alt Hacker News- "Tell me more about how a judge is calling people privileged"
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- "The family received food stamps for four years beginning when Katherine was 12. They were homeless for six months. "I came from nothing," Forrest said. "I came from a father who made no money. He was a playwright and then a writer, and even though he published a lot of books, I was a complete scholarship student all the way through."
Yeah, I read that before I said that, and I said it anyway, because that in no way changes anything. The accusation against Ullbricht was uttered by an adult Federal Judge with net worth in the millions, not a 12-year-old on food stamps. Just because she started out underprivileged, does not make her underprivileged now.
And look, I don't even agree with the narrative of "privilege". I think if you see someone being treated badly, the solution to that is to treat that person better, not to adamantly insist that people who are treated better are privileged. Calling someone privileged is pretty much always an ad-hominem argument to discard what they have to say.
I disagree with Forrest, not because she's privileged, although she IS privileged. I disagree with Forrest because the argument that purer drugs kill fewer people than cut ones is just as valid coming from a street crack dealer as it is coming from Ross Ullbricht. I don't care who says an idea, I care whether the idea is true or not.
Do you have any actual refutation of that claim, or are you going to continue to insist that who said it is more important than whether it's true or not?
EDIT: Ironically, the argument Forrest is making here is actually a particularly offensive appeal to privileged (read: racist) misinformation. She references "crack dealers" specifically because crack has a reputation as the worst of the worst of drugs, when in fact crack is extremely similar to regular cocaine. The difference is that crack is used by poor, often black users, whereas cocaine is used by rich, often white, users. But criminal charges for crack vs. cocaine are still drastically different, although this has improved[1]. This is part of a larger pattern where drugs are prosecuted with more severity if they're used by poor black people than if they are used by middle class white people. For example, PCP is a whole schedule higher than, although these are chemically similar drugs with similar effects and harms in any of the scientific literature I can find.
[1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/crack-vrs-po...