Injustice Systems

Everything is working as planned I see.

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I would think that for-profit prisons at least would want each of their cash cows to stay alive as long as possible. I wonder if they have fewer suicides for that reason.

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Some jurisdictions are legally obligated to send the prisons a certain number of prisoners (or, at the very least, to pay as if they had that number of prisoners). So at the very least, not all private prisons would have that incentive.

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At the end of a thread about #JewsAgainstICE protesting in an Amazon bookstore and getting arrested:


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Religious Freedom!

Oh, wait


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He’ll discover Vince Foster was behind the whole thing!

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Yeah, just to be clear, Rosh Hoshanah is a school holiday in New York so everyone knows it’s an important holiday, even those that don’t celebrate it.

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I assume it’s for the same reason that my high school (not in NYC) got all the Jewish holidays off in the fall, and so we had to stay in school an extra week in June: our catchment area drew from a heavily Jewish area – yup, Chicago really is a segregated metropolis – so we’d be missing so many students on those holidays that attendance would fall below the required minimum and thus the state wouldn’t pay the expenses for those days.

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Yes, it was part of the reason we moved to Long Island when my daughter was 9. In NC, my daughter was the only Jewish girl in her class; possibly in her school. In NY, there were other Jewish kids in her classes and it was possible to be socially Jewish and not just religiously so. My daughter has always identified with Judaism, from a very young age. It was something she saw as being special about herself. Although Long Island wasn’t the place we felt the most at home, I was glad to raise her in a place where she felt her religion and culture was respected and seen.

The schools let out for Rosh Hoshanah, Yom Kippor, and usually had spring break coinciding with Passover - a lot of times that was overlapping with Easter so it was just part of the spring schedule and not a special holiday.

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I don’t think that’s entirely fair.

Yes, the article glosses over the harm that she’s done. But she not only realized that she was being harmful, she turned around and started fighting against that same harm, and that’s worth something.

Does the good she’s doing outweigh the harm that she’s done? I don’t know if that’s a question that even someone with perfect knowledge, of how things are and how things would have otherwise been, could answer. How can you really say that a future where person A is worse off than they would have been, but person B is better off, in vastly different ways, is better than the alternative? How can you acknowledge A’s perspective and yet say that it’s better? How can you acknowledge B’s perspective and yet say that it’s not?

All we can really measure is whether people are behaving better or worse than they have been in the past, and, by that measure, Ms. Peña has definitely improved. She’s admitting the harm she’s caused; she’s trying to make amends for it. And while I don’t think this excuses her, I think she can at least be commended for it.

I also think we must make an effort to commend people like this, for making progress towards being better people. If we treat people every day based on how they behaved on their worst day, then why should anyone bother today to be better than their worst day? What incentive do they have to be good when good behaviour is scoffed at because of past bad behaviour?

Clearly, we shouldn’t forget what people have done in the past; bad habits have a tendency to recapture people. But I fail to see what good holding a grudge against someone for the harm that they’ve done, when they’re already actively working to make recompense for that harm, does for anyone.

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Agreed. She is trying to atone for the evil she did so I give her props for that.

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There were ~8,500,000 members of the Nazi party in 1945.

Fewer than 2,000 were charged.

Fewer than 500 were convicted; many were acquitted because anything that the Allies did was, by definition, not a war crime.

About 200 were executed; most of the rest were released after serving less than five years.

Which category do you think she belongs in? Among the 200 worst Nazis, the ones literally putting people into ovens? Or among the other ~8,500,000 who received less punishment than the US mandatory minimum for possession distribution of 5g of crack cocaine, or no punishment at all?

She thought she was.

She was mistaken.

She learned from her mistake, admitted it publicly, and is now putting forth all of her effort to rectifying it.

Given that her mistake is in the past, and cannot be undone, what more could you ask of her to do? Not yesterday, not last week, not three years ago; nothing can be undone. What more could you ask her to do today?

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The article certainly has a certain story it’s trying to push, of the prodigal daughter brought back into the fold. And I wouldn’t argue that that characterization is fair, either.

The article also uses the term “pro bono” (which, as I understand it, means that the attorney isn’t being compensated) for legal aid work that it sounds like she’s being paid to do, which also makes her sound better than it would otherwise.

This isn’t a case of a defeated enemy being brought on board after the war is lost; it’s a defection.

How much adulation would you expect to be given to:

  • a spy for Nazi military intelligence,
  • who assisted with the conquest of Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland,
  • and then returned to Germany,
  • joined the Nazi party officially,
  • and started using Jewish people as cheap labour,
  • until an up-close encounter with the Holocaust showed him exactly what the Nazis were
  • and then tried to make up for it by spending the rest of the war protecting Jewish people?

I mean, that seems like a lot to atone for, but that guy seems to have come out of it with a decent reputation.

Yes, that’s a terrible equivalence. But certainly no worse of one than Unit 731.

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I had to stop after about 8.

My cousin is part of the problem. She is rich (husband’s an investment banker) and white, and like the rest of her cohort, thinks paying taxes to stop such problems is an abomination, and blames the victims anyway.

We went to dinner last night at a first cousin’s house (parent of the person I’m talking about). There were about twelve people there. The only other vaguely liberal person there (besides myself and my wife) were a cousin of my cousin. It was an anxiety-provoking, unpleasant experience.

The weird thing is that the cousin’s husband is of Indian extraction from Great Britain I believe. That’s where they live. They’re in the US for a five week vacation.

Edited as above.

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Pulling up the ladder once they’ve made it to the club treehouse. Tale as old as time.

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The gun problem?

Neoliberalism is ON IT!

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