Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I was watching Youtube video on talking to the police and Youtube video on what’s illegal in america on youtube.

I have to wonder, why do we do this to ourselves? I can’t imagine the police officers that participate in the events talked about on the second video can honestly think of themselves as the good guys. They have to know, they’re a part of making the world a worse place. And the first video makes it clear that talking to the police can not help your case. What it doesn’t make clear, and I’d really like to know, is has someone taking advantage of their fifth amendment rights ever been sufficient evidence to convict? If I don’t talk to the police, is that considered a admission of guilt by a jury? I have to say, after watching that video I would be tempted to answer questions on a simple speeding stop with “On the advice of my attorney I do not answer questions from the police. Here’s my ID, here’s my insurance and registration, and I’ll happily take a DUI test. Beyond that, I will not answer questions without a attorney”. Even “Do you know how fast you were going?”. I’ve never really thought about that before, but the fifth amendment can be used on a traffic stop. Of course, it might anger the police and they might start looking for more things I’ve done wrong.

Why are we so obsessed with creating our own little piece of hell here on Earth? Ideally it wouldn’t matter too much if you sent a innocent man to jail because jails would be well designed places of healing, so the time would do him in good in any case. But jails seem to be run as for-profit businesses rather than places of healing – the jailors don’t care how much damage they do to the inmates so long as they get their check from the government – a check we the people are signing for them. We’re paying to punish ourselves, and we’re paying a massive array of politicians to write a ever more byzantine collection of laws that we can’t really understand, in many cases laws that are not needed and don’t do any good. We have no real provision for the removal of laws and we badly need one. I can’t understand why people have children any more – why bring more people here?

And yet – so youtube and facebook are dark and scary. Wandering around out there isn’t really that scary. The people are friendly, the food is good, I don’t see the police abusing people. As someone with a mental illness I’ve come across more than my share of cops and 99% of them were good people – a credit to the uniform. I know this sounds like a impressive level of insanity, however I understand at this point just how much computing power 10^11 neurons is – could my mind be *making up* these videos? I’ll never know if any of the rest of you can see them, because my mind could also easily be making up your responses that you have indeed seen them. Text is *trivially* easy to create out of whole cloth – probably a few thousand neurons could make up text (rather than receiving it from a external input like my eyes) and I’d have no way of knowing this was being done. A few hundred thousand neurons could probably make up low resolution video and I’d have no way of catching them. Is the disparity between my real life experiences and my internet experiences the result of a massive hoax being perpetrated by my own mind? I have no way to find out. I can’t get outside me.

Another thing that bothers me is our obsession with punishment. Nearly all the people committing crimes are mentally ill or they wouldn’t be committing crimes, is my guess. We should really be helping them heal – punishing them helps no one. But we just love to punish. The idea of hurting someone who’s done wrong rings as a good and wonderful act in our minds. This is especially disturbing when we’re putting someone in the pen for six years for selling lobsters that are too short. I can’t even understand how the people on the prosecuting side of that can sleep at night.

So, the question is, how do we stop this?

Well, if it’s all inside my head, I stop it by becoming healthier. This is in fact the only thing I *know* I can do to improve the world – I can improve me. I can become less chased by my own demons. I can understand the red pill paradox. I can try to learn as much as I can about as many things as I can and try to put it together in a coherent picture of what’s going on. I can try not to live in fear, either of myself or of my fellow man – or of any “supernatural” (silly word – if it exists, it’s natural) entities there might be.

If it’s really out there, I don’t have any idea what to do about it. It seems like if it is really out there there’s a lot of evil being done in the name of good, and the only way I can think of to address that is to educate the individuals involved, one at a time.