snowden were offed tomorrow, for example, there would be a veritable chorus of believed people declaring him mentally unwell whether or not there was any clinical evidence for it.
Any additional "craziness" from my past (& most people have some) adds fuel to the fire. Any evidence that you considered suicide in the past then you're practically a write off.
The fact that even foreshadowing it by saying "I would never commit suicide" would be used as evidence that I'm crazy (because "normal" people don't do that) is truly depressing. I thought this would work but it appears it's too easily dismissed as somethihg only a kook would do because Occam's razor.
Assuming the other evidence can be dealt with quietly (videotape, autopsy, etc), state sanctioned murder of dissidents and whistleblowers this way seems fairly easy. Moreover, if you're a whistleblower or dissident with real mental health issues or god forbid have attempted it before a staged suicide is a very logical way of dealing with you. The public is primed to write it off without a second thought.
If he did, I'm sure his wife will know and will confirm this soon.
Yeah, but the thing is the state usually doesn't need to whack them.
Like here: Why would the US have had McAfee killed; what would be gained from it that couldn't just as well be gained from letting him rot in jail, be it in Spain or the US?
And please don't try the old "to silence him / suppress the Secret Truths he knew!". A) The null hypothesis is that there are no such "Secret Truths"; and B) if anything, this "suspicious" death lends more weight, not less, to his deluded ravings. (As witnessed by much of this comment thread.)
Unless they are, e.g., also head of state and government, but that’s not an issue with McAfee, though its not unheard of.
He was about to be extradited, the US Government was well on their way to making an example of him. There was no incentive to murder him.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/02/13/jaildeaths/
As far as the US is concerned, you've quoted policy. I'm pretty sure that jails and prisons in the US are supposed to provide medical care, mental health care, food enough for decent health (without having maggots): There are plenty of examples of it not happening. "I didn't know they were suicidal" or "We've been short staffed, and I couldn't check on him" are easy excuses.
I mean, he did get a tattoo saying if he was found dead while in custody he had been murdered. But do go on...
AFAICS it's evidence either that he was trying to make himself seem a martyr, or that he was just generally unhinged. Both, of course, at the time he got it -- now, around the time of his death, it isn't evidence of anything at all; now it's just a bunch of fading old paint on his arm that has nothing to do with what is happening now.
But that's all it is "evidence" of. Claiming it's relevant in any way or "evidence" of anything else is like reading tealeaves, seeing deep significance in the colour of the getaway car at some bungled heist: "It was green, as in the Green Party the accused is a supporter of! So this was an act of poitically-motivated domestic terrorism! I rest my case!" -- "The defence?" -- "Your honour, my client bought that green 1992 Plymouth Omni at Honest Joe's Great Car Bargains six years ago. It was green at the time, had been ever since it was built, and my client assures me he bought it not because of the colour but because it was the cheapest car on the lot. And the reason he joined in on a plan to commit armed robbery was not political, but because he still drives that 1992 Plymouth Omni that was the cheapest car on the lot six years ago."
I consider it an "alternative possiblity" that Epstein hung himself.
Feels much, much more plausible that Epstein was silenced than that McAfee would have been. At least AFAICR I haven't seen any even remotely credible reason why anyone would have needed McAfee silenced.
I don't think Mcafee really thought things through enough to come to this conclusion.
[1] http://dickening.com/
He was a clearly unhinged individual.
If McAfee said the moon is made of cheese, I’d call that less credible than McAfee saying he’s going to get suicided.
Why? The fact that he had a paranoid fantasy of being murdered by the US government doesn't make it so. I don't have to take extra care with the ramblings of conspiracy theorists with a long history of outright bullshit.
Like the one where he promised to eat his own penis?
In fact, if you have people who will believe you (either becuase of who you are or who your target is), and a beef against someone, and see a confluence of circumstances likely to lead to a place where suicide is your only way out, why wouldn’t you set them up to take the blame if it got to that point (especially if you blamed them for the situation driving in that direction, so you might feel that it was a lie in only peripheral details, but not grand narrative.)
He started doing that not long after (or maybe concurrently with) announcing he was on the run from the USG in relation to the specific charges that he was ordered to be extradited to immediately before actually committing suicide.
I have no idea if McAfee had such knowledge, but "I don't know any reason why someone would kill him" doesn't mean much.
Whatever McAfee would "reveal" would just be his word. Which isn't great. Unless he knows how to obtain evidence of things, what he "knows" is just rambling.
Movies have instilled in us this notion that simply knowing something is good enough. It's not. Let's pretend for a second that McAfee knew that certain public figures were, without a doubt, 100%, Satanic pedophile lizard people or whatever the flavor of the month panic is.
If his only proof of this is that he saw Person X devour a live baby while molesting children in the basement of a pizza parlor, it's kind of meaningless. It's not much better than just saying you know it because you believe it really strongly.
The information he would have to know would be specific to uncover something in a way that people could actually act on that information.
Otherwise, it's like what Bill Murray whispered in my ear after he painted my house last night, "No one will ever believe you".
Yes, and even if not, testimony alone is evidence, even if it doesn't lead to other evidence.
It may or may not be evidence that a trier of fact views as credible or sufficient on its own to meet the applicable standard of proof, but it is evidence.
Because founding and running an anti-virus company for a while gets you invited to all the big shots' murder rampages...?
Was he ever even a largish campaign contributor, or anything that might have got him hobnobbing with (people that later turned into) The Powers That Be? I've never heard anything such about him; have you?
Yes, I can. He was no Epstein; he didn't extortionably frolick around on his yacht with underage girls and politicians, billionaires, and celebrities of science, media, and entertainment. The only commonality McAfee's sad "frolicking" had with Epstein's was that it was on his yacht. But it was with his ex-hooker wife, crew and servants, and Idunno what more-or-less temporary "friends" and other hangers-around he may have picked up. Sure, some of the latter may have been second- or third-rate celebrities in their Latin American or Southern European home countries. Do you think that's the kind of people who have the clout to have someone "whacked" (or even the reputation to need "I snorted bathsalts with John McAfee on his yacht" suppressed)?
I mean, sure, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that he might have had some "whackable" knowledge, after all... As soon as anyone presents even a shred of evidence for that. But as far as we know, he didn't have any inside knowledge that needed to be "silenced". That's the null hypothesis; it's claims to the contrary that need evidence in their favour so as not to be dismissed out of hand.
He's also indicated much more recently that any "suicide" wouldn't be such.
what's the optimal cooldown to post affirmations of life so that you believe they're true?
Instead of trying to look for evidence in someone's tweets, how about we look at the facts on the ground. Such as: was he on suicide watch? Is this jail reliable? Is there a history of conspiracy and/or corruption in this jailhouse?
Also, what benefit is there to the US to kill him? They already won. Being able to kill people you have custody of is a weak message compared to "nowhere is safe from us".
He killed himself to damage the reputation of the US government.
He couldn't escape from imprisonment, and he couldn't do much to harm the government. But he could do this.
It was the most he could do, so (I think) it's what he did.
Really, honestly, seriously. Have you even tried to consider it could be that way around? Occam's razor suggests -- no, it screams! -- that he killed himself:
* People get desperate and kill themselves in some situations. McAfee was in a typical such situation.
* Having killed himself -- or not, as some would have it -- at the moment McAfee is big news. People (such as yourself) are (literally) screeching bloody murder. If there is anything to find, investigative journalists now have lots of incentive to look for it. If he'd just been extradited, probably no one would have cared; there might have been a few short articles noting the fact, and that would be that. Wouldn't it be stupid, then, to kill him since that would only attract all this attention (that you and I are lavishing on it)? How plausible is it that any actor that has the resources to have someone "whacked" is that stupid?
* Lots of people (you possibly among them?) have suggested that he was killed because "they wanted him silenced". I have asked a few what, exactly he is supposed to have had on anyone that would warrant "silencing" him. So far nobody has had any suggestions. Do you?
So, yeah, it does indeed look like some are doing their best to avoid facing the truth: You all who see a conspiracy here.
More to your point -- replacing one weakly substantiated theory with another -- there are still degrees of plausibility among unsubstantiated theories.
That said, he was 75, so I guess even a few years could potentially be a life sentence.
Usually, without aggravating circumstances, federal sentences would run concurrently, though thr multiplicity might push them up within the range permitted. So, lots of nonviolent up to 5 years per count crimes with no particular extreme factors likely adds up to...about 5 years.
Which at his age might still be a sizable fraction of his life, and he wouldn't be the first person to act based on an unrealistic estimate based on what is theoretically possible rather than likely.
If our secret ninja assassins wanted to take him out because he Knew Too Much or whatever, they could do that any old time. Why do it on the day his extradition was approved instead of some random day 6 months ago or something.
On the other hand, it seems much more reasonable that a man whose extradition to the US to face Federal Criminal charges was just approved might suddenly decide to kill himself rather than deal with that.
Unless of course the Secret Ninja Assassins knew that and decided to kill him today to make it look less suspicious. But then we're really getting into the weeds of conspiracy, where any crazy thing we could dream up might have happened.
“Camp Delta at Gitmo is used...” is more accurate here than “Gitmo is specifically not on US soil...”; Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950) was not a motivating factor in securing the lease at Guatanamo Bay (in 1903) but was a factor in siting the temporary (Camp X-Ray) and later permanent (Camp Delta) detention facilities for War on Terror detainees there.
I think the HN community has little overlap with the #FreeMcAfee club.
It also makes little sense that the US government would kill him before extradition and not after when they have a lot more control over narrative and investigations. Killing him on foreign soil makes everything needlessly harder for the US.
Part of his career was at Booz Allen Hamilton, though not for too long. Also he was in a position where corporate or personal secrets may have been accessible, which could also explain why an extradition would lead to action.
I think the GP you replied to meant McAfee. (Snowden was never supposed to have killed anyone, was he?)
...or not.
TIL; thanks.
It seems like HN is becoming more like Reddit and downvotes now indicate disagreement instead of being used to hide things that don't add to the discussion.
I don't doubt that at the time he said he wouldn't commit suicide, he meant it, but based on other tweets quoted among these comments, he was very clearly in a state of depression brought on by his incarceration -- and, for god's sake, he'd spent most of the last decade as a fugitive. This is a man who went to extreme lengths to avoid being in prison. So when you keep asking, over and over, "What makes you think he would possibly commit suicide to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison," the answer is "literally everything the man had been doing before he was caught."
There is so much reactionary outrage online that people accuse you of supporting a belief for simply discussing it even if you didn't push it and haven't committed to it.
I seriously doubt a drugged-up 75yo who lived outside the US for much of the past 20 years somehow had a hotter scoop on the US government's doings.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the theory most likely to be true remains the null hypothesis: He didn't have diddly-squat on anybody.
I don't think John had any credibility left for that to happen. We will never be 100% sure but I lean %99.99 that he committed suicide. He was not the kind to spent time in jails. Boredom killed this man
I am content in here. I have friends.
The food is good. All is well.
Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/131680121508322509...
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/138634987054662041...
> I have been imprisoned in Catalonia nearly 7 months. I speak no Catalan and little Spanish so human contact is limited. There are no entertainments - no escape from loneliness, from emptiness, from myself.
> This has been the most trying period of my life.
Turns out prison sucks after a while.
As for the food, he changed his tune on that, too:
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/139145553961222553...
> Most prison food in Spain is indistinguishable from rat shit in motor oil. The single exception is potato pie, which is only served on Saturdays.
> Unfortunately today is Sunday.
Sounds like it sucks at the beginning, too.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7qawy/john-mcafee-no-longer...
Kind of undermines his credibility.
https://archive.ph/peexn
https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/131680121508322509...
When you're sitting in a tiny concrete box and looking at the very distinct possibility of spending the rest of your life in such a box, either metaphorically or, in McAfee's case, literally, the thought process is quite different. Yes, McAfee has had run-ins with the law before, but maybe he figured he wasn't going to get out of this situation so easily, and he didn't have that many more good years left in front of him, concrete box or no.
Thus, I'm willing to accept this as a suicide unless and until compelling evidence otherwise surfaces.
Maybe it helps to remember having said it oneself? I mean, if you are so badly off that you contemplate suicide, then everyone else saying "there's always something to live for" may be easier to write off; like, "what do they know of my life?". But if you've used to say so yourself, then sure, you may now think "so obviously I was wrong then"... But still, you're you, so you do know a thing or three about your life, so you may perhaps still hang back and consider "but wait, maybe I'm wrong now, and not back then?".
Maybe. At least feels like it should have a better chance than other saying it. So, hey, let's all remember to repeat this to ourselves now and then, mmkay?
McAfee was always paranoid. He was not a threat to the man. He also lied a lot and even admitted it many times.
https://web.archive.org/web/20201005231441/https://twitter.c...
I have no trouble believing that people wanted him dead in general. He was credibly accused of both murder and sexual assault[1]. I am sure he was annoying to many officials, but most of the reports of death threats around McAfee were those experienced by the people he disliked.
I think that the simplest and most straightforward explanation is that this tweet (and tattoo) were another promotional stunt for someone trying to get out of the charges against him. It would be another in a long line of claims McAfee made on various topics which had the effect of, however briefly, centering himself in the eye of the public. He wasn't adverse to extreme actions and I have no trouble believing that he would both get that tattoo and decide later to end his own life.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/12/12887124/john-mcafee-rape...
Rest In Peace.
"How To Uninstall McAfee Antivirus" => https://youtu.be/bKgf5PaBzyg
- My adventures with John McAfee https://www.csoonline.com/article/2616198/my-adventures-with...
I notice he stresses the first syllable of his name. Is "McAfee" always pronounced that way, also in England, Ireland and Scotland?
Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as /ˈmækəfiː/, like in the video. Is it reasonable to suppose that if lots of people pronounced the name differently then at least one of them would have edited the Wikipedia article to mention the other pronunciation?
"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."
-- Hunter S Thompson
RIP
It's not just about taking drugs, though plenty of drugs are taken. It's an outsider's look at just how weird society is. It's also absolutely hilarious.. but fully appreciating the humor may require experience with drugs.
We're all monkeys on a space rock. I think it's good we have such variety.
He just committed suicide.
And if you don’t believe he did I’m not sure that makes a case for it working out okay for him either.
But it cuts both ways. There's a phrase "high-functioning alcoholic", meaning someone who still holds down a job, wears respectable clothes and all that. I grew up with a drunk: "high-functioning alcoholic" just means the worms are well concealed inside the can.
Especially at high doses for long periods of time, which is how Hunter S. Thompson got his name.
Looks around suspiciously
Oh god, you don't think the deviants could be in this thread do you?
At least MacAfee took that shit to have fun, as God intended.
I have dear friends that have been tarred and feathered by national broadcasters and I am supposedly one of the victims as are many of my closest friends and I can't relate to the story at all :-/
As an example: it would be odd to celebrate Amazon's financial success without mentioning their labor practices. Agree or disagree with them, they are part of how Amazon is able to make money.
If people are more than the worst thing they have ever done, then they are also more than the best thing they ever did. Talking about either in isolation is deceptive.
We’ll never know for sure which of the allegations are true, but from what I’ve read/watched, my personal opinion is most seem pretty credible. If they are, I’d find it in poor taste to celebrate much about the man, given how much pain and suffering he’s likely caused.
Didn’t he have a pretty detailed site on “how to smuggle drugs through Central America and get away with it”? I’m pretty sure that was him. Can’t seem to find the site rn though.
That one is the most verifiable. He in fact seemed to be proud of that fact.
https://twitter.com/dril/status/831805955402776576
Voltaire is racist, Washington had slaves, this or that twiteroo said 10 years ago some kind of sorry thing, McAfee killed and frauded.
Look it's all kinda true and all kinda irrelevant. People are more than the 10% of the time they sinned. I sure have sinned, and I sure hope you'll still find me valuable as a human.
Big, big difference.
Not everything about a person is their public image though. Summing up a persons life like that, even if you disagree with his public image, is just inhumane. Did you know him? Did you ever even see him once?
We're going to need to rewrite an awful lot of history if our standards for judging people are "knowing them and seeing them even once"
Reading history, I encounter statements about what people did and about what motivated them to do it in a way that is aligned with my deterministic outlook. I never find myself bristling at a historical biography the way I do in, eg., this thread. The author might want me to judge someone, but they don't tell me to do so or even express directly that that is their belief.
I don't think a rule like, "you can't say someone is good/bad if you didn't know them," would result in a change to any history texts I've read, though I expect there are exceptions that I have not seen.
I briefly met McCafee in this context right before he announced his candidacy. I was using the cowork space to get out of the house. He was there to meet with Kyle, the COO, and what appeared to be potential investors.
Had a conversation with his meth-mouthed bodyguard who started talking about ducking behind me if someone came in with a gun.
At that point I left for the day and didn’t renew my coworking membership. Eventually, what was obvious to me about the place came out. I used it because it was the only coworking option in Auburn-Opelika at the time.
Having been on HN, I figured it was probably what it was. But also accepted I might be wrong…a bias for the sake of using the space perhaps.
Never mind running a con, they were the sort of assholes who didn’t mind putting my life at risk.
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250 lb Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach – but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of 33 – just like Jesus Christ – you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is already 33½ years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure blood off the front porch every 30 or 40 minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.
— Hunter S. Thompson
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/
In my language they spell hv...
Hvem, hvad, hvor = who, what, where etc.
Does working in tech bring about a condition of no longer making value judgements, so that you never have to turn that spotlight on yourselves?
Wikipedia is surprisingly sparse here.
Edit - in 2012 he was the prime suspect to the killing of his neighbor as mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27609243
Guess Belize are lax on experiments and "labs"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee#After_McAfee_Assoc...
Drugs.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/09/the-obscure-legal-dr...
"He was already facing a suit from a man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were out of the country, he'd be less of a target. And he knew that, should he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money if he lived overseas." https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/
Wired suggesting it was a financial move is just lowbrow journalism.
(You're roughly correct about the circumstances - his nephew was illegally piloting and crashed a plane killing himself and the passenger in McAfee's low-altitude flight program.)
I mean, sure he built some antivirus software a few decades ago, but I don't think he deserves the eulogies he's getting here. He's not tech's Hunter S. Thompson; he's a murderer who spent the last years of his life screwing over people with crypto scams.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6071534/
Documentaries like money?
In America, we're supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty. It's a shame it really only takes an accusation.
Also, presumption of innocence applies to the law, not to HN comments.
The legal system should presume innocence. It's completely reasonable for people have lower standards for assuming guilt.
I probably won't describe someone as evil for committing victimless crimes. But MPDV is a hard drug that's connected to serious, graphic crimes. I believe he was involved with trafficked women in third-party countries, that's rape. So I easily believe both the murder and rape accusations.
Open and shut case then. So unattributed "reported" anecdotes on the internet are all it takes these days, huh. No wonder it's so easy to smear and bury people.
Everyone here on HN is so strict about online security and providence and yet assign truth to a story based on anonymous anecdotes.
2) He was found guilty in civil court.
3) If he wanted to be judged by American standards he should've perhaps stayed in America.
4) You're acting like accusations of torturing and murdering your (yes actually dead) neighbor happen regularly to random people. Cancel culture, amirite?
But as others have already pointed out, a court already found him guilty, and it's moot anyway.
Innocent until proven guilty is an admission to your own flaws in judging another person. You can live life without that admission, but they are still present within you.
"Likely" is a fully appropriate term, since all evidence points to that being the case, but (as you say) there has been no trial to subject that thesis to evidence.
He ran for US president in the last few races. How was he on the run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McAfee_2020_presidential_...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
With a campaign slogan of "Don't Vote McAfee". And he failed to win the Libertarian nomination in either 2016 or 2020 -- he barely even placed in the 2020 nomination, winning a grand total of two write-in votes (out of over a thousand).
This was never a serious campaign. It was a publicity stunt.
> How was he on the run.
He conducted his "campaign" from a boat in the Caribbean, and described himself as "in exile".
https://www.cnet.com/news/john-mcafee-says-he-has-recruited-...
Surely having built an antivirus us corroborating evidence of evil intent?
I find it unlikely that the product he created less damage to computers and user productivity than what it protected them from, especially in the last 15 years or do.
Most people still believe OJ "did it" even though he was found innocent. In a just judicial system, the accused must be proven guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt", but the general public are not beholden to such stringent requirements. People are allowed to evaluate the available evidence and come to their own conclusions. In the case of John McAfee, that evidence is pretty damning, and he's done nothing to temper its persuasion.
source: my parents live in the town where it happened.
Then you’re not for due process
"Innocent until proven guilty" is really only applicable in the context of formal judicial punishment. Absent formal judicial proceedings, it is completely fair for people to draw their own conclusions from the available evidence.
Even when a court of law does come to a conclusion, it does not mean public opinion is required to agree with that finding (i.e. that time OJ Simpson killed a person)
It's weird how many on HN have this attitude to McAfee, but not to Assange.
He has influenced the world in much more significant ways.
Not saying I sway one way or another with Assange or McCafee... just that, as in Reiser's case, I am sure there's so much information we don't know that running to make an armchair judgement is most likely bound to get you to the wrong conclusion.
> he's a murderer who spent the last years of his life screwing over people with crypto scams
Well, that escalated quickly.
It seems a bit daft to think "gee, he probably did nothing wrong" simply because of how the American legal system is designed.
It's worse than that. People are saying "gee, he probably did nothing wrong" simply because he avoided seeing any trial by fleeing the countries he is wanted in.
Or, what, are we suddenly not allowed to judge people's apparent behavior & deeds as soon as they're criminal, but free to before that? That doesn't make much sense either. But clearly we can form and share judgements about behavior that's not criminal, and that's fine. If it gets too serious, though, then we have to stop unless a conviction occurs? Huh?
(Allright, I'm just trying to lighten the mood).
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9718567/amp/Antivir...
Which naturally leads me to the question, why was McAffee pursued for this all the way to Europe but Elon Musk isn't even investigated while millions watched him do the same?
I am not loading this politically at all. I am not from the US and I am mostly apathetic to celebrities. But I am genuinely curious why is it OK for one guy to do it and very illegal for another one doing the same?
Unless you can show that he actually mislead users for financial gain I don't think you're going to get authorities involved.
Musk claims that Telsa never sold any of their bitcoins before the price collapsed when he reversed course on BTC, but who the hell really knows at this point?
Either way, he has certainly gained financially from boosting Tesla's stock, which lying about crypto is part of...
Weirdly, they announced they would no longer accept BTC (on grounds known for years) right after they dumped.
This was very easy to find, and makes me question your position that you weren't aware of it.
I have no idea if he dumped his Bitcoin before announcing the change at Tesla, but misleading a bunch of people while leaving himself a technicality escape hatch would be extremely on brand for him.
The trick is in knowing how to do Tax Avoidance.
The others all file, they just recognize very little income and make sure to recognize enough losses to cover it.
Also, Musk is rich and powerful right now. That alone makes it harder to go after him as he will pay for better justice. McAffee is not that powerful.
He had a good run.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/qThvR2S.jpg
http://www.5z8.info/racist-message-board_u1s1lj_-----TAKE.TW...
This place would be one of the best to hit with a 0day. Lots of IT people with full admin rights to entire corporate networks.
Users at XYZ.gov gets the 0day, everyone else gets what is expected.
When a link can compromise an entire machine, having a machine you can literally throw away with no consequence is nice.
Hell, I'd wager to say that containers wouldn't be a thing if it weren't for this kind of behavior. Looking for ways to build up and destroy VMs even faster.
https://qemu.readthedocs.io/en/latest/system/i386/microvm.ht... https://virtio-fs.gitlab.io/
Or maybe people just have temp VMs running anyway, and like others have said, if you’re browsing hacker news on your work machine you should probably do so with a healthy dose of paranoia.
EDIT: I'm no doubt the angry alcoholic archetype who doesn't want to discuss it when my Windows-using friends try and tell me it's better than my Linux setup. Then again, I know my stance is the absolute right one ;)
It is easy to get along with people of various ideological positions, as long as you are willing to nod along, regardless of real world consequences of their ideological stances. As long as their opinion is the one ever said out loud.
There are some political stances that also imply a particular moral/ethical stance. I think it'd be pretty normal to not like someone if their morals are incompatible with yours.
What I have noticed in recent years is that people increasingly have little respect for those they disagree with and it’s largely on the basis of that disagreement.
Five other hits in the entire Google corpus, all of which are the same use from 1921. It's so uncommon it's literally a shibboleth until you ruined it.
Seriously though, thanks for this memory. My Gram and I were very very close.
Sure, mildly clever ruse, but I always felt that the way it was done was a bit off - could have been more straightforward. I guess he thought people would not help him if he didn't use the pretext.
Somehow the rest of the story does not surprise me. Making his millions seems to have given him no peace either.
RIP
I wonder how many people would also spiral out of control.
@erwinkle Do you realize you touched a guy who touched John McAfee?
So a serial killer is a good person just because he’s a nice neighbor to you? If you’re hanging out with a friend in your inner circle of elites and that friend is nice to you but is very rude to waiters and other blue-collar workers, is that friend a good person?
I’m not making a judgment of McAfee’s character here, just pointing out the myopic sense of morality. It’s so popular, too popular if I must say, among people these days.
I don't think that is what the person you responded to was saying. Quite the opposite.
Interestingly, a minority of people seem to be somewhat able to see through the facade. I have ADHD and a brother who's very nearly on the autism spectrum, and both of those conditions seem correlated with this ability to have an unbiased sense of a person. Perhaps it's due to the way we are slightly detached from normal social interactions, or the highly analytical way our brains function. All I know is that there are definitely times I feel this. For instance, if you look online, there are tons of relatively recent videos that have special forces types (SEALS, rangers, etc.) commenting on movie scenes or so on. The comments are always full of people talking about how they seem like such a great person, or how funny/charming/positive/etc. this person is. Meanwhile, I just come away with this feeling of being very deeply unsettled by them almost every time. Everything about their demeanor unsettles me. Now I'm in no way saying every special forces operator is a closet sociopath. But the job does attract a certain personality type, and many of the ones on these videos are the most charismatic of the whole bunch.
Back on topic, John always seemed to be to be a pretty typical narcissist to me. He did some stuff that I found to be funny in kind of a black humor sense (that video of him supposedly telling you how to uninstall McAfee antivirus), but the idea that he was a truly positive person I just totally don't see. I mean, think about it -- the OP's story involves John having the guy call his wife and tell him how great he thought John was and how great his ideas were. That's pretty typical narcissistic behavior.
Not to mention that people on the spectrum who are trying hard to show emotions appropriate to a situation end up seeming just as unsettling.
I couldn’t read people in teens. In 20s I decided to change that. Would stare intently at a person face and watch every muscle movement, tone, etc. read some books on body language.
Was absurdly exhausting for me. But I got very good at reading people. Eventually it went from intense analytical analysis to just “normal” paying attention.
GP was even very careful to concede that the traits they think they've observed aren't necessarily a strong proportion of that specific niche.
Guy Burgess was well known when a British diplomat for protracted alcohol binges accompanied by all sorts of poor decision-making, but he never let slip that he was a Soviet spy.
Being on their own, they have their dark moments, too.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/nov/18/gringo-dangerou...
Disgusting. We rob the world and destroy, even so, collapse is coming and no amount of fake money will stop it.