Hacker News Reader

I think the Chinese “social credit” system described here is pretty horrible. But your support of the American system drastically misses the mark.

A good summary is the ACLU’s position paper on Race & the War on Drugs. https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs

You also are repeating a common misconception when you state that “If you want to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession.” It has been shown time and time again that black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced. And your trite remark about how “If you do not agree with such laws, work to change them” is puerile. The GP was expressing their opinion; in our democracy that is a critical component of working to change the law.

>You also are repeating a common misconception when

It's a misconception that you could avoid being in the felon caste by not breaking laws? That's what he said. He didn't say "if you want to gamble with not joining the felon caste, you have fair odds". Lots of soapboxing ITT, threads should decapitate at the first post with 'systemic' in.

>It's a misconception that you could avoid being in the felon caste by not breaking laws?

With the number of overturned sentences coming out of the courts lately, yes, it seems you can go to jail without ever having actually committed a crime.

Your use of the term “soapboxing” to describe what was reasonable argument until your appearance and the bizarre thought-terminating cliché that is your fear of the word “systemic” don’t inspire confidence in me that you are here in good faith. I notice your account is also relatively new.

Nonetheless, consider this after rereading the GP’s comment. If a doctor told two patients that they could avoid getting cancer by not exposing themselves to carcinogens, knowing that one somehow unknowingly lives on a Superfund site, but deciding to purposefully neglect to mention the risk this entails, would you say the doctor was presenting one patient an incorrect understanding of the issue at hand?

Likewise, if a car manufacturer found a problem with one of their models and decided to notify the US about this by saying “you can avoid harm from the problem by not driving cars,” I would say that thinking that this is not “somehow unfair,” as the GP writes, would be a misconception, as I wrote.

The sort of juvenile discussion you are attempting to bring to this conversation is not really appropriate for HN.

>Your use of the term “soapboxing” to describe what was reasonable argument

You conspicuously failed to substantiate his "misconception".

>It has been shown time and time again black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced.

I could not in all charitability/good faith (all your efforts to troll noted btw) extract a relevant point here. If they are disproportionately arrested having committed a crime, that has nothing to do with allthenew's whole post. If one charitably adds the context that in america you can also be arrested for committing no crime at all, then you've switched a basic premise of his post in 'arguing' it.

You equate driving cars and living on superfund sites with consuming illicit substances and wilfully committing violent acts, and then have the audacity to call someone else's contribution juvenile?

Does personal responsibility exist in your ivory tower?

What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices? We're talking about smoking marijuana and stealing expensive clothing, after all, not theft of food for subsistence.

Why is it that any time race is brought up, any argument that even has the potential to cast minorities in negative light is immediately shouted down with any sort of logic or reason thrown out the window? What about objectivity?

We cannot shout down potential truths simply because they have unpleasant implications.

> What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices?

That you consider all drug use “antisocial” is revealing; that you think the need to use a car would exert more pressure on the average person than an environment which encourages drug use from a young age is telling.

Your use of the term “ivory tower” is ironic when your assumptions are based on a kind of life that many Americans do not inhabit.

There is such a thing as personal responsibility. I would argue that most drug use is not a good idea. I think environments that encourage people to make bad decisions should be repaired. But to argue that “just one drop” of bad decision making justifies massively unfair treatment is an argument that is as intellectually demeaning as it is dangerously naive.

Would you argue in favor of a law that puts people in jail for doing something “antisocial” like using bad language, and that is predominately enforced against people of a particular race? No one needs to use foul language, but having done so does not give us carte blanche to hate.

As my final comment, your unprompted use of the term “ivory tower” and your ominous reference to “unpleasant implications” regarding race suspect that you are trying to bring another argument into this discussion in which I have no interest. This is my final reply.

The united states prison system is designed to systematically incarcerate and disempower black americans. It has nothing to do with "breaking laws". Incarceration is not correlated with crime rate, and nearly everyone breaks laws, but a small segment of the population is incarcerated to a large degree (black men).

>It has been shown time and time again that black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced.

And you also conveniently ignore that blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.

Such discussions cannot be productive until we are willing to admit to both sides of the problem.

I do not deny that there are inequities in our justice system. However, disproportionate police presence in low income communities is not a symptom of racist targeting. The blackness of these individuals is incidental to the fact that low income communities have higher rates of all types of crime, especially violent offenses, and in any other context it would be obviously prudent to assign additional police forces to target high crime areas.

But this discussion has far surpassed the boundaries of what is acceptable on HN, and I will not comment in this thread further.

>blacks disproportionately commit crimes, especially violent crimes.

This is a racist lie. If you control for socioeconomic factors, the difference totally vanishes.

If a correlation is completely explained by controlling for a third factor, that doesn't make the original correlation a lie. If black people are poorer than average and poor people commit disproportionately more crimes, blacks committing disproportionately more crimes is just what you'd expect.

What knowing the controlling variable does is give you additional information about what interventions are likely to change the situation. If you thought the reason for more crimes committed by blacks were their skin color, you might think that vitamin D deficiency is the culprit and attempt to provide them with supplements. Knowing the influence of economic factors makes that suggestion appear silly, and crime-prevention efforts would be better focused on improving the economic standing of blacks.

>If a correlation is completely explained by controlling for a third factor, that doesn't make the original correlation a lie.

The implication of "black people commit more crimes" is that there is something about being black that involves a degree of criminality. It is a very poor way of describing the issue. A much better framing is "black people in the US are disempowered socially, politically and economically and black communities are ignored by US social policy." Another, far more useful framing of the issue, that I hardly ever hear is that black people are more often the victims of crimes.

>The implication of "black people commit more crimes" is that there is something about being black that involves a degree of criminality

It sounds like you are the racist here.

It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site rules and we ban accounts that do it; we have to, or this place will go up in flames.

Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and abide by the rules when commenting here?

If you make enough laws that everyone is breaking some every day, and only go after what the people you want to punish, that is no different than having less laws and a secret police that have hidden criteria for punishing people.

The end result is still members of the executive branches of the government deciding who gets punished based on their whims.

Your point saying "...so long as laws are followed as written" cannot apply as long as you ignore when the government chooses not to apply those laws to everyone, even if everyone that's gets charged has violated the law

What a bunch of bigoted hogwash.

How many times must the particulars of the system be documented and disseminated before these arguments go away completely?

If you are white and wealthy, then drug possession is against the law only in vague terms on paper. It is not your practical reality. That's how the drug war has been made into the new jim crow. It's astonishingly simple, and very real.

> If you wish to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession.

Yeah, except that most humans don't consider the government a legitimate arbiter of their diet. I'm not going to decide not to consume cannabis because some person in Washington (or my state capital) overstepped his bounds. And yet, because I'm white and not poor, I suffer no consequences of this.

> so long as laws are followed as written

You can't be serious. The whole point is that laws aren't followed as written. If every person driving 56MPH in a 55 zone, if every person possessing cannabis, if every person violations "intellectual property" laws is suddenly subject to enforcement of those laws, they'll change real quick. But instead, only the "lower castes" are subject to enforcement, and they haven't the power to change the laws.

Just please stop spreading this nonsense. There are possibly young people reading these threads whose understanding of basic sociopolitical principles isn't developed yet, and we need to stop poisoning the well of discussion with this, "follow the law and you'll be fine" nonsense.

The world you describe is a world to work toward, but not the one that black and brown people live in today.

>If you are white and wealthy, then drug possession is against the law only in vague terms on paper.

Not to discount your other points, but this is exactly how the Chinese system will work as well. (and already does in other respects from what I have heard and read)

>What a bunch of bigoted hogwash.

What did he say that was bigoted? (I am serious, by the actual definition [0], not the pejorative commonly thrown around to silence dissent) As a side note, my brother has a felony on his record, so I have some knowledge of the cause and effects.

[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigoted

Edit: This turned sour fast... not sure it's worth replying to comments.

Black people are 12% of the population but over half those imprisoned for drug offenses, and GP's advice is, "If you wish to stay out of the felon caste, do not break obvious laws, like those regarding drug possession."

I mean, that's bigotry. That's something I expect to read on the_donald.

I know we all have biases, but I reread the comment, and I didn't see any references to race. Is it really fair to apply a blanket percentage generically to any statement and equate it to race?

Bigotry [0], are you sure you are using this word correctly?

[0] http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bigotry

If two groups of people commit the same crimes at similar rates, and individuals in one of those groups are imprisoned more frequently than those in the other group, that's unfair on a systematic level. Nobody here said otherwise.

What aspect of this situation makes the GP's advice untrue? For any individual in either group, the best way to avoid becoming a felon is to avoid committing felonies.

> For any individual in either group, the best way to avoid becoming a felon is to avoid committing felonies.

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.

For a white, wealthy person, the healthiest life choices are to select a diet based only on the effects of the ingested materials in question, independent of their legal status.

For a black person, the healthiest life choice is instead to make very different dietary choices in order to avoid becoming a felon.

It is simply not the case that individuals in the two groups have the same dynamic re: life choices.

>For a white, wealthy person [...] For a black person

I don't think it's likely that a purely scientific and non-emotional discussion about race related subjects can be had these days online. Primarily because too many people frame their arguments in such a way to automatically make the other person wrong.

But race is not the primary difference between the two groups you're talking about. The biggest difference is socio-economic and that drives everything else - health, education, opportunity, world view, etc. You could, of course, make the argument that the underlying cause of the socio-economic discrepancy is rooted in racism and bigotry.

I think you're doing more to poison the well of this conversation with the attitude and tone of this post. While I happen to agree more with your position than gp's, there is room for a discussion here. The accusations of bigotry and attempts to wish away different perspectives are counter-productive here. You did not make the point so much better than gp that you get to command them to exit the conversation.

GP says: 1) laws are clearly defined, 2) increased attention/punishment for repeat offenders != institutional inequity

You say: 1) laws are subjectively enforced, 2) white and/or rich people don't suffer the same consequences

Note that neither of your points are necessarily responsive to or mutually exclusive with gp's.

But your appeal to the youth who might be reading this was just over the top.

> Note that neither of your points are necessarily responsive to or mutually exclusive with gp's.

I think you're ignoring the more serious point, though. GP literally advised disadvantaged people to more judiciously follow the stupid laws that were designed in the first place to disadvantage them.

> But your appeal to the youth who might be reading this was just over the top.

Listen, I usually find any sort of "protect the children" narrative nauseating. But in the specific case of racism, I do think it's reckless to spout this stuff on this forum. You and I have perhaps read The New Jim Crow or exposed ourselves to the statistics of the drug war, but a lot of people (sure, young and old) come here from other fora where they're more likely to have followed the breadcrumbs of technological development and might need a little more help before being able to pick apart these basic, bedrock examples of institutional discrimination.

How about those people going to prison for carrying a "gravity knife" in New York city? People who just bought a pocket knife for work, or an old knife wore out and became loose enough to open with one hand - hence illegal. The law in America is pretty arbitrary too.

> Theft is theft. Drug possession is drug possession. Had these "unfairly" targeted individuals followed the law, they would not be subject to its penalties.

Not all laws are that simple. Are you aware that not even the US Federal Government is aware of how many laws apply at any given time in a given place[1]? While I'm not going to justify people breaking laws, there are many federal laws that you can see might cause problems for people that could not reasonable have known that a law was being broken. For instance 16 U.S.C 3372[2] (the Lacey Act):

> It is unlawful for any person [...] to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase any fish or wildlife or plant taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation of any law, treaty, or regulation of the United States or in violation of any Indian tribal law

So if you have ever bought or been gifted a fish or plant that at any point broke Indian tribal law (even if you didn't know about it, even if it wasn't the law where you received it, even if the plant or fish is legally farmed and sold in another area) you have broken a federal law and you're now a criminal.

Does it make sense to not allow someone to have their constitutional rights if they were given a fish that was caught in an area where that is prohibited by Indian tribal law, and they weren't aware of that? Not all criminals have been convicted under such strange laws, but having such a black-and-white view of criminals stops being as obvious when you look at cases like this.

[1]: https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=279 [2]: http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-16-conservation/16-usc-sec...