[dsfyu404ed]

>Are you seriously judging someone by their great-great-uncle's book?

Not the person you're referring to but barring exceptional circumstances the apple can only fall so far from the tree.

That said, I don't see why being raised by a family full of super hardcore leftists has more than a passing impact on his politics wrt petty crime specifically. He could just as well have fallen on the "we should go hard on petty crime because it undermines social cohesion and respect for the rules of the state" side of things (obviously that's not how he turned out for reasons that are well documented but you get the point).

[mc32]

In interviews he has said his experience growing up with two parents doing time for whatever it was (accessory to murder?) influenced his view on crime and punishment.

[kilo_bravo_3]

As far as I'm aware, in 2019 only one country has an official policy of prejudging people based on the actions of their family members.

North Korea.

If my life had been weighed based on the actions of a few of my relatives, I would have been executed at birth.

[dsfyu404ed]

Oh cut out the strawmanning. Obviously (one would hope it's obvious) we don't want the one entity that can use violence to officially or unofficially judge people based on their parents but individuals are not held to the same standards and expecting people's values to at least be correlated with the values of the people who raised them is not unreasonable and it's a pretty decent rule of thumb.

[kilo_bravo_3]

>expecting people's values to at least be correlated with the values of the people who raised them is not unreasonable and it's a pretty decent rule of thumb.

I'm more of a "content of one's individual character" guy.

And I'm not an proto-human from 500,000 years ago who has to rapidly distinguish friend from foe or face a painful death on a grassy plain in what is now Ethiopia so I have the wonderful luxury of being able to evaluate everyone individually.

Expecting people's values to at least be correlated with the values of the people who raised them is unreasonable and it is not a decent rule of thumb.

It is prejudice.

Here's a pretty good analysis of Patanjali's statements on prejudice (Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (4.24-28)):

>Prejudice is always based on misperception, which comes from ignorance. Ignorance arises from being told a lie and believing it and then continuing to tell yourself and others that lie—deepening your belief in it to such an extent that it affects how you see yourself and the others whom you are prejudiced against, resulting in a distortion of the truth. Prejudice is a mental affliction that pollutes the mind with deception. To rid yourself of prejudice, you must destroy the lie at the root. Only knowledge can burn prejudice at its root and reveal the truth.

Of course, there are many philosophies that repeat this or something virtually similar to this, and have done so for thousands of years so for a happy, more ethical, less prejudiced life you can take your pick.

[dsfyu404ed]

You call it prejudice I call it trying to understand the lens through which people who's upbringing and life experience is different than mine see the world.

The need for heuristics that allow people to make decisions about other people with an incomplete amount of directly pertinent information is not going anywhere. If you know what someone's upbringing was that's much better information than no information.