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At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says

(www.nytimes.com)
644 points xbryanx | 6 comments | 11 Jul 25 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 1.013s | source | bottom
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jordanb ◴[11 Jul 25 14:59 UTC] No.44532900[source]▶
I went on a deep dive on this scandal about a year or so ago. One thing that struck me is the class element.

Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".

The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.

So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.

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klik99 ◴[11 Jul 25 19:42 UTC] No.44536140[source]▶
Someone brought this up in a previous HN comment section as an example of trust in software ruining peoples lives. But your explanation is far more human and recontextualizes it a bit for me - it just happened to be that this was done with software, but the real motivation was contempt for the lower classes and could have easily have happened 100 years ago with an internal investigation task force.

Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).

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AceJohnny2 ◴[11 Jul 25 21:05 UTC] No.44536778[source]▶
> Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist

It just manifests as racism.

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bigstrat2003 ◴[12 Jul 25 06:06 UTC] No.44539721[source]▶
Most claims of racism in America are in fact classism. Very, very few people have actual dislike of others based on race. But a whole lot of people dislike people due to culture or class signals.
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1. burnt-resistor ◴[12 Jul 25 13:10 UTC] No.44541835[source]▶
Since you brought it up, this political-leaning topic is fair game.

> Most claims of racism in America are in fact classism.

This is bald-faced racism denialism and makes a sweeping generalization. For example, the Trump administration is going after immigrants not for economic or class reasons but as a dogwhistle for their Floridian golf club members who don't like minorities of any sort and to appease a large section of the base of covert and overt racists generally. There is no logic in exiling and disappearing the low cost labor needed to product food, build homes, and do the terrible jobs that make civilization possible.. because it is mission of dumb people sabotaging themselves and others. The selective protection plus oppression and criminalization of undocumented people is grounded in the need to control a desperate, underpaid population to keep prices of agriculture, home construction, and restaurant prices lower than paying ordinary, livable wages to them.

> Very, very few people have actual dislike of others based on race.

You can't know this. And, it's leans towards false because of how propinquity works.

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2. amy214 ◴[12 Jul 25 13:31 UTC] No.44541933[source]▶
>ut as a dogwhistle for their Floridian golf club members who don't like minorities of any sort and to appease a large section of the base of covert and overt racists generally.

I mean, here's how I see it, if 100 million Polish people, a very white peoples, suddenly claimed asylum in the US, had 300 million anchor babies to exploit that loophole, used the anchor baby army to claim massive funds of welfare in aggregate, all the while claiming zero income while working under the table and undercutting the common man ... ... and also driving drunk and refusing to learn any English and demanding Americans ought to learn Polish

If the Polish people did that I'd have it in to deport them all. And it wouldn't be about race at all, it would be the overwhelming unfair advantages and systematic exploits the Polish performed in this case. The racist narrative is just another manifestation of "playing the race card" to defend indefensible, selfish, toxic behavior

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3. roughly ◴[12 Jul 25 15:55 UTC] No.44542926[source]▶
Not so much a dog whistle as a dog symphony orchestra at this point
4. Clamchop ◴[12 Jul 25 17:03 UTC] No.44543353[source]▶
Good thing this scenario is entirely fictional. Even if it weren't completely made up, though, you'd still be ethically obligated to assess immigrants as individuals and not simply guilty by association, except perhaps under the most dire wartime circumstances.

You'd also be legally obligated, but to be lawful is not always the same thing as being ethical nor moral.

It would be challenging, I admit, considering the country will have doubled in size with half of them being infants that naturally don't speak English, or any language for that matter.

We really should close that loophole, though. And it definitely is a loophole and not the explicit intention of a constitutional amendment. An oversight to be sure.

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5. slim ◴[12 Jul 25 18:36 UTC] No.44544028[source]▶
what is racist in what you just said is you decided to bundle all the polish in one indiscriminate entity and punish them collectively despite knowing that some of them did not commit any crime. in fact you decided to sacrifice those because their lives are not worth your attention. and that's racist.
6. yndoendo ◴[12 Jul 25 18:46 UTC] No.44544100{3}[source]▶
Look over there were Law of Small Numbers can be applied to immigrants that commit crime and exploit the system. Don't believe me, here is a coherent story to help push the narrative. See that one person in this category did something bad so they are all bad!

Ignore all the wage thief and other crimes like poniz scheme's, multi level marketing scheme's, political bribery, and fraud. Those crimes just hurt millions upon millions. Don't look at those numbers, they are too big for anyone to under stand. Focus on that person's skin color and accent. They are the true criminals.

This propaganda is just sickening that it works all to well.