I can't imagine reading this and not feeling tears well up.
No sense of what I would call humanity. From what perspective does this make the world a better place?
What am I missing about being human that this fits into that I don't understand?
Take land mines. I've heard that they play a critical role in South Korea's defense, which was a major reason Clinton didn't sign. Military experts talk about how it's an effective tool that, when used responsibly, can benefit civilians more than harm them.
They also kill and maim people.
Intellectually, both sides seem reasonable to me. Of course, emotionally, one is passively helping people (or so we are told), while the other is actively harming them, so, ya, I lean towards being anti land mines. But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.
You could do a lot of other things (or rather not do them), but it might cost you your political standing.
So point being - playing the moral high card, as the US do around the world, should not follow the line from a Genesis song:
"Do as I say, don't do as I do..."
At least in my humble opinion (the same goes for my Governement, the German one by the way.)
Does the US gov't say that everyone else should abandon land mines?
Perhaps you think what North Korea does is the proper way to interact with the world, perhaps you think that the US should be the moral lead for countries like the Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afganistan, and Croatia instead of the moral follower.
The former will kill tons of non-soldiers and persist long after the war is over. The latter will kill NK soldiers moving south and can be easily collected in the event they are no longer necessary.
Ah, yes, complexity explains everything from the role of private oil companies in Iraq to the ties of the Bush family with the Bin Laden family.
> But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.
I think a very safe way, given the histoy over the last decaded, to form an opinion, is to consider everything the US defense industry-slash-ministry proclaims an outright lie and only accept very small points as true when they have been verified.
The problem is the other extreme of not expressing an opinion where you have reasonable doubt will lead to leaving the discussion to everyone else. And there will always be a huge crowd of people who will voice their very uniformed opinion no matter what.
Even worse, you become extremely susceptible to malign publicity tactics. For example I would not see it beyond the US government[1] to argue with South Korea's defense even if the land mine treaty explicitly had an exception for these well cataloged mines in narrowed down locations [2]. They would of course word their public statement carefully so they can later refuse to acknowledge a causal connection between the two in case their bluff is called.
[1] And my government on other topics.
[2] I'm assuming the best case here. I don't know how the mines along the border are actually distributed, or even if there are mines at all.
It's not what happened, it's the idea of one man standing up to the state that strikes fear into their hearts.
Don't underestimate Chinese political sophistication, especially amongst what we might call the middle class (a <10% minority in China). There is a common feeling, if not outright belief, that a strong government is necessary to hold the country together, especially during its current transition period with its massive inequalities. I am no expert but my impression is that the people who do know - the middle class educated, with internet access (firewalls are trivial to get around) understand or at least play along with the idea that from a stability point of view, some information is best not fully shared.
I see some interesting parallels between Chinese political censorship and the debate about the NSA revelations, by the way. Both are about concealing information of great public interest in the name of some alleged greater good. The only real difference is that the events in Tianenmen Square happened outdoors.
Beijing University from what I understand is where China's elite school (when not schooling overseas)
Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this if they think the goal is just ? It seems so. I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
Maybe we should create a "politically correct NSA" that spies on everyone who might be involved in unpopular politics ? How about spying on every company and violently extracting their labour practices ? I'm sure quite a few European unions wouldn't mind doing that (and at least in .be and .nl that would be a legal grey area, illegal but not punishable).
This is actually a significant part of why we have trial by jury (according to some; others argue that it's just silly); they can decide that the accused did commit the crime and still return not guilty.
>Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this
Do what? Expose evidence of government corruption? It is written in the law that this is exactly the case. There are numerous examples of the failure of the laws meant to protect us from this scenario.
> if they think the goal is just ? It seems so.
There is no justice in following unjust laws.
>I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
An informed electorate? Backroom-dealing politicians have to work harder to conceal their works? We should be so lucky.
The law does not permit breaking the law to further expose corruption though. That is the role of an appointed (and trained!) inspector general. Or, if necessary, a special prosecutor.
It would be one thing to reveal evidence of wrongdoing that one happens to fall into as part of their normal duties. Going further beyond that is illegal for good reason, as otherwise those who are impersonating high-ranking officials for purposes of espionage would be literally indistinguishable from those impersonating the same officials for to "dig for dirt".
Put another way, if your logic applied Google would have not merely the right, but the obligation to constantly scour through their GMail archives, G+ private messages, and everything else they have access to, for evidence of wrongdoing. Is it your position that Google should be doing this?
The Inspector General is empowered to break the law? Or is that a bit of a bait-and-switch?
This is a very silly bit of circular reasoning. The State has effectively made it illegal to expose The State's own illegal conduct. You suppose we should all ignore the State's lawbreaking, because it took Snowden's lawbreaking to expose it, as if citizens are to be constrained by judicial rules of evidence?
Or, are you invoking the "not my job" excuse for abdicating one's responsibility as a citizen (to hold the State to account for its actions). We've had this argument before. I remain unmoved by your opinion.
>It would be one thing to reveal evidence of wrongdoing that one happens to fall into as part of their normal duties. Going further beyond that is illegal for good reason, as otherwise those who are impersonating high-ranking officials for purposes of espionage would be literally indistinguishable from those impersonating the same officials for to "dig for dirt".
I would have hoped that the NSA were competent to the degree that a Snowden wouldn't have been able to betray the them so thoroughly and completely. Hawks such as yourself ought to be especially furious at the level of organizational incompetence made evident by Snowden's disclosures. Even after being personally embarrassed by my government's shameful conduct in spying on everyone, I am again embarrassed by its obvious lack of competence. It apparently hopes to ensure the security of The State with thuggish threats, and nothing more. It must change or it is destined to fail.
>Put another way, if your logic applied Google would have not merely the right, but the obligation to constantly scour through their GMail archives, G+ private messages, and everything else they have access to, for evidence of wrongdoing. Is it your position that Google should be doing this?
Except that logic does not apply to Google, nor have I attempted to apply it to Google; because Google is not an agency of the State, especially not a part of the Judicial Branch, and therefore not the arbiter of the law in this country. Even if Google were an agency of the State, they still are not empowered to violate citizens' rights under the Constitution.
Yes, I'm seriously suggesting that following orders contrary to good conscience is immoral and illegal, but luckily the better part of the world agrees with me in the precedent set at Nuremberg.
He fled out of fear of long-term incarceration, for actions that ordinarily would indeed deserve such harsh sentences.
Mostly true, I suppose, but I remember this : "TSA loudspeakers threaten travelers with arrest for making jokes" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkWPMeLSk6M
Yes, the US has freedom of expression, and you can claim whatever you want about the government (you can even lie). But if you yell 'fire' in a theatre with 500 people and 1 small exit, or 'allahu akbar' in a TSA line, you deserve to get sued and punished for that. That is not legally considered to be freedom of expression.
Personally I don't find that very controversial. If you lie to get someone else's kid into your car, that's not freedom of expression either. Lying to private security during an emergency is not freedom of expression either. Reporting a bomb threat because you have a math quiz is not freedom of expressoin. If you commit fraud on a contract, that's not freedom of expression either, whether or not "it was a joke".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_thea...
Does your opinion change if it is spoken in English? Or is it just Arabic? Should it be taken more seriously if a person is wearing a turban or not? Or maybe their skin color… does that matter?
Read the case before you quote it. American Supreme Court has done a lot of injustices in its time. And this is one of the more egregious once.
http://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hac...
Summary - the case involved was not a principled exception to free speech, but the diametric opposite; a judge basically ruled that you can't criticize the government during wartime because it would undermine the state.
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, affirmed Schenck's conviction on the theory that this expression could be punished in wartime even though it merely urged "peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal" of conscription, on the theory that the government could suppress speech that might interfere with the draft.
Here in the US, we strive to bring partisan politics into every discussion.
Sure many countries are horrible places to live compared to the United States, but if we ignore our problems as you would have us do, that might not always be the case.
Our founding fathers knew from the very start that government is but a necessary evil. One that requires constant monitoring and modification in order to keep the power in the hands of the American people, which is where it belongs. Patriotism is about loving one's country, not worshipping the government.
I don't agree with every criticism of the United States that appeared in this thread, but I do agree with some of them.
The vast majority of people who are raised in USA public schools.
That is an appropriate reaction, but the ACLU's focus on life without parole sentences grossly understates the savagery of US sentencing schemes. Tens of thousands more inmates are serving life with the possibility of parole for non-violent crimes. These inmates may very well never be released, and if they are they will have served so long that they will never be able to recover.
In Nevada, for example, 1 in 5 prisoners is serving a life sentence with the possibility (but no guarantee) of parole. Our version of the 3 strikes law, which is used in several other states as well, enables any three felony convictions to qualify an offender for a life sentence. This can and has included repeat drug offenders (including those who were not dealing), those committing multiple relatively minor property crimes (vandalism, theft, etc), and those with multiple DUI's that never resulted in accidents.
Simply put, US habitual offender laws defy all sense of logic, humanity, and reason. The political will to change this does not exist within either of our major political parties, so the problem is likely to expand over time.
Oh come on. I've lost my license for what you'd call DUI - made a stupid decision to drive the 1.5km back home from a pub, got a 1 year ban and a hefty fine. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do and I deserve what I got, but attempted murder? Don't be ridiculous.
At most repeated DUI is criminal negligence, and negligence on the part of whomever supplied the offender with the vehicle. It should be met with driving bans and escalating punishments if those are ignored. Life imprisonment is an amazingly harsh and expensive over-punishment for a stupid but usually non-malicious crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_driving_in_the_United_Sta...
I was just saying that attempted murder is when you actually attempt to murder someone. It's not the same, not at all.
As a whimsical thought experiment, care to explain why the other 60% of fatal accidents should not be classed as criminal negligence by one party or another? : P
edit: since this got a few upvotes, I'd like to expand. I'm in my late thirties; I got my drivers' license in the early nineties. I was never really educated on drink driving the way people are today.
I didn't take it seriously enough. I thought it would be OK; I didn't know the risks properly, and I certainly didn't know the penalties. I had no idea that being a couple of times over the limit led to a 20x+ increased risk of accident. Maybe I was stupid to not know that, nonetheless I had never properly internalised that fact.
Maybe everyone here is smarter than me - it certainly seems like that most of the time - but I am not completely stupid, and my internal risk profile was totally wrong about this. If you're of a similar age as me - earned your license decades ago, in a more permissive time - I beg you not to make the same mistakes I made. Drink driving is never an option. It is not even on the table. You are endangering yourself, the community, your reputation, and everyone you love. Catch a god damn taxi, like I wish I had done that night.
Drink driving - not even once. From one hacker to another. Please.
And yet we have media organizations saying things like:
" Washington (CNN) -- A common benchmark in the United States for determining when a driver is legally drunk is not doing enough to prevent alcohol-related crashes that kill about 10,000 people each year and should be made more restrictive, transportation safety investigators say.
The National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday that all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content (BAC) cutoff of 0.05 compared to the 0.08 standard on the books today and used by law enforcement and the courts to prosecute drunk driving.
The NTSB cited research that showed most drivers experience a decline in both cognitive and visual functions with a BAC of 0.05. "
Of course we have a decline in cognitive and visual functions - that's what a depressant does. At any dose. So long as we have drinking as a major societal institution, and we have bodies that slowly process alcohol, and we have an automotive-mobile culture, there is some nonzero number of deaths we will prefer to tolerate every year due to drunk driving, whether it's 1,000,000 or 10,000 or 100.
---
While there may be some distribution of how well people deal with a certain degree of drunkenness, the basic objective fact that we possess to measure impairment is BAC. Limits vary geographically and through history - in the US we have had experience with thresholds at 0.05%, 0.08%, 0.1%, and 0.15% in various eras and places.
A BAC of 0.01% doesn't significantly harm anyone - it is barely detectable. A BAC of 0.05% poses some minor statistical increase in danger, and is generally the minimum people seek out to 'get a buzz'. A BAC of 0.1% indicates moderate impairment - about what you thought, several times more dangerous. It's only when you get to a BAC of around 0.2% that it becomes 20x more dangerous. At a BAC of around 0.3% and up, on the other hand, one generally loses consciousness. Death from alcohol intoxication (assuming no complications) occurs at an average of about 0.45% BAC (that is the approximate LD50).
First, the existence of a bad policy somewhere does not excuse the existence of similar bad policies everywhere. You can't justify the penalties under the CFAA by comparing to the penalties for crack cocaine possession, because they are both excessive.
Second, you'll notice that your discovery (if such a prohibition for arsonists indeed exists) breaks the analogy with a prohibition on driving for those convicted of a DUI, because it isn't a prohibition on all fire, when it is a prohibition on all driving. Which makes your argument the straw man, because a prohibition on large public fires is a minor inconvenience, whereas a prohibition on burning fuel to heat one's residence, like a prohibition on driving whatsoever, is a life-altering situation that may require you to find a new job and residence while doing very little to combat the evil in question supposedly justifying the restrictions.
The goal of this idea is to encourage you to not attempt manslaughter with your vehicle, so if you were faced with life imprisonment perhaps you would think long and hard before you do it the third time.
Look, I can see your point of view. There needs to be a deterrent, yes. Locking someone up and throwing away the key, though, should be reserved for only the most heinous offences. In my opinion, you should not be able to achieve that using only a six-pack, a car, and zero dead bodies.
There has got to be some other solution that doesn't utterly ruin the person's life, and the state's finances.
I think DUI three times is particularly heinous. Maybe life in prison is excessive, but the third time you do it you are well aware that it is potentially lethal, and the punishment should be on the level of attempted manslaughter. If that gets you nailed with some three-strikes thing, I think your argument should be against the three-strikes aspect.
But my original point was to disagree that DUI is the same class of crime as drug use in general, since it's incredibly dangerous for the other members of the public.
It is hard to disagree with you about the third-time DUI. I guess I am against "automatic" laws in general; it reeks of populism and "tough on crime" rhetoric, ignoring the human variables - see above article for examples. Trying to legislate judicial discretion out of the equation is, to me, a foolish idea.
Couldn't agree more on the drug use issue. They should not even be in the same category of crime.
update: thanks for the link, it led me down an interesting path of "attempted manslaughter" reading. eg, from http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=645716
> in Virginia a few traffic offenses can be classified as attempted manslaughter. Such as, speeding well above what classifies as reckless driving or driving sufficiently intoxicated. I think the reasoning is that if one were to kill someone under those circumstances it would be manslaughter, and any reasonable person would know that excessive speeding or driving drunk carries a high risk of killing someone even though that person isn't exactly trying to kill anyone, therefore, even though they didn't kill someone, they still basically attempted to in being so careless. IOW, you really should be charged with manslaughter, you just were lucky enough to have no actually killed anyway
> I think different jurisdictions probably punish those actions similarly, they just may call it something other than attempted manslaughter, like maybe reckless endangerment or whatever.
Reckless endangerment - I admit that strikes me as a better term, although I now understand the reasoning behind "attempted manslaughter".
Perhaps I'm misguided, but it seems to me that its more fair to impact the life of the offender than it would be to allow an innocent person to die.
Fortunately, there are more than two options. The best idea I can come up with would be to permanently suspend driving privileges for anyone with a second DUI conviction.
This is the worst part of excessive penalties -- that people think they would actually be effective. Most defendants have absolutely no idea what the penalties are until after they've been charged with the crime, which makes any deterrent effect of increasing the penalties quite impossible.
Even if you ran some kind of expensive continuous education campaign (which naturally can't work for every category of crime because there are so many types with such complicated penalties that no one could keep track), you're assuming that people engage in planning. If people planned ahead then they would all have a ride home from the bar in the first place.
Then again, death is an amazingly harsh and expensive punishment for an innocent who happens to get killed in a driving accident with somebody who's drunk...
That said, attempted murder doesn't really fit. Attempted Manslaughter or something like criminal negligence (of the sort that endangers people's life) maybe?
That kind of ruins your simplistic little moral diorama, doesn't it?
As a society we realize that certain risks will always remain, and due to bad luck accidents will always happen: We accept that and live with that. What we do not accept is behavior which unnecessarily endangers a person's life. It's perfectly reasonable from a moral point of view to hold people accountable in proportion to how reckless they are acting.
So, yea, murder. That's how serious DUI (or texting behind the fucking wheel) is.
TL;DR Breathalyzers are based on dubious science, system is unfairly tilted in favor of conviction. Guilt is presumed & punishment issued even before trial.
I cannot tolerate anyone who would plow around our roads in a 2,000 pound bullet and either be drunk or looking at their phone.
Are we going to argue that you're a murder if you drink to excess while your keys are still in your pocket? Because that's when the decision was made, not when you get in your car drunk. At that point, its not you making the decision.
Well, no. Turns out that alcohol's effect on behavior is strongly dependent on culture and/or expectations:
Unless you cause a accident, then you can get attempted murder, or murder (depending on the outcome).
Then people will say: "Oh, but the driver had no intention to murder someone." here the most common argument from the judge is: "someone that knows that driving under influence is dangerous and do it anyway, is taking full responsability for the fact that it might accidentally kill someone, thus it is not accidental, since the person is on purpose gambling away with other people lives."
It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that wouldn't tug the heart strings as much. California's law is particularly dysfunctional, because it applies to any three felonies while most states limit their laws to serious felonies. As a result, about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent predicate felonies (burglary, robbery, and drug possession). But in other states the law is more limited. For example, the Georgia law only applies to: (1) Murder or felony murder, (2) Armed robbery, (3) Kidnapping, (4) Rape, (5) Aggravated child molestation, (6) Aggravated sodomy, or (7) Aggravated sexual battery.
Besides that, what you're missing is that nobody is really intending for these specific, cherry-picked, people to be kept in jail for their whole lives. Their sentences are the unintended consequences of three-strikes laws that offer no discretion to sentencing judges.
When legislators voted for these three strikes laws, with public support, they were thinking of people who are "irredeemable." Hardened convicts who end up in jail on three occasions. What they didn't count on was the fact that there are people living on the edge who rack up a number of felony convictions for relatively minor things even though they're not the kind of hardened criminal legislators were thinking about. If you live in the ghetto and have friends who engage in gang activity, it's pretty easy to get drawn into some bad behavior that results in a couple of felony convictions, so that "one mistake" later in your life can bring you under the three strikes law.
Why don't these laws get repealed? Because Americans are really not sympathetic to people living on the edge. Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where they might wander into a felony conviction from a minor lapse in judgment. They don't have drug dealer boyfriends or friends who try to recruit them into burglarizing a house. It helps that 75% of people sentenced under California's three strikes law are black or hispanic (45% are black despite only 6.5% of the state population being black). Americans are particularly unsympathetic to racial minorities living on the edge.
I think sentences in the U.S. are deeply dysfunctional, but I hate this sort of publication by the ACLU. It makes people who support sentence reform seem dishonest by cherry-picking the edge cases, instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.
It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of
people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that
wouldn't tug the heart strings as much.
That said, with three strikes laws, you don't need to resort to sob stories. The statistics are evidence enough: about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent offenses. That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
What if you are the next edge case in this system? with nobody to remember that you even exist, if its fair..
Just one person beiyng this edge case is enough to put the whole system down.. as every engineer knows this is what we call a bug, and can make the whole system irrelevant, and work agains its own purpose..
And that is what happens to the justice system.. the worst thing is that its all about property.. its f#$% stupid.. its unproportional, and minimize that is pure lack of humanity.. and its the real reason why things are still working that way.. because if you are not one of those "edge cases" you really dont care
And thats so many human lifes wasted, not only the people behind bars, but also their families, how they kids will grow up.. how can they support their families..
If we get, say, 1000 edge cases every year - then it's completely acceptable unless you can provide another system that will have much less edge cases. And if you're not sure, you don't switch until you are sure. If you simply "switch off" the system, then you get random 'mob justice' which whill have much more problems than the current situation.
Three-strike laws exist to quench the mob's appetite for blood (as public execution is sadly no longer acceptable, the mob has to settle for life sentences), and get politicians get elected on a fearmongering & repression platform. But on a humane level, it's not far removed from judicial amputations.
The problem is not convincing rational thinking people. Are there really some nontrivial group of informed rational people without an ownership stake in a private prison company who genuinely believe that three strikes laws are good policy?
The problem is not the rational thinking people at all. The problem is politics and rational ignorance. It's the swarms of busy people who don't have the time or the education to understand the statistics, who consequently go back and vote for the people who enacted these laws.
I get where you're coming from. The world would be a better place if all policy decisions were based on evidence and reasoning rather than emotion. But when you have the prison lobby heaping the corpses of teenage girls on their side of the scale, you need to put something visceral on the other side to shock complacent people into realizing that something is very wrong here.
Politics is a popularity contest. It's important that the side with the best argument wins, but how do you get that to happen when people have limited time and limited resources and the winner is decided by voting rather than correctness?
Irrational emotion bred these laws, they will only go away via the same pathetic process. The ACLU is just playing the game with their appeal to emotion.
If anything the system still has too much discretion (in the hands of police and prosecutors) that lead predictably to discriminatory outcomes.
I know, now the problem lies with these judges having poor decision making skills... if only there were a process to removing or overriding their decisions.. like an "appeals" process.. or a way of electing new judges and "voting" them in and out of office...
Neah, that's crazy talk.. we need absolute maximum/minimum sentencing guidelines like three strikes so we can keep those privatized prisons full, and making money.
AFAICT, it's about neurological differences, not racial or cultural differences. White people with low IQ or poor impulse control get shafted just as hard, they are just a smaller proportion of the population. Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color.
I thought it really funny to be so "politically correct" when speaking of black people, yet quite happy to refer to "people with less color" as "trailer trash."
People are even more unmoved by accurate pictures painted by statistics than they are of "minorities living on the edge". That's the problem here. The ACLU is trying to relate to people on a human level so that they can build some support. So what if they end up producing something very biased? Is this a scientific paper in peer review? I think most people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing.
Does it? I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics. Right to bear arms, for example, freedom of speech and religion, right to life. The "stand your ground" phenomenon, a very American thing, is definitely right-wing.
It seems to me more that the "right" and "left" have adopted certain civil liberties for their pet causes, and the ACLU, a left wing organisation for sure, advocates for their favoured issues. But let's not confuse that specific organisation and their agenda with the general concept of "civil liberties" per se.
The ACLU, for example, was a leading plaintiff working to get the Citizens United ruling in favor of freedom of speech including corporate advocacy. The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.
And the NSA reform bills in the Congress have about equal support from both parties.
Could you tell me specifically what definition of "strong supporter" you're using here? I can't think of any reasonable one that would make your claim true. Supporter, maybe.
But a "strong supporter" is not someone who endorses a watered down version of the Second Amendment, and then spends zero effort defending infringements of that.
That wasn't the topic.
The topic was the claim that the ACLU is a "strong supporter" of the second amendment. Do you know a definition of "strong supporter" that is appropriate for the ACLU's actions regarding the Second Amendment?
No, I don't want to hear about how great the ACLU is.
No, I don't want to hear about the ACLU really does support civil rights.
No, I don't want to hear about how their position on the 2nd amendment is reasonable.
No, I don't want to hear about all the other people who can protect the second amendment.
I want something responsive to my question: in what sense is the ACLU not just a "supporter" but a "strong supporter" of the Second Amendment?
Don't have anything to say about that? Then please stay out of the discussion rather than changing topics and blurring the issues. Thanks.
The topic of this thread is actually that we have a lot of people serving life in prison for non-violent crimes.
Your post is now 8ish levels deep and asking people to prove that the ACLU is a strong supporter of 2nd amendment rights.
This seems like a pretty big topic change and blurring of the issues.
Let's stop with the farce: your complaint is that you don't like their interpretation, and so you choose to change the topic and blur the issue on a completely different thread to grind that ax of yours.
How do you differentiate a "supporter" from a "strong supporter"? If I firmly believed that the First Amendment only protects pro-government speech, and filed the occasional legal brief in defense of those prosecuted under this interpretation, would that make me a "strong supporter" of the First Amendment? Would you talk about how crazy wicked cool it is that a nutty right-winger like me paradoxically has a thing for protecting the first amendment?
Or, to avoid the issue of weak interpretations of amendments, how about if I had the "normal" 1st amendment views, and had a "pro-Bill of Rights" group that spent only a token amount of effort protecting infringements on speech (or the other 1A stuff), and never to represent any such client? Still a "strong" supporter? Or just a "supporter"?
People sometimes like to paint their side as "for freedom" and the other side as "wants to restrict you", but the reality is far more complicated, changing issue-by-issue and occasionally covering legitimate tradeoffs where both sides might be considered "for freedom".
The ACLU Is a Conservative Organization - Noam Chomsky
When that starts working I'm sure advocacy groups and politicians might give it a try.
Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where
they might wander into a felony conviction
dont fool yourself into think the legal system is anything other than a tool for oppression and control
Piss off the right person, and you may find yourself getting pulled over on some deserted road where officer Clancy "discovers" a felonious amount of a controlled substance concealed in your car or on your person.
Vast majority of white/asian people in this country are so far removed from that life that chance of getting underserved felony is as likely as getting hit by lightning. It can happen but definitely not three times in the row.
When government says Jump, they respond with "How high master" , the government says "Give me 50% of your labor" they say "Yes Master"
The vast majority of people, not even white/asian, just people, are useless sheep being lead complacently to slaughter
If you manage to find the very rare employer willing to overlook a felony conviction, there's also the challenge of finding an apartment with a criminal record (apartments can and do reject ex-cons from leasing).
Never mind the emotional hurdle of reuniting with family (if you're lucky), and the huge challenge of socially re-integrating with society.
After all, even if three-strikes is reformed, that almost certainly wouldn't be reapplied retroactively.
I need to do something, something meaningful. Sure I send a few bucks every month to a few charities but that just makes me feel worse, like I'm loosely patching holes of my guilt with plaster that will fade the next day.
What can I do? I don't belong here. I'm just another waste of space.
Consider: if we can write the software that cities, states, and even the federal government uses to do it's job, then we can also have a material impact on transparency, usability, etc for the users.
Take the judicial system. It is badly underfunded, especially in California, which has the largest civil court system in the Western world. What if an enterprising group of civic minded programmers simply wrote awesome, free, open software to run a state courtroom, complete with a self-help web interface?
Such a project would not necessarily be fun. But it would be useful, and it would arguably contribute greatly to society.
It would contribute to the system that is perpetuating these kinds of injustices. Recall that a good portion of these people serving life sentences for non-violent crimes are in state prisons. How is helping them build their software systems going to find justice for a man in jail for life for stealing some tools?
By the way, this is not a rhetorical question: I'm honestly trying to understand this point of view.
1. In the courtroom. These people could have received a faster, more painless, and more just trial. The proceedings could have been more open, easier to search and data mine, and hence easier to react to faster. Additionally (and somewhat science-fictiony) I personally would like to see us experiment with alternative juries - particularly much larger, distributed juries. If justice can't be crowd-sourced, then I don't know what can.
2. In the legislature. Although the creation of bills is an intensely collaborative process, too often the details are delegated to underlings, and those details are seriously misinformed by the facts. So one piece of software that is needed world wide are better document collaboration tools that are tied to accurate sources. The legislature in particular should be obsessively concerned about how the justice system is applying their laws. Better visibility into what's happening, in real-time, would make the legislature a) more aware and b) more responsive to injustice.
It's hard. It's not just giving $10 to Oxfam (which you should do anyway), it's a real dedication of time and care. But you'll meet people, you'll support something you are passionate about, and you'll have a lot less time to think about how you're a waste.
Isn't everyone? Why is working 18 hours of labour a day inherently more valuable or useful to humanity, the planet, the universe, anything? Why is someone struggling inherently a better, more worthy person than anyone else (and by what standards?).
Would you really prefer a world where everyone has to struggle to survive, because that's where it sounds like your comment is leading.
The feeling of guilt is an echo in your head. It's not actually an objective measure of your worth, it's not really some outside deity judging you and finding you unworthy, even if it feels like it is. Because of this, there's no saying there is anything you can do to assuage your feelings of guilt if you go with them. Maybe it's a while loop that says "while (bad_things_happen_anywhere) { feel_guilty(); }". You ask what to do as if there's bound to be a corresponding "if I do X then I can feel less guilty" pattern in your head waiting to be triggered - but maybe there isn't.
What you can do is work on it as your problem, your suffering, your mental issue that needs addressing in your head. You're not unhappy because the world sucks for a dirt poor person. You're unhappy because of a "be unhappy" thought stuck in your head. Don't change the world to stop this suffering, change your thoughts.
Oh FFS, don't do that, it just encourages them to treat visiting whiteys as walking ATMs, which is bad for their tourism industry long-term.
Stay at hotels, eat at restaurants, take taxis, but don't encourage the obnoxious hawkers, no matter how young they are.
I'd suggest that any startup worth its salt is actually offering something of real value, not explicitly a charity case, so the analogy completely breaks down. I fully support encouraging the startup ecosystem.
And I'm not even sure about using a term like "top down". Hotels really do employ locals, as do restaurants, and by patronising them you send a strong signal of support to the local tourism industry. With that assurance they can make plans, invest, advertise, expand. It's not about making the rich richer, not at all. Giving a small regional tourism industry the confidence to plan for the future is a wonderful thing.
The fact that they even have to do this speaks volumes.
That's not the least bit true, in my experience. I've watched them come over from where their families are working and attempt to sell trinkets, then go back to their families (or friends' families).
As for "crap", yeah, it's crap. Because you don't give children appliances and automobiles to sell. It's no different than the stuff you'll buy from American children going door to door, trying to raise money for their school.
I think you're really looking down your nose at people. You have a choice when traveling in areas like this. You can either act like you have to guard your precious money from all these street urchins trying to cheat you, or you can simply accept it as part of the experience traveling in a very poor area, and embrace the reality that you can make some small difference in an individual's life.
You talk as if denying individuals some income is somehow helping their long-term tourism. Yet Thailand, which is decades ahead of Cambodia in terms of development and wealth, still sees foreigners as wealthy, pesters them for sales and rides, and they have a very healthy tourism industry in spite of this. A country can't force its way into a $500/night resort industry. Thailand has tried for years, and it's not happening anytime soon. Cambodia doesn't even have a reasonable highway infrastructure.
> Hotels really do employ locals
To give an interesting regional example, are you aware that the Thai island of Koh Phi Phi is controlled by the Chinese mafia?
The wider issue with buying stuff off Cambodian street urchins is that you really don't want to encourage a state of affairs where the most aggressive child beggars/vendors earn far more than their parents... and then need kids of their own once they hit their mid-teens and no longer appeal to tourists' sympathies.
So, you only want your money going to the wealthier families, many of which are foreign?
Street hawkers may be annoying, but they also represent the most basic form of entrepreneurial spirit.
Don't do it from a place of guilt, find something that you feel passionately about, cut back on the meaningless and lucrative tinkering and start tinkering for your passion. Your most valuable contribution to the world is your time, arrange your life so that you can spend as much time as possible, without burning out, on something meaningful to you.
You can also shift to work for an institution which is genuinely trying to do good, such as the World Bank or a not-for-profit. Or you can do what you can from within your own organisation to get them to be working to improve the world rather than take advantage of it.
(1) http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/what-problem-will-you-own/
<update - my apologies, there is a registration requirement for the article. The lightbox appears after a little wait, so you should be able to read it>
Just keep in mind the World Bank is considered by many as an instrumental part of a quasi-colonial system of institutions that is set up to exploit the third world through their advocacy for unfavorable debt and a certain economical bias.
I'm sure they also do some good, but they are at least a somewhat ambiguous organization.
Being poor is not a moral flaw and I see people everyday go out of their bed and try to win most of their days. Still people manage to find happiness within the most dire constraints.
You cannot do everything and nobody expects to. Take comfort in that. We are all doing out bits to repair the world (There's a wonderful Hebrew phrase for this: Tikkun olam).
But when you have the means, go travel. Meet the others who occupy this world, who have different perspective of living, who struggles with different things that you do. They will be happy to meet you.
People don't seem to be able to imagine just how bad life is in the third world for the majority of people.
And frankly, sorry to put it so bluntly, but here's a thought people should think about. Given you are a third-worlder, would you want to be one of the exploited or one of the non-exploited. Given that in practice most third-worlders still choose what job they want, the answer is obvious : with very few exceptions, people want to be one of the "exploited". Visit a third-world city, turn a few non-approved blocks, and you'll understand why.
Btw: one of the things that amazed me about Cairo is that they've created a "fake" city center, where the poverty you see is almost absent, in a way that I've seen nowhere else. So in Cairo, you definitely have to turn a few non-approved blocks.
But what you describe does not sound like an honest or clear assessment of the world. It sounds more like depression. Which is real and serious and treatable.
The world is often tragic. It <em>is</em> wrong to live comfortably and be willfully ignorant to tragedy, but it is not wrong to take care of yourself and make yourself whole. So, yes, seek something meaningful to make the world better, and start by taking care of yourself.