Sure it would be nice to have other options, but the reality of social media and group-think means they could really only say nothing or say everything. I don't like it, but to deny that is a dangerous gamble for any company.
Uh, no. Social psychology is a complicated subject and there is no way to distill 'social media and group-think' into a single set of choices for all situations. Most companies say nothing, but if they do say something, it certainly isn't a good idea to seem vindictive when you do so, and is an especially bad idea to do it on a public forum. Luckily they know their audience well and being a jackass is applauded, so their position wins - as long as he can't convince people their response isn't genuine. Group dynamics and public opinion can get as complex as chess.
As a sober addict I really can't comprehend the "flavor" of addiction the author describes. Most of my addict friends and acquaintances either worked at sobriety or died from using. Actually most died.
If someone can just stop, most would simply say the person wasn't actually an addict.
I've seen this comment about "wasn't actually an addict" or "not really an addiction" in every discussion of this story, here and elsewhere.
I'm very curious as to why people say this, because it doesn't seem to add anything to the discussion or take it in any useful direction. I'm not trolling here: I really don't get it, and it bugs me a bit because it seems to distract the discussion from things that might be useful (and I've contributed to that distraction here, likely... sorry.)
Consider a similar case: small round blue cell tumours (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1867426/). These present identically in routine histology done on biopsied tissue, but in fact consist of four different types of underlying disease.
Neuroblastoma was identified in the 1800's. Non-Hodgin lymphoma wasn't fully classified until the 1960's. At no time did anyone say, "That's not actually a small round blue tumour" because that would have contributed nothing to the discussion.
If we treat "addiction" as a name for a set of symptoms that may arise from several underlying conditions, some of which can be corrected adequately by an act of will on the part of the individual and some of which cannot, we can start to ask interesting questions like:
1) How do we identify each type of underlying condition?
2) Are there more than two underlying conditions? Is there a more complex, more useful taxonomy?
3) Given the existence of a population that ages out or chooses to stop, are there ways that we can intervene to help them that exploit the specifics of their underlying condition that are different from what has proven to be effective in the population that does not age out and is not able to choose to stop?
And so on. All of these are useful, important, valuable things to say. "Then it's not really an addiction" is not.
That sounds a bit "no true Scotsman". Just because someone grew out of it after a few years, does not mean that they did not struggle with the addiction in the midst of those years.
No, he wants rich white people to understand what the rest of America has been going through for years. That way, maybe they'll devote their political, social, and economic capital to reforming these abusive policing practices.
According to another comment on this story, Adam told the Senate his legal fees are $100,000 a month. I'm not sure what else he has going on professionally but I doubt he'll see a big enough rise in podcast subscribers to offset that.
