Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
Number of alleged ‘witches’ and ‘wizards’ killed in witch trials during the early modern area.
I love this because the Spanish Inquisition is always presented in its cartoonish Black Legend role, when the real fanatic witch hunters have always been the Protestants.
…France, Poland and most of the Holy Roman Empire were Catholic states. Get your history straight, back then the Protestants were a little too busy getting persecuted themselves to also burn witches :v
First of all, clearly defining the period covered by this map would be important, as a 5-10 year interval would effect important changes in whether an area is majorly Catholic or Protestans. Also about the Catholic/Protestant divide, there are no reliable data for witch hunting in Britain and the North American colonies because there was no unified, “official” organization like the Inquisitions in both Catholic and Protestant countries of continental Europe, so that bit is very difficult to gauge. Specially when you add the fact that English “Witch Finders” got a personal economical stake in finding “witches”, and no supervision by any kind of tribunals, like the Inquisitions did. All in all though, Germany had a staggering body count even after it became a mostly Protestant area. So did Switzerland, who among other people burned the man who first studied the double circulation of blood in the human body. You know, that witch.
The importance of having actual, accountable tribunals can be shown by, for example, the fact the Spanish Inquisition had a higher count of “not guilty” veredicts than “guilty” ones. Also, most executions by it were for charges of heresy and not witchcraft. It was also a political tool used to dispose of uncomfortable people who couldn’t be attacked some other way, and to keep a “healthy” climate of distrust.
i found a d20 in my kitchens junk drawer and i absentmindedly rolled it and got a 1 and was like, aw dunk, and then i immediately stubbed my toe into the trashcan while trying (and missing) to throw something away
i just had the funniest experience in vr chat, i joined a random server and the one i joined had Japanese people so i waddled around in my goofy club penguin avatar that i have saved, after a while a guy walks up to me and clones my avatar so were both penguins then another guy shows up and clone my avatar
now keep in mind there only speaking Japanese i don’t know what they are saying, then another guy joins in, so i got a group of three penguin friends
we just waddle around and goof about, the one of them tries to talk to me, but not only do i not have a mic i also don’t speak Japanese, they figure out i don’t speak Japanese and start listing various places, they get the part of being European right, and after listing a lot of places they ask if im from the UK and when i nod they all just start cheering. after hanging out for a while one of them gets real close to me and whispers…
Maybe this was common knowledge to some folks but I only learned today that koalas have so little cognitive power, they won’t recognize leaves as food if they’re not on a tree branch. They have almost 0 learning capability or problem solving ability.
For years people thought that you couldn’t keep koalas in captivity because they were just ‘too sensitive’ and ‘meant to be wild’
Then they realized that the koalas literally just couldn’t figure out that leaves in a bowl were food
Apparently the koala’s brain represents only 0.2% of its body weight, the lowest of any mammal. In addition, it occupies only 61% of its already unusually small skull cavity, it’s completely smooth all over and there’s a big hole through the middle where the lobes never connect.
