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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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What always trips me up about sentiments like this is that I agree with them... and that's a big part of why I'm a prison abolitionist, you can't trust the justice system to deliver real justice and shouldn't premise everything on it's ability to do so.

But most people expressing these sentiments are not prison abolitionists, many of them among Republicans want to be tougher on crime with harsher sentencing and so forth, and I don't understand the epistemic state that lets someone dismiss the justice system as obviously corrupt when it works against someone they like, but reliable enough to throw people in jail for life willy-nilly otherwise.

What always trips me up about sentiments like this is that I agree with them...

You straightforwardly don't, though. The fact that you have a critique of an element of the justice system and I have a critique of an element of the justice system doesn't mean that those critiques share any meaningful overlap, whether in focus, hypothesized mechanisms, evidence presented, standards by which that evidence is measured, proposed solutions or standards by which the effects of those solutions should be assessed.

...and that's a big part of why I'm a prison abolitionist, you can't trust the justice system to deliver real justice and shouldn't premise everything on it's ability to do so.

I could, as you have, claim to likewise be in favor of prison abolition, on the understanding that I and people like myself will simply band together to punish criminality directly through immediate and severe violence against perpetrators rather than deferring to sclerotic, compromised and increasingly incompetent institutions. After all, if there's no jail to send criminals to any more, than naively one might assume that there's no jail to send those who simply beat or shoot criminals to, either. Only, I don't think this is actually what you have in mind by the term "prison abolition", and it seems to me that blurring the distinction between our positions and values only generates misunderstandings and frustration without advancing meaningful conversation.

I don't recall you ever making a case for prison abolition, though I'd certainly be interested in discussing it if you ever chose to. As with your recent post on race, I'm interested in the discussion, but that requires an actual willingness to discuss, rather than limiting oneself to laments over discussion that isn't happening. I've provided some examples of why I consider the justice systems deployed against Trump to be compromised; if you've got a similar list for why you consider the justice system deployed against ordinary murderers and thieves to be compromised, I'd be interested in seeing it.

Whoever you reesponded to, their post is still marked as filtered, and I can't see it.

It was darwin. He must have finally triggered something in the site code.