Millions of people worldwide don’t have clean water to drink, even though the United Nations deemed water a basic human right more than a decade ago. Yet, even as extreme heat dries up more aquifers and wells and leaves more people thirsty, luxury water has become fashionable among the world’s privileged, who uncap and taste it like fine wine.
Fine water is drawn from volcanic rock in Hawaii, from icebergs that have fallen from melting glaciers in Norway, or from droplets of morning mist in Tasmania. The rarest of all, often bottled in collectable glass, sell for hundreds of dollars apiece.
Associated Press teams reported on the trend from India, Bhutan and Greece.
I’ve worked with very nice people convicted of murder. The world is not black and white. We all live in the grey.
Any person is capable of murder if pushed beyond their threshold. There are common mitigating factors like alcohol/substance use, high danger/crime neighborhoods, and childhood abuse.
I had a forensic client who committed a particularly bad murder, and he had antisocial personality disorder (sociopathy) from extreme childhood trauma/abuse, had a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder with paranoid auditory, visual, and command hallucinations, and he was also very sleep-deprived and high on meth.
That was a recipe for disaster, and he brutally, heinously murdered his childhood best friend and roommate. He tried to call the person he murdered to bail him out of jail, not truly comprehending what he’d done. He refused the NGRI plea and told the judge “I’m guilty. I deserve the time.” He got 20 years.
Another convicted murderer I worked with was a very sweet elderly man who was a vietnam spook. He got a murder rap when he was having a psychotic episode/flashbacks and fired into a crowd.
I worked with a lot of people who were in and out of the DOC their whole lives, trapped in the revolving door. They weren’t bad people. They were victimized people who needed help. Most of these people never truly had support before in their lives.
Many murder charges and harsh criminal sentences are pegged on lower-functioning individuals who cannot properly defend themselves. Police here in the U.S. are notorious for goating false confessions from this population. I worked with many people like this who were abused, chewed up, and spit out by the criminal justice system.
I worked with the population you’re ignorantly dehumanizing. You’re not justified. You’re just demonstrating your own narrow-mindedness. Dehumanizing is a bad thing. Period.
What you are doing is lumping innocent people falsely charged with murder (including low-functioning and disabled individuals) with brutal murderers. You’re also taking potentially a single, rash, worst mistake of someone’s life, and judging their entire personhood from it.
That’s bullshit. We all have a threshold for rationality and keeping our cool. There are typically other very important mitigating factors, especially alcohol/substance use, in which the perpetrator wasn’t in their right mind.
Anyone and everyone has the capacity for violence when pushed beyond our threshold. We switch from rational thinking to emotional thinking, which makes us feel more justified in our actions.
A great example of this where you can see someone lose their rationality is the behind the scenes of Bad Grampa with the penguin guy. You can watch as Johnny Knoxville slowly erodes his cool/capacity for rationality.
Now imagine you were being raped by your step brother and beaten by your step father every night. Imagine you join the military to turn your life around and escape, you excell, and then your schizophrenia symptoms manifest, and you’re discharged. You’re left with no resources, social or support system. You can’t maintain your medication prescription because of your disability. You are destitute and have to live a rough life on the streets to survive. You turn to drugs to ‘self-medicate’ and because everyone in your group is using. You fall into an addiction and you are high on meth, sleep deprived, awake now for over 3 days. On your walk back to your apartment, you (perceive that you) are being pursued by police choppers and the police are even hiding in the trees watching you on your walk home. You are extremely paranoid, hallucinating, and in survival mode. Then your roommate and childhood best friend is in the wrong place at the wrong time. You feel like your life is endangered, and command hallucinations are demanding you kill the assailant.
That’s the reality of that former client of mine. That’s the grey we all live in. A murder charge doesn’t mean someone is despicable, sub-human waste. They are a deeply flawed human being just like you and I. And they are capable of change, like that former client of mine. He turned his life around.
You’re not justified in dehumanizing this population whatsoever. Dehumanization is a despicable tactic employed by fascists and dictators, and attempts to justify cruelty against a group of people.
Ya, “murderers” was a bad example, but I stand by my point. Maybe replace “murderers” with “Fox News anchors” or “police”, someone who chooses actively to make the world a worse place for their own gain deserves dehumanization.
Thank you, @GONADS125