(October 7, 2015 at 5:28 pm)MentalGiant Wrote: I have more than one family member who has been/is currently in prison who have near-genius IQ's. Unfortunately, intelligence often comes paired with arrogance and an invincibility complex.
Meanwhile, college has become a total fucking joke/money making/social control scheme. I don't buy for one second that college students today are anywhere near as smart as in generations past.
Perhaps we have hit a slope-intercept point at which more and more people have been caught up in the Drug War and its consequences (even a smart guy in the 'hood is likely to get caught up in gang violence, when he has few other real options and the failing school isn't much help to him) end up in prison, raising the number of high-IQ prisoners, and the colleges have become more about money, lowering the IQ averages even at Ivy League schools.
There are a great many reasons smart people wind up committing crimes other than arrogance or a feeling of invincibility. One of the main failings, I think, of the American moral compass is that the average middle-class WASP cannot imagine a scenario wherein he can see himself doing the same thing as those poor, uneducated, "other people". Yet if they were in the other person's situation, they would very likely be. It is a lie we have been sold, to suggest that the only reason people go to prison is socio/psychopathy or other criminal "mindsets". They exist, but they are far from the majority of prisoners. The US prison industrial complex has seen to it that practically everything is now illegal, and it's not even necessary to actually commit a crime to go to prison on a false conviction, so rotten-to-the-core has our trial court system become. Finally, a person at 17 is not the same as a person at 25, let alone 35. Look back on your own life and ask yourself why you did the crazy things you did when you were 17...one of the luxuries of being a middle-class WASP is the ability to be crazy teenagers without a high risk of encountering Law Enforcement, or just getting slapped on the wrist if we do.
A Christian told me: if you were saved you cant lose your salvation. you're sealed with the Holy Ghost
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
I replied: Can I refuse? Because I find the entire concept of vicarious blood sacrifice atonement to be morally abhorrent, the concept of holding flawed creatures permanently accountable for social misbehaviors and thought crimes to be morally abhorrent, and the concept of calling something "free" when it comes with the strings of subjugation and obedience perhaps the most morally abhorrent of all... and that's without even going into the history of justifying genocide, slavery, rape, misogyny, religious intolerance, and suppression of free speech which has been attributed by your own scriptures to your deity. I want a refund. I would burn happily rather than serve the monster you profess to love.
