Brazilian law to allow police shoot anyone with a rifle.

[redpoint5]

From scratch means starting with your fingernails digging into the ground.

...even that skips the much more complicated process of turning sub-sub-atomic shtuff into hydrogen, and then turning hydrogen into heavier elements.

...and all that skips the step of creating something from nothing.

We're infinitely incapable and ignorant. How we ended up with smartphones and plenty of food is a miracle.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by All Darc

But society also have responsability. The sh...t heads who buy drugs knows perfectly well he is financing the drug dealer and all the murders involved. Most drug users are not innocent people seducted by bad influence. They kew all these things when they started using drugs.

You have to look at the other side: the people who decided to make drugs illegal had to know (from the example of US Prohibition) that it would do just what it has done: create an illegal industry with huge profits, and foster a disrespect for law by the general population. If somehow they didn't realize it then - since it never pays to underestimate human stupidity - they surely do by now. Yet the drug laws remain in place, honest citizens pay more taxes to try to enforce them while the drug dealers amass huge fortunes. And cops get their jollies from using the laws to arrest or shoot down just about anyone they please.

[redpoint5]

Drug laws should not exist at the federal level. Should be a states rights issue.

Let a couple states legalize all drugs, and then deal with all the addicts.

Prison is very good at breaking addiction though. I've known fantastic people in prison that are monsters when given enough freedom to feed their addiction.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

We're infinitely incapable and ignorant. How we ended up with smartphones and plenty of food is a miracle

Fuller explains it: https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/0...-lords-prayer/

Since 1927, whenever I am going to sleep, I always concentrate my thinking on what I call “Ever Rethinking the Lord’s Prayer.”

He then goes on to write out his “prayer” — essentially a secular definition of divinity as a curiosity-driven love of truth bent through the prism of our subjective experience, something Philip Ball articulated a quarter century later in his eloquent distinction between curiosity and wonder — on his 84th birthday:

[example of EVER RETHINKING THE LORD’S PRAYER from July 12, 1979]

Then you read the example, with it's definitions and qualifiers, and realize why he never got any sleep at night.

But seriously, the brain concerns itself with specifics, only mind can discern generalities.

"Only minds have the capability to discover principles and put them to rigorous physical test before accepting them as principle. More often theologists and others discover principles but do not subject them to the rigorous physical-special-case testing before accepting and employing them as working-assumption principles.

Principles are eternal. Special case interactions of principles are temporal and brain-apprehensible because in pure principle we have time, which is simply the principle of potentially different relative frequencies and not of beginnings and endings."

[Hersbird]

Whatever the reason, wherever the place, taking guns out of the hands of lawful citizens will only lead to increased gun violence and crime. I'm not talking suicide or accidents, those will obviously go up and require different actions to limit. If your problem is a small percentage of the population being criminally violent to a large peaceful percentage, arming more of the peaceful percentage will put a stop to the thugs faster than police or soldiers ever will be able to. The same goes if it is the police or the soldiers are the criminals.

[redpoint5]

As I've said, police are not first responders, they are last responders. We're the first responders. Police response is an indication that we've failed to maintain our family/community.

Government is a last resort for when all the lower level solutions have failed.

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Yet the drug laws remain in place, honest citizens pay more taxes to try to enforce them while the drug dealers amass huge fortunes. And cops get their jollies from using the laws to arrest or shoot down just about anyone they please.

You wouldn't complain if you had a brother in law who ran a privately owned prison.

[Xist]

I never hear anything good about private prisons. What is the purpose of prisons? Keeping criminals off the street? Rehabilitating criminals?

Probably not the second.

What is the purpose of private prisons? Making profit?

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Fat Charlie

You wouldn't complain if you had a brother in law who ran a privately owned prison.

IDK about that. While I have no brothers-in-law myself, I know a few who'd prefer their brothers-in-law to BE in prison.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Xist

I never hear anything good about private prisons. What is the purpose of prisons? Keeping criminals off the street? Rehabilitating criminals?

Probably not the second.

What is the purpose of private prisons? Making profit?

It's not a convincing argument because we can add "making profit" to the end of any business. What's the purpose of dentistry? Making profit? The profit motive does not invalidate the usefulness of the service.

Prison serves several purposes to varying degrees of effectiveness. Prison acts as a deterrent, it prevents further criminal acts, it rehabilitates, and it fulfills the vengeful desires of people. The last purpose sounds terrible, and it is. We shouldn't delight in the tragedy of others regardless of how deserved it is, yet we do.

As far as rehabilitation goes, I'd say most US prisons fail this because we're more concerned with retribution than rehabilitation. Granted, rehabilitation is extremely difficult, but I think that's why we choose retribution, because it's the easiest to administer and is instantly gratifying.

What both criminals and society ignores is that if a criminal is going to be released from prison someday, they will need to be be accepted by society, and feel like they have something meaningful to contribute. There has to be a path for redemption.