351–360 of 497 posts
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Rather than personal attacks you should take the time to actually respond to their comment if you feel so strongly against it.
Responding to somebody's life experience with "maybe the people you spoke to were lying" is more a statement about what your priors are than a substantive contribution to a conversation.
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"I didn't get into college because I had to use the bathroom during class a lot" - no one, ever Just turn on your voice recorder and go.
I don't know about how things usually are because my kids aren't in HS yet, but I do know that their school district, during distance learning, has a blanket policy that parents are not allowed to record the teaching sessions. So I wouldn't be too surprised if voice recorders aren't allowed in many schools as well.
As someone who's been to prison and school, lots of comments here sound pretty tone deaf. Prison in the USA is really bad. Yes school is authoritarian, but most popular entertainment on prisons downplays how bad it really gets. Watch some interviews of people who have actually been to prison. Murder and rape is common (I saw it happen), you will get your possessions stolen under the threat of murder/rape, you'll prob…
I think you are under-estimating the extent that many urban schools are preparing students for prison though, and have some structural features in common, even though of course schools aren't nearly as bad as prisons. Contemporary urban schools are often really terrible places, stockhousing and controlling children, preparing them to be stockhoused and controlled.
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> if you do not understand that then it is because you live in a very sheltered world This is the part which is a personal attack. You have some time to edit your comment to restate that, if you're up for it. :)
Fair enough, I've restated that.
Ugh. That's not really any better. You're still effectively saying the person is an idiot / incapable of reasonable thinking. :(
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> it doesn't serve as a deterrent (based on talking to ~50 prisoners about this) 1. Talking to prisoners doesn't mean it's not a deterrent for the rest of the population. This is a massive selection bias, it's like saying diet and exercise doesn't work because morbidly obese people say it doesn't work for them. 2. People sometimes lie (often first to themselves), especially about their motivations. This is like an an…
Could we just not do things like this. I'm sorry to be singling anyone out but there is a pattern here. People, the "well actually" rebuttals that you pull out of thin air in two minutes are not a useful or meaningful response to someone's reportage of their lives experience and do not facilitate the quality of discussion that brought you to HN in the first place, and if you do not understand that then consider that…
I actually was searching for a response to GP claims about prison not being a deterrent and if nobody had mentioned it would commented it myself.
To add to the arguments: GP even contradicts himself by stating how bad prison is and that you really don't want to be there while claiming it's not a deterrent.
Criticizing that point was absolutely fair and doesn't mean the rest of GP's comment is bad or untrue.
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1960's-1970s celebrity culture was full of young groupies sleeping with older men. Bowie, Jagger, Ozzy, etc were all doing it, and often brazen about it, so its not overly surprising that European intellectuals just wanted it formalized as they were doing it too. They felt it harmless enough for their own selfish reasons and wrapped it up into a 'autonomy of self' argument that, of course, was very self-serving. I th…
Really? Groupies below 15 were common?
Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? Michel Foucault
Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?
Not all criticism is moral criticism.
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> it doesn't serve as a deterrent (based on talking to ~50 prisoners about this) 1. Talking to prisoners doesn't mean it's not a deterrent for the rest of the population. This is a massive selection bias, it's like saying diet and exercise doesn't work because morbidly obese people say it doesn't work for them. 2. People sometimes lie (often first to themselves), especially about their motivations. This is like an an…
Most people who end up in prisoners in the USA are reoffenders. The USA has the highest incarceration rate in the world and very high crime rates. So when I talk about deterrence I'm mostly talking about reoffenders. I.e, the prisoners I talked to coming back. I think they're more likely to commit crimes after prison, not less!! Do you think people would lie, in a heavily monitored prison, about wanting to never come…
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Could we just not do things like this. I'm sorry to be singling anyone out but there is a pattern here. People, the "well actually" rebuttals that you pull out of thin air in two minutes are not a useful or meaningful response to someone's reportage of their lives experience and do not facilitate the quality of discussion that brought you to HN in the first place, and if you do not understand that then consider that…
What we call “lived experience” today used to be called, “an anecdote,” and what brought me to places like HN, actually, is that the kind of people who came here understood why we distinguish such statements from data. (There’s a pithy aphorism to this effect, which you may be familiar with.) The grandparent comment here is very good and I agree with all of it — comparing prison to high school is risible, at best — b…
Secondly, you're wrong. "Lived experience" is not the same as "an anecdote." An anecdote is a story. Experience is interrogable. The man sharing his experience is right here on HN. The person who wrote was not repeating a story that he had heard, or describing a single isolated incident.