> If you read a story about a drug kingpin being convicted at trial, do you assume that he might be innocent?
That's a very fair question.
To answer: I try as hard as I can to not draw any conclusion from something like that.
I'll be 50 this year. I've seen so many examples of media manipulation, "spin", crooked prosecutors, etc... that I try very hard not to jump to a conclusion. Especially with outrage stories like "child pornography was found on his laptop". There are countless examples of police and three letter agents getting caught red-handed planting this stuff, so I'm always skeptical of news stories like that.
Then there's the whole argument of "what's a criminal?". It's frequently the ethical choice to violate an unjust law. Was Ghandi a criminal? If someone broke a law, but then the law was changed or removed, are they still a criminal?
What kind of drug kingpin? (I'm purposefully being pedantic here for rhetorical purposes) Were they "dealing" ibogaine? Maybe for injured vets, but the news is just calling him a drug kingpin? It's strange to me that ibogaine is schedule 1, and I probably wouldn't consider them to be a criminal for doing that. Or maybe they were doing some combination of things, some good some bad. Or maybe there's a good reason why it's schedule 1, and I just don't understand and they really are a bad guy.
My point is that there's usually nuance. I don't trust stories like that, I don't "believe" news articles. I read them, take them in, and reserve judgement. Really. My initial, unconscious reaction and inner voice immediately says "are they framing him? What's the other side of the story? If he is a bad guy, does he see himself that way?"
I've just been burned too many times in my life by getting sucked into media stories that I believed were true, and made an idiot out of myself because I didn't think critically about it and jumped on a bandwagon that later turned out to be BS.
That's a very fair question.
To answer: I try as hard as I can to not draw any conclusion from something like that.
I'll be 50 this year. I've seen so many examples of media manipulation, "spin", crooked prosecutors, etc... that I try very hard not to jump to a conclusion. Especially with outrage stories like "child pornography was found on his laptop". There are countless examples of police and three letter agents getting caught red-handed planting this stuff, so I'm always skeptical of news stories like that.
Then there's the whole argument of "what's a criminal?". It's frequently the ethical choice to violate an unjust law. Was Ghandi a criminal? If someone broke a law, but then the law was changed or removed, are they still a criminal?
What kind of drug kingpin? (I'm purposefully being pedantic here for rhetorical purposes) Were they "dealing" ibogaine? Maybe for injured vets, but the news is just calling him a drug kingpin? It's strange to me that ibogaine is schedule 1, and I probably wouldn't consider them to be a criminal for doing that. Or maybe they were doing some combination of things, some good some bad. Or maybe there's a good reason why it's schedule 1, and I just don't understand and they really are a bad guy.
My point is that there's usually nuance. I don't trust stories like that, I don't "believe" news articles. I read them, take them in, and reserve judgement. Really. My initial, unconscious reaction and inner voice immediately says "are they framing him? What's the other side of the story? If he is a bad guy, does he see himself that way?"
I've just been burned too many times in my life by getting sucked into media stories that I believed were true, and made an idiot out of myself because I didn't think critically about it and jumped on a bandwagon that later turned out to be BS.