http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR1bbBg9bP4&feature=watch_response
I have gall enough to say that no one is born a criminal. A criminal, after all, is someone who commits crimes; a category into which being born hardly falls. Surely one who has never committed any crimes can hardly be called a criminal with any degree of accuracy.
Yet, every criminal who exists and ever has existed was once a child. The act of becoming a criminal, when it happens, happens somewhere along the line.
Odds are, most criminals were not criminals in preschool or grade school. Very few who slip into such a lifestyle have the slide begin before adolescence. This means that, most of us, at some point, have gone to school with people who, since, have committed a few crimes. Are we responsible for those crimes? Are you responsible for someone who took to selling drugs in High School whom you haven’t seen since you were both five years old? Does the entire population belong behind bars? Of course not.
“Barack Obama has associated with domestic terrorists, and just listen to the vitriol from his preacher. If you object to domestic terrorism and vitriol, this means that you must object to him as well.”
“Margaret Sanger was a communist sympathizer. Since communism is wrong, sympathizing with communists must be wrong, which means that Sanger and everything she stood for must be wrong. That means contraception and atheism must both be wrong.”
Just the other day, I gave a couple bucks to a guy I came across on the street. He said he was trying to get across town and that was good enough for me. Now is it possible that, instead, he used that money to buy drugs? Is it possible that this is money that contributed to drug operations in my area? Yes. I took a risk, and whichever is the case, I will probably never know for certain. But I trust the odds. I know that, in order for any society to function, most of the people within that society have to be at least mostly honest most of the time. Their habits, their behavioral norms, must favor honesty, or else society could not function. So by my reckoning, the fact that society functions most of the time indicates that the odds that he was telling the truth were high enough to bet on.
Now what if he used that money to buy drugs? What if a police sting nabs that cash and the investigation traces it back to me somehow? Does it make me a drug dealer or a drug user? No. At worst, it makes me an unwitting accomplice.
This fallacy is called Guilt by Association. This is what occurs whenever someone is blamed for something objectionable done at some point by someone he or she has come into contact with at some point, and as I illustrated previously, it can be brought to bear against anyone. I think the problems with it are pretty clear, so I’m going to leave it at that.
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