Glorifying Albert Fish?


Watching this documenatry, it felt to me that it kind of glorifyed Albert Fish. Especially by that Joe Coleman guy - he seemed to relish talking about him as if he were his idol. And the psychologist seemed to have pity on him. How disturbing!
I find Albert Fish to be the sickest individual of the 20th century. This low life deserves no pity. The electric chair was too tame for him. He should have suffered a slow agonizing death.

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I think Coleman was attempting to illustrate how important Fish is in to crime history and American history. Fish was a victim of pain and suffering just as much as his victims were. Serial killers are souls in torment.

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Hi Filmzrule,

I completely agree with the point made about Joe Coleman by the original poster. Sleaze drips from the guy. He wasn't trying to make a point, just revelling in his 15 minutes of fame. The guy is off his trolley.

Quote "Fish was a victim of pain and suffering just as much as his victims were." What a load of BS. He took pleasure in his pain, and his 'pain and suffering' were just another facet of his masochism, in turn part of the sexual deviance side of his madness. To compare his suffering as 'just as much as his victims' is both an insult to his victims and futher proof you have no real understanding of the pathology involved here.

The more I read of your opinions on this film, the more it underlines the shallowness of your responses. Please put some more thought into your reasoning before contributing. If you claim to 'know' the facts, then it's essential you put some more time into your analysis. How you interpret and understand the facts is at least as important.

Lastly "Serial killers are souls in torment."

Duh!

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Someone like you will never realize what the meanings of my writings are and also Joe Coleman's unique vision. You are part of the system and people who are part of the system will never see people like Fish as human beings created by other human beings (Coleman's quote "society gets the criminals it deserves" is so amazing in this respect.). These are not monsters.

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Filmzrule, I cant understand how you can say Fish was "suffering"? That is just absurd to say. Fish was in extreme states of pleasure when killing and cannibalizing his victims. There was no suffering there! The freak got off on his victims suffering - he orgasmed during his killing frenzies. Tell me - how does one suffer when experiencing orgasm! The religion angle in this film just attemtps to justify his actions. There is no other reason to justify his actions but for the fact to feed his sick fetish.

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For someone to live with the fact that they have been doing these awful acts upon other human beings are suffering an internal turmoil. Yes, his murders were an obsession, but they were filling a void inside his soul. It is easy to label people, but more difficult to attempt to understand them. As progressive thinkers, we must move beyond just locking criminals up and executing them and attempt to understand why people become serial killers in hopes that we can prevent creating future killers and victims.

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Filmzrule:

The reasoning here I'm afraid seems to confirm a pattern in your posts which veers off on a tangent further and further away from reality. Fish is a psychopath. He has a built in defect which prevents him from feeling empathy for others, may still on the surface be a highly functioning member of society and yet is able to manipulate his own interests without regard or concern for what effect that has on others. It is a very common disorder, however one in which you see very few people afflicted go as far as murdering people. It is not a legitimate defense when used in court because although the acts perpetrated are beyond our comprehension, they still exhibit an awareness evident in the preperations they take to cover their tracks, an act proving they were aware that what they were doing was wrong. They just didn't care.
These people don't 'live with the deeds', they relish them. They relive them in their minds, frequently in a sexually arousing manner, until the novelty wears off and it's time to hunt another. We already understand the root causes of these problems and for the most part they boil down to an abusive childhood or an individual born with a screw loose. Neither can a study stop serial killers. They aren't defined as such until having killed repeatedly, and law enforcement cannot arrest until after this happens, or lock away someone they suspect will commit thee crimes if that law has not been broken yet.
Finally your 'progressive thinking' comment is anything but. Welfare and law enforcement are grossly underfunded, and a country which now has succeded in locking away more people than any other country in the world is not operating rehabilitation centres, but increasingly privatized institutions where over crowding can run 3 to 4 times over what the facilities were built to house, and function merely as warehousing facilites.








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Filmzrule:
Well i think you miss a big point here, the guy is crazzzzy.
When you slice a child, and have an orgasme earing them yell and cry
i have no sympathie. Of course he is a product of his father cruelty.... So what
He's not the only one that suffers during childhood.
A psychopath as no remors at all, were is the suffering???
When he tried to put a needle to his testicules he stoped cause it hurted to much..... Does he cared about others pain, c'mon.

That was my 2 cents, forget my english, it is not my main language.
Cheers

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Wow! real_hiflyer has been consistently obliterating filmzrule's silly opinions on this board.

I'm loving it!

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I think filmzrule is right.

This "defect" you say Fish has built in is likely not genetic, but a by-product of being abused, neglected, etc as a young kid. This sort of thing is what creates people like Fish... not genes.

People like this are usually lacking empathy, and are not happy people. Fish may have been able to disguise himself as an old kind man, but I'm sure it was a whole different story inside of him.

And sure he may have gotten some sort of sick pleasure from what he did, but it's likely only because of how he was raised.

I'm not saying he wasn't a sick, disgusting old bastard, just that it's not his fault for being that way. And yes by studying how Fish was treated as a kid there's probably a lot to learn about.

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Hi Mossap,people like this cannot exist if they have any emotional understanding of 'empathy' - period. There's no 'usually lacking empathy', that's like saying your neighbour stabbed you twenty eight-times, but was able to stop himself from the 29th when his empathy kicked in. Part of the lure these people use to garner victims (think Ted Bundy) is to rely on invoking empathy from the other person until They're thrown in the back of a van and all masks are off (figuratively), when they're tied and gagged and taken somewhere for some sick *beep* pleasure. In this example Bundy understood empathy perfectly, and he developed methods of using this against his victims. This shows he was not only capable of understanding how important it is to a victim, he was also clever enough to utilise it for his own uses. He had a very good intellectual understanding of the word, but no emotional understanding whatsoever. You cannot suffer afterward from how you've used it, because you never saw it as anything other than a means to an end in the first place. A large number of these people take souvenirs from the kill site, but it's to make them feel good. Not bad. GOOD. Its when its effectiveness wears off as a stimulating means of 'recommitting' the deed and revelling in the pain and terror all over again, he finds that it's time to kill again.
Tell me, when does he find the time to be tortured by it? I could go on but for now it's time to go. I would suggest you do a lot more reading on this subject. Get a hold of books written particularly by psychologists and psychiatrists from both sides of these trials. We can try this again after that. No offense,but it's a bit of a chore saying the same thing over and over again; give me the concrete evidence behind your opinions and it'll be a lot more fun ripping those apart - that is, if you don't already agree by then. Take Care.

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You misunderstood what I meant by "people like this are usually lacking empathy".

I didn't mean "a person who cannot usually understand empathy"... I meant "most people who cannot understand empathy are usually...".

I don't think Albert Fish even understood sympathy or empathy.

And I don't know when he found the time to be tortured with it... there are 24 hours in a day... some time in there.

"give me the concrete evidence behind your opinions"

Which opinion(s) are you referring to specifically?

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Lol, Wow mate, ur a complete *beep* tool

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"just as much as his victims were..." I don't think anyone can really claim that.

Sure, he was a tortured soul. However, I think anyone would have to agree that the torment he inflicted on his victims far outweighed his own. No one cut him up and ate him.

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Thank s^^t I didn't grow up with my father. He's gonna be like this in 10 years. Religious nutcases.

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Albert Fish should be worshiped and revered for his bravery and intelligence.
His amazing Life was a true work of Art.
The World would be a better place if we respected this gentle giant and his amazing Art.
What he did to the so-called victims IS Art.

It shows initiative, drive, intelligence, and vision.
My only life's regret is not being alive when this amazing Humanitarian was alive so I could sit down with him, shake his hand, and learn from his incredible wisdom.

After learning everything I could about this Brilliant Artist, I have decided to base the rest of my Life around his Work and emulate him the best I can.

I have recently purchased some property in Northern Michigan and SW Florida.

I will be setting up work camps and farms so I can help wayward children.
I am so excited!

God Bless Albert Fish.

"Belief is the Death of Intelligence" - Robert Anton Wilson

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You sound like one of those people who'd rather never understand the motivations of someone like this, just kill 'em. (That is, unless it was your son, or daughter, or someone you love dearly committing these heinous crimes. Suuure, you could tell me you would show them no mercy. But who is worse? The monster that has little-to-no control over his mind and urges, or the man who refuses to treat the "monster" as a fellow human being. In need of love, care, understanding, treatment, food, and shelter?) I won't accuse you of being Christian. Just ignorant. But I find, anecdotally as well as soem interesting non-biased studies released recently--Religious people, especially dogmatic evangilcal Christians in the U.S (Don't detract, Orthodox Jews and Muslims are just as bad, they just aren't the majority so they don't wield the same weight), are as unforgiving as it comes. They are "pro-life" yet the majority are pro-execution. They don't see how that is contradictory.

They absolutely cannot and will not try to understand a man like Albert Fish, let alone forgive him. This isn't a Christian problem, it is a people problem. Christianity and other religions just act as a catalyst of justification for disguting displays of judgment.

Albert Fish should have been studied. Studied, and had his brain kept and preserved to be studied further as technology caught up. Today we'd be able to scan that brain and compare t with anomalies of both live and dead serial killers and murderers, soldiers with high kill-ratios (and combat addicts. There is little difference in the parts of the brain that are overworked and the parts that atrophy when it comes to this area, SO FAR. WITH CURRENT SCIENCE. Which, mostly, continues to point us into semi-predictable situations)

Anyway...I have a question for you: Would you kill Albert Fish when he was 5? How about 10? 15? 17 and a half? what about 6 months later, where, via a made-up, non-scientific policy deciding when you're "mostly" an adult (you can fight in a war, you can't drink a beer or rent a car in most circumstances, though. The reality is you do get to drink off-base as a military man in many places, but it's still on the books). At what point does it become okay to kill him to prevent his future murders? The day before? What if he had killed others we don't know about? Can we risk it? All the trauma and weird *beep* he went through, the resources he used up (another argument for using the death penalty). ...Wouldn't it be better to just slit the infant-Albert's throat? He'd die an innocent baby, to a horrific child-murder (you) who claims to only be protecting other children.

For the sake of argument, let's say that's all true and plausible. What if Albert had killed a child that would have killed 50-60 people, or maybe startedd WW3 within a year of ending WW2? You see what happens here when we run into this kind of logic?

We all know most, if not all, of us couldn't kill a child, no matter how horriblr it's crimes would be later. Maybe you'd kidnap the child and try to raise s/he differently, maybe that would be what makes 'em go bad.

We need to understand the human brain and the minds of killers so we may know how to prevent it. We need to accept that, perhaps, one day a man like Albert Fish could be rehabilitated. Maybe even be given a measure of controlled freedom.

After all, if one truly believes in seond chances, why not test that with one of the more extreme cases you could apply it to?

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