121–130 of 183 posts
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You should consider doing more research on a topic before trying to present your opinion/viewpoint as fact. You are stating patently false things, which invalidates your credibility.
Inconvenient things perhaps, but not false things... Unfortunately.
A fictionalized example is in the original (1969) film "The Italian Job".
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People have been able to find stuff in prison since the time of Julius Ceasar, in every country and every time. There's no avoiding that...
> There's no avoiding that... Of course it's avoidable. But no-one cares enough: As long as it is hard enough to escape then the public does not care too much whether inmates use drugs, rape/fight each other, or what not, especially if stopping that would mean spending more on prisons. The fallacy (or hypocrisy) is to pass off lack of will as practical impossibility. The UK and the US are among the richest countries…
a better option, and one more befiting of these rich democracies is to just let them have some of those affects and get on with it. controlling every inch of their lives is the opposite of the democratic ideal
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Good thing I didn't say that, then. What I said was that we must look at what's natural and decide which bits require amplification and which require mitigation. And of course saying that hierarchies should be mitigated is far from unreal. It was the central message of the people who started America. They put a great deal of effort into checks and balances on power both at the federal level (between the 3 branches) a…
I'm not from the US, so excuse my ignorance. I was under the impression that US federal law trumps state law. Is this not the case? And wouldn't that imply a hierarchical relationship?
From this system design, you can deduce that there _does_ exist a hierarchy in the theory of US government — the Constitution is the law of the land and all other actors and subsystems are subordinate to it. Modifying the Constitution requires significant effort at multiple levels of government usually including (by state law) extensive popular support and supermajorities of representatives.
>> A December 2017 parliamentary report said up to 90 percent of prisoners have mental-health problems, and 12 percent turn to self-harm or attempt suicide multiple times. How could it be otherwise? Even ignoring the likely correlation between psychological problems and incarceration... Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design. Would we be surprised if concentration camp or gulag inhabitants had m…
> Prison is a terrible environment by its nature and by design. Usually, yes. But not necessarily. A prison could be more like a residential college or a boarding school. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halden_Prison
The _visibility_ of the class system is one thing that surprised me about the UK. It seems to be a very visibly stratified society. Unlike in the US where everyone likes to pretend they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and assumes there's ample social mobility (which there isn't as much as they think), in the UK most folks seem to know exactly where they belong, and they seem to be more content with their po…
It's more a combination of social graces and breeding. In the USA, someone like Donald Trump would be considered upper class but would never be considered so in the UK.
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Not necessarily. Smuggling contraband into prison has got to be as old as the existence of prison itself, and there are numerous examples of contraband being snuck in and traded without the knowledge of the staff. It’s errant to assume that all cases of contraband existing in prison is due to corrupt staff. In fact, this issue is becoming more and more of a challenge today as drone technology advances and decreases i…
Smuggling is impossible unless staff turn a blind eye, or procedures are sufficiently lax. Preventing visitors from passing things to inmates is not rocket science, if you allow visitors at all. As for drones, let me try to fly a drone over GCHQ or the Pentagon and let's see what happens... But over a prison and then actually drop something? "Oh well, what can we do? Can't even find what they drop..." The point in al…
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Good thing I didn't say that, then. What I said was that we must look at what's natural and decide which bits require amplification and which require mitigation. And of course saying that hierarchies should be mitigated is far from unreal. It was the central message of the people who started America. They put a great deal of effort into checks and balances on power both at the federal level (between the 3 branches) a…
I'm not from the US, so excuse my ignorance. I was under the impression that US federal law trumps state law. Is this not the case? And wouldn't that imply a hierarchical relationship?
Hierarchy is the rule of men, not of laws. So even if there were a hierarchical relationship between bodies of law, that doesn't require a hierarchical relationship between people.
In the US, federal law can supersede state law, and state law can supersede county and city law. It does have to be written that way of course. In practice, many laws are written to allow jurisdictions to self-regulate within broad limits. For example, in California it's legal to open a marijuana store. But localities get to decide whether it happens in their city. And it's technically illegal federally, but that's currently unenforced.
But the president has no direct authority over governors, and governors have no direct authority over mayors. However much Trump dislikes a variety of San Francisco policies, he cannot just order them changed. Instead he would have to persuade both the House and Senate to pass a law, and San Francisco could challenge that law in the courts.
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I deeply disagree that "much of human government through most of human history" is an edge case. I do agree that families are somewhat naturally hierarchical, and that can be good. However, there are plenty of examples of that being taken too far. I disagree that teaching and learning can only be accomplished through hierarchy, although that's certainly the common mode in industrial education. So it's as I said: we h…
I think I misread the comment I was responding too. I was more trying to say hierarchies are not always wrong, but I realize now that's not exactly what he was claiming. You're right they're often abused and should always be challenged. Nothing about nature is good or evil it just is.
The _visibility_ of the class system is one thing that surprised me about the UK. It seems to be a very visibly stratified society. Unlike in the US where everyone likes to pretend they are a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and assumes there's ample social mobility (which there isn't as much as they think), in the UK most folks seem to know exactly where they belong, and they seem to be more content with their po…
"class" means something different in the UK than it does in the US. Wealth is often a side-effect but there are plenty of aristocrats without money who would still be considered upper-class. It's more a combination of social graces and breeding. In the USA, someone like Donald Trump would be considered upper class but would never be considered so in the UK.