But stories like this always make me wonder how society is ever going to find a path forward. The young idealist who saw a black man as a victim of the system ended up fleeing from him and living in hiding to protect herself and their child. But on the opposite end, some comments here feel this guy deserves no break at all.
How do we make a better world when it clearly doesn't work to say "You were just a victim and you deserve better!" but it also doesn't work to err on the side of "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
I'm kind of glad to see he found some sort of path out, against very long odds. We seem to do such a poor job of that at the societal level.
I think this is an excellent observation and I agree that it's very hard.
I'm no expert whatsoever, but I think that the key to all of this stuff is nuance. Nuance, nuance, nuance. Nobody's totally good or totally bad, and you just need to dig deep enough to see the details. A jury can see all the nuance (if there's enough lawyer time/money to dig it up). A judge can (eg in contintenal European courts).
Here in NL there's a popular narrative that judges are old rich white dudes who are disconnected from reality (they're actually mostly middle-age white women, but OK). I never understood that narrative - these are people who get confronted with all the nasty parts of society in their full nuance, all day every day. They see that somebody commits wellfare fraud, but they do it out of desparation to keep their family afloat. They see that someone beats up their wife, but it's driven by harsh inescapable alcoholism. These are tragedies plain and simple, and it's extremely hard to just say either "you were just a victim!" or "lock you up forever!".
Personally I think mob outrage (eg on Twitter), or justice processes with too little money for proper lawyering, are a serious threat to society precisely because of this. If there's no time or space for nuance, everything becomes black&white and tragedies deepen.
Alcohol is not a drug that makes people violent. It merely lowers inhibitions. If drunkards are violent, the violence can't reasonably be blamed on the alcohol per se.
Giving people a chance at a fresh start only works if it involves a "tough love" approach with an explicit expectation that future behavior must be better. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior and it is notoriously hard to get people to actually change, often even in cases where they want to change.
People who get told "It's not your fault. You were the victim of a broken system." tend to not conclude that their behavior still needs to change going forward. That message tends to actively hinder the reform process.
They tend to want to justify their past behavior as okay because they had a good reason and it wasn't their fault. This tends to result in monsters, not reformed lives.
Even if you supposedly "do everything right," extremely warped people tend to be talented at running things through their warped minds and coming up with creative interpretations that just keep justifying their horrifying behavior.
> Alcohol is not a drug that makes people violent. It merely lowers inhibitions.
Even if lowering inhibitions was the only mechanism by which alcohol induced violence (it's not, despite the popularity of the myth that disinhibition is the only mechanism by which alcohol affects behavior; for instance, various forms of alcohol- or alcohol-withdrawal induced psychoses exist that have nothing to do with disinhibition), alcohol would still be a drug that induced violence.
> If drunkards are violent, the violence can't reasonably blamed on the alcohol per se.
On the one hand, nothing can be blamed on alcohol because alcohol isn't a moral agent. On the other hand, there's nothing special about disinhibition as a mechanism of inducing behavioral change that makes the disinhibitor any less the cause of the resulting behavioral change than it would be if it induced the change by some other mechanism.
They used to claim that alcohol caused pedophilia. It doesn't. Pedophiles drink to intentionally lower their inhibitions when planning to abuse.
You can claim there's no distinction, but there is. Drinking doesn't cause people to suddenly and uncharacteristically lust after children. Lowering your inhibitions to facilitate some impetus already inside you is different in important ways from instilling something in you that wasn't previously there.
> They used to claim that alcohol caused pedophilia.
I'm not sure who "they" are, but this is changing the subject. Alcohol absolutely does cause violence, including by mechanisms other than disinhibition.
> Pedophiles drink to intentionally lower their inhibitions when planning to abuse.
People who are able to form a plan to abuse don't need to lower inhibitions; if its done with a conscious plan, then having something to point to (even to onesself) to evade responsibility is more likely than lowering inhibitions as the motive. There are also absolutely cases of people who abuse under the influence of alcohol without a conscious plan prior to becoming intoxicated (which may still be a matter of disinhibition, but very different in character--if not ultimate moral culpability--from when alcohol is part of a plan of abuse, and in any case this is all besides the point on the question of violence generally, which alcohol, through various induced psychoses, among other means, absolutely does cause by means other than disinhibition.)
> Drinking doesn't cause people to suddenly and uncharacterustifally lust after children.
I don't really care if people have un-acted-upon socially-unacceptable impulses (pretty much everyone does, even if it isn't pedophilia, which I have no idea why you have decided to shift the conversation to from violence.) Alcohol absolutely does induce people to act on such impulses when they otherwise would not choose to, even when they become intoxicated without any intent to act on any such impulse--that's disinhibition--and absolutely does also lead to dangerous socially-unacceptable action not related to disinhibition, as well.
> Lowering your inhibitions to facilitate some impetus already inside you is different in important ways from instilling something in you that wasn't previously there.
There are certainly contexts in which the difference is important, but its absolutely not important when discussing the social costs associated with the drug in question and, in any case, the mechanisms by which alcohol leads to violence are not limited to disinhibition in any case, no matter how popular that myth is. Psychosis induced by alcohol intoxication is real. Psychosis associated with alcohol withdrawal is also real. Both can produce violence, and neither has anything to do with disinhibition.
I wasn't trying to shift the conversation anywhere. I just felt it would be an easier to parse example. People typically comprehend the idea that sexual orientation doesn't suddenly and magically change because you had a beer. General understanding of anger management tends to lack a clear and bright line of that sort.
I would say that there is something specific about alcohol that increases violence actually. MDMA, Cannabis, and various other drugs also lower inhibitions but I've never seen anyone on MDMA or Cannabis get violent or even come anywhere close to violence.
Alcohol is an absolutely brain-warping drug and can create behaviors and new personalities which are light-years from how somebody was originally. I know this from personal experience seeing two close friends pass into alcoholic territory and become completely different people.
> I have my own anecdotal first-hand experience that contradicts yours.
Leaving aside reliability concerns of anecdote in associating cause and effect, an anecdote could can suffice to say that alcohol does induce violence by means other than disinhibition (since if does so even once, this is true) but it could suffice (even, again, leaving aside reliability concerns) to say that it does not, because it not doing so in one particular case (or even a larger number of particular cases) does not support the argument that it cannot do so. All you can get from "it didn't happen this time" is "it doesn't always happen", not "it doesn't happen at all".
There can be many confounding factors in a particular instance. Correlation does not prove causation.
I've had personal experience with thinking X caused Y and only realizing years later that there was some unaccounted for variable that I had been unaware of at the time.
> There can be many confounding factors in a particular instance. Correlation does not prove causation.
Yes, that is a source of reliability errors in associating cause with effect in anecdote, which is why I was discussing what was possible even in the semi-ideal case that such reliability errors were not a concern. Obviously, realistically, neither case can be made by anecdote, but anecdote can't even contradict one side of that discussion, because something not occurring in one case isn't inconsistent with it occurring sometimes, while something occurring even once is inconsistent with it never occurring.
If it's unreliable, it's unreliable. Setting up hypotheticals where you can rely on it so as to suggest that my unreliable anecdote is inferior to their unreliable anecdote is not a good faith tactic of debate.
MDMA had been used to treat PTSD unlike alcohol, that's not an anecdote, it's the direct positive effects tested in multiple experiments. Also the amount of crimes commited under drug influence (percentage wise) is higher on alcohol than marihuana and MDMA, that's also not anecdote is statistics that repeat time and time again in multiple nations.
> But stories like this always make me wonder how society is ever going to find a path forward.
Maybe the mere fact that you are thinking this way is a good sign.
In a sense we are the products of our time, in relation to our environment. It seems to me that people appreciate both the empathic and rational more and more.
Europe basically shipped its rejects to the US (and Australia), then likes to claim moral superiority and better ability to play "let's all just get along."
But stories like this always make me wonder how society is ever going to find a path forward. The young idealist who saw a black man as a victim of the system ended up fleeing from him and living in hiding to protect herself and their child. But on the opposite end, some comments here feel this guy deserves no break at all.
How do we make a better world when it clearly doesn't work to say "You were just a victim and you deserve better!" but it also doesn't work to err on the side of "The beatings shall continue until morale improves."
I'm kind of glad to see he found some sort of path out, against very long odds. We seem to do such a poor job of that at the societal level.