This whole comment thread has been a crazy way to find out the ways people justify immoral behavior to themselves.

This kind of minor fraud is completely normalized within middle and upper classes. It's half the way many kids end up at these schools in the first place, thinking of the "pay-to-play" scandal at USC a while back.

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only-one1701 an hour ago | parent [-]

So it’s funny, I grew up upper middle class with an extremely severe morality taught to me re: this kind of thing — integrity, etc. My entire adult life has been a lesson in how that’s a maladaptive trait in America in 2025.

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afavour an hour ago | parent [-]

That has been one of the underpinning lessons of Trump's America to me. That playing by the rules and doing the right thing just makes me a sucker. Once a critical mass of people start to feel that way (if they don't already) it'll have a devastating effect on society.

(when I say "Trump's America" I don't directly mean Trump himself, though he's certainly a prominent example of it. It feels like it's everywhere. One of the first times I really noticed it was the Netflix show "Inventing Anna". A dramatization of the real life story of a scammer, Anna Sorokin. Netflix paid her $320,000 for her story. She led a life of crime and successfully profited from it. Now she's been on Dancing with the Stars, essentially she's been allowed to become the celebrity she pretended to be.)

	▲	saalweachter an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		"It's always been this way" and "everyone does it" are what bad people say to justify themselves.
	▲	watwut an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Donald Trump won twice. Republican party is mostly cheering everything he does. Ho won by lying a lot. Media mostly sanewashed it. Meanwhile, GOP complained they did not sanewashed it enough. HN itself and startup culture celebrate breaking the rules and laws to earn money. It is ok to break the law if you are rich enough. People here were defending gambling apps despite all the shady stuff they do just a few weeks ago. The white collar crime was barely prosecuted before, now the DOJ is loosing even the ability to prosecute it. So, I think the effect you worry about already happened, long time ago.