It’s been going on for way longer than 9 years, is part of the problem. They turned up the propaganda at just the right rate and timing

ITT: poe’s law and misunderstood intent. I was making fun of that supposed script-flipping line that genocide apologists were using last year, to be clear, not that it matters too much.

!go more extreme

Yeah nah, you don’t get to skip addressing my points(then and now) and then bitch about the same thing in the end, I didn’t even read past “actually made a point”

Lol go fuck yourself

dO yOu CoNsUmE hAm AsS?

I agree he fucked up bad enough to get fired and for some kind of punitive fine, but 84k worth of pension (the entire pension, which is itself a problem) is entirely too much. It completely pulls the rug out of the rest of his life, which is also when he’ll be most vulnerable and least able to push through hardships. That pension is also too little to truly retire on, maybe the old man has been on survival mode for a long time. Maybe. I was once poor enough that 15 dollars’ worth of an unexpected expense caused enough anxiety to make me want to recalculate my budget that month. I was in college with a minimum wage job and doing everything I could to save a dollar and still only keeping my head above water, relying on sharing a room for rent. Would I have risked my job? Hell no. But would I have taken 7$ from somewhere if I felt I could truly get away with it and I was taking it from some large organization that is guaranteed to stay running from government? Maybe. It might mean a dinner I really needed to keep going. It would still weigh on my conscience, but your brain and sense of self can change when you’re that vulnerable for that long.

It took many years for me to undo some of the effects that has on your sympathetic system of the brain. Still probably fuels some things.

I could easily see how someone could become callous to such small thefts as a wrong deed and even somewhat justified if they felt a part of an unfair system. Which is arguable. There’s plenty of people who try to take advantage or take the opportunity to knock you down as less-than because of your financial situation when you are that poor. Life is different. The world in which you live is very different. I don’t know every detail, all I know is it’s not as easy to judge as someone who doesn’t have or hasn’t had those hardships.

Sorry to belabor the point, but it’s also worth pointing out that even from a more pragmatic standpoint, we know that overly punitive sentences result in more recidivism across different types of crime, especially if you’re exacerbating the reason they might’ve done it in the first place.

Not that much over 7 dollars, get fucked

Still seems quite excessive

Ah yeah, I’m sure lack of due process in an authoritarian regime leaves freedom of speech and accurate reporting of power abuse from the state completely unaffected.

Holy shit, you came back to write this? lol Amazing

This is the real question. Americans don’t give enough of a shit to lift a finger and do anything about it.

Without due process and unchecked power, Bukele’s regime are the new gangsters. You haven’t solved anything.

I’ll take your wife

It was lost a long time ago for the lower classes and those with the least power. It’s the middle class that it’s catching up to.

A lot of the commenters here can’t legally consent to anything, then

I don’t understand what your point is in this context.

Alcohol impairment can be very messy. I know someone who had 1 and a half drinks, had no speech slurring or obvious signs of being black-out drunk, but did not remember a third of the night the next day because she’s a lightweight that’s drank a single-digit number of times in her life (she’d also eaten very little that day and had some recent sleep debt). I would not have guessed she was blackout drunk, she was just talking about her problems and was articulate the entire time I saw her. If I didn’t know she had been drinking, I can’t think of how I would’ve known short of some kind of specific motor function test that’s made to suss that out/harder than just sitting around, talking, and occasionally going to the restroom. She just looked a little tired. When we spoke later, she didn’t remember basically anything after a certain point (a couple of hours’ worth) and wondered if some vague flashes of memories had been dreams. It was rather surprising to me.

We need to do some hard thinking about systemic fixes in a vacuum. We really don’t have a perfect answer to preventing eventual power disparities that eventually accelerate in a game theoretical sense, imho, and we probably want as best of an answer as possible to rally around and hopefully one day test. Patching what we have now is a more reachable option, but even that needs to be defined better as well, imo. I’m talking ranked voting, removing money influence, market collusion, market manipulation, oligopolies, no media monopolies, removing taxes havens while not incentivizing the chasing of loop holes; vs direct democracy or adjacently less-representative forms.

To play devil’s advocate, because this is where my fears and doubts lie, is do we (as humanists/anti-authoritarians worldwide) have enough nation-states with enough manpower to fight back the current openly fascist ones if it came to it given that authoritarianism and tolerance to it is worryingly on the rise in traditionally democratic first-world countries? It seems that maybe due to current analytical tools like palantir, psy ops from social media and regular media, (or for one reason or another); mass-control government factions are reaping the benefits of a sedated population, the outrage may simply never reach a point of action because it is being actively dissipated the Goldilocks amount relative to the rate of increase in power disparity.

My own big problem with it all is that we keep talking about guns to fight back, but drones and the network of surveillance cameras that exist we also really need to talk about, including the doorbell ones that law enforcement already has access to.