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[except as a punishment for crime]

I think you're 75% correct. The missing 25% is the profit motive from privatized prisons and cheap prison labor.

Text of the 13th Amendment: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

This was the amendment that prohibited the practice of slavery in the United States after the Civil War. Notice the bolded exception, and consider who the United States tends to put in prison a LOT more than everyone else.

Taken from that angle, it starts to make much more sense as to why thing are the way they are. Criminal justice in the United States is deeply warped by profit motive (and, y'know, racism). It meshes nicely with "Get Tough On Crime" and "Zero Tolerance" attitudes: indulge people's gut-level desire to punish wrongdoers and spend effort on scooping people up to exploit, rather than spending effort on improving standards of living or community health.

Of course profit has something to do with it, this is 'Murica after all.  Tied with that is enforcing and reinforcing current power structures.  The police are there to ensure that the rules those at the top want are followed by those at the bottom.  Nixon took this to another level by creating the never ending war on drugs as a way to disenfranchise the predominantly democratic voting minorities who were using the substances most heavily targeted by his administration.  Racism with a purpose!

I've also noticed recently that there is a slice of the progressive left who don't seem to be willing to accept when someone has done their time. Does the legal system mean anything anymore? How does a society rebuild something like a legal system? Is that idea as infeasible as the libertarians who want to rebuild the government?

I think it stems from a deep distrust of the legal system's ability to redress certain grievances.

Our society in general has a really hard time digesting the concept of someone having done their time, or having repaid their debt to society. What crimes exactly someone is most concerned about varies, but lots of people feel the need to twist the knife on anyone who's ever fucked up. Being a felon in the USA is practically second-class citizen status, no matter how much you're punished.

OTOH, the only voices I've heard (lol perception bias) calling most strongly for justice reform and rehabilitation are progressive voices. The ways in which the USA's penal system in particular is perverted by private interests and profit are especially strong rallying points.

Our legal system is premised on exacting by vengance on those who we perceive as having done wrong, which really makes it hard to forgive those who have gone through the system and reaccept them into society.  Prison isn't about making you a better person or working to overcome the circumstances that encouraged or allowed for the behavior that landed you there, and it certainly isn't about finding reconciliation between the involved parties.  Sure, we are doing better now than we used to, implementing some education and training programs in prison, and some crazy places even help people returning to society find jobs and housing, which it turns out massively reduces recidivism.  We have made some improvements, but the basic premise of our prison system (and the law enforcement and court systems that funnel people there) is to punch back at people we think have hurt us, and lock them away so we don't have to think about them.

Just because you kick someone in the shins doesn't mean you've forgiven them for kicking you first.  The fact that so many would be criminals can just ignore this whole system if they are sufficiently rich/white/male/et cetera makes it that much harder to have any faith that prison can allow for true reintegration.

Use it to direct people towards candidates that are actually from different conservative parties, such as the Libertarians, to split the vote

This is great.

Our nation was founded on a set of shared beliefs, and our values, by the grace of God, have made us the greatest country in the world.  Lately our culture has come under attack from outside, by a torrent of illegal aliens who steal our jobs, threaten our children, and endanger our very way of life.  But thanks to the strengthening of our borders, and extreme vetting of would-be immigrants, this tide is being stemmed.

Yet there is another threat which faces us today, one far more insidious.  Every year, four million people arrive in America, and are summarily granted citizenship, without so much as a pledge of allegiance.  These newcomers often take years to learn to speak and read our language, placing an enormous drain on our already overburdened educational system.  Even when they pretend to fit into our culture, they twist it in subtle and disastrous ways.  They disrespect our hallowed institutions, distort our language, commit obscenities, and even mock our religion.

Great strides have been made in preventing the influx of these invaders, but these measures are not always effective.  Yet there are those in our own government who want to make some of these measures illegal!  Your help is needed.  Defend our American way of life, and petition your representatives to continue to allow us to protect ourselves, by any means necessary.

Support women's right to choose.

This is even better, though in a very different vein.

I'm going on vacation tomorrow, so I'll see what I can come up with here when aided by French wine and a beautiful lake beach.

Same old story. Newspag walks in and gets all butthurt then passive-agressively picks a hopeless fight with Howl because he said the bad words.

Really does get boring.  Guy walks in, the first thing he says to me is some rotten crap about how I'm not living up to his expectations, then is somehow surprised when I laugh and shit in his lunchbox.

You can pretty much set your watch to this shit.

Now I feel like I screwed up my entry.  Well Doc, your mother was a hamster and your father lived an unremarkable life with dull mores and expectations that he passed to his progeny, who, while clearly cursed with an overabundance of schooling, can't figure out that arguing with schmucks on The Interwebs won't change The World.  Also, you smell weirdly of balsa wood and ozone.  Take that!

How did I do?  Please lavish me with praise and adulation for my shitposting skills, for I need your approval to sustain me in these comically surreal and mildly terrifying times.

Hello!

I am a 34 years old french guy.
I love cabbages, men, poetry, magic, music. I also enjoy feet, gothic parties & witchcraft.

I hope this is the right topic, Happy to be here, sorry for my english! 

Pleasure to meet you!  My apologies for the English language, it's a bit of a mess and we never seem to get around to cleaning it up.

Kinda, though her skin colour would not make her very welcome there.  She's more Kingston, Jamaica.

Have you asked her to shut her stupid face?

Pretty much every day.  God I wish I had firing power.  Half the department would be gone, but it'd still give better service as a result.

I feel you there.  The nice detail I ended up at last night watching people watch fireworks quickly devolved into a group of my coworkers laughing along to stories of cops beating the shit out of people.  I do not like cops and increasingly do not like most of my coworkers.  On the plus side, two of my friends and I somehow convinced people in management that they should let us make people suck less at the types of calls that the three of us like to do.

Blackreach sounds fun.  The warlock thrall start sounds like it would fit my character concept as well.  I'm going to try not to use weapons as much as I can, and probably avoid destruction spells as well; it may or may not work, but I think it sounds interesting.  I'll let you know how it goes once I've had some game time.

but the prelude is you go all Jackie Chan mysterious magician on the nearest police officer, and take his handcuffs, preferably not naked... this wouldn't be a good sign to have the plan tragically haulted due to being naked too soon.

Being naked out in public would be a good way ensure said police officer made an appearance, just saying.

The game launches and Live Abother Life seems to be working, though it turns out I won't a have a chance to actually play till Wednesday.  Any suggestion on interesting starts?  My last play through started of stealthy but transitioned to a simple dual wield monster once my gear was maxed out, so I'm thinking of a magic heavy build that gives no fucks about her fellow man.  I'll probably go vampire eventually, but starting as one feels to powerful.  Also, do you know how the real needs mod interacts with Sacrosanct vampires?  Do vampires need to eat normal food and feed on people?

I have the Ordinator-Apocalypse patch, but I'm not seeing the Ord-Bruma, Ord-MLU, or MLU-Bruma patches.  Are those ones I need to generate on my own?  Here's my current LOOT order:

  0  0     Skyrim.esm
  1  1     Update.esm
  2  2     Dawnguard.esm
  3  3     HearthFires.esm
  4  4     Dragonborn.esm
  5  5     Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch.esp
  6  6     BSAssets.esm
  7  7     BSHeartland.esm
  8  8     BS_DLC_patch.esp
  9  9     Campfire.esm
10  a     SMIM-SE-Merged-All.esp
11  b     Andromeda - Unique Standing Stones of Skyrim.esp
12  c     EnhancedLightsandFX.esp
13  d     ELFX - Exteriors.esp
14  e     Hothtrooper44_Armor_Ecksstra.esp
15  f     MLU.esp
           Joy of Perspective.esp
16 10     Imperious - Races of Skyrim.esp
17 11     Thief skills rebalance for Ordinator.esp
18 12     SkyUI_SE.esp
19 13     Summermyst - Enchantments of Skyrim.esp
20 14     VioLens SE.esp
21 15     MagicalCollegeofWinterhold.esp
22 16     Better Spell Learning.esp
23 17     RealisticNeedsandDiseases.esp
24 18     Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim.esp
25 19     OpulentThievesGuild.esp
26 1a     Thunderchild - Epic Shout Package.esp
27 1b     ELFX - Weathers.esp
28 1c     Hothtrooper44_ArmorCompilation.esp
29 1d     Sacrosanct - Vampires of Skyrim.esp
30 1e     Inigo.esp
31 1f     Immersive Patrols II.esp
32 20     Frostfall.esp
33 21     MCoW_CampfirePatch.esp
34 22     Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim.esp
35 23     Better Spell Learning - Apocalypse SE Patch.esp
36 24     Immersive Weapons.esp
37 25     MLU - Immersive Armors.esp
38 26     Apocalypse - Ordinator Compatibility Patch.esp
39 27     Wildcat - Combat of Skyrim.esp
40 28     MLU - Inigo.esp
41 29     Alternate Start - Live Another Life.esp
42 2a     Immersive Citizens - AI Overhaul.esp
43 2b     ELFX - Hardcore.esp
44 2c     MCoW_ELFXHardcore.esp
45 2d     Immersive Citizens - ELFXHardcore patch.esp

EDIT: Found Ord-Bruma patch, not seeing any mention online of the other two (Ord-MLU, MLU-Bruma).  I also picked up Mortal Enemies.  Will try actually launching later today after my work meeting.

Good stuff.  I'm downloading Skyrim now and will probably work on getting everything set up tomorrow.  I saw that T3nd0 left the modding scene; do you know if Perkus Maximus works with Special Edition?  It looked cool.

EDIT: I see the Ordinator you recommended does something similar.  And by Aurora did you mean Andromeda?

Also, is anyone else here playing Elite these days?

I've mostly been playing Elite Dangerous recently, which is still not so much a game as a massive sandbox with some really satisfying mechanics.  Just landing and take off still feels deeply awesome, and wing combat is now pretty cool.  I do wish anything I did in game felt like it meant something; I keep getting better stuff, but beyond being able to crash local markets in one good, there's minimal impact players can have on the world.  Maybe it's just my years of EVE leaving me wanting here, but I feel like Elite has so much potential that just isn't being utilized.  It's still fun to fly around in, either solo or with friends.

After reading through this whole thread at work yesterday (it was really slow at work and I almost lost it), I'm now thinking of picking up Skyrim again.  I bought the base game when it came out, tossed on some simple mods, then played until I was too powerful for it to feel interesting anymore, which is where a lot of Bethesda games end up for me.  It sounds like there's been some real work done in the modding community since then, and stuff like Requiem plus the DLC's sounds really cool.  I saw the mod lists you posted earlier Cain, and I think I can work from there.  As for picking up the DLC, is the Special Edition that came out in 2016 the way to go?

The biggest flaw in the OP is the weird belief that a social structure means you can't be an individualist.

You are far more likely to be yourself if you can be yourself and not have to worry about starving to death or dying of staph infection.

Holy thread resurrection Batman!  I've been chewing through this thread for the past week and still didn't expect that timeline jump.

Has anyone else read this https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
on the calcification of socioeconomic status in the US?  There's a lot in there so it's been on my mind the past few days, particularly the differences between the US and developed countries with lower intergenerational economic elasticity.  That collectivism that Nigel mentioned seems to be a big step towards not elevating the powerful at the expense of the weak.  Japan, who is substantially better than us in IGE, has that sense of community and collective support that we in the US have lost (what little we had to begin with).  Scandinavia is crushing it here, somehow having come to the conclusion that they shouldn't let people die poor, homeless, and uninsured.  That whole "bootstrap" mentality here leaves US thinking that anyone not rich is, at best, too lazy to help themselves.

There are plenty of changes we could make in this current system to improve the situation, some incremental and some significant shifts: cutting the mortgage interest deduction, taxing investment income more, increasing education funding, increasing earned income tax credits, universal healthcare, basic income, or just upping the minimum wage would all help.  The problem is that there's so much money and power going into keeping things status quo that it's hard to muster enough energy to make any headway.

I still worry that Foucault was right in his analysis of power structures, and I'm sure there's a need for Discordian injection of weirdness to shake things up, but however inherently flawed the system is there are sure to be ways we could make things a little less awful just by tweaking here and there.  Or maybe I'm just an ignorant optimist too stupid to realize that life is pain and suffering and we just have to take it.

Oh shit buddy if you're near Boston I an hook you up with activisty folks

Yes please!  I'm down in Dorchester, though my partner and I just got offered housing on campus at the school where they teach, so we'll be moving a mile south come August.

i'm the same way about money - i've found the only way i can enjoy spending money on a vacation is if I budget a certain amount of dollars per day - way more than i normally spend in a day - so I always come in under budget while also am treating myself.  that's like a win-win.  roll the unspent money into the next days budget and pretty soon it's "hookers and blow" for everybody!

I do something similar for my normal spending.  A small portion of my paycheck (and a large chunk of any overtime I pick up) goes into a "fun buys" account which I can then feel free to spend on whatever I want without giving a damn.  After living paycheck-to-paycheck for years I didn't really know what to do once my paychecks had leftovers after regular expenses, and I've found that this system lets me pay down debt fast while still having a good time.

transgender protections

Fucking this! Having grown up in rural Michigan I never expected to see shit like this now that I live in Mass.  I'm so proud of my partner for getting the spoons together to help canvass, particularly since my working Saturdays precludes my joining in during their usual times.

As for my prison, I've been struggling with my focus on the goal causing me to lose sight of the present.  After seven years in EMS (which was a plan B made when academia sucked), I finally realized I just want to be a doctor.  I am going back to school in the fall for my prereqs but I find myself constantly looking to what's next in a way that I didn't struggle with before.  There's so much good in my life but it's easy to get mired in the pieces that dissatisfy.