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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Which makes me wonder how long until some asshole tiktok prank becomes smashing that button as many times a day as possible until gas stations across the country have to start locking them up. Which then leads to more avoidable accidents at gas stations.

By law, they can't lock them up. In a blue state we'll just get op-eds and politicos opining about how this is why we need to ban gasoline cars and go to all electric. There IS a solution to this particular class of problems, but it's banned. Basically the "railroad bull" solution -- swift and painful punishment for the assholes that do it.

I have lately wondered if what we're missing is a bunch of, I suppose, nuns with rulers or the equivalent to punish modest anti-social behavior (defecting, in this conversation) promptly with a transient painful stimulus that neither leaves lasting marks nor a permanent legal record.

But I don't think it would work in all cases, or maybe even at all. And it's almost certainly disallowed by the Constitution. And suffers from a lot of ambiguity as to where to draw the lines.

Yeah, the problem is "promptly". Nothing about the justice system is prompt, nor really can be; it can be faster, but not prompt enough for simple conditioning like I'm suggesting. That is, some fools start doing obviously stupid shit. Some of them are caught immediately by guards, who give them a thorough beating and are not punished. Word gets around. Trying to do this in a world where the guards can't be trusted either obviously has problems, and formalizing ways of verifying the guard's behavior will tend to make the system too slow.

A good chunk of our current society has made every effort to metaphorically disarm and discourage the previous set of 'nuns with rulers'. I don't see how trying to artificially implement them from the top down is going to do anything but make things worse.

Put bluntly, if you want a high-trust society, get more Daniel Perry's and stop punishing them when they actually step up and do things.

I have heard tourists (here n Japan) remark on how surprised they are that the iPhones in the shops are just sitting there for you to look at and aren't locked up. The reason is that if you steal one you'll be summarily caught and sent to jail. This seems like a blindingly obvious policy.

Having written that I admit sometimes the catching takes time. Last Saturday in Kyushu some asshole stabbed two teenagers in a McDonald's, killing the girl, and is still at large.

While there may be rule of law here, when it does go south there are very few Daniel Pennys.

Edit: Found him

Comparing two different nations with very different setups, society, and ethnic spread is always a bad comparison.

What works for one doesn't always work for another. I envy Japan on a level you cannot imagine for their train network, that doesn't mean I expect the same to be implemented in the US.

More Daniel Pennys or Kyle Rittenhouses can't magic up a high trust society. They're mainly useful in showing the insane behavior of agovernment that abdicated responsibility and then punished anyone that refused to be preyed on.

The government just has to do its job and enforce order. But apparently that's too much to ask for a variety of reasons.

More Daniel Pennys or Kyle Rittenhouses can't magic up a high trust society.

I disagree, the thing that makes a society "high trust" is the understanding that bad actors will not be tolerated.

The people of New York City have collectively chosen to tolerate bad actors and punish those who do not tolerate them. Thus the people of New York City have chosen to be a low trust society and the only way that will ever change is for people to choose differently.

And it's almost certainly disallowed by the Constitution.

There's nothing in the Constitution that bars corporal punishment. There's a prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishment, but we know this doesn't mean all corporal punishment, because it was widely practiced at the time and not ended until long after the ratification of the Bill of Rights.

Certainly it's plausible that a Supreme Court containing at least five left-leaning Justices who take a somewhat cavalier attitude towards their oath to uphold the Constitution might rule that the Eighth Amendment bans corporal punishment, but that would be them, not the Constitution.

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