111–120 of 173 posts
3-5 years?! THREE TO FIVE YEARS???!!! There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
It's a white collar crime and she's an educated person who isn't black or hispanic. That's not every factor behind the sentence, but it's an uncomfortably large subset of those factors.
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If taking a life is savage, how much more savage is it to systematically, wrongly deny people their freedom for the sake of promotions? Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it'…
On kind of a tangent to the actual topic of the article being discussed, but I saw you mention how you think slavery has been abolished worldwide. I'd like to correct that thinking and let you know that slavery is still a very active thing, with millions of slaves around the globe, and people being captured even in the USA as sex slaves to be sold around the globe. The nearest count I know is at least 27 million peop…
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Does this mean that plainly barbaric things may be justifiably used as punishments? Does this perhaps suggest the possibility that "killing a man", and "killing a man after convicting him of a crime" are morally distinct? Or does this mean that a serious revamp of how we view and run our justice system is long overdue?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a white collar crime and she's an educated person who isn't black or hispanic. That's not every factor behind the sentence, but it's an uncomfortably large subset of those factors.
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Results should be impartial. Bribing the lab tech is not what I would call a fair and balanced process.
That email, unless pleasantries or enthusiasm count as bribes, would not be considered a bribe. It's just good practice to be polite to those who can help you. Perhaps we should legislate that prosecutors should be dour towards everyone they encounter, less a pleasant experience bias someone? P.s. I realize that improper conduct by both parties is probable in this case, but the quoted email certainly does not cross t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If taking a life is savage, how much more savage is it to systematically, wrongly deny people their freedom for the sake of promotions? Is that any less barbaric than denying people their freedom because some people needed their labor in order to enjoy comfortable lives? When that used to happen it was called slavery and from what I can tell it's been abolished worldwide (or nearly so) because we've mostly agreed it'…
On kind of a tangent to the actual topic of the article being discussed, but I saw you mention how you think slavery has been abolished worldwide. I'd like to correct that thinking and let you know that slavery is still a very active thing, with millions of slaves around the globe, and people being captured even in the USA as sex slaves to be sold around the globe. The nearest count I know is at least 27 million peop…
I think mostly what I meant is that it's theoretically (I think) illegal worldwide. There are plenty of places where it still happens through corruption or lax law enforcement.
I am a bit disappointed that the website linked to rolls child labor in with slavery and such because it weakens the number. I don't LIKE child labor but there are still places so poor that the only alternative to children working is starvation. And they don't break the 27 million number down. So it's hard to tell if the child labor portion is 1% or 80% of the full 27 million.
Again just to be clear I'm not in favor of child labor across the board. But if the alternative to a child working is starvation then I see no reason to make a law to stop him or her from working. Getting charities together to give the families food so that the kids can stop working? Great! But just passing a law and supposing/hoping that it will solve the problem? I don't know that it's the right thing to do.
I guess part of the problem is that I have no idea how many kids are working to eat and stay alive by their parents conscious choice vs how many are effectively slave laborers being exploited.
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I think you need to dig a bit deeper than the rationalizations people give for their actions. There is a difference between a person who genuinely considers what they are doing to be OK, and people who are actually rationlizing things they know deep down to be wrong. I think your implicit assumption that anyone might have acted like she did, in her position, is wrong. Both a person's innate (not necessarily genetic)…
I look at her and I think "I would never do anything like that!" But is that really true or am I just rationalising with the benefit of hindsight? There was an article on HN about a man running a family business who started defrauding money. It needed the cooperation of other people. Rather than creating any elaborate lies he simply told them, and asked them for help. (I can't remember any more about it, which is mak…
This reminds me a lot of espionage. No one sets out to betray their country, but by gradually making more and more compromises you go from being Uncle Sam to Aldrich Ames.
3-5 years?! THREE TO FIVE YEARS???!!! There are no words. Agents of the law need to be held more accountable for their actions than your average citizen, not less. This is disgusting.
This kind of case is fascinating. The woman wasn't evil. But her actions really are. It's very easy, too easy, to say that she is evil because what she did was so bad. But that's lazy, and it misses the interesting stuff. How do people get caught up in performing such horrendous acts? There's a bunch of cognitive stuff going on, and some subtle manipulation. I suspect that something similar is how we end up with app…
Maybe, overcome with self-interest, she didn't view her victims as actual human beings. For example, if someone wanted to cut down a forest to build a strip mall on top of the land, they'd be dooming or displacing the animals (squirrels, insects, etc) that lived there, but most people would be comfortable with that.
Maybe she had dependents to take care of, and she felt that everything she did, she "did it for the family."
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Just because you can point out exceptions — and that's all they are: one-off exceptions — to the racial imbalances in the American criminal justice system doesn't mean they aren't glaringly and egregiously there.
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And your remark about an "NAACP award" reads awfully petulantly, to me.