be capable of doing terrible things given the right circumstances, and therefore viciously retributive responses to wrongdoing are immoral.
An idea that originally attracted me to Left politics was that virtue & vice are largely products of the environment; that we would all...
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This idea largely seems to have disappeared. We hear very little talk of the possibility of redemption or rehabilitation. Instead, we get...
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"progressives" calling for harsher punishments, extrajudicial punishment, consequences that follow people around for a lifetime, and so on.
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It's as thought the Left, when it comes to particular classes of crime, have adopted the Daily Mail's playbook. It's depressing to see...
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people who ought to know better suggesting that brutalizing life experience plays no causal role in people's bad behavior. But of course it
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bloody does. The argument that terrible things happen to people, and they don't go on to commit heinous crimes, therefore there is no link
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between the two is (a) an awfully bad argument; and (b) precisely the same argument that right-wingers used to deploy to dismiss links...
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between poverty and crime, etc. If you consider yourself progressive, and you're tempted by that sort of argument, you need to start...
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thinking a bit harder. Same goes for the link between mental illness and violence. It doesn't follow from the fact that mental illness...
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overall is inversely correlated with violence crime, that mental illness is not a causal factor in any particular case. And it doesn't...
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follow that just because you've been living non-violently with your mental illness that mental illness cannot be a causal factor, & thereby
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diminish culpability, in somebody else's case. The Left used to be good seeing the limits of personal responsibility. It's now crap at it.
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