>It's a misconception that you could avoid being in the felon caste by not breaking laws?

With the number of overturned sentences coming out of the courts lately, yes, it seems you can go to jail without ever having actually committed a crime.

Your use of the term “soapboxing” to describe what was reasonable argument until your appearance and the bizarre thought-terminating cliché that is your fear of the word “systemic” don’t inspire confidence in me that you are here in good faith. I notice your account is also relatively new.

Nonetheless, consider this after rereading the GP’s comment. If a doctor told two patients that they could avoid getting cancer by not exposing themselves to carcinogens, knowing that one somehow unknowingly lives on a Superfund site, but deciding to purposefully neglect to mention the risk this entails, would you say the doctor was presenting one patient an incorrect understanding of the issue at hand?

Likewise, if a car manufacturer found a problem with one of their models and decided to notify the US about this by saying “you can avoid harm from the problem by not driving cars,” I would say that thinking that this is not “somehow unfair,” as the GP writes, would be a misconception, as I wrote.

The sort of juvenile discussion you are attempting to bring to this conversation is not really appropriate for HN.

>Your use of the term “soapboxing” to describe what was reasonable argument

You conspicuously failed to substantiate his "misconception".

>It has been shown time and time again black Americans are disproportionately arrested and sentenced.

I could not in all charitability/good faith (all your efforts to troll noted btw) extract a relevant point here. If they are disproportionately arrested having committed a crime, that has nothing to do with allthenew's whole post. If one charitably adds the context that in america you can also be arrested for committing no crime at all, then you've switched a basic premise of his post in 'arguing' it.

You equate driving cars and living on superfund sites with consuming illicit substances and wilfully committing violent acts, and then have the audacity to call someone else's contribution juvenile?

Does personal responsibility exist in your ivory tower?

What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices? We're talking about smoking marijuana and stealing expensive clothing, after all, not theft of food for subsistence.

Why is it that any time race is brought up, any argument that even has the potential to cast minorities in negative light is immediately shouted down with any sort of logic or reason thrown out the window? What about objectivity?

We cannot shout down potential truths simply because they have unpleasant implications.

> What sort of convoluted logic could possibly drive you to equate necessities of life, or constraints of circumstance, with such antisocial choices?

That you consider all drug use “antisocial” is revealing; that you think the need to use a car would exert more pressure on the average person than an environment which encourages drug use from a young age is telling.

Your use of the term “ivory tower” is ironic when your assumptions are based on a kind of life that many Americans do not inhabit.

There is such a thing as personal responsibility. I would argue that most drug use is not a good idea. I think environments that encourage people to make bad decisions should be repaired. But to argue that “just one drop” of bad decision making justifies massively unfair treatment is an argument that is as intellectually demeaning as it is dangerously naive.

Would you argue in favor of a law that puts people in jail for doing something “antisocial” like using bad language, and that is predominately enforced against people of a particular race? No one needs to use foul language, but having done so does not give us carte blanche to hate.

As my final comment, your unprompted use of the term “ivory tower” and your ominous reference to “unpleasant implications” regarding race suspect that you are trying to bring another argument into this discussion in which I have no interest. This is my final reply.

The united states prison system is designed to systematically incarcerate and disempower black americans. It has nothing to do with "breaking laws". Incarceration is not correlated with crime rate, and nearly everyone breaks laws, but a small segment of the population is incarcerated to a large degree (black men).