If my hunch is correct
Then if all of the concrete, steel, and man-hours wasted in the War On Drugs had been used to build wastewater treatment plants in India, that continent would have fresh water available from every tap.
We need to remember to not have Wars On People. Let’s have Wars On Suffering, Wars On Disease, and Wars On Stupidity instead.
While we’re talking about stupidity, why do we build places to punish sick people? This inevitably is going to make them sicker, and as a result, they’re going to commit more crimes and cause more havoc. Surely the mass shootings, the cops shooting innocents should be hints that we broke something badly and we need to rethink the way we do things. Surely the cash for kids scandal should be giving us some kind of neon sign that we’ve done something beyond stupid and it’s time to stop. Are we incapable of thought? People, please prove to me you’re not morons. I’m begging here.
While I’m ranting, the idea that children can get busted for sexting – look, assholes, STOP HURTING THE KIDS! Sex is a normal, healthy thing, and you’ve warped their minds about it by being afraid to talk honestly with them about it, not to mention threatening them in all kinds of weird ways, insisting that they’re subhuman, and ..
I speak as someone who remembers parts of my childhood not at all, and other parts entirely too clearly and painfully. Adults shouldn’t be allowed to raise children in groups less than 5 adults – I talked earlier in my blog about entrainment signals and how two adults can *barely* provide a clean entrainment signal under the very best of circumstances. And this world – not the best of circumstances. Many feedback loops, many bad designs coming back to bite us in the ass.
I want love to win, not fear.
July 11th, 2016 at 10:13 am
I remember a story a few years back about a 15 year old girl who was running her own porn site, with pictures of herself. Among the charges they filed was “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” – herself. The whole time I’m thinking, “Aren’t those laws supposed to protect children from being manipulated or exploited by others?” There were no others in this situation, she was her own “victim”, she was the only one who gained from the operation (other than her customers, whom she never met or touched). I mean, seriously, if I had been female and knew as much as or even half of what I knew about computers when I was 15 (with knowledge and time skewed such that the Internet was as it is now, etc), I probably would have done the exact same thing. I’m not even sure I would have considered or cared about the legality of the situation, the Internet is a big place, what are the odds that somebody would actually FIND me, much less connect the online me back to ME? Yeah, I probably would have been her.