If you don't feel like a criminal in today's society, you are complicit.
I have plenty of criticism of what's wrong with the US. For example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19888281
But I don't actually agree with your assertion, nor with other comments suggesting that the US is currently about as bad as East Germany was.
After she escaped, my mother helped multiple relatives get out. Family stories indicate that part of the process was sending enough cash to help them cover bribes to get their papers. My dad was an American soldier. The exchange rate was 4 West German marks to the dollar and 4 East German marks to the West German marks, or 16 East Marks to the dollar. My father's relative wealth and pragmatic attitude facilitated a lot of this.
You didn't have any means to wire it or whatever. You sent cash. Sometimes it got to the intended recipient. Sometimes it didn't.
It took tremendous faith, willingness to trust and callouses to keep sending help in the face of that and not just accuse desperate people of lying, etc.
My dad was a remarkable man.
Since getting divorced, I have mostly not owned a TV. I think I have been to one movie at a theater in the many years since my ex moved out.
I'm aware it is a classist, sexist, racist system in many ways.
I also seem to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of Hacker News. I hit the board under my original handle of Mz about a month or so after finally getting off the street, so a lot of the upvotes that got me to the leaderboard were gotten during the years I was homeless.
I bitch regularly about the classism and sexism both in the world and on HN. But I'm not really the right person to aim your remark at. Because if you imagine you are "talking about me," then you have absolutely no idea whatsoever who the hell I am.
Making a point in a discussion is not about the personal circumstances of the one we're talking to. Doubly so if they're an outlier, and triply so if we don't know their circumstances to begin with, because the discussion happens in an online forum.
B. Plenty of people here know plenty about my circumstances. I know because they routinely use that against me.
So it is not unreasonable on my part to assume some people here do have some idea who I am and what I'm about. I was, in fact, very recently told I'm full of shit if I assume they don't: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19776469
Could be a few that have grievances against you or something.
I've noticed that some people, on online forums, get an obsession with another they had a dispute with (and felt wronged or whatever), and follow them from post to post, gather intelligence, and act like stalkers. Then again, some people are cuckoo with no personal lives and compensate in all kinds of bizarro ways online. Best to ignore those kind of people...
I would thank you to stop trying to police my participation here. You have something of a history of treating me like an idiot.
If you want to engage some point I've made in a good faith manner: awesome.
If you want to continue your pattern of talking at me like I have no fucking clue how public discourse on HN works, please stop doing that. I view it as a form of harassment.
If you are not consciously aware of doing that, well, consider yourself notified that I have noticed a pattern of behavior here and it's something I don't like and don't want done to me.
And if you are suggesting I simply "ignore" jacquesm, I assure you I've tried. He's impossible to ignore. He's extremely influential here.
I'm not policing anyone, I'm offering my opinion. Likewise, I would thank you to stop being paranoid, and either respond to what I said or ignore it. Not respond on some imagined "intentions".
>You have something of a history of treating me like an idiot.
Actually, I have absolutely no recollection of who you are, and of having treated you like anything. I don't even remember the name "DoreenMichele" or having had a history of discussing with you, or whatever.
If I indeed have a history of treating you like an idiot, it's not because I go out of my way to treat that particular username (which I don't recognize and don't follow across threads) as an idiot.
It's either because I treat almost everybody like an idiot (which I might tend to), or because your individual (non-connected as belonging to a single person to me) comments over threads pushed the same kind of buttons on my responses (e.g. because you tend to make comments that I tend to disagree with and respond in a certain way to).
In any case, I don't go around keeping tabs. For most people I talk with on HN, I only ever remember the names/opinions of a few frequenter commenters which tend to commend often and on the same things so end up as identifiable, e.g. pjmlp has a soft spot for older languages, research compilers and so on, dang is one of the moderators, tcpatec is a security boffin, and so on. I only recognize as specific people on HN something like 10 persons or so, the majority are just opaque aliases that tell me nothing when I see them, even if I have engaged in threads with them at various times.
>If you are not consciously aware of doing that, well, consider yourself notified that I have noticed a pattern of behavior here and it's something I don't like and don't want done to me.
Well, the problem is I seldom ever check who I respond to. I mostly check what's written in their comment and whether it triggers a "somebody is wrong on the internet" / "I must respond to this" sentiment. I might glance at their username, but in most cases I wouldn't even remember it.
I could do some effort to check for your name and not respond in the future. In fact, if there's something like "block" I could use that and spare us the drama.
If you aren't going to pay any attention whatsoever to social details, such as whether or not you have ever spoken to this particular person before, it's generally a best practice to refrain from any kind of personal commentary at all concerning their behavior. Behavior is influenced by context and you are making no effort whatsoever to understand context at all, so your opinions about such things are going to tend to be uninformed opinions that go bad places.
Well, you first accuse me on following you on HN and treating you this or that way repeatedly. And when I tell you I don't keep tabs, and I seldom know who is who I'm answering to (I'm just answering when I think some comment warrants an answer), you write the above that implies that you, instead, keep tabs on me and "how I behave generally on HN" (and, logically, on others too).
To me that's akin to stalking.
I'm not here talking with my friends or expecting long term camaraderie and rivalries, and going into who said what when. I'm on an open online forum with hundreds of users. Each new post is to me a new discussion, not a picking up from where we left, with animosities etc on what someone said.
>If you aren't going to pay any attention whatsoever to social details, such as whether or not you have ever spoken to this particular person before, it's generally a best practice to refrain from any kind of personal commentary at all concerning their behavior.
Well, I don't feel I offered personal commentary. I wrote a generic commentary on what you wrote to the grandparent, that can apply to anyone:
"Making a point in a discussion is not about the personal circumstances of the one we're talking to. Doubly so if they're an outlier, and triply so if we don't know their circumstances to begin with, because the discussion happens in an online forum."
>Behavior is influenced by context and you are making no effort whatsoever to understand context at all, so your opinions about such things are going to tend to be uninformed opinions that go bad places.
Sorry, the context here is technical, hacker-oriented discussion, and being informed (as in "informed opinions") rests on the technical, historical, etc knowledge of the issue in each TFA.
It's not about social subtleties, who is who, who said what in some earlier thread, etc. This is not Livejournal.
I haven't bothered to read your entire comment and may not bother. I got to the ugly and ridiculous accusation against me of stalking and stopped there.
I don't plan to continue engaging you.
You have chosen to not respond to that and then you come here to describe me as basically playing the victim card every time I open my mouth. You further go out of your way to make sure that if I defend myself or disagree with your accusation, that's just further proof of how I'm the problem and I'm in the wrong and so forth.
Your comment is a personal attack and it's rather nastily framed to ensure that whether I reply or not, anything I do is agreeing with your ugly framing. Suffice it to say that I don't think it consitutes any kind of good faith attempt to be helpful to me and I have no plans to try to take your claimed "help" seriously.
Which society exactly are you referring to? What crime are you claiming that every single member of this society is complicit in? How does feeling like a criminal itself absolve someone of complicity in this crime? You seem to be saying we should take on guilt for something precisely in order to free ourselves of this guilt. This seems like a paradoxical admonition. Could you please clarify?
Essentially, in modern society, if you do not feel like a criminal, it's because you are walking on eggshells around your government. Just about every modern government has laws on the books which are just plain ethically, morally, or constitutionally unjustified.
The DMCA, the PATRIOT act, the listing of cryptography under non-exportable munitions, the War on Drugs, the US foreign drone strike program, whistleblower laws, same-sex marriage laws or even death penalties, (soon to be) Article 13, social credit systems, mass surveillance, threat of ostracization/deplatformization if you fall outside of or in the middle of the now-split Overton window, the militarization of police in some developing countries coupled with a growing propaganda-driven movement to disarm citizens in order to increase the power gap, neoliberalist consumerist lifestyles propped up by military coups, dictatorships, and pollution sinks in developing countries.
I could keep going. But what it boils down to, is that if you don't find yourself at odds with the way things are being run in most parts of the developed world (not just the US) then you're either living under a rock, or complicit. If you're in the UK, it also means you like your sex without salt.
And, as ignorance is not an excuse in a society where you have plenty access to such information, you are still complicit.
I think a bit of guilt over the way our lifestyles impact the health of the earth and the lives of other people is certainly in order. I think some guilt over allowing our brand new rebel government to turn into the world's largest bully and largest perpetrator/denier of climate change, some guilt over not participating in activities which put you directly at odds against your government for the sake of knowledge or ethics, is entirely in order. Guilt gets things done.
I spent a lot of time in therapy, so I don't suffer a lot of existential guilt. I've generally walked the walk on things I believe in, so I don't have a lot of guilt of the type you are describing.
I'm not unaware of the fact that anyone can potentially find themselves tossed in jail over basically bullshit reasons. This happens at times to tourists who are doing nothing wrong according to the law of their country, but it's a serious offense in the country they are visiting.
My last boyfriend spent three years in prison in his youth for his political activism. He also was trying to talk me into illegal activities that would have benefitted him and not particularly endangered him. He tried to justify this with reasoning similar to yours.
So I've had plenty of opportunity to think about such things and my mental framework is likely not anything I can adequately explain in a single comment on HN.
But perhaps an anecdote will have a modicum of value.
I had food stamps for part of the time that I was homeless. Food stamps cannot be used for non food items and it is illegal to convert them to cash by, for example, offering to buy groceries for someone in exchange for cash for a portion of the value.
There is one loophole that I know of: food stamps cover the CRV, a charge on cans and bottles in California. You can then take the cans and bottles back for a cash refund after consuming the contents.
A lot of homeless people break the law regularly as a matter of course merely to survive or merely by existing. I no doubt was breaking the law every single night by sleeping someplace I wasn't supposed to be.
But I didn't use that as an excuse to justify doing any damn thing I wanted and to hell with the law. I did my best to find legal ways to get my needs met to the best of my ability.
While homeless, I was repeatedly offered money for sex in a state where prostitution is illegal. I have zero moral qualms about the idea, but was celibate for medical reasons, so wasn't tempted to take the money. I also had it hinted to me that I could potentially get scads of money from some guy I knew if I would launder some of his money. I ended our so called friendship.
Among other things, I run several blogs to put out useful info for homeless Americans. I do this in part to try to point them to practical legal solutions that have some hope of actually working.
I also do my best to put out good information on what we can do to actually improve things in a way that will help address the issue of homelessness. I'm aware that it is a genuinely hard problem. I have done a lot of research and I try to educate people while keeping the information accessible in a way that conceptually simplifies a complex issue without distorting it or watering it down.
I believe the solution to the issue you are wrapped around the axel about is twofold:
1. Educate people about what they can do to get their needs met that is legal.
2. Increase the availability of viable, legal solutions.
I do my best to walk the walk on that conceptualization of the problem space. I'm aware I'm only one person and there is only so much I can do, so either the road rises up to meet me or I'm doomed anyway.
I'm plenty frustrated at the fact that the road mostly does not appear to be rising up to meet me when it comes to certain things. But that's not on me. That's mostly on other people and their shit.
My websites don't get a lot of traffic, nor do they make much money. Other people mostly are not promoting nor supporting my work.
In fact, I get actively stonewalled. For example, I was thrown off of Metafilter, nominally for "promoting my websites." It's basically a cesspit of classist asshats, so my real crime is probably something more like "having the ridiculous expectation of being treated like a human being."
The world has hung plenty of it's baggage on me already, thank you. I have no plans to agree to accept more of it. That includes yours.
If you worked on your framing, you might find that we agree on a lot of things. Of course, you aren't obligated to do that. I am equally not obligated to agree with how you choose to frame it.