Of course, people, whether criminals or not, should be attributed for their intellectual contributions but there is a bigger point here which people do not say enough:
The criminal justice system already wields the responsibility of punishing criminals. Let the convicts go through due process and do their time. The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
I would like to piggyback on this sentiment to call out a common feeling in the US (and probably elsewhere).
When people are facing jail time, they are usually told to expect to be brutalized in prison by the other prisoners and guards.
Putting additional punishment in the form of abuse (physical, mental and sexual) and then putting the onus of that additional punishment on a vulnerable population is a recipe for disaster.
Prison is the punishment, anything on top of that is a crime and a lot of people turn short sentences into life by targeting other prisoners with certain crimes.
>When people are facing jail time
Actually, it's when _men_ are facing jail time, that people make rape jokes. I've never really heard people do it for women at all.
Not only is that sort of thing much less prevalent in prisons than media would have you believe, media still perpetuates this stereotype, just as it perpetuates the "all gay men are fruity heyyyyyy" stereotype that I also loathe. But the extract media and popular opinion is; rape jokes about men are funny, men being assaulted or kicked in the balls is funny, men dying on screen is just a bad guy or a henchman but a woman dying on screen is either not done, camera cut away or a huge plot point with emphasis on how _evil_ the victim is for doing such a thing.
Men are the victims are of the majority of crime, however because of sexism many people (including women) are happy to lump men in all together with each other. People don't care if the victim is a man, because the criminal is a man, too. And that's like...the same! :O
This is not mentioned nearly enough. I think it’s rooted in the idea that people must be either great or awful when being both is a very real possibility.
Another possibility is that being a good or bad are not inherent properties of people -- but only properties of actions. Bojack Horseman explains it well.
> That's the thing. I don't think I believe in deep down. I kinda think that all you are is just the things that you do.
and
> There's no such thing as "bad guys" or "good guys." We're all just...guys, who do good stuff sometimes and bad stuff sometimes. And all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff [...]
This view too, is naive. There absolutely are bad guys. There absolutely are good guys. Bad people still occasionally do good things; Good people occasionally do bad things.
Fred Rogers was unquestionably a good guy. He still made mistakes, and was very upfront about this. He made mistakes from the bottom of his heart trying to do the right thing but not always having the information (or patience to gather and process) to make better decisions, but he absolutely always made decisions trying to, even when advancing his own interests, take others into account.
Unfortunately, there are people who make decisions always with the intent to hurt others. Many of the actions that they take are individually neutral or good. It's hard to get anything done if you don't do some cooperation in society. It's quite probable that even for the most awful people, if you count unweighted they've taken more good actions than bad - but the magnitude of their evil is much higher.
Most people are neither. Most people are stupid and selfish but trying not to do too much bad. Bojack gets this, but somewhat misses the other implication - that being good and bad is learned and practiced, and that you should learn from and practice the ways people who are Good at being Good people,
People will judge you as good or bad. I think that's the extent of my agreement. I'll use a common joke as my perspective here:
"I built bridges for 20 years and no one ever called me Joe the bridge builder, and I paved roads for 20 years and no one ever called me Joe the road paver. But I fucked one goat..."
Human judgement can be fickle and outright vain at times. If there's an idea of outright good or evil, I don't trust any human (let alone society) to cast a proper judgement as such.
Interesting perspective, and it's hard to disagree with the idea that there are people who are more outliers than some others on either end, which is just a natural result of any distribution, though I think another angle to this topic is how "good" and "bad" are always relative. Throughout human history, somebody who is regarded as a visionary, saint and savior by their own in-group might well be regarded as the biggest evil by another group of humans. Some simple examples would be somebody like Columbus or Genghis Khan. Those are extreme cases of course, but the same applies on various scales.
Solzhenitsyn had it right that we are all capable of good or bad actions:
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being."
Don't wanna argue too deeply into philosophy. But I definitely think there is a certain moral code embedded in you by your early childhood. That moral compass on how you navigate life.
It's "deep down" but not some unchanging, inherent aspect of "you". You just need more work to tackle it, and probably with help, not alone.
But yes, "good" it "bad" absolutely doesn't work when evaluating a single individual life.
I don't think he intended Twitter to be a good financial investment. It seems like he bought it for its power in the public discourse. Whether or not that investment paid off is an exercise for the reader.
The failures of other electric car companies; Fisker Arrival, Dyson EV, Nikola, Faraday Future, would seem to indicate that being merely competent is a higher compliment than it feels like it would be.
His biographies go into far more detail than fit here, but even if you only believe half of those stories, he is still way more involved that most investors. At one point he slept in his office at the Fremont plant to get the Model 3 launched. There's more to him than being able to sign a check.
> The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
Agreed, we kept the Reiser filesystem namesake and attribution in the kernel even after his murder. Didn't adversely affect the project or the views of Reiser himself.
> The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.
Why should the rest of society be forced to continue associating with someone?
How are you “forced to continue associating with someone” who is arrested and cannot use their online accounts? What exactly does that do to you? And how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?
>how does Stack Overflow keeping all the posts but removing the name protect you in any way?
Well that's just a violation of the license they attribute posts to
>Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
That's not even a moral argument. They just broke the contract they signed up to.
They shouldn't be "forced" to continue associating with someone; they should not change their position on whether or not they should associate with said person based on this situation.
That sounds abstract, but such concepts already exist. If you have a restaurant, you are allowed to refuse to serve someone who happens to be a member of a race R, but you are not allowed to refuse someone _because_ they are a member of race R.
Maybe people are just very fickle these days, but last I checked: "someone posting on your server" is not association. Site owners put in that one article precisely so that cannot be the case.
But this does break the CC license by unattributing content but not deleting it, so that's bad.
I don't know if people are different these days, but we certainly have taken the concept "all relationships are voluntary" too far. If we had a society where people associated with each other only when there was personal gain to be made, that would not be a very nice society.
> you have entered into a social contract to interact with others.
An entirely voluntary social contract. I'm not required to read a specific person's posts and can chose not to based on new information I'm told about them.
Please don't post in the flamewar style, and please edit out swipes like "what are you talking about" from your posts here. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't really understand the issue. They say that people have a legal system if they're wronged by these companies. And it's clear that the legal system isn't an option for normal people when a company like UHS denies claims. So I want to know what they're talking about and why they think the justice system is sufficient as it is today to help normal people.
Seriously. I want to know what they're talking about. The justice system they're stating exists simply does not.
It has nothing to do with a flame war. That's an unfair characterisation, particularly when people's lives are so deeply affected when they can't get the care they need because of their insurance company.
"What are you talking about?" is a swipe in online English. It insinuates that the other person doesn't know what they're talking about.
That's even more true in a comment like the GP, which starts with 3 tendentious sentences hammering the other person's point and then moves to "What are you talking about". Such a comment pattern-matches to a cross-examination style of conversation, which the HN guidelines ask you to avoid because it's not what we want here.
If you really want to know what someone is talking about, "what are you talking about?" is an ineffective way to say so, since it means the opposite of what it says, with an overlay of insult.
The criminal justice system already wields the responsibility of punishing criminals. Let the convicts go through due process and do their time. The rest of the society should not participate in "delivering justice": obviously not by hitting them or torturing them, but also not by taking away their property or social capital.