5 ms·
My personal life experiences tell my that, nowadays in the US at least, most people couldn't care less about the idea of "freedom" and on a daily basis happily
by cubano 9y ago
My personal life experiences tell my that, nowadays in the US at least, most people couldn't care less about the idea of "freedom" and on a daily basis happily trade it for faux-security and financial gain.
In fact, most are scared by the idea of it and actively try to limit the meme. This explains why the US has basically become a prison state and has roughly 4% of the world's population and 33% of the incarcerated inmates, with no serious efforts at reform seeing the light of day.
I suppose given our evolutionary biology, these attitudes aren't surprising, and really represents just another form of tribalism where the ingroup works safe "corporate-drone" jobs and the outgroup don't.
- somecallitblues 9y agoThat incarceration rate is there to keep the blacks off of streets and away in prisons. It's the modern form of slavery and one in three black males will be put in prison once in their lifetime. Not sure that it has anything to do with evolutionary biology and all with a fear of a black person.
- devmunchies 9y agoI think its a positive feedback loop. We criminalize blacks, which makes life "harder", which makes crime more attractive, which leads to more crime, which criminalizes blacks... But there could be a chicken or the egg argument as to which step occurred first in the loop (crime vs criminalization), because blacks didn't make up such a large percentage of prisons until the last few decades.
- tcfunk 9y agoI believe the egg was once called slavery
- devmunchies 9y agoI think that's lazy thinking. Blacks didn't make up such a large percentage just a few decades ago, so its a recent problem. Fatherless homes, for example, are much more common than before.
- southphillyman 9y agoSlavery transitioned to Jim Crow which transitioned to Redlining which transitioned to systemic poverty by the 60s-70s. Every thing was nicely set up for the arrival of the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
- devmunchies 9y agoSo you are more directly blaming the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986 rather than just slavery, which make more sense to me. Are you also indicating that slavery enabled rather than caused the current predicaments?
- jsymolon 9y agoLook at what Nixon's Aid (Ehrlichman) said about Nixon's drug policy. (Excerpt NY Daily News): The “War on Drugs” was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people, a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in a decades-old interview published Tuesday. John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, laid bare the sinister use of his boss’ controversial policy in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the writer revisited in a
- tcfunk 9y agoI don't think so. There's a whole waterfall of cause effect starting from there. When you deprive a group of people equal opportunities over the span of 200 years, you're bound to develop a culture and community which has grown around the notion that one cannot succeed using standard methods.
- zuminator 9y agoArguably the "egg" is the heroin epidemic that was caused by the Vietnam War. Blacks sought out and eventually won the right to fight for our country alongside white Americans, only to find that coincidentally(?) the nation no longer felt the same pride and sense of responsibility it once had for those who served as members of the armed forces. Regarding fatherless homes, I don't think one can take for granted which way the arrow goes. Is it fatherlessness --> problems or Problems --> fatherlessness? In other words chicken/egg redux.
- somecallitblues 9y agoAren't a lot of these people in jail for stupid shit like drug position and there are rules such as 3 strikes and out specifically designed for them? Maybe this fiscal freedom Americans love to talk about and the gun carrying freedom could extend to some other parts of life...
- cubano 9y agoAs tempting as it is, you can't immediately ascribe the situation to racism per se, which is why I believe tribalism actually much better fits the data plot.
- devmunchies 9y ago> This explains why the US has basically become a prison state and has roughly 4% of the world's population and 33% That could also be attributed to strict drug laws. If we decriminalize drugs, that number will fall dramatically. It may not be as philosophical as "people are scared of [freedom]".
- maxerickson 9y agoI'm sure there is some relationship between drug prohibition and violence, but the big difference in US incarceration rates is from the severity of sentencing for violent crime. There aren't all that many people imprisoned for straight up drug crimes.
- Bartweiss 9y ago> If we decriminalize drugs, that number will fall dramatically. Not so much. Drug charges are common, but sentences are often short. Releasing everyone in state or federal prison solely or chiefly for drug crimes might manage a 14% drop. That's important, definitely, but we would still be #1 globally in incarceration rate. And worse, that's everyone in on drug charges, up to and including smugglers and major dealers. Some of those people are fine to release, but remember that drug charges are very easy to get convictions with. So some people doing long sentences for dealing are also known murderers, but got convicted of possession/intent conviction because it's easier to prove in court. If we let them out, they'll probably reoffend violently. If we hadn't pressed drug charges initially, they'd have gone to prison for one of their other offenses. (The difficulty of identifying these people is one reason politicians are more opposed to decriminalizing than other people - they don't want to enable Willie Horton ads.) None of which makes drug decriminalization bad! Our drug laws are ineffective and immoral. But something like cut50 is totally unattainable via drug law.
- tempodox 9y agoAlso, prison is a business much more than anywhere else in the world. And business is the most sacred thing we have in Ferengistan.