First thing, most people in prison are not rapists and murderers. If you do your reasoning about prison by thinking ‘what do I think the worst people in prison deserve? I guess that’s what prisons should be like’ then that will really suck for the vast majority of prisoners who are not rapists or murderers and the substantial share of people in jail who have not even been convicted of anything.
95% of people in prison never got a trial – they were advised to plead guilty, which is often the best thing to do even if you’re innocent.
Secondly, I also want you to have access to medical care, and you being denied access to medical care is bad. Saying ‘prisoners being denied access to medical care is wrong’ does not mean it’s fine with me that you struggle to pay for housing and medical care. I want access to basic medical care to be universal.
Thirdly, if you want the government to spend less money on incarceration, well, making prison conditions less torturous, and ensuring that prisoners when released are able to integrate into society, is going to drive down prison costs in the long run. U.S. prisons make people likelier to commit crimes. Even if you don’t see any moral reasons to change that, it will also save the government money.
Fourthly, when we send people to prison we make it illegal for them to work for money to support themselves or pay for their own medical needs, and we make it illegal for them to access medical care even if they somehow could pay for it on the $.10 an hour we might allow them to earn, and we subject them to violence. Lots of people think that you have an obligation to people who you strip of their rights and lock in a cage, such as the obligation to feed them and provide them with basic medical care, which you do not have towards people you have not stripped of their rights and locked in a cage.
Fifthly, it is possible that it would benefit your economic situation if you didn’t have to compete with free forced prison labor. I don’t know how many Americans would be benefitted by this, it’s a bit hard to study, but it’s at least possible that you are struggling financially partially because it is cheaper for companies to use free forced labor than to pay employees.
Sixthly, denying prisoners healthcare is an inefficient way to torture them even if you think torturing them is just! For example, consider a man who gets behind on child support. We lock him up, of course, because he’s a criminal, and he dies, because why would our taxpayers’ hard-won earnings go to insulin for criminals?
Meanwhile someone who murders someone else but isn’t diabetic doesn’t die! If you think our prison system should be more punitive, that’s one thing, but surely you don’t think it should be more punitive specifically for diabetic people.
Lastly and most importantly, at least to me:
they broke the law! If they didn’t want consequences for their actions, they shouldn’t have done those things!
I think that this mindset is incredibly harmful and incredibly widespread and if I accomplish anything at all with this blog I want to get people to rethink it.
The law is not just. The law is not right. There are laws that are deeply unjust; there are laws that are impossible not to break if you’re in a sufficiently bad situation; there are innocent people serving long prison sentences because they thought it was better to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit than risk even harsher sentencing if they lost at trial. The vast majority of people in our prisons did not get a trial.
I will disagree with you if you say “people who have raped or murdered someone deserve to be slowly tortured to death at taxpayer expense and with a thin veneer of respectability, because, I mean, rapists and murderers, fuck those’. But I understand why you’d feel that way, and I want a legal system that works for you as well as for me.
But if you say “because people broke the law – because they are criminals – regardless of which laws they broke, or whether those laws should exist at all, or whether the punishment is remotely in line with the crime, or whether they got a fair trial, they do not deserve rights and should be tortured in a horrible inhumane catastrophe of a prison system -”
Well, when I say it like that it sounds terrible, right? But it’s an absurdly common way of thinking. People who broke the law are criminals, and criminals are bad, and if they didn’t want to be denied rights then they shouldn’t have broken the law, and I’m not a criminal, and I’m better than criminals, so why should I care about how we treat criminals?
The law is not just. Lots of things are illegal which shouldn’t be, and lots of punishments are more severe than the crime warrants, and almost no one gets a trial anymore, and whatever you think should happen to rapists and murderers, I beg you to realize that our system is not just doing that to rapists and murderers, it is doing that to everyone, and it gets away with it because people keep thinking ‘well, they’re criminals. In a world where people stopped automatically writing off anyone who has broken any U.S. law, regardless of whether they hurt anyone or did anything wrong or whether their sentence is remotely in line with the crime, as no longer worthy of moral concern, then these things would stop happening.
Anon: You have broken at least one law. I promise you, this is so. You can’t not have broken laws. There are a lot of laws. Do you speed? If you drive, in the US, you speed; I have met maybe one exception in my life. And if you don’t speed? You’re actually violating a law. There are many places in the road system where, if you aren’t speeding, you are driving at a speed so different from the rest of traffic that you are creating a road hazard. And that’s also illegal. But of course, your own crimes don’t count, because they never do. We always see our own motivations and circumstances and how those things matter. (It’s called the fundamental attribution error.)
More fundamentally: Let’s say you don’t care about any of the ways in which the position you advocate for is immoral. It’s still stupid. TUOC has already pointed out the issues with competition with prison labor. But think about the guy who got behind on child support payments, and got locked up, and died. Do you think that the fact that he no longer owes child support, because he has no income, benefits the child he is no longer supporting? It doesn’t. Do you think we all benefit from more kids having insufficient resources to grow up safe and healthy? We don’t.
The prison system in the US is an ongoing atrocity which survives because people like you got suckered into thinking that an organized system of what is basically slave labor is a Good Thing, because it’s happening to people who totally aren’t like you. Only, they are. Many of them did less to get there than you’ve done and not gotten there. Yet.
Author: lebelinoria
Taken from: Philosophy Memes For Fantastic Philistines (FB)
This is a very serious fight that I am honoured to see trivialised in meme form
… Someone needs to translate a programming language so that people who speak that language can, without learning any other spoken languages, learn to write programs which recurse. I want to see what happens.
“ewwwww he thinks that the self is something more than just a bundle of correlated qualia”
You ever just realize that, pre Internet, maybe even pre social media, none point none none percent of us fucks would have ever even heard the word qualia before?
I mean, okay, maybe some of us would’ve taken an intro to philosophy course in college. But probably very few of us would’ve bothered to seek out knowledge that would lead us to run into this topic.
I saw this meme and I instantly knew what it meant. Anyone using the internet while having an almost completely passive level of curiosity about human existence would be exposed to the word qualia in less than a decade. Maybe less than 5 years. Based on my own experience.
That’s just wild to me. Having that word. Being a person who knows what that word means. A thing doesn’t exist as a known concept until it is described and attached to a word. And I can just apply that concept to other ideas any time it feels applicable. I can associate that idea with other concepts.
The internet as a thing that fosters interdisciplinary understanding is maybe my favorite invention that humans have created. (Besides obvious life saving stuff.)
Imagine it. Memes fostering the sharing of concepts between academic disciplines by putting those concepts into the lexicons of young people. That’s some future shit. That’s some 2037 shit.
That’s an interesting quale.
why are Americans so obsessed with quale? I’ve tried it a couple of times, and I just can’t see how it competes with spinach.
Kale is way better than spinach, wtf are you talking about. It doesn’t bruise and get gross at the slightest touch even when raw, and you can cook it in a sure and end up with softened by still discrete and reasonable-textured kale instead of a bunch of goop.
okay, sure, qualia are nice, but consider all the p-zombies sitting around starving because yuppies think they need qualia.
In her book Trauma and Recovery,
Judith Herman writes about forgiveness (in the context of atrocities and abuse):
“Revolted by the fantasy of revenge, some survivors attempt to bypass their outrage altogether throught a fantasy of forgiveness. This fantasy, like its polar opposite, is an attempt at empowerment. The survivor imagines that she can transcend her rage and erase the impact of the trauma through a willed, defiant act of love.
But it is not possible to exorcise the trauma, through either hatred or love. Like revenge, the fantasy of forgiveness often becomes a cruel torture, because it remains out of reach for most ordinary human beings. Folk wisdom recognizes that to forgive is divine. And even divine forgiveness, in most religious systems, is not unconditional. True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.“Genuine contrition in a perpetrator is a rare miracle. Fortunately, the survivor does not need to wait for it. Her healing depends on the discovery of restorative love in her own life; it does not require that this love be extended to the perpetrator.
Once the survivor has mourned the traumatic event, she may be surprised to discover how uninteresting the perpetrator has become to her and how little concern she feels for his fate.“(pages 189-190, Chapter 9, Remembrance and Mourning)
tl;dr: Forgiveness is not a requirement for healing. You can heal and move on without forgiveness.
It can also harm you and it should never be demanded of you.
And you certainly don’t owe forgiveness to anyone.
I’m pretending all the time to be, kinder, stronger, funnier, more sociable than I am. I guess we’re all like that but it just feels so inadequate.
What’s the difference?
I know it sounds flippant but… certain things are fundamentally performative. And other things are so close as makes no difference.
Kindness is performative. Actions are kind, and people are kind by performing those actions. You can’t “pretend” to be kinder than you are, you can only perform kindness or not perform kindness, and choosing to perform kindness is always worthwhile, no matter how much you may second-guess your motivations.
Strength is so many things. It takes strength to pretend a strength you don’t feel. And the way to achieve strength is to exercise it, so long as you do it in enough moderation to not strain or break anything. Being able to affect strength when necessary while being able to put it down again when that in turn is necessary is healthy. Everyone starts weight training with the littlest weights. It’s not fake or pretending to do what you gotta do in any given situation.
Funniness lives in the interlocutor, not in the speaker. It doesn’t matter how funny you think you are (or think you are pretending to be) – that’s not how it’s measured. At what point are you “pretending” to be a musician if the music still gets made? And often what it’s tempting to describe in first person as “pretending” is more accurately described in the third person as “practicing” – which is of course the way you cause things to Be.
Sociability is also performative. Pretending to be sociable is just…being sociable, despite a disinclination towards it. It’s making an effort towards something you value. So long as the effort is not so great that it backfires into resentment, there’s no practical difference.
Qualities or activities or whatever are no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them. If anything, the worthiness lies in the act of choosing. It’s not “pretending” – it’s agency.
tl;dr: ain’t nothing wrong with “fake it till you make it.” A plastic spoon* holds just as much soup as a “real” one
* I keep wanting to talk about semantic domains! Artifacts are defined by their utility, whereas living things are defined by their identity. So plastic forks are still forks, but plastic flowers aren’t flowers. So there’s two pep-talk messages to take away from this: (1) for certain things, the distinction between “fake” and “real” isn’t a relevant one so long as they still get the job done, and (2) the purpose of a living thing is to be the thing that it is. The idea of a “useless person” is as semantically nonsensical as the idea of “pretend kindness” (or fake cutlery).
I love this post. It illustrates what I think is maybe the key difference between a developing self-identity and a formed self-identity, which is, like…confidence? If you are BEING kind, consistently, if you are prioritizing that over your own comfort or fatigue or even, occasionally, your emotional inclination (because OH MY GOD FUCK THIS GUY, I HAVE HAD IT UP TO HERE–uuughhh, but no, I’m not gonna lash out at him, that won’t accomplish anything, and besides, he’s probably had a bad day, he’s under a lot of stress, I don’t have to be an asshole about this…), guess what? That makes you kind. That is literally what kindness is. Same for patience, same for strength, same for all of this stuff. You got it. You’re doing it. You’re not faking anything. Stop second-guessing yourself and cutting yourself down. Give yourself enough credit to look at your actions and confidently assert to yourself that you are no longer just making things up as you go.
has this been done or
I was ashamed of what I was. But I’m done with the First Order. I’m never going back.
How to Finish
I drew this poster for Jon Acuff and his FINISH book tour. Big thanks to Jon for this collaboration, his book has some great ideas about how to complete creative and life goals.
As much as I love all of this dearly, my main takeaway from the whole thing is “holy shit, I want to punch apart a piñata.”
you need human connection to thrive you dumb bitch!
humans are an absurd collection of wet sacs wrapped around a brittle carbon-calcium scaffold. filaments are also involved, as is squirting. to get to space they have to load themselves into complicated artificial polymer sacs and squirt themselves VERY fast. i love them
Frequently we put ourselves into special metal sacs and squirt ourselves horizontally along the tar tendrils so we can go very far very fast.
see!! SEE!!!
just moving along like everyone else 