Reminder that:
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Less than 10% of American prisoners are held in private prisons.
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All US prisons are for-profit.
Private prisons are bad, yes. But they are not the core of the problem.
See this thread:
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There is a religious connection to this aspect of punishment equating justice in American cultural.
Calvinists believe in predestination in that some people are born to sin and be damned for all eternity. And the assumption is that we on Earth can generally tell by a person’s actions if they are the elect versus those that are not destined for salvation. Catholics have a much less extreme view, while Lutherans have a similar but more nuanced view.
I believe Christianity, especially Protestantism, heavily influenced American views on justice and punishment. We’re kind of stuck in the 18th century in our social thinking. Primarily during the age of enlightenment we’ve worked out rationalization in order to convince ourselves that we’re enlightened.
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How will the US maintain its position as incarceration world leader without private prisons?
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Thank you this helps make sense of something for once in comments.
I myself was raised Episcopalian but I still have no idea what that means and I don’t go to church and I am not religious. Fortunately I had good parents that understood my view.
Personally I am sick of people deciding how to act based on belief in an imaginary being being kind to them and punishing other people of course never the people who claim to believe. All based on a book that has been edited so many times anyone claiming it’s the word of God is a factual liar. How convenient it must be, this persecutorial view of the world for them.
I have no problem with people believing in something greater than themselves because that’s I believe a natural human reaction to not knowing what happens after death. I can understand and rationalize with that.
What I can’t stand is people creating laws and a society that punishes People based on their biblical views regardless of what religion that is.
Calvanists can just go to hell. Predestination is bullshit, and that would mean that from birth someone has no chance to ever change their future. What a disgusting and morally decrepit way of thinking.
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Warren and a Magic 8-Ball do share a similarity: If you ask them a question, they have an answer.
How is this not preferable to bluster, bullish and bluffing? Or ‘Mayor Pete’'s disingenuous ‘I just want to talk to folks and then I’ll have mah policies …’?
without the senate, 100% of all ideas from any president are 100% pointless
That’s where our old friend Executive Orders come in.
Also, the Executive can set the rules (that is, the implementation of various already-passed laws), to great effect.
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There are other beliefs which can be just as dangerous, such as a belief in the scientific validity of bigoted world views. We are all to some extent blinkered, because we have to navigate a world with a very limited and limiting view of the whole of existence. That’s the case whether we’re religious or not. We as individuals can only see, hear, taste, touch, etc from our own specific, historically contingent POV. That’s part of the reason why we build institutions, so that we can, as individuals, build up a greater knowledge base that we can all benefit from. Some of those institutions are better and more beneficial than others, of course. And not all religious world views are as harmful as others, and not all secular world views are helpful. Outcome might be the thing to focus on?
Agreed on this point though.
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What a terrible and terrifying bubble this is to be inside of. From their POV: "I dont want what I want. I just want what the god(s) want. And the god(s) want what I want. But, see those progressives over there? They're godless. How can anything they do be legitimate? They're selfish and only do what's in their personal interest."
And they’ve used this for centuries millenia to get/keep what they want. And even when various things they wanted (slavery, torture, genocide, segregation, discrimination, class warfare) have been discredited, the system of “relying on god(s)” never is discredited.
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I can understand where your thinking comes from, and you are certainly no fool, though I do not feel it is an atrocious thing to expect the world to make its laws and systems operate on principals of science, and provable concepts, as well as rationality.
I am aware that there are and have been some fucked up people that have used what they thought was “science” to justify atrocities and horrible things, such as racial “science” in the early 30s, and other less directly evil things, but very very wrong things nonetheless, like phrenology, that supposedly justified their bigoted views of people. Those people especially can go un-fuck themselves off the planet.
In the age of Trump, it seems all too often that intelligent well meaning people have to subjugate themselves, no matter what, to some degree of asinine “equality” arguements that keep actual intelligent thoughts and arguements always somehow equivocable to the mindless authoritarianism drivel of “there are bad on both sides” and some such things.
I sugguest we wholeheartedly reject that as a bullshit and false dichotomy whereever it is such.
I considered you too intelligent to fall prey to such hollow equivocations. I hope I have merely misunderstood, as I think I know what you mean.
Edit- and apologies if I seem overly verbose and flowery. Using the word “fuck” descriptively 20 different ways on a daily basis among people who never speak to me in whole sentences has left my mind to atrophy along with my degree, occassionally I’d just like to use more of my vocabulary, though it comes with its own hot air
Agreed, but we are, human beings, I mean, not entirely rational creatures. We often believe irrational things, often along side completely rational ones.
Agreed, and this is a mass media problem I’d argue. That’s a pretty complicated problem involving institutions and gate keepers, and more recently the lack of faith in such institutions (because of obvious failures in the cold war era). The rise of social media means that alternative narratives can emerge and if they get enough traction, the media feels like it must take it seriously. On top of that, we have a political party that has fell into line with the hard right, and are using the media landscape to it’s political and economic advantage. They do so, however, in a logical and rational manner. Much like you point to race science as a tool for political control. That’s what such things are, more than anything else. Tools. Science is a method of better understanding the world, but it’s use in practical terms depends on inherently flawed human beings to use it. And anyone with a working knowledge of the history of science and technology know that’s a checkered past.
As for religion, I’m not religious, but I also know that not all religious people are bad. Religion isn’t science, and the people who aren’t in an ideological fight with modernity are well aware of that. Religion has been a tool of oppression, but also a tool of liberation. we ignore that at our peril, I think, and end up branding all religious people, whether that’s Bayard Rustin or Jerry Falwell with the same broad brush. To paraphrase Malcolm X, I’ll throw in my lot with anyone who wants to fix this miserable existence on this planet and build something better.
I don’t know if I’m intelligent and am not sure it matters.
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