Friday, June 13, 2014

In response to a liberal commenter, who felt felons losing the right to vote was not disenfranchsing

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This was my response to a guy who agreed with me politically, it seems, but took the attitude that the millions who have lost the right to vote knew what they were getting into when they committed their "Crimes" and as such, felt no sympathy for them. This was in a Huffington Post article about a certain female potential presidential candidate politician. I had this to say to him:

....So, since people should know better than to break the law, would you say women in Saudi Arabia who are stoned for speaking with a man without a brother or their father around, or men whose hands are cut off for simply being accused of stealing, or people of both sexes accused of blasphemy who are killed in a public execution...... "As getting what they deserve as a consequence of their crimes as well?"
......Would you say they are not disenfranchised at all, on account of they know what their punishment for committing such heinous crimes will be, and therefore have no valid complaints whatsoever when they are stoned, mutilated, or murdered?
I am fairly certain you and I are cut of the same political cloth. However, I am guessing its your age that has blinded you to the fact that many, many laws are patently unfair and should be abolished.
.....Drug use, prostitution, and less obviously, breaches in national security if they clearly make available any information TO the public that directly AFFECTS the public. AKA, Snowden and Manning.
.....These are all victimless crimes. Sure, sometimes victimless crimes ruin families and hurt political agendas, result in unwanted pregnancies, and spread disease....all of which are, at face value, "not good for society," As such, it could be fairly argued that as such, they are not victimless, but to this I say intentions are everything, and if collateral fallout from an act in which no victim is intended, happens to inadvertently affect someone else, its unfortunate. However, if we started outlawing every single thing that occasionally tore apart a family, hurt political agendas, or sometimes spread disease, we'd be......Saudi Arabia.
.....As such, its unfair that all of these things can and usually result in felony charges, which according to you, result in a perfectly acceptable legal removal of one's legal rights. Including the right to vote. You know, all they have to do is convict the entire country of a felony in a trial in absentia, and whammo--none of us can vote.
....Who else is going to vote in candidates to change the laws that are unfair and unjust to the perpetraitors of victimless crimes, if not the convicts themselves? Who else to have experienced the misery of a for-profit prison and as such is best equipped to cast a vote for candidates who vow to fight this corrupt, immoral and powerful business lobby. Who else to speak out against the continuous push to make petty offenses more serious, and subject to mandatory minimums that the prison lobby is relentlessly and endlessly pushing, in a self-interested and careless drive to get our country to imprison even more people for stupid, and paltry "crimes" in order to enrich their shareholders and executives further? There is no money, and no votes to be had in speaking out against this insidious behavior because felons cannot vote, and therefore don't feel like there is any reason they should donate money or time towards assisting the political process that is so clearly rigged against them. Until felons can vote, there is no downside to politically demonizing and persecuting those of us who have had the unfortunate luck to have been arrested, even when/if our crimes had no victims besides ourselves. And until more liberal people start recognizing this, there is no advocate to speak on our behalf.
.....Before you go writing people off because they are getting what they deserve/asked for/have coming, think about whether or not the simple act of something being illegal actually makes it objectively "WRONG." If something is not objectively, arguably, "WRONG" in the eyes of a halfway reasonable person, should it still be illegal?

I feel like a jerk for not saying something in Memory of Sasha Shulgin

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.....But I also feel like everybody was falling all over themselves to prove their hero-worship was more intense then the next person, and I didn't want to fall prey to compromising the legacy and memory of a great man, by risking my own integrity in order to outdo the next guy sycophanitizing him. Suffice to say,

RIP Sasha Shulgin. You Will Be Truly Missed.