Yeah, I am generally viscerally horrified by the procedures of ICE/CBP but I am still somewhat disgusted by liberals counterargument that we need immigrants to do jobs that are beneath us.
Nothing is beneath us, except what's beneath everyone.
Bingo! Mocking the elite is a deeply rooted historical tool used to challenge the powerful. Historically, the "carnivalesque" tradition aimed to mock all customary kinds of social hierarchy. By donning masks or mocking those in power, ordinary people could temporarily dissolve the differences between the rich and the poor, challenging the legitimacy of the ruling class. Elites have always feared and suppressed these displays precisely because ridicule has a leveling effect that makes it impossible for them to retain their dignity and authority.
Over the last several decades, a tiny fraction of the wealthiest families in America—the top 0.1%—have effectively transformed the United States into a civil oligarchy, using their unfathomable fortunes to manipulate government policy and the legal system to serve their own financial interests.
Public mockery and collective joy are incredibly effective at forging unity among the powerless. In the face of overwhelming corporate and state power, achieving the immediate joy of solidarity is often a movement's sole source of strength.
You are unbelievably out-of-touch with the state of the world and social relations, although citing twelfth-century verse isn't in itself inexcusably outmoded.
The other poster is right about tit-for-tat. I'm afraid you're giving advice of the "let them eat cake" variety.
In other words, you don't seem to recognize that America not a society of equals.
Maybe I should read Canterbury Tales, though. Is the knight high-born?
I also don't "need" nor "depend" on hacker news to live. We're talking about websites like they are vital to living, that's not real. They are not. The closest thing to a website someone actually "needs" might be a government website (to report or file taxes maybe) or a bank website (assuming no brick and mortar locations near you). Let's not use words like "need" and "depend" to mean much lighter things like "is convenient" and "frictionless".
By "bad behavior," I mean robbing and murdering and the like, so no need for scare-quotes. Framing the average criminal as the victim of their own circumstances -- which seems to really be in vogue -- is entirely unconvincing to me.
> people STILL find reasons to burn to a crisp.
You make it sound as if turning to crime is less the criminal's decision and moreso nature's.
Yes, but not nature's—the built environment and socially constructed institutions of modern civilization.
Conservative political scientists like James Q. Wilson have historically argued that the root of crime is an essential moral and cultural failure, rather than just a byproduct of poverty. They maintain that social programs squander investments on those who will simply continue their destructive ways, and that society instead needs punitive mechanisms to regulate inherently destructive human urges.
On the other hand, sociologists and criminologists argue that while the decision to commit a crime belongs to the individual, the conditions that make that decision likely are structural.
Criminologists have long studied "social disorganization" as an engine for bad behavior, analyzing why certain neighborhoods suffer from persistent vandalism, street crime, and violence even as the specific individuals living there change over the decades. Critics of this theory often share your skepticism—arguing that high-crime neighborhoods might simply be the result of "birds of a feather flocking together," and that individual choices or family nurturing are far more important than neighborhood effects—but, ultimately, research demonstrates that people are profoundly motivated not only by their own choices, but by the circumstances and choices of those around them. When community social capital is high, networks of trust enforce positive standards and provide mentors and job contacts. When those adult networks and institutions break down, individuals are left to their own devices, making them far more likely to act on shortsighted or self-destructive impulses.
While it doesn't explain 100% of crime, this is just true. You change people's circumstances such that crime isn't rational, and they're less likely to do it.
There is a reason that crime goes up a ton when existing tools for survival disappear (e.g. disaster scenarios). When people have paths to prosperity, the need to do crime goes down. When the marginal value of crime is low, people don't do it. You can get there with draconian punishments, but you can also get there with, like, a strong social safety net and general prosperity.
While not the only reason, one reason that my coworkers won't steal my wallet if I leave it somewhere is that the $20 is mostly irrelevant to them given the general level of prosperity at my office.
I'm willing to bet most burglars aren't motivated to do crime due to suffering from starvation-level poverty; there is hardly ever a "need" to do crime -- i.e., a scenario wherein doing something criminal is the only way to survive. You totally neglect the moral angle and reduce it to a barebones cost/benefit sort of judgement, which is reflective of this popular view of criminals as hapless victims of fate or of society, and who are almost righteous in their choice to do crime. Oh, and the only solution is more welfare.
I said that for many people crime is a rational approach to more prosperity. That doesn't mean folks are near starvation and have no other choices, it just means that criminal options may be more appealing than other ones. If you create accessible, non criminal pathways to prosperity, crime decreases..if you remove them, it goes up.
it's heavy lifestyle restrictions that lead to anti-social behavior in the first place. by far the most common crime is property crime, people usually commit it out of desperation and lack of opportunity. the degree of personal freedom in a capitalist state is defined by wealth, which creates a natural incentive to steal. then when they do, those people are put in prison, where they connect with other labeled criminals, all of whom face significantly lower chances of being hired, making sure that doing anything else in their life except crime will be as difficult as possible. aren't those heavy lifestyle restrictions enforced on people by government?
If the world is to stay within a range of carbon emissions that avoids catastrophic global warming, 80 percent of the fossil fuel industry’s reserves must remain unused in the ground.
If we "run out" we'll have done ourselves terrific injury.
One such perspective is Tools for Conviviality, a 1973 book by Ivan Illich.
Your ultimatum is imaginatively anemic.
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