What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

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duszek
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What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by duszek »

I am reading Norman Collins´s novel "The Husband´s Story".

The protagonist, a certain Stanley Pitts, a civil servant interested in photography, is going to be sentenced to 18 years eventually, but the reader does not know for what (unless he reads the end of the book out of curiosity but I prefer not to in order to be able to speculate about what is about to happen).

Hardships so far:

1. hoping for a promotion and not getting one
2. his wife Beryl does not really love him, she just wants him to earn a lot of money so she can brag about it and behave like a lady
3. when the ex flame of Beryl shows up in their home as a friend of the family they both treat Stanley a little bit like a footman

Would this be enough for anyone of you here to go ape ?

I will share my insights with you as I proceed.

The events take place in 1965, so it is a historical novel.
But perhaps many things have stayed the same.
Celebritydiscodave2
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by Celebritydiscodave2 »

His company.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by Philosophy Explorer »

The question should be what can turn a criminal into a peaceful man? Or even better, keep violent criminals from happening in the first place?

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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by -1- »

duszek wrote: Sun Dec 24, 2017 11:09 am Hardships so far:

1. hoping for a promotion and not getting one
2. his wife Beryl
Being married to woman called Barrel would be enough for me to run amok. I can't imagine making love to someone whose name reminds me of barrels of dill pickles or barrels of (take your pick: laughter, monkeys, crude oil, sour cabbage).
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

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Philosophy Explorer wrote: Sun Dec 24, 2017 4:19 pm The question should be what can turn a criminal into a peaceful man? Or even better, keep violent criminals from happening in the first place?

PhilX 🇺🇸
Put violent criminals in jail and in high security psychiatric prisons before they commit any violent crime.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by Impenitent »

why give criminals 3 hots and a cot?

save the planet, soylent green

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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by -1- »

To turn a violent man into a peaceful, docile person, put him behind bars for twenty years.

To turn a peaceful, jovial man into a violent man, put him behind bars for twenty years.

Fete accompli.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by duszek »

la fête = the festivity or party
le fait = the fact

fait accompli = accomplished fact

I am happy that not only me is interested in French. I listen to M. Proust on CDs for recreational purposes.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by duszek »

Thanks for your contributions.

Stanley gets in touch with a certain Mr Karlin who is going to sell his pictures and tempts him with a career as a professional photographer. Mr Karlin is warm and welcoming but there seems to be something fishy about him as well.

I will let you know in due time how things develop. You don´t have to read the novel yourselves.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by Greta »

His company.
The company that he keeps or owns? Either can do it.

In Hollywood, peaceful men become violent after the hero's family dies.

In real life, alcohol is more likely to do it, along with mental illness and disturbances and severe financial problems. Generally there will be a sense that there is nothing, or not much, to lose.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by -1- »

duszek wrote: Mon Dec 25, 2017 3:43 pm la fête = the festivity or party
le fait = the fact

fait accompli = accomplished fact

I am happy that not only me is interested in French. I listen to M. Proust on CDs for recreational purposes.
Thanks for the correction, Duszek.

How do you write "deed", something that has been done? I thought "fait" was "to make, to do" as well, but please do't ask me to conjugate this verb.

I am, and is everyone else, lucky I did not write "Fece accompli."

Which reminds me of a story that happened to my brother's friends.

They were engineering students at a Hungarian university, put on work assignment in East Germany. This happened in the late sixties, when there was a lot of awareness of the events of WWII.

So one pupil was not all that good at German. He decided to create a prank. He sneaked up behind some East German nationals, their international student comrades, he put his finger to their backs, and declared, "Hands oben, oder ich scheisse." (Instead of "ich schiesse.")
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

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Greta wrote: Mon Dec 25, 2017 11:08 pm
His company.
The company that he keeps or owns? Either can do it.

In Hollywood, peaceful men become violent after the hero's family dies.

In real life, alcohol is more likely to do it, along with mental illness and disturbances and severe financial problems. Generally there will be a sense that there is nothing, or not much, to lose.
Physical pain makes you violent, too, if only verbally. My aunt abused me verbally, emotionally and physically for decades for this reason (and because she was schizotypal), and I abused everyone for a good five years around me verbally due to mental anguish over a failed writing career, and because I am also schizotypal. I even succeeded to make one psychiatrist so angry once, that he burst out in tears, because he so badly wanted to punch me. So physical pain, or mental anguish, or frustration, or newly developing physical and/ or emotive or cognitive limitations -- these all create anger and ensuing violent behaviour.

Or limitations in general: people in jail are restricted in their old freedoms a number of major ways, therefore they are very angry. Rape is not a sexual act; it is an act of anger, and that's why it goes on in jails against same-sex victims much more frequently than against different-sex people in the free world. For every instance of a male raping a woman in the free world, there are 4,300 or so instances of men raping men, in certain environments, and the homo rapes are committed by truly heterosexual males.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by -1- »

Greta wrote: Mon Dec 25, 2017 11:08 pm
His company.
The company that he keeps or owns?
"What you say about his company is / what you say about society / Catch the wind, catch the wind / but be so careful, don't break it.)" -- lyrics by Rush
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by -1- »

duszek wrote: Mon Dec 25, 2017 3:43 pm I listen to M. Proust on CDs for recreational purposes.
I love to listen to French monologues by males with perfect pitch (purely for the sound of it) in Film Noire movies. They all sound so very, very philosophical! And I get that impression without understanding a single word of it. Imagine a movie where a thug is getting ready to rob a bank, or to disembowel a prostitute while she is alive, or throw over the government, and he first gives a half-hour monologue on his motives, why his motives are compatible with the French existentialist movement, he has a minor intellectual diversion to cover his criticism of Prousst, he makes a slight belittling of English cuisine, he makes a detour to denounce the German Forty-Seven, the futurist artist group emergent during the Great War, and finally closes his monologue with a compelling and emotionally highly charged petition for a pay raise for himself by the studios. All this comes through, even without understanding a single word of his speech, and I am telling you, this is true, no lies.

The best experience of this kind is to watch the movie "L'Etranger" or "The Outsider". Marcello Mastreianni (or is it Mastroianni?) is the king of French existentialist monologues.
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Re: What can turn a peaceful man into a criminal ?

Post by duszek »

Yes, it sounds all very convincing, Mr 1.

And just yesterday I read in an Italian novel that a Italian man wanted his Italian girlfriend (big love) to say to him in French: je t´aime beaucoup. And she did it to please him.

It could be the exotic sound that makes us feel charmed.
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