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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges.

I was gonna say "surely that's exaggerating" but then I remembered that I know someone who literally went through this kek

Right?! It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count".

This is an amazing "one movie two screens" moment because, TTBOMK, nobody in my circles has ever been jailed.

I suspect a lot of people here are a third case: they don't pay a ton of attention to the private lives of other people outside of a small circle of family and friends. I could tell 5-10 stories of this type (of varying degrees, not literal jail) just from college, and plenty more from being involved in an art scene with lots of gossip. Suspect that small towns can be similar, but I'd have to hear from a ruralposter on that one.

That depends a lot on the small town. I can only remember one set of divorced parents among my childhood classmates, and still today, the town is mostly populated with functional, intact families. Most people are either middle class or have the values and traits associated with the middle class.

A friend of mine teaches third grade in a different rural community. Most years, only one or two of her students have married parents. The bulk of the parents divorced when the kids were younger, though an increasing number never married at all. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, trailer trash behavior has long since spread outside the park, and the kids pretty much all suffer from emotional and behavioral issues, which then also negatively impacts their academic performance.

I don’t think I personally know anyone who went to jail on DV charges, real or fake. She could probably list two dozen off the top of her head.

I don't mean to call small towns dysfunctional, just that one assumes people in smaller communities hear more of what the folks around are getting up to.

I've seen in plenty in body cam videos, but the closest I have in my personal life is a great uncle who got screwed over by his ex wife. This was like 30 years ago and I hardly know this great uncle. He and his wife owned a business, she was cooking the books and ran off to a country with no extradition treaty while leaving him to face any consequences. You'd think his wife fleeing the country would be evidence that she was the one cooking the books but the cops wanted their scalp.

He spent a few years in jail, and obviously he divorced her over it.

I literally do not know anyone who has been to jail. Or if they have, they've never told me about it. So your dichotomy isn't accurate, because I don't fall into either group.

I literally do not know anyone who has been to jail. Or if they have, they've never told me about it.

I know lawyers who have been to jail (and I don't mean they were visiting clients). They did not go around broadcasting it. You might be surprised who has gotten to spend a night or weekend in jail without you ever knowing.

Sure, I'm not trying to say it's impossible that anyone I know has been to jail. My point is merely that if they never told me about it, then I can't possibly be classified as having mental blinders about the topic. Nor can I be classified as someone who knows someone who has been to jail on trumped-up charges, because there isn't evidence to say that. Thus, it's a false dichotomy.

I've never seen it.

I have. My sister did this to her ex-husband, before she settled into the life of a childless lesbian.

We can't live like this.

We literally can't; we are empirically failing to reproduce.

Define "we"

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