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Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

“Temporarily unable to go to Northern Ireland” doesn’t justify abandoning your child for the entire rest of his life.

There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

In so many of these stories, once the parent and child have publicly reconciled as Bushby and his son have, the child is very annoyed by total strangers on social media continuing to harp on abandonment or injustice; it feels like an intrusion into their personal life that hbn or smt88 knows nothing about. So, you might want to ask whether your intervention here is actually sought.

Reflects a lot better on the son than his selfish old man; he's fortunate he's seemingly turned out so well.

Well maybe public judgement of a father abandoning their child will stop it from happening to a child in the future.

I'm sorry, but: Post-hoc justification.

This entire discussion is post hoc, unless you're assuming that everyone who is commenting here happened to also have criticized him publicly in the past. There's no statute of limitations for people voicing their opinion on something they just learned about from a while back.

What?

The son forgiving his father doesn’t make him a good father.

Good fathers don’t need to reconcile in the first place.

I don’t know what your weird beef is here, but abandoning your son to do something incredibly pointless is selfish and terrible parenting.

"My weird beef" is hoping people will talk about Bushby's walk, which is legendary in overland travel circles and full of interesting details of local people, local customs, geography and geology, instead of trying to turn this into yet another social-media harangue of a person's personal flaws. What the man saw on his walk would probably be more interesting for a community of intellectual curiosity like HN (and look at dang's response above) than the man himself.

Sorry I don’t see it the same way. I don’t see a hero or admirable life’s work. He spent his life choosing himself over others.

Again, there is more to talk about than the man himself or his walk as his personal "life's work" . The regions he moved through, things like the Darien Gap in the early millennium, are often of great interest to the HN crowd, and these facts are discussed in the coverage of his walk.

> There’s no way to spin it so that Bushby isn’t an absentee father and a selfish person.

I never understood why people are so willing to advertise their lack of imagination.

If you need “imagination” to prove that this guy was a good dad, he wasn’t a good dad.

What a ridiculous and childish snipe lol.

Then dazzle the discussion with your creativity.

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