Sorry but that's bullshit.

It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose.

But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.

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20after4 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A system’s purpose is what it does, not what it claims to do.

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therealdrag0 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That doesn’t make sense. Such a “I’m 14 and this is deep” thought terminating cliche.

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array_key_first 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It does make sense, because if you were developing a bad or evil system then you would obviously want to obfuscate that as much as possible. The first thing you'd do, clearly, is proclaim that the purpose of the system is something good.

This is a common fallacy or I guess maybe shoddy reasoning I see often. Because someone or something either does not announce their intentions or says their intentions are good, then the thing they are using must also be good. Or, we must assume it is good until they announce they're going to use it for not-good purposes.

Like with Flock. There's a lot of people who think the simple defense that Flock thinks it is used to fight crime means it's good. Or DOGE. The simple defense that the people behind DOGE say it's to prevent fraud means it's good.

But what people say and what actually happens are two different things, and the what actually happens part is 1000x more important. Anyone can say anything, and obviously bad actors will lie. That's just a given. So you can't use the stated purpose of something as a defense for that something. You just can't, it makes no sense.

	▲	cindyllm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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salawat 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Will say every benefactor of people not thinking that way. The rest of us, on the other hand, look at the objective results and realize if you want them to change, you have to change the system.

	▲	therealdrag0 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well duh. “A system will do what it does” is true, but that should not be conflated with its intent or purpose or design which require understanding of human intent. And humans produce unintended results all the time.

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ahhhhnoooo 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The purpose of a system is what it does. If that wasn't the purpose, the system would be changed.

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therealdrag0 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That’s as dumbs as the saying “there can’t be a 100$ bill on the ground because if there was it’d have been picked up.”

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ahhhhnoooo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not at all like that?

Claiming that a system's purpose is something it consistently fails to do is absurd. Intentions don't matter, outcomes matter.

This is a pretty basic systems theorist argument, to be honest...

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therealdrag0 4 hours ago | parent [-]

A systems purpose depends on its creator. Creators regularly fail to produce intended results. It’s absurd to say an unintended result is the intended result

	▲	ahhhhnoooo 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It’s absurd to say an unintended result is the intended result I didn't say that. I said the unintended results are the purpose of a system, not the intent.
	▲	kennywinker 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How long is it ok to produce “unintended” results without changing anything, before you can say that’s now an expected part of the system? Because i think that’s the issue. It’s not that the US has a goal to criminalize poverty - the constitution doesn’t say anything about that - but since it’s been that way for so long it seems the system is unwilling to do what needs to be done to prevent that. It’s part of the expected behavior of the system.

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anonymousiam 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not as rare as you might think.

Organizations such as OSF/OSI (Open Society Foundations, not Open Software Foundation) have successfully placed their preferred candidates in positions of power in many major US jurisdictions. If you research, you'll see many cases of OSF DAs prosecuting or not prosecuting based on their political ideology. Many prosecutions are politically motivated, but now we have foundations funding activist candidates who are all pushing the same agenda. The result is diminished trust in government, which the activists will exploit to eventually make things even worse, because "capitalism is not working."

	▲	kennywinker 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You make it sound like they are doing corruption. I.e. don’t prosecute your friends, do prosecute your enemies. But this is more like using the power at your jurisdiction level to oppose unjust laws. I.e. where i live the city council long ago directed police to stop arresting people for marijuana possession - on the grounds that this is an unjust law and criminalizing it is tying up resources and doing more harm than good, and because the majority of the city’s population supports legalization. City gov doesn’t have the power to change those laws, but they can fix it locally by directing enforcement away from them. A decade later, it was legalized - imo proving that it was the right decision. This did not “diminish trust” in the gov. In fact, laws that the majority disagree with but stay on the books do far far more damage to the credibility of gov, in my opinion