{ϕ; ¬ϕ} ⊢ ψ

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

like, we can all agree that the sentence for drug possession, drunk driving, trespassing, etc. is not execution, and even if it was, that’s after they’ve been arrested and convicted. cops are not judges, so it’s not their call to decide if someone is guilty or to punish them for it. so why does it matter if someone is “a known criminal,” or if they have drugs in their system, or if they have a gun on their person?

“well, obviously it’s to bias the public against the person who was killed,” you might say. okay, but why is that?

it’s because they know that we think of guilty people as less than human, and innocent people as blameless. therefore the murdered person deserved to die (because guilty people deserve what they get), and the cop is innocent (he was just trying to protect people!). if it didn’t work as a tactic, then they wouldn’t do it!

the fridge-freezer is in the kitchen. Not only are there dishes every day, not only are there food preparation surfaces of various kinds every day, not only are there crumbs and odds and ends that fall on the floor every day ... but the fridge-freezer is in the kitchen. The oven is in the kitchen, the food cupboards are in the kitchen, and above all THE KITCHEN BIN IS IN THE KITCHEN.

I mean, it's not like the bathroom is all sweetness and light, but seriously! Who in their right mind is choosing the bathroom?!?!?!?

As machines, rooms are systems consisting of structures and devices which are intended to support certain activities. However, there is a truism that many of us on [tumblr] are familiar with:

The purpose of a system is what it does.

This means that, if you start doing things like using your kitchen counters for paperwork, then the system naïvely referred to as a kitchen would be doing office-behavior, would therefore have the purpose of being an office, and would therefore be an office. As we all know, magic buttons are well aware of such nuances, and therefore the kitchen-cleaning button would refuse to clean your kitchen-cum-office.

HARMFUL GAY STEREOTYPES EMBODIED BY MOHG

lives in sewer

kidnaps children actually he was cleared of this one

us: WE DON'T KNOW. SHE SHOWED UP AT OUR HOUSE TWO DAYS AGO

the vet and techs were all really shocked by how sweet and stable she is and one was even like "she kind of acts like a service dog?" which I took to mean she was observing the same stuff that I was when I was thinking yesterday that she seems like she has received some positive reinforcement training. she's a very mysterious dog. she needed to take her Emotional Support Cow Ear with her to the x-ray, but she wasn't guard-y about it at all when the techs picked it up to give back to her if she dropped it etc.