Posted by gmays 3 days ago
(you might have a different opinion if you are female)
But what you embrace as historical and perennial in shunning, shame, and ostracism is in like historical and perennial company with compassion, forgiveness, mercy, etc.
But for many of us in the US, in the GenX and Millenial generations that we grew up in, we experienced the worst of the shunning culture in high school, among small town cliques, and in the midst of certain church groups; and then social media came, and we witnessed a clear turn where the dreaded "Mean Girl" dynamics that we hoped to have escaped in a liberalizing adult world of funky tattooed weirdos, long haired UNIX nerds, rainbow-flagging Unitarians somehow became the dominant voice of social media culture and it was somehow being championed loudest of all by some of those same colorful weirdos!
Maybe you're happy with that turn, but you can't really take away the disappointing and disorienting transition that many of us experienced as it took hold.
The colorful weirdos were never better people in the first place, so I don't know why you're surprised. People who don't presently have the power to exploit others tell themselves that they don't, or wouldn't anyway, because they're better people. This is self-flattery. Give them power and they'll promptly demonstrate their corruption.
Nietzsche wrote quite a bit about this dynamic.
When something bad happens (like, say, a murder), people want to talk about it. But now, the conversations happen in view of the public--the _whole_ public. So people don't want to be on the wrong side of the conversation. In private, among friends they understand and trust, they might express doubt or complex thoughts. But out in the general public, where their opinion could be boiled down to a soundbite, they don't dare lean on nuance. So, they play it safe.
Go onto Reddit, and under some controversial story post a nuanced take. Chances are you'll get downvoted to oblivion. And that's fine--it's pseudonymous. But if it were attached to your real name, and you happened to be wrong (or some part of your statement could be taken out of context and made to look wrong), then it could always be dredged up and used against you. OTOH, there's basically no scenario where it would be dredged up to help you.
So the result is, all nuance is drained out of the conversation. We end up with junk food for public discourse: no fiber, no nutrition, just feel-good sugar: "fuck that guy, he should be locked up for life!" And seeing everybody carry that line unanimously makes anybody who doesn't look immediately suspicious.
I'm not saying that social media can't bleed into real life, but I think the effects it has on how communities choose to ostracize people is completely exaggerated here. Your high-level theory for how it could result in a huge societal shift might be plausible, but it would also be plausible to argue that it causes people to move on much more quickly from events like this because it's so much easier for a new one to pop up for everyone to focus on, which leads to people no longer caring about the previous one faster. All of this is is just armchair philosophizing though, without any real evidence.
I think there are very real problems caused by excessive social media that are documented with compelling evidence, but I have trouble believing this is one of them.
The issue here is that we should expect 'the state' to be fairly objective in it's determination of illegality, the correct punishment for the event, and to publish what actions are illegal in a way that is publicly consumable prior to the events it arbitrates.
Lessor transgressions should be handled directly by the peers of the transgressors. I don't want the government holding a court case about something trivial to society at large but relevant to the small community it occurs in.
Well, many have victims who weren't treated with dignity or respect.
Recidivism is high, and so there's a statistical basis that people are who they show you to be.
Choosing to believe in an idea of them may hurt you, and its unfortunate if you choose to believe on society's behalf in an idea of them rather than who they actually are.
Here in the US, people kill for a lot less.
In Australia, organised crime has taken to hiring teenagers as hitmen; e.g. the perpetrators of a failed assassination attempt against a retired footballer (they shot him but he survived) included a 15 year old and 16 year old – https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sixteen-heart-pumping-ab...
Reasons for using teenagers include that they cost less, they are impressionable, easier to manipulate, eager to "prove themselves", and receive more lenient sentencing (especially those under 18). Adult hitmen demand thousands, they'll find a teenager willing to do it for $500 (AUD 500 = USD 350). https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/at-the-crossroads-offend...
Apparently, this strategy wasn't invented in Australia, Australian criminals have copied it from Europe where it was already established (particularly in Sweden and the Netherlands)
It's an old strategy. It's commonly been part of plots of various stories/movies in the US going back decades.
I think significant aspects of it are quite novel – e.g. teenagers being recruited via Signal or Telegram, often by overseas fugitive gang leaders; some cases have even (allegedly) involved Iranian government agents
Also, there's a difference between something repeatedly happening in fiction over decades, and law enforcement seeing multiple real life cases of it over a few months in a single metro area
And incidentally, in case you didn't know, to classify as a robber you need to either use, or threaten, with violence.
The average burglar is not a robber.
Also, given he opened the safe and called the police a few minutes later, what happened to the money from the safe.
Truth is in these situations we don't know so no one outside of the case should speculate.
I feel the tendency to turn criminal cases into public spectacles does more harm and disservice to justice than anything else. The public has no business passing judgement or deciding for themselves. Leave them out of it.
Though the gruesome spectacle of public obsession with criminal cases like this has a long and (ig)noble history. There were late Victorian and early Edwardian “police reports” that filled exactly this sort of lurid fascination with the macabre.
However, I found the wider premise of the article more interesting than the speculation about the crime - which is whether someone convicted of an unpleasant violent crime can be simultaneously a warm and friendly person, and whether the justice system is as cut and dried as people like to think.
I found it very thought provoking beyond (or possibly in spite of) the “unsolved mystery” aspect.
What a laughably insulated statement. An example from NZ - Janek Patel was murdered in 2022 while attempting to prevent the cash register at his corner store from being stolen.
The figure has been described as "a few dollars".
But ultimately what is the point of these stories? I didn’t learn anything, no mystery was unraveled. It’s information fast food but dressed up as intellectual.
For twenty minutes it was an engrossing read for me, but to each their own I guess.
not everything has to have a plot or an arc, this is real life
God bless America. I’m glad I’m here and not there.
There's no fundamental difference in justice, just minor differences in thresholds.
But the bigger problem is that, if the process were really so precarious, then that's exactly why we would want stronger controls. There may be a good argument for a different threshold but it isn't this one.
You don't magically avoid a threshold just by saying "obvious".
The US is first on prison population (total) and forth on rate on incarceration (behind El Salvador, Cuba, and Turkmenistan).
5.9 homicides per 100k annually [1]. Assuming the average person who commits homicide commits 1 homicide in their lifetime (known homicide distributions support this) then that is 5.9 new murderers per 100k annually. Distributed over expected lifetime that would be 200-350 murderers per 100k.
So, if the US successfully imprisoned every murderer and only murderers, it would still be ~25th (~Nicaragua) to ~80th (~Russia). Nearly 2x the total incarceration rate of France and 3x the total incarceration rate of Germany if only murderers were incarcerated and we used the low estimate.
If we assume that homicide is relatively rare compared to severe physical violence that most nations consider worthy of incarceration, then just imprisoning all violent offenders in the US would likely require 1,000+ per 100k at the low end, over twice the actual rate in the US.