I was recently reading a bullshit article on CNN’s website. CNN doesn’t have any articles that are not bullshit, by the way.
So, the article I was reading was about the rise of heroin abuse in the United States and was written by some guy who did not go into any detail about the fact that the War on Drugs is a way to enrich the Prison Industrial Complex and to throw people – mostly minorities – into prisons which are increasingly becoming privatized, which allows a pretty obvious opportunity for Judges to be paid to throw people into prisons, and so the cycle goes.
Does anyone else think it is absolutely hilarious that Americans have to be told how free they are over and over again, yet America puts a larger percentage of its population into prisons than any other country on earth, possibly ever?
Okay, for those of you taking your hat off during the Star Spangled Banner – The list of countries on earth includes Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Kistchwana.
Also, Kistchwana is not a country, but if it was I’m assuming it would be pretty fucked up.
Anyway, here are a few snippets I pulled out of the article about heroin:
Todd (not his real name) is a friend of a friend. He’s a rare breed—a finance guy who lives in L.A.
“You’d be surprised how many people are doing it” says John (not his real name.)
Okay, so according to the stats I read, roughly 3 million people in the U.S.A. use heroin.
Can you, cheese dick Associated Press writer, explain to me why you feel the need to give pseudonyms to people whose surnames aren’t even being used?
Is it really worth your time to change Michael to John or vise versa?
Do you think that someone is going to randomly read that their friend Bill has been quoted in an article about heroin and then throw an intervention for everyone that they know whose first or middle name is Bill on the off chance that they are the guy in the article?
Another question: What if you accidentally outed someone named John when you used John as a pseudonym. Did you ever think about that? What if you cost some guy named John his job?
Did you think about that?
The only reason I can think of to possibly change what probability would dictate is a fairly common name, to another equally common name, outside of a childish fantasy of playing a journalist, would be that the person quoted in the article has a first name that almost nobody else in the United States has.
The kind of first name that would instantly rule out every other person in America as being the person quoted.
Like recently, I was reading an article about people who go into people’s wallets when they are over at their friend’s house to watch football, and they quoted my friend MOTHAFUCKINGWALTERFROMCLEARWATERFLORIDA – his legal first name – although we just refer to him as MO.
I just wish that the journalist could have changed his name to Dale, because it cost me a friend.
Really?