This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
See the Jaremy Smith case in SC. 5 years in prison, 7 more for hostage taking during a breakout attempt.
Released on Dec 1st 2003 for "good behavior".
Murdered a woman and a police officer in March 2004.
No amount of labor you get out of that thing will make up for the risk some "progessive justice" ghoul will release it on the public to kill again. A rapid death penalty is the only way to remove the threat they present to their victims.
It would be nice if we had the power to peacefully incapacitate them so they could make up for the harm they've caused, but it's simply not possible when large parts of the justice system are dedicated to freeing violent criminals.
You could have made this point without calling people “it” or insisting that your outgroup are ghouls. But no, you’re doing the always-popular thing, deciding that this time, the behavior is so egregious that normal rules don’t apply.
We’ve warned and banned you repeatedly for this. We’ve permabanned better users for the same thing. Consider this one month ban your final warning.
More options
Context Copy link
No amount of labor? Consider that statement very seriously. Would you seriously have executed that man if he were otherwise guaranteed to cure every form of cancer?
Everything about the justice system is an expected value calculation. If you let at most ten guilty men go free to save a innocent, you're implicitly saying that the risk of them committing crimes is outweighed by the good the innocent person could do. And you're also saying that an innocent person is worth less that the expected value of letting eleven criminals go free.
There are other problems with imprisonment for innocent people. A big one is that the state needs to have credibility on both ends. On the one hand (where the modern states fail IMO) is that it has the capacity and will to deal with actual crimes in a way that protects public order. When people have no reason to suspect that the government can and will deal with crime, you end up with various ad hoc solutions to crime that can escalate to the point of vigilante justice. On the other hand, a state that cannot reliably prosecute only the guilty or at least mostly the guilty (with the errors being mostly good faith mistakes) is one that loses public trust rather quickly. If I think that I’m going to be persecuted for thought crimes with a random prosecution, I’m not going to trust the police. You might not call on them and you might resist them. And the loss of trust is a detriment to stopping crime. This is why the defund movement is making crime worse. When you tell an entire population that the police exist to persecute them, they don’t cooperate and crime increases in that area. Then those people end up victimized by the criminals riding free because the cops are not trusted.
In case it's non-obvious, I'm making an argument about optimizing for expected efficiency, rather than saying there's any agreement about how many innocent people we would knowingly condemn to prison in order to keep guilty people imprisoned too. My claim is that we already make implicit cost-benefit calculations about what sort of false negative/false positive rates we're willing to accept from the justice system. Which, in turn, implies that we must also be placing an implicit, finite cost on how much damage we think particular crimes actually cost.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No; there's also the harm of the imprisonment/execution of the innocent itself, and the second-order effects (you do not want the civilian population en masse to start treating the justice system as an occupying army).
I'm abbreviating for conciseness. Of course there's a lot of other factors that go into what false positive/negative rates we optimize our justice system to accept, like the risk of a justice system being seen as "soft" encouraging vigilantism and the degradation of state power.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link