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Such a heartless view at the top of an HN thread is one of the disappointing things I've seen in a long time. If you cannot feel any sympathy for a man who hur
by xiaoma 14y ago
Such a heartless view at the top of an HN thread is one of the disappointing things I've seen in a long time. If you cannot feel any sympathy for a man who hurt no one and yet lost his job, prospects for future jobs and even prospects for renting a place to live... that speaks more about you than it does about the writing at Reason.
This story is about not only a wasteful, inefficient system and a six year injustice committed against a productive and from all accounts harmless man. It's about an the creation and perpetuation of an entire underclass.
- tptacek 14y agoThinking critically about the story, I have trouble getting past the narratives playing through my head about people who's lives truly were ruined by our drug laws, while at the same time overlooking the spectacularly bad judgement evinced and clumsily covered up by the writing in this story. I am specifically not litigating the wastefulness, inefficiency, or injustice of our drug laws.
- lolcraft 14y agoSo. You recognize the laws are stupid. Still, this article doesn't talk about what you think it's important, so let's blame the victim for getting caught. Hmm. Yeah, that was callous, and a bit pointless.
- tptacek 14y agoI like how it's not enough that I agree with you; because I don't agree with you with the right measure of emotion, I must be your adversary. This is a problem I have in general with _Reason_ (and also with Radley Balko, who I also enjoy reading and often agree with, and whose writing introduced me to _Reason_). They have a bad habit of building emotional narratives around cases where the facts don't support them. As a result, every time I read one of these pieces, I find myself having to dig in to see where I'm being manipulated. Often, it turns out I'm not, and the piece is completely honest. But sometimes they're not. This isn't a dishonest piece, just kind of a dumb one. Other stories about narcotics laws have turned out to be directly misleading: key facts of the case had been withheld to create an undue perception of victimhood, because victimhood suits the ideological agenda of the writer.
- DanBC 14y agoPeople make mistakes. His mistake was to have friends who took drugs and gave him some. We don't know if he took drugs himself. Was that mistake enough to warrant the results? What have I gained from him going through that?
- tptacek 14y agoWhat results? He got probation and an expungement. It cost him his job as a stock broker, because stock broker jobs are exquisitely sensitive to the appearance of bad judgement. He got his MBA, and is now working on his second graduate degree. He never went to prison. Like many, many, many people in this economy, after losing his preferred job, he found the next available job was pretty terrible. Welcome to the club; they have jackets; the jackets read "English Majors". How sorry do you feel for the short order cooks with postgraduate degrees who weren't caught with Oxy? This is simply not a story about someone who's life was ruined. Losing your medical license and then going to prison at age 53 because your intractable pain practice was targeted by a sting operation and you were found one time to have not followed the absolute letter of the 3498739847 page law on how to prescribe vicodin to a cancer patient: that is a story about a ruined life. This isn't.
- DanBC 14y agoSo that's your entire point? Other people are demonstrably much more innocent, and have much more severe results, and so we should be much more sympathetic to them?
- tptacek 14y agoYes. Or, put differently, if we're going to use cause célèbre cases to argue against drug laws, let's pick more convincing ones.
- boxy_brown 14y agoThe beautiful, cruel wisdom of Ptacek, in haiku: Arm amputated? Stop crying and use your brain You still have one left
- tptacek 14y agoAre you sure you care this much that I disagree with you about an article in _Reason_?