pop morality

[TheRocketSurgeon]

You know I use prison analogies just for the opportunity to push your buttons right? and like a Swiss watch you keep near perfect time.

You know that makes you an asshole, when you deliberately try to push peoples' psychological buttons in order to cause them distress and/or make them react angrily, right? And I don't know what "button" you think you pushed. I was simply trying to set you straight about how prisoners (typically) see the Warden. You're wrong about it. Sorry, but you are.

While I'm sure your an expert on what goes one behind closed cell room doors.. at night.. But, unless you spent time in a 23 hour lock down for 20 years I'm going to have to ask you to put your prison card back in your... where ever they make you keep it. the analogy I used was place on a shelf above your pay grade.

They made us pin our ID to our shirt with a clip, if that's what you mean... but it's not, unfortunately. I did spend a significant amount of time in 23-hour lockdown, back in the first couple of years in jail when they were trying to force me to plead guilty to a crime of which I was innocent, but I had only a couple of months in the Hole during my actual prison stay, following a fight in which I hurt a guy pretty badly after he tried to sexually assault me. They actually tried to charge me with a new crime, but the local DA dismissed the charges as soon as they hit her desk because the guy whose skull I split was a known serial rapist.

As to the analogy thing, I'm amazed--truly--at your degree of arrogance. Your analogy was perfectly clear and obvious to all of us: you think that people who are under the control of an "Ultimate Authority" will automatically chafe against that authority, and I explained (or tried to explain) to you that such is not the case, even with prisoners. We understand that when a law is broken, society says you have to go to prison, and that prisons need someone to run them; we also understand that people in positions of power can abuse that power, and so they will hold a Warden accountable for the way in which (s)he runs the prison. This analogy holds for atheists, when reading what people like you claim are the rules to which we are being held accountable... we find the policies as stated in writing to be ridiculous, as we have so often pointed out here.

The difference here, of course, is that the prison warden can be proved to be real... all you have is a set of documents written a long time ago, by a diverse group of people, edited and copied endlessly by others hundreds of years later, in which they talk about a warden and even claim to have met him, but no one anywhere in the prison can be found who has actually seen this warden... instead (to follow the analogy), what I see is a group of fellow prisoners who claim there's a warden, that they know him, and that I should follow these odd rules they carry around with them "because the Warden said so".

I got to hear the other side of things. My dad spent 15 years? maybe 20 as a teacher/guard/program director, and while he was in a min security area most of the time, they did have 'lock down' and he even had the power to send inmates there. those he sent to lock down (especially those he sent away for weeks at a time for stupid stuff) defiantly thought him 'immoral.'

The deal was though he knew certain people did not play well with others, and while "I maybe sitting on to of a keg of dynamite if I pull the fuse out, and get rid of it, me and everyone else is safe." (Till it all blows up in your face.)
so he looked hard at certain people to violate them, and send them away in an effort to pull the fuse. I can promise you those people who had their freedoms all taken away and put in a hole 23 hours aday for weeks on end (As per my original senerio, and not your wonderful life experience) did not see him as a moral person. Despite the reasons and relative safety he bought with his actions to personnel and inmate alike.

That's just not true, either. Guys who get violations know when they're "good for it", as they say, and they do their time when they are caught infracting the rules-- as a prison law clerk (jailhouse lawyer), I dealt every single day with guys accused of Conduct Violations, and I learned that 99% of prisoners readily admit when they have broken the rules and are ready to accept the consequences of their actions. It's a movie trope which says all prisoners claim to be innocent; in reality, the opposite is true, and guys who claim to be innocent are mocked openly by other prisoners, even though statistically even the federal government admits that 1 in 50 are wrongfully convicted, and as many as 1 in 10 are incarcerated on charges more severe than their actual actions deserved.

I have no doubt that there are some guys your dad sent to the Hole ("lockdown" means sent to your normal cell with the doors locked; the Hole is a special set of punishment cells, and are what you were referencing, above) who were unregenerate and resented being punished for anything they did, but it's just not the way things were for most of us unless the penalties were overly harsh without cause or the rules were arbitrarily and capriciously applied.

Your frequent references to some sort of abuse you seem to assume I suffered behind bars is a bit disconcerting, to me... I think you have some sort of male rape fascination. You should probably seek help for that.