Failure to sign the Ottawa treaty (anti landmine) and the international criminal court agreements, execution of minors (and execution at all), assassination of opponents even if citizens (via drones), torture, war crimes, illegal invasions, use of phosphorus (probably comes under war crimes), continual killing of civilians in non declared wars, massive prison population, secret prisons, outsourcing torture, supporting some of the worst governments of earth etc. Who sees the US as a leader in human rights? No one I know.
It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.
Take land mines. I've heard that they play a critical role in South Korea's defense, which was a major reason Clinton didn't sign. Military experts talk about how it's an effective tool that, when used responsibly, can benefit civilians more than harm them.
They also kill and maim people.
Intellectually, both sides seem reasonable to me. Of course, emotionally, one is passively helping people (or so we are told), while the other is actively harming them, so, ya, I lean towards being anti land mines. But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.
Further, there is a big difference between long term persistent land mines out of a plane into a civilian area (what the treaty is meant to stop), and keeping a careful inventory of (mostly wire controlled) mines in a controlled area just south of the border.
The former will kill tons of non-soldiers and persist long after the war is over. The latter will kill NK soldiers moving south and can be easily collected in the event they are no longer necessary.
> It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.
Ah, yes, complexity explains everything from the role of private oil companies in Iraq to the ties of the Bush family with the Bin Laden family.
> But, I fundamentally can't shake the feeling that I have no clue what's going on, so maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge.
I think a very safe way, given the histoy over the last decaded, to form an opinion, is to consider everything the US defense industry-slash-ministry proclaims an outright lie and only accept very small points as true when they have been verified.
> It's easy to distill these issues and hold a self-righteous opinion, but I personally find most too complex to form anything resembling an educated opinion.
The problem is the other extreme of not expressing an opinion where you have reasonable doubt will lead to leaving the discussion to everyone else. And there will always be a huge crowd of people who will voice their very uniformed opinion no matter what.
Even worse, you become extremely susceptible to malign publicity tactics. For example I would not see it beyond the US government[1] to argue with South Korea's defense even if the land mine treaty explicitly had an exception for these well cataloged mines in narrowed down locations [2]. They would of course word their public statement carefully so they can later refuse to acknowledge a causal connection between the two in case their bluff is called.
[1] And my government on other topics.
[2] I'm assuming the best case here. I don't know how the mines along the border are actually distributed, or even if there are mines at all.
Point being (I believe), it is expensive to take a moral position. It costs you money and thoughtful action. You could secure the South Korean border without landmines. It just would cost a lot more money.
You could do a lot of other things (or rather not do them), but it might cost you your political standing.
So point being - playing the moral high card, as the US do around the world, should not follow the line from a Genesis song:
"Do as I say, don't do as I do..."
At least in my humble opinion (the same goes for my Governement, the German one by the way.)
The point being whatever you want to make of the similarities in the human rights records between the US and North Korea.
Perhaps you think what North Korea does is the proper way to interact with the world, perhaps you think that the US should be the moral lead for countries like the Sudan, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Afganistan, and Croatia instead of the moral follower.
Three-strikes laws are dumb, but so are you. Take your anti-US agenda somewhere else. I suggest North Korea, China, Venezuela, Iran, Russia, or any of the other countries not allied with us, so you can see how much "better" they are.
The phenomenon where people like you act as if anyone with something critical to say about the United States lacks patriotism is the very thing that is destroying our nation. I'm a moderate conservative and a Soldier, but your "love it or leave it" attitude is sickening to me. Its ruining our country, so please stop.
Sure many countries are horrible places to live compared to the United States, but if we ignore our problems as you would have us do, that might not always be the case.
Our founding fathers knew from the very start that government is but a necessary evil. One that requires constant monitoring and modification in order to keep the power in the hands of the American people, which is where it belongs. Patriotism is about loving one's country, not worshipping the government.
I don't agree with every criticism of the United States that appeared in this thread, but I do agree with some of them.
Here is the US, we're allowed to criticize the government. If you're unhappy with that, maybe you'd like to move to North Korea, China, or any of those other countries where people like you are allowed to shut down critical thinking.
I keep wondering how people can possibly defend what Snowden did. He used social engineering exploits in his job as sysadmin on a large scale, then published the resulting information. He apparently even compromised personal accounts of the people he was supposed to help.
Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this if they think the goal is just ? It seems so. I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
Maybe we should create a "politically correct NSA" that spies on everyone who might be involved in unpopular politics ? How about spying on every company and violently extracting their labour practices ? I'm sure quite a few European unions wouldn't mind doing that (and at least in .be and .nl that would be a legal grey area, illegal but not punishable).
I keep wondering how people can possibly defend the government's conduct.
>Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this
Do what? Expose evidence of government corruption? It is written in the law that this is exactly the case. There are numerous examples of the failure of the laws meant to protect us from this scenario.
> if they think the goal is just ? It seems so.
There is no justice in following unjust laws.
>I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
An informed electorate? Backroom-dealing politicians have to work harder to conceal their works? We should be so lucky.
> Do what? Expose evidence of government corruption? It is written in the law that this is exactly the case.
The law does not permit breaking the law to further expose corruption though. That is the role of an appointed (and trained!) inspector general. Or, if necessary, a special prosecutor.
It would be one thing to reveal evidence of wrongdoing that one happens to fall into as part of their normal duties. Going further beyond that is illegal for good reason, as otherwise those who are impersonating high-ranking officials for purposes of espionage would be literally indistinguishable from those impersonating the same officials for to "dig for dirt".
Put another way, if your logic applied Google would have not merely the right, but the obligation to constantly scour through their GMail archives, G+ private messages, and everything else they have access to, for evidence of wrongdoing. Is it your position that Google should be doing this?
>The law does not permit breaking the law to further expose corruption though. That is the role of an appointed (and trained!) inspector general. Or, if necessary, a special prosecutor.
The Inspector General is empowered to break the law? Or is that a bit of a bait-and-switch?
This is a very silly bit of circular reasoning. The State has effectively made it illegal to expose The State's own illegal conduct. You suppose we should all ignore the State's lawbreaking, because it took Snowden's lawbreaking to expose it, as if citizens are to be constrained by judicial rules of evidence?
Or, are you invoking the "not my job" excuse for abdicating one's responsibility as a citizen (to hold the State to account for its actions). We've had this argument before. I remain unmoved by your opinion.
>It would be one thing to reveal evidence of wrongdoing that one happens to fall into as part of their normal duties. Going further beyond that is illegal for good reason, as otherwise those who are impersonating high-ranking officials for purposes of espionage would be literally indistinguishable from those impersonating the same officials for to "dig for dirt".
I would have hoped that the NSA were competent to the degree that a Snowden wouldn't have been able to betray the them so thoroughly and completely. Hawks such as yourself ought to be especially furious at the level of organizational incompetence made evident by Snowden's disclosures. Even after being personally embarrassed by my government's shameful conduct in spying on everyone, I am again embarrassed by its obvious lack of competence. It apparently hopes to ensure the security of The State with thuggish threats, and nothing more. It must change or it is destined to fail.
>Put another way, if your logic applied Google would have not merely the right, but the obligation to constantly scour through their GMail archives, G+ private messages, and everything else they have access to, for evidence of wrongdoing. Is it your position that Google should be doing this?
Except that logic does not apply to Google, nor have I attempted to apply it to Google; because Google is not an agency of the State, especially not a part of the Judicial Branch, and therefore not the arbiter of the law in this country. Even if Google were an agency of the State, they still are not empowered to violate citizens' rights under the Constitution.
Yes, you are right, it would have been much better if we did not know what NSA does, and to what extent it violates our rights. NSA officials lying to congress, no big deal. A man standing up for what he believes and releasing the truth about a corrupt, lying, and out of control governmental organization. By god, that fucker needs to die!
Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this if they think the goal is just ? It seems so. I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.
This is actually a significant part of why we have trial by jury (according to some; others argue that it's just silly); they can decide that the accused did commit the crime and still return not guilty.
Yeah he's in the leagues of Thomas Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence who used social engineering exploits in their jobs as legislators to undermine the authority of the crown.
Yes, I'm seriously suggesting that following orders contrary to good conscience is immoral and illegal, but luckily the better part of the world agrees with me in the precedent set at Nuremberg.
Criticism of government has it's limits. Snowden is questionable because what he said was not public knowledge and had crippling negative effects towards security of the state, but say, expressing your criticism of government by blowing up a federal building...
Similarly to how China would react to someone talking about Tianamen Square which isn't public knowledge but knowledge of it would cause a massive shit storm that would undermine the security of the state.
It's not what happened, it's the idea of one man standing up to the state that strikes fear into their hearts.
I would wager that almost every educated person in China knows exactly what happened at Tiananmen Square. Certainly every chinese person I've ever really gotten to know knew all about it. The politics around it is complicated, but there is an acceptance of sorts that there's some items the government does not want dwelled upon, and that's one of them.
Don't underestimate Chinese political sophistication, especially amongst what we might call the middle class (a <10% minority in China). There is a common feeling, if not outright belief, that a strong government is necessary to hold the country together, especially during its current transition period with its massive inequalities. I am no expert but my impression is that the people who do know - the middle class educated, with internet access (firewalls are trivial to get around) understand or at least play along with the idea that from a stability point of view, some information is best not fully shared.
I see some interesting parallels between Chinese political censorship and the debate about the NSA revelations, by the way. Both are about concealing information of great public interest in the name of some alleged greater good. The only real difference is that the events in Tianenmen Square happened outdoors.
So releasing documents that prove that US Government is knowingly violating its citizens constitutional rights is equivalent in your mind to killing a lot of people with an explosive?
I think that falls under the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" rule [1].
Yes, the US has freedom of expression, and you can claim whatever you want about the government (you can even lie). But if you yell 'fire' in a theatre with 500 people and 1 small exit, or 'allahu akbar' in a TSA line, you deserve to get sued and punished for that. That is not legally considered to be freedom of expression.
Personally I don't find that very controversial. If you lie to get someone else's kid into your car, that's not freedom of expression either. Lying to private security during an emergency is not freedom of expression either. Reporting a bomb threat because you have a math quiz is not freedom of expressoin. If you commit fraud on a contract, that's not freedom of expression either, whether or not "it was a joke".
Summary - the case involved was not a principled exception to free speech, but the diametric opposite; a judge basically ruled that you can't criticize the government during wartime because it would undermine the state.
> Holmes, writing for a unanimous Supreme Court, affirmed Schenck's conviction on the theory that this expression could be punished in wartime even though it merely urged "peaceful measures such as a petition for the repeal" of conscription, on the theory that the government could suppress speech that might interfere with the draft.
That stupid and overused quote comes from an opinion by justice Holmes. "Holmes, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that it was a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917 (amended with the Sedition Act of 1918), to distribute flyers opposing the draft during World War I." - Wikipedia.
Read the case before you quote it. American Supreme Court has done a lot of injustices in its time. And this is one of the more egregious once.
So what you have said is that if someone says "God is great" in a TSA line they should be sued or punished.
Does your opinion change if it is spoken in English? Or is it just Arabic? Should it be taken more seriously if a person is wearing a turban or not? Or maybe their skin color… does that matter?
My country of birth, New Zealand, has plenty of dark secrets of its own. It's not as simple as being with us or against us though, surely? There are plenty of countries that are worse than the US and there are also a fair few who are better. However there aren't any countries who have a bigger international profile everywhere I have ever been. Its a pity this isn't used to create more good.
Actually, it is. I mean "partisan" as in "parted into parties" which is the same as "us versus them" rather than more jargony "national political parties inside America".
It is usually extremely partisan. It is fairly rare for an entire country to be violently nationalisic, even if the ruling party is. Also, as saraid points out, it is by definition being partisan, just internationally rather than internally.
That is an appropriate reaction, but the ACLU's focus on life without parole sentences grossly understates the savagery of US sentencing schemes. Tens of thousands more inmates are serving life with the possibility of parole for non-violent crimes. These inmates may very well never be released, and if they are they will have served so long that they will never be able to recover.
In Nevada, for example, 1 in 5 prisoners is serving a life sentence with the possibility (but no guarantee) of parole. Our version of the 3 strikes law, which is used in several other states as well, enables any three felony convictions to qualify an offender for a life sentence. This can and has included repeat drug offenders (including those who were not dealing), those committing multiple relatively minor property crimes (vandalism, theft, etc), and those with multiple DUI's that never resulted in accidents.
Simply put, US habitual offender laws defy all sense of logic, humanity, and reason. The political will to change this does not exist within either of our major political parties, so the problem is likely to expand over time.
Multiple DUIs do deserve a severe punishment IMO, because that is attempted murder basically and they are a danger to the public. The rest I agree are ridiculous. Huffing drugs three times does not deserve permanent incarceration.
Oh come on. I've lost my license for what you'd call DUI - made a stupid decision to drive the 1.5km back home from a pub, got a 1 year ban and a hefty fine. Yes, it was a stupid thing to do and I deserve what I got, but attempted murder? Don't be ridiculous.
At most repeated DUI is criminal negligence, and negligence on the part of whomever supplied the offender with the vehicle. It should be met with driving bans and escalating punishments if those are ignored. Life imprisonment is an amazingly harsh and expensive over-punishment for a stupid but usually non-malicious crime.
I've got a massive 7 inch scar across my face from when a drunk driver plowed into our car when I was 8 years old. I had over 100 stitches in my head and my face was a criss cross of zipper scars for years. The only thing that saved my life was that I was reading a book when we were struck - the book literally saved my life by blocking the glass from slashing my throat.
So, yea, murder. That's how serious DUI (or texting behind the fucking wheel) is.
Unless you cause a accident, then you can get attempted murder, or murder (depending on the outcome).
Then people will say: "Oh, but the driver had no intention to murder someone." here the most common argument from the judge is: "someone that knows that driving under influence is dangerous and do it anyway, is taking full responsability for the fact that it might accidentally kill someone, thus it is not accidental, since the person is on purpose gambling away with other people lives."
TL;DR Breathalyzers are based on dubious science, system is unfairly tilted in favor of conviction. Guilt is presumed & punishment issued even before trial.
Fantastic. I wish they were put behind bars even longer. I have no sympathy for people who drink and drive, and no sympathy for people who text and drive.
I cannot tolerate anyone who would plow around our roads in a 2,000 pound bullet and either be drunk or looking at their phone.
Are you aware that people can be convicted of DUI for such things as sleeping in your car while drunk, or standing 10 feet from your car with keys in your pocket while drunk?
But... murder implies intent. The driver did not get in the car to say "I'm going to try to kill silverbax88", or even "I'm going to try to kill someone".
If you get drunk and get behind the wheel of a car, it's the same to me as walking around with a loaded gun and firing randomly. Does it matter that you didn't set out to shoot someone?
Unfortunately, this is not the case. You still are conscious of your decisions when you walk into a bar and fire randomly. There is a reason its considered rape if you have sex with someone who is intoxicated; they can no longer provide consent. The no longer have the ability to reason for themselves.
Are we going to argue that you're a murder if you drink to excess while your keys are still in your pocket? Because that's when the decision was made, not when you get in your car drunk. At that point, its not you making the decision.
And why the hell should intent matter? It's the outcome that is relevant. My grandfather was killed by a perpetual drunk driver. I don't give a shit what his intent was, he obviously had no regard for the safety of the innocents he was putting at risk. He deserves to rot in prison.
repeat offenses should be factored in to sentencing and charges just as much as intent. regardless of your particular situation, our legal system (and most) have the concept of intent built in (manslaughter vs murder, etc.)
Grabbing a stat off of Wikipedia, almost 18,000 people died in drinking-related vehicular accidents in the US in 2006. Maybe attempted murder is a little extreme, but I think negligent homicide would be right on the mark.
Yeah, not trying to downplay its seriousness. I honestly did not know how much alcohol impairs one's driving ability - I would have thought maybe 2 or 3 times, turns out it's more like 20x. Well, I learned my lesson.
I was just saying that attempted murder is when you actually attempt to murder someone. It's not the same, not at all.
As a whimsical thought experiment, care to explain why the other 60% of fatal accidents should not be classed as criminal negligence by one party or another? : P
edit: since this got a few upvotes, I'd like to expand. I'm in my late thirties; I got my drivers' license in the early nineties. I was never really educated on drink driving the way people are today.
I didn't take it seriously enough. I thought it would be OK; I didn't know the risks properly, and I certainly didn't know the penalties. I had no idea that being a couple of times over the limit led to a 20x+ increased risk of accident. Maybe I was stupid to not know that, nonetheless I had never properly internalised that fact.
Maybe everyone here is smarter than me - it certainly seems like that most of the time - but I am not completely stupid, and my internal risk profile was totally wrong about this. If you're of a similar age as me - earned your license decades ago, in a more permissive time - I beg you not to make the same mistakes I made. Drink driving is never an option. It is not even on the table. You are endangering yourself, the community, your reputation, and everyone you love. Catch a god damn taxi, like I wish I had done that night.
Drink driving - not even once. From one hacker to another. Please.
I learned to drive in the mid 90s and it was repeatedly hammered into my skull that drunk driving is extremely dangerous. That included in school testing on a table showing impairment as a function of weight and number of drinks. This was all standard as part of the licensing process in suburban NJ at the time.
No, it's not "you've been drinking" -> 20x more dangerous. Much idiocy has been put forth by people who are unable to understand basic layman's toxicology/pharmacology. Drugs have effects. More of the substance has more of an effect. Step functions where a little of a substance has zero effect, shifting to a major effect with a little more, are extremely rare. It is never the case, for example, that a dose of ionizing radiation goes from "not dangerous" to "dangerous" suddenly - we may measure a low dose at 5 cancers per 100,000 and a high dose at 5,000 cancers per 100,000, but there is always presumed to be some effect.
And yet we have media organizations saying things like:
"
Washington (CNN) -- A common benchmark in the United States for determining when a driver is legally drunk is not doing enough to prevent alcohol-related crashes that kill about 10,000 people each year and should be made more restrictive, transportation safety investigators say.
The National Transportation Safety Board recommended on Tuesday that all 50 states adopt a blood-alcohol content (BAC) cutoff of 0.05 compared to the 0.08 standard on the books today and used by law enforcement and the courts to prosecute drunk driving.
The NTSB cited research that showed most drivers experience a decline in both cognitive and visual functions with a BAC of 0.05.
"
Of course we have a decline in cognitive and visual functions - that's what a depressant does. At any dose. So long as we have drinking as a major societal institution, and we have bodies that slowly process alcohol, and we have an automotive-mobile culture, there is some nonzero number of deaths we will prefer to tolerate every year due to drunk driving, whether it's 1,000,000 or 10,000 or 100.
---
While there may be some distribution of how well people deal with a certain degree of drunkenness, the basic objective fact that we possess to measure impairment is BAC. Limits vary geographically and through history - in the US we have had experience with thresholds at 0.05%, 0.08%, 0.1%, and 0.15% in various eras and places.
A BAC of 0.01% doesn't significantly harm anyone - it is barely detectable. A BAC of 0.05% poses some minor statistical increase in danger, and is generally the minimum people seek out to 'get a buzz'. A BAC of 0.1% indicates moderate impairment - about what you thought, several times more dangerous. It's only when you get to a BAC of around 0.2% that it becomes 20x more dangerous. At a BAC of around 0.3% and up, on the other hand, one generally loses consciousness. Death from alcohol intoxication (assuming no complications) occurs at an average of about 0.45% BAC (that is the approximate LD50).
Every vehicular accident where any party has any sign of drinking is counted as "drinking-related". If a drunk guy jumps out in to a busy street and is hit by a stone-cold sober driver, that's "drinking-related", though obviously not a case for further-strengthening DUI laws.
It's not negligence because you are an active participant. But, ok, let's meet in the middle and call it attempted manslaughter because you had no mens rea.
The goal of this idea is to encourage you to not attempt manslaughter with your vehicle, so if you were faced with life imprisonment perhaps you would think long and hard before you do it the third time.
I see what you're driving at (ha!), but "attempted manslaughter" is a contradiction in terms. Attempt implies intent; manslaughter is by definition without intent.
Look, I can see your point of view. There needs to be a deterrent, yes. Locking someone up and throwing away the key, though, should be reserved for only the most heinous offences. In my opinion, you should not be able to achieve that using only a six-pack, a car, and zero dead bodies.
There has got to be some other solution that doesn't utterly ruin the person's life, and the state's finances.
"Attempted manslaughter" is an actual legal concept [0]. Gotta love the US legal system :)
I think DUI three times is particularly heinous. Maybe life in prison is excessive, but the third time you do it you are well aware that it is potentially lethal, and the punishment should be on the level of attempted manslaughter. If that gets you nailed with some three-strikes thing, I think your argument should be against the three-strikes aspect.
But my original point was to disagree that DUI is the same class of crime as drug use in general, since it's incredibly dangerous for the other members of the public.
It is hard to disagree with you about the third-time DUI. I guess I am against "automatic" laws in general; it reeks of populism and "tough on crime" rhetoric, ignoring the human variables - see above article for examples. Trying to legislate judicial discretion out of the equation is, to me, a foolish idea.
Couldn't agree more on the drug use issue. They should not even be in the same category of crime.
> in Virginia a few traffic offenses can be classified as attempted manslaughter. Such as, speeding well above what classifies as reckless driving or driving sufficiently intoxicated. I think the reasoning is that if one were to kill someone under those circumstances it would be manslaughter, and any reasonable person would know that excessive speeding or driving drunk carries a high risk of killing someone even though that person isn't exactly trying to kill anyone, therefore, even though they didn't kill someone, they still basically attempted to in being so careless. IOW, you really should be charged with manslaughter, you just were lucky enough to have no actually killed anyway
> I think different jurisdictions probably punish those actions similarly, they just may call it something other than attempted manslaughter, like maybe reckless endangerment or whatever.
Reckless endangerment - I admit that strikes me as a better term, although I now understand the reasoning behind "attempted manslaughter".
How would it be less fair to permanently imprison a repeat DUI offender than it would be to wait until he's actually killed someone before locking him up for good.
Perhaps I'm misguided, but it seems to me that its more fair to impact the life of the offender than it would be to allow an innocent person to die.
Fortunately, there are more than two options. The best idea I can come up with would be to permanently suspend driving privileges for anyone with a second DUI conviction.
> The goal of this idea is to encourage you to not attempt manslaughter with your vehicle, so if you were faced with life imprisonment perhaps you would think long and hard before you do it the third time.
This is the worst part of excessive penalties -- that people think they would actually be effective. Most defendants have absolutely no idea what the penalties are until after they've been charged with the crime, which makes any deterrent effect of increasing the penalties quite impossible.
Even if you ran some kind of expensive continuous education campaign (which naturally can't work for every category of crime because there are so many types with such complicated penalties that no one could keep track), you're assuming that people engage in planning. If people planned ahead then they would all have a ride home from the bar in the first place.
Yeah, I am going to side with the attempted murder interpretation. You should have lost your licence permanently as well.
But hey, that's just my opinion.
Driving is a privilege granted by society, not a right. If you Demonstrate that you no longer deserve that privilege, then yeh you should lose it for life.
"Driving is a privilege, not a right" is just something MADD made up to justify unusual penalties. You could just as well say "fire is a privilege, not a right" and claim that arsonists should be prohibited from heating their homes in the winter. As a policy it doesn't make any sense.
It's weird you chose that strawman because actually people do need a permit to operate large fires in public and I am pretty sure a convicted arsonist would be denied this privilege.
An analogy is not a straw man. Moreover, I can identify at least two problems with your rebuttal.
First, the existence of a bad policy somewhere does not excuse the existence of similar bad policies everywhere. You can't justify the penalties under the CFAA by comparing to the penalties for crack cocaine possession, because they are both excessive.
Second, you'll notice that your discovery (if such a prohibition for arsonists indeed exists) breaks the analogy with a prohibition on driving for those convicted of a DUI, because it isn't a prohibition on all fire, when it is a prohibition on all driving. Which makes your argument the straw man, because a prohibition on large public fires is a minor inconvenience, whereas a prohibition on burning fuel to heat one's residence, like a prohibition on driving whatsoever, is a life-altering situation that may require you to find a new job and residence while doing very little to combat the evil in question supposedly justifying the restrictions.
> Life imprisonment is an amazingly harsh and expensive over-punishment for a stupid but usually non-malicious crime.
Then again, death is an amazingly harsh and expensive punishment for an innocent who happens to get killed in a driving accident with somebody who's drunk...
That said, attempted murder doesn't really fit. Attempted Manslaughter or something like criminal negligence (of the sort that endangers people's life) maybe?
While the outcome is a tragedy in either case, there is a significant difference in whether it was truly an accident, or if one of the parties involved in the accident willfully and knowingly significantly increased the chances of an accident by, say, being drunk or texting while driving.
As a society we realize that certain risks will always remain, and due to bad luck accidents will always happen: We accept that and live with that. What we do not accept is behavior which unnecessarily endangers a person's life.
It's perfectly reasonable from a moral point of view to hold people accountable in proportion to how reckless they are acting.
Take a good look at your city's crime logs. At least in the US, it's not unusual for most DUIs to be repeat offenders; and again, not unusual for people to drive with revoked licenses. Revoking a license does nothing to protect society from those willing to flout the law.
If anything it makes it a lot worse, because now whatever car they're driving doesn't require them to breathe into it in order to start it, and now when they drive into your parked car (or worse) they have a huge incentive to commit a hit and run to avoid being caught driving with a suspended license.
Murder, or attempted murder, is an intent crime in most states in the US. Generally speaking, that means that in order to be convicted, it must be proven in court that the defendant had the specific intent to cause the death of another person when they undertook the act that caused the death. That's why most traffic-related deaths are charged as manslaughter, or under traffic-specific statutes such as vehicular homicide or DUI resulting in death (depending on the specific state and circumstances).
The ACLU page is rather manipulative in that they construe the facts very favorably to the convicted. E.g. "After serving two years in prison during his mid-twenties for inadvertently killing someone during a bar fight." Oh yes, he just accidentally killed someone in a bar fight. Happens all the time really, right up there with leaving your credit card with the hostess after getting a little too tipsy.
It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that wouldn't tug the heart strings as much. California's law is particularly dysfunctional, because it applies to any three felonies while most states limit their laws to serious felonies. As a result, about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent predicate felonies (burglary, robbery, and drug possession). But in other states the law is more limited. For example, the Georgia law only applies to: (1) Murder or felony murder,
(2) Armed robbery,
(3) Kidnapping,
(4) Rape,
(5) Aggravated child molestation,
(6) Aggravated sodomy, or
(7) Aggravated sexual battery.
Besides that, what you're missing is that nobody is really intending for these specific, cherry-picked, people to be kept in jail for their whole lives. Their sentences are the unintended consequences of three-strikes laws that offer no discretion to sentencing judges.
When legislators voted for these three strikes laws, with public support, they were thinking of people who are "irredeemable." Hardened convicts who end up in jail on three occasions. What they didn't count on was the fact that there are people living on the edge who rack up a number of felony convictions for relatively minor things even though they're not the kind of hardened criminal legislators were thinking about. If you live in the ghetto and have friends who engage in gang activity, it's pretty easy to get drawn into some bad behavior that results in a couple of felony convictions, so that "one mistake" later in your life can bring you under the three strikes law.
Why don't these laws get repealed? Because Americans are really not sympathetic to people living on the edge. Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where they might wander into a felony conviction from a minor lapse in judgment. They don't have drug dealer boyfriends or friends who try to recruit them into burglarizing a house. It helps that 75% of people sentenced under California's three strikes law are black or hispanic (45% are black despite only 6.5% of the state population being black). Americans are particularly unsympathetic to racial minorities living on the edge.
I think sentences in the U.S. are deeply dysfunctional, but I hate this sort of publication by the ACLU. It makes people who support sentence reform seem dishonest by cherry-picking the edge cases, instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.
It would be less biased to show statistics for the kind of
people sentenced under the three strikes law, but that
wouldn't tug the heart strings as much.
Perhaps we could aspire to have a law that works right in outlier cases, not just on average?
One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.
That said, with three strikes laws, you don't need to resort to sob stories. The statistics are evidence enough: about half of three strikers in California are in for non-serious or non-violent offenses. That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
> That's much more persuasive, to a rational thinking person, than a few examples of people who fell into the edge cases of the system.
The problem is not convincing rational thinking people. Are there really some nontrivial group of informed rational people without an ownership stake in a private prison company who genuinely believe that three strikes laws are good policy?
The problem is not the rational thinking people at all. The problem is politics and rational ignorance. It's the swarms of busy people who don't have the time or the education to understand the statistics, who consequently go back and vote for the people who enacted these laws.
I get where you're coming from. The world would be a better place if all policy decisions were based on evidence and reasoning rather than emotion. But when you have the prison lobby heaping the corpses of teenage girls on their side of the scale, you need to put something visceral on the other side to shock complacent people into realizing that something is very wrong here.
Politics is a popularity contest. It's important that the side with the best argument wins, but how do you get that to happen when people have limited time and limited resources and the winner is decided by voting rather than correctness?
If the last 25 years or so have taught me anything, it's that politics is _never_ about rational, thinking people voting for their own best interest. It's pretty much just emotion and/or fear for the vast, vast majority (of the tiny minority of people who actually bother to vote).
Irrational emotion bred these laws, they will only go away via the same pathetic process. The ACLU is just playing the game with their appeal to emotion.
>One of the most basic principles of system design is that there will be edge cases. Every engineer knows that. In a country with 300 million people, enough will fall into these edge cases for the ACLU to put together a pamphlet with a few examples. That's inevitable.
What if you are the next edge case in this system? with nobody to remember that you even exist, if its fair..
Just one person beiyng this edge case is enough to put the whole system down.. as every engineer knows this is what we call a bug, and can make the whole system irrelevant, and work agains its own purpose..
And that is what happens to the justice system.. the worst thing is that its all about property.. its f#$% stupid.. its unproportional, and minimize that is pure lack of humanity.. and its the real reason why things are still working that way.. because if you are not one of those "edge cases" you really dont care
And thats so many human lifes wasted, not only the people behind bars, but also their families, how they kids will grow up.. how can they support their families..
No, one person being the edge case is definitely not enough to put the whole system down.
If we get, say, 1000 edge cases every year - then it's completely acceptable unless you can provide another system that will have much less edge cases. And if you're not sure, you don't switch until you are sure. If you simply "switch off" the system, then you get random 'mob justice' which whill have much more problems than the current situation.
The big difference here is, mandatory minimum sentencing is an aberration which is engineered from the start to create more injustice. There is a reason that in a normal case, sentencing takes the history of the individual and the circumstances of the crime into account, instead of following a rulebook saying "Theft: 5 years in prison, no early release".
Three-strike laws exist to quench the mob's appetite for blood (as public execution is sadly no longer acceptable, the mob has to settle for life sentences), and get politicians get elected on a fearmongering & repression platform. But on a humane level, it's not far removed from judicial amputations.
If only we could have a system where a real, live flesh and blood person could make decisions regarding punishment upon a guilty conviction... we could call these people, I know, judges.. they could judge on a case by case basis and make appropriate decisions.
I know, now the problem lies with these judges having poor decision making skills... if only there were a process to removing or overriding their decisions.. like an "appeals" process.. or a way of electing new judges and "voting" them in and out of office...
Neah, that's crazy talk.. we need absolute maximum/minimum sentencing guidelines like three strikes so we can keep those privatized prisons full, and making money.
The biggest problem with broad judicial discretion is that you get wildly varying outcomes with identical facts depending on which judge you get and even what kind of mood he's in.
If anything the system still has too much discretion (in the hands of police and prosecutors) that lead predictably to discriminatory outcomes.
The problem with restricting judicial discretion is that a judge always has a living breathing person in front of him or her, and a sentencing committee never does. This leads to inflated sentences across the board.
instead of trying to paint an accurate picture with statistics.
People are even more unmoved by accurate pictures painted by statistics than they are of "minorities living on the edge". That's the problem here. The ACLU is trying to relate to people on a human level so that they can build some support. So what if they end up producing something very biased? Is this a scientific paper in peer review? I think most people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing.
> people are aware of the fact that the ACLU is a civil liberties advocacy organization and that this naturally biases towards the left wing
Does it? I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics. Right to bear arms, for example, freedom of speech and religion, right to life. The "stand your ground" phenomenon, a very American thing, is definitely right-wing.
It seems to me more that the "right" and "left" have adopted certain civil liberties for their pet causes, and the ACLU, a left wing organisation for sure, advocates for their favoured issues. But let's not confuse that specific organisation and their agenda with the general concept of "civil liberties" per se.
I can think of any number of civil liberties which I would associate with the "right" wing of American politics.
The ACLU, for example, was a leading plaintiff working to get the Citizens United ruling in favor of freedom of speech including corporate advocacy. The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.
And the NSA reform bills in the Congress have about equal support from both parties.
>The same ACLU is a strong Second Amendment supporter.
Could you tell me specifically what definition of "strong supporter" you're using here? I can't think of any reasonable one that would make your claim true. Supporter, maybe.
But a "strong supporter" is not someone who endorses a watered down version of the Second Amendment, and then spends zero effort defending infringements of that.
Disagreeing with your interpretation of the Second Amendment does not mean they do not support civil rights. Nor does spending their money and time defending civil rights that don't have massive organizations devoted to defending them.
Yeah, I get that the ACLU's actions regarding the 2nd Amendment are defensible.
That wasn't the topic.
The topic was the claim that the ACLU is a "strong supporter" of the second amendment. Do you know a definition of "strong supporter" that is appropriate for the ACLU's actions regarding the Second Amendment?
No, I don't want to hear about how great the ACLU is.
No, I don't want to hear about the ACLU really does support civil rights.
No, I don't want to hear about how their position on the 2nd amendment is reasonable.
No, I don't want to hear about all the other people who can protect the second amendment.
I want something responsive to my question: in what sense is the ACLU not just a "supporter" but a "strong supporter" of the Second Amendment?
Don't have anything to say about that? Then please stay out of the discussion rather than changing topics and blurring the issues. Thanks.
I think they're a strong supporter of the Second Amendment as per the way they interpret it; they have filed a number of briefs in support of cases that fit their definition.
Let's stop with the farce: your complaint is that you don't like their interpretation, and so you choose to change the topic and blur the issue on a completely different thread to grind that ax of yours.
No, my complaint is that there's a difference between "supporter" and "strong supporter", and that if the latter is to have any meaning at all, the ACLU doesn't meet it.
How do you differentiate a "supporter" from a "strong supporter"? If I firmly believed that the First Amendment only protects pro-government speech, and filed the occasional legal brief in defense of those prosecuted under this interpretation, would that make me a "strong supporter" of the First Amendment? Would you talk about how crazy wicked cool it is that a nutty right-winger like me paradoxically has a thing for protecting the first amendment?
Or, to avoid the issue of weak interpretations of amendments, how about if I had the "normal" 1st amendment views, and had a "pro-Bill of Rights" group that spent only a token amount of effort protecting infringements on speech (or the other 1A stuff), and never to represent any such client? Still a "strong" supporter? Or just a "supporter"?
In a smaller example, the ACLU recently supported my father-in-law's small church in its suit against a local government ordinance restricting their ability to pass out literature on public sidewalks. Religious proselytizing usually falls more under the domain of the right than the left.
People sometimes like to paint their side as "for freedom" and the other side as "wants to restrict you", but the reality is far more complicated, changing issue-by-issue and occasionally covering legitimate tradeoffs where both sides might be considered "for freedom".
I think the problem is that modern conservatives have gone so far to the right that organizations which are traditionally conservative are now considered left wing.
Ordinary people don't live in the kind of circumstances where
they might wander into a felony conviction
Ohh I think you should be shocked at the number of felonies a person could commit on the course of everyday life. Felony is not just used for serious crimes. Almost every state have what are referred to a "catch all" felonies that can be brought against just about any one at any time if you piss off the right person in power.
dont fool yourself into think the legal system is anything other than a tool for oppression and control
Piss off the right person, and you may find yourself getting pulled over on some deserted road where officer Clancy "discovers" a felonious amount of a controlled substance concealed in your car or on your person.
I guess your life is way more interesting than mine. You can also add that NSA will tap your phone/email/web activity and find child porn, CIA will track all your foreign trips to find that you talked to Bin Laden and PETA will report that you feloniously tortured puppies.
Vast majority of white/asian people in this country are so far removed from that life that chance of getting underserved felony is as likely as getting hit by lightning. It can happen but definitely not three times in the row.
That is because the Vast majority of white/asian people are simple sheeple doing what their masters in government tell them to do, never rocking the boat, never expressing any opinions.
When government says Jump, they respond with "How high master" , the government says "Give me 50% of your labor" they say "Yes Master"
The vast majority of people, not even white/asian, just people, are useless sheep being lead complacently to slaughter
You're construing the facts against the convicted. You didn't even finish the sentence you quoted. After he went to jail, that guy turned his life around and became a productive valuable member of society. They say he killed someone accidentally because there's an important distinction between accidental and intentional homicide, not because it's an easy mistake to make. He's exactly the kind of edge case that shows the stupidity of three strikes laws. Instead of being an irredeemable criminal, he was a criminal who actually showed clear signs of rehabilitation. Really not someone who should be shoved in jail forever at the taxpayer's expense.
I agree. While I sympathize for the people in the stories, the publication by ACLU is much like typical spinning of facts done by marketing firms and politicians.
> Americans are particularly unsympathetic to racial minorities living on the edge.
AFAICT, it's about neurological differences, not racial or cultural differences. White people with low IQ or poor impulse control get shafted just as hard, they are just a smaller proportion of the population. Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color.
"Gypsies and trailer trash are just as screwed as minorities of color."
I thought it really funny to be so "politically correct" when speaking of black people, yet quite happy to refer to "people with less color" as "trailer trash."
Almost sadder is the fact that if these people were ever released, they're in the exact same position as every other ex-con. Which means that finding a job goes from being a challenging task (for most of us) to almost impossible.
If you manage to find the very rare employer willing to overlook a felony conviction, there's also the challenge of finding an apartment with a criminal record (apartments can and do reject ex-cons from leasing).
Never mind the emotional hurdle of reuniting with family (if you're lucky), and the huge challenge of socially re-integrating with society.
Does anybody else constantly live in a state of guilt? So many lives lost and wars fought just to get us to where we are, and we reap the benefits. I feel so guilty for having a good paying job in the city. I'm not adding any value to the world, none at all. I tinker with a few codes every day and make silly amounts of money, when there's people struggling to put food on the table working 18 hour days.
I need to do something, something meaningful. Sure I send a few bucks every month to a few charities but that just makes me feel worse, like I'm loosely patching holes of my guilt with plaster that will fade the next day.
What can I do? I don't belong here. I'm just another waste of space.
Take some of your money and travel. Go to Cambodia and don't be shy with your cash. Visit the landmine museum, do some crying, and see how the resilient people are (slowly) making a comeback. Buy all the trinkets and crap off the swarming children. Hire a guide. Stimulate their local economy, then come back with a greater appreciation of everything in your life. Vote (I suggest independent, since mainstream are different shades of the same color), focus on your friendships, and find yourself a more challenging and fulfilling job, and don't read so much bad news. Everyone plays a role in the world, and yours doesn't have to be one of direct savior. You can and do add value in innumerable ways that you don't even notice.
This is a beautiful answer, thank you. Here's a twist that I read about from Tyler Cowen, from marginalrevolution: for reasons a child of your comment has pointed out, handouts to the people asking for handouts creates something of a perverse incentive; Cowen recommends going to random people in third world countries who seem to be in need but are _not_ begging for money, and give them your money. Not sure about the practical effects of this (there's a whiff of the kind of paternalism that economists, including Cowen himself, debunks in other economic domains) but thought-provoking nonetheless.
Would you advocate for the same 'top-down' approach to stimulating the economy in the US or another developed country? I think the concept of 'hawkers' could be easily applied to startups. Do you believe a good consumer should be supporting big corporations or fledgling startups? I'm just genuinely curious of your position and if you think the analogy applies in the first world.
I am not so sure it is such a good analogy. The "business model" of these hawkers in third world countries like Cambodia or Laos is to explicitly present themselves as impoverished, and then pressure or guilt-trip you into buying something from them as a gesture of charity. The OP seemed to encourage such behaviour, even admitted it was "crap" they were selling (it is).
I'd suggest that any startup worth its salt is actually offering something of real value, not explicitly a charity case, so the analogy completely breaks down. I fully support encouraging the startup ecosystem.
And I'm not even sure about using a term like "top down". Hotels really do employ locals, as do restaurants, and by patronising them you send a strong signal of support to the local tourism industry. With that assurance they can make plans, invest, advertise, expand. It's not about making the rich richer, not at all. Giving a small regional tourism industry the confidence to plan for the future is a wonderful thing.
> to explicitly present themselves as impoverished
That's not the least bit true, in my experience. I've watched them come over from where their families are working and attempt to sell trinkets, then go back to their families (or friends' families).
As for "crap", yeah, it's crap. Because you don't give children appliances and automobiles to sell. It's no different than the stuff you'll buy from American children going door to door, trying to raise money for their school.
I think you're really looking down your nose at people. You have a choice when traveling in areas like this. You can either act like you have to guard your precious money from all these street urchins trying to cheat you, or you can simply accept it as part of the experience traveling in a very poor area, and embrace the reality that you can make some small difference in an individual's life.
You talk as if denying individuals some income is somehow helping their long-term tourism. Yet Thailand, which is decades ahead of Cambodia in terms of development and wealth, still sees foreigners as wealthy, pesters them for sales and rides, and they have a very healthy tourism industry in spite of this. A country can't force its way into a $500/night resort industry. Thailand has tried for years, and it's not happening anytime soon. Cambodia doesn't even have a reasonable highway infrastructure.
> Hotels really do employ locals
To give an interesting regional example, are you aware that the Thai island of Koh Phi Phi is controlled by the Chinese mafia?
Do you have a source for the Ko Phi Phi claim (reason I ask is genuine curisoity: I had a long conversation with a Thai bar owner a couple of years ago where he observed that one of the attractions of Phi Phi is that unlike Phuket or Samui, it wasn't mafia run). The mafia "protected" parts of the Thai tourist industry still employ lots of working class Thais, not to mention the Burmese diaspora.
The wider issue with buying stuff off Cambodian street urchins is that you really don't want to encourage a state of affairs where the most aggressive child beggars/vendors earn far more than their parents... and then need kids of their own once they hit their mid-teens and no longer appeal to tourists' sympathies.
> The "business model" of these hawkers in third world countries like Cambodia or Laos is to explicitly present themselves as impoverished, and then pressure or guilt-trip you into buying something from them as a gesture of charity.
The fact that they even have to do this speaks volumes.
I really liked this "own a problem" perspective from an HR post (1). Pick a problem to help solve, prioritise that and deprioritise everything else to solve it.
You can also shift to work for an institution which is genuinely trying to do good, such as the World Bank or a not-for-profit. Or you can do what you can from within your own organisation to get them to be working to improve the world rather than take advantage of it.
<update - my apologies, there is a registration requirement for the article. The lightbox appears after a little wait, so you should be able to read it>
Just keep in mind the World Bank is considered by many as an instrumental part of a quasi-colonial system of institutions that is set up to exploit the third world through their advocacy for unfavorable debt and a certain economical bias.
I'm sure they also do some good, but they are at least a somewhat ambiguous organization.
What can I do? I don't belong here. I'm just another waste of space.
Isn't everyone? Why is working 18 hours of labour a day inherently more valuable or useful to humanity, the planet, the universe, anything? Why is someone struggling inherently a better, more worthy person than anyone else (and by what standards?).
Would you really prefer a world where everyone has to struggle to survive, because that's where it sounds like your comment is leading.
The feeling of guilt is an echo in your head. It's not actually an objective measure of your worth, it's not really some outside deity judging you and finding you unworthy, even if it feels like it is. Because of this, there's no saying there is anything you can do to assuage your feelings of guilt if you go with them. Maybe it's a while loop that says "while (bad_things_happen_anywhere) { feel_guilty(); }". You ask what to do as if there's bound to be a corresponding "if I do X then I can feel less guilty" pattern in your head waiting to be triggered - but maybe there isn't.
What you can do is work on it as your problem, your suffering, your mental issue that needs addressing in your head. You're not unhappy because the world sucks for a dirt poor person. You're unhappy because of a "be unhappy" thought stuck in your head. Don't change the world to stop this suffering, change your thoughts.
I worked for an investment bank before for a year. I work for a genome sequencing centre now. In both cases building / maintaining databases. The work is paid less, and there is less opportunity to earn lots in the future, but I do feel better about myself for not being part of the corrupt self serving finance system. Many of our projects are involved in cancer research, so its doing the tiniest bit towards helping the world.
I am a third worlder currently living in Cairo - if you think a bit of poverty here and there in the US is bad, here in this city we are surrounded by it.
Being poor is not a moral flaw and I see people everyday go out of their bed and try to win most of their days. Still people manage to find happiness within the most dire constraints.
You cannot do everything and nobody expects to. Take comfort in that. We are all doing out bits to repair the world (There's a wonderful Hebrew phrase for this: Tikkun olam).
But when you have the means, go travel. Meet the others who occupy this world, who have different perspective of living, who struggles with different things that you do. They will be happy to meet you.
I have visited, amongst other places, Cairo. I wouldn't be able to live there for the guilt it would instil in me. Sadly, Cairo is by far not the worst place (compared to New Delhi, government services are quite good in Cairo. Yes, really), and several "first world" locations are, at best, a degree of difference with Cairo (Hong Kong would be a good example).
People don't seem to be able to imagine just how bad life is in the third world for the majority of people.
And frankly, sorry to put it so bluntly, but here's a thought people should think about. Given you are a third-worlder, would you want to be one of the exploited or one of the non-exploited. Given that in practice most third-worlders still choose what job they want, the answer is obvious : with very few exceptions, people want to be one of the "exploited". Visit a third-world city, turn a few non-approved blocks, and you'll understand why.
Btw: one of the things that amazed me about Cairo is that they've created a "fake" city center, where the poverty you see is almost absent, in a way that I've seen nowhere else. So in Cairo, you definitely have to turn a few non-approved blocks.
Contact representatives in government bodies every so often. I'm not sure it makes a difference but I always figure that at a bare minimum it occupies some of their time (at least it does here in New Zealand, as the replies are not canned as far as I can tell, and they aren't from assistants either usually) which prevents other work getting done. I have a faint hope that it achieves more than this, but hope is about all.
There is hope. Software is the key to addressing a great deal of injustice in the world. I believe that software programmers who want to make a difference can do so by collaborating on open source projects intended for use by government at every level.
Consider: if we can write the software that cities, states, and even the federal government uses to do it's job, then we can also have a material impact on transparency, usability, etc for the users.
Take the judicial system. It is badly underfunded, especially in California, which has the largest civil court system in the Western world. What if an enterprising group of civic minded programmers simply wrote awesome, free, open software to run a state courtroom, complete with a self-help web interface?
Such a project would not necessarily be fun. But it would be useful, and it would arguably contribute greatly to society.
> it would arguably contribute greatly to society.
It would contribute to the system that is perpetuating these kinds of injustices. Recall that a good portion of these people serving life sentences for non-violent crimes are in state prisons. How is helping them build their software systems going to find justice for a man in jail for life for stealing some tools?
By the way, this is not a rhetorical question: I'm honestly trying to understand this point of view.
In this case, technology could have helped in (at least) two places:
1. In the courtroom. These people could have received a faster, more painless, and more just trial. The proceedings could have been more open, easier to search and data mine, and hence easier to react to faster. Additionally (and somewhat science-fictiony) I personally would like to see us experiment with alternative juries - particularly much larger, distributed juries. If justice can't be crowd-sourced, then I don't know what can.
2. In the legislature. Although the creation of bills is an intensely collaborative process, too often the details are delegated to underlings, and those details are seriously misinformed by the facts. So one piece of software that is needed world wide are better document collaboration tools that are tied to accurate sources. The legislature in particular should be obsessively concerned about how the justice system is applying their laws. Better visibility into what's happening, in real-time, would make the legislature a) more aware and b) more responsive to injustice.
I wasn't asking about how could technology help these poor people (I agree that it could possibly help, or at least holds that promise), I was asking how helping the court system build their software would help them.
Don't do it from a place of guilt, find something that you feel passionately about, cut back on the meaningless and lucrative tinkering and start tinkering for your passion. Your most valuable contribution to the world is your time, arrange your life so that you can spend as much time as possible, without burning out, on something meaningful to you.
Find a local (and hopefully small) charity you like. Start giving to them, as much as you can. Volunteer with them. See if they are looking to add trustees. Find every way you can help.
It's hard. It's not just giving $10 to Oxfam (which you should do anyway), it's a real dedication of time and care. But you'll meet people, you'll support something you are passionate about, and you'll have a lot less time to think about how you're a waste.
I second volunteering. Donating your time makes you feel much more involved than if you donated an equivalent (or even greater than) your wage for that time. It also is a visible show of dedication to a cause!
But what you describe does not sound like an honest or clear assessment of the world. It sounds more like depression. Which is real and serious and treatable.
The world is often tragic. It <em>is</em> wrong to live comfortably and be willfully ignorant to tragedy, but it is not wrong to take care of yourself and make yourself whole. So, yes, seek something meaningful to make the world better, and start by taking care of yourself.
You are a waste of space. But committing suicide is so boring—I don’t recommend it. You are going to have to figure out the point you want your life to have. So quit complaining on the internet about your privileged guilt, save your silly amounts of money for a while, then spend it executing your vision. The best any of us can hope to do is to mean something to somebody.
I can't imagine reading this and not feeling tears well up.
No sense of what I would call humanity. From what perspective does this make the world a better place?
What am I missing about being human that this fits into that I don't understand?