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0 pointsashtonkem5y ago0 comments

> It's vital to recognize that criminals can choose to exit the criminal class.

Citation needed.

How can one choose to not have a cop plant evidence on you? Or lie during trial, or choose to not get strong armed into pleading guilty because you can't afford bail and they're threatening you with even worse consequences if you don't plead out early? Or not have a law about drug usage enforced selectively against you and not against others? These are things that happen each and every day in this country, to paint that as a choice on the part of everyone is actually kind of insulting.

Even for those who did commit crimes and got thrown in jail, what exactly do you expect them to do when they get out and can't get a job? Recidivism is very high in this country, higher than our peers. Either you've got to conjure up something about American criminals that makes them permanently criminally, in which case I will just assume that you're two steps away from getting out the skull calipers, or you're forced to come to the conclusion that we've decided to arrange our society in a way that makes this a likely outcome.

Yes, some individuals do escape the cycle, and that is both good for them and good for society. But given the strong trend, one has to ask why.

> stay addicted to drugs, sex, and violence, and keep coming to prison over and over

See, there's a funny thing that happens here. This logic is only ever applied to some people. Poor, black, and addicted to crack? Criminal, straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect any help. Rural white and addicted to opioids? Well by god they're a victim who needs help!

Now to be honest, I think that both of those groups need help, and should be treated far, far better. But the selective nature of who gets sympathy and treatment and who gets steel bracelets is pretty core to my argument.

> There are some skinheads that blame racial preferences for their own failures in life, lest anyone think that I'm naming SJWs facetiously

I still think you're bringing up SJWs facetiously.

> Stop telling people that they have no control over their lives.

Stop making up my point. It's annoying.

Every single person's outcome is a mixture of their own choices, luck, and society. Individual choices matter, I never claimed to the contrary. The question is not "do individual choices matter" but rather "is the playing field setup in such a way that some people's choices are more likely to result in negative outcomes than other people's?" > those are the people that I see coming back to prison on their 8th or 9th sentence. Those are the guys with 8 kids, most of whom will also end up dead or in prison.

Gee, I wonder why that seems to happen so often? Obviously it's people on the internet worried about the US criminal system's fault, because that obviously makes sense.

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edbob5y ago

Not much point talking if you're going to say "Citation needed" to trivial truths, while making trivially disprovable claims like rural whites not going to prison for drugs. (You may have heard of methamphetamines). I was actually intentionally trying to be more fair to the left when mentioning unfair blame being assigned, as it could seem biased if I only mentioned unfair blame against "conservatives", but it's interesting how you masterfully twisted that attempt at fairness into a slur against me.

"The liberal elements of whites are those who have perfected the art of selling themselves to the Negro as a friend of the Negro. Getting sympathy of the Negro, getting the allegiance of the Negro, and getting the mind of the Negro. Then the Negro sides with the white liberal, and the white liberal use the Negro against the white conservative. So that anything that the Negro does is never for his own good, never for his own advancement, never for his own progress, he’s only a pawn in the hands of the white liberal. The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros, and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked, or deceived by the white liberal then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man. The only way that our problem will be solved is when the black man wakes up, clean himself up, stand on his own feet and stop begging the white man, and take immediate steps to do for ourselves the things that we have been waiting on the white man to do for us" - Malcolm X, seeing straight through the word games and sophistry.

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