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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   26123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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In regards to the IQ thing, I can sympathize with Scott. People get a bad roll of the genetic dice and end up with low IQ and high impulsiveness. Then they grow up in a broken home in Flint or Camden, go to a failing public school and end up a common criminal. It’s hard to walk the straight and narrow in those circumstances.

But we can’t just let these people murder and steal either.

The ideal intervention seems obvious. Far longer prison sentences but also prisons which are far less cruel.

Scott’s cost analysis assumes government waste (maybe fair) but doesn’t factor in the cost of criminals having children which might dwarf even the cost of their crimes.

Perhaps an archipelago solution would be an idea.

No, not that kind. The good kind.

The US has partly outsourced running prisons to private enterprise. This is bad because the incentives of prison companies are not the same as the incentives of society.

Instead, one could outsource the rehabilitation process on a voluntary basis, as an alternative to state-run prisons which can be opted out of at any time.

Any organization could, with the prisoners consent, offer them an alternative to state run prisons. If they rehabilitate prisoners at better rates than state prison, they can pocket the costs they saved the criminal justice system. If they do worse, they pay that difference instead.

All kinds of for-profit and not-for-profit orgs could compete. Think that what the criminals really need is Jesus? Just incorporate JesusPrison. Think corporal punishments are the way to go? Fine, as long as you stay within BDSM norms, the prisoners safe word is 'state prison'. Have a shortage of plumbers in your enterprise? Invest in the education of prisoners and offer them jobs afterwards, and benefit from their limited options on the job market. Want to treat criminals for some psychiatric diagnosis? Same rules, with strict oversight. Want to teach the prisoners how this is all societies fault for being racist against them? Whatever you think, as long as you are able to pay the recidivism fine.

Of course, the organizations should be somewhat vetted (the mafia running a 'sex and drugs' based rehabilitation center for their own members is likely not what we want), and the orgs would have to have some kind of liability insurance, but otherwise something like this could work.

Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not the (horrible) revised edition.

Ok, I ran a quick eyeball-based diff, and it looks like in the revised edition, the first two sections were cut, with references to a conworld he ran with Alicorn from which the very name Archipelago was adopted.

The revised edition is much de-nerdified, with the power grantor becoming some generic wizard.

I can see both why Scott wanted a revised edition (which is spending fewer weirdness points on a backstory ultimately not terrible relevant to the point he is making) as well as why you might believe the original version instead of the watered down version edited for mass appeal.

Part of it is that, yes, replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, but the other part is that deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.

Far longer prison sentences but also prisons which are far less cruel.

I agree completely, along with a more formal separation between prisons for violent and non-violent criminals (rather than the somewhat arbitrary system that exists now), where allocation is also affected by behavior while in the prison system.

Then they grow up in a broken home in Flint or Camden, go to a failing public school and end up a common criminal. [...] The ideal intervention seems obvious. Far longer prison sentences but also prisons which are far less cruel.

Based on your post, I'd say two even better interventions would be to encourage intact homes and improve the failing public schools.

If there was a way to do that, sure.

I don't think executing criminals is outside the Overton Window at all. The death penalty is on the books in most of the world and has remained popular even in countries where it has been abolished, consistently polling majority support in many such nations. Most people want to do it. And lots of people will readily confess that they want murderers and rapists to be executed.

It is specifically unpopular in Western elite circles, for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable, but that's a very unique crowd.

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