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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   32433 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Removing serious criminals from the streets is good, regardless of how black people feel about it. And arresting people who commit minor crimes is a very valid way to do that.

I'm honestly a little irritated that none of the responses seem to really want to engage with my actual question, which is whether this particular type of crackdown could result in a net loss to society because criminals and criminal-adjacent people will start behaving worse.

Yes, I get that you don't like criminals, and think that removing them is good, and that arresting people who commit minor crimes is a "valid" (what exactly does that mean here?) way to do that. Taken at its most likely interpretation, this is a boring, mainstream position with no nuance and no utilitarian receipts shown. Why do you believe those things? If it's just axiomatic, then talking about it is not really appropriate for the venue, since the only way in which a moral axiom can be persuasive is by showing off a +1 to adherent numbers and hoping for conformism.

arresting people who commit minor crimes is a "valid" (what exactly does that mean here?) way to do that

No, arresting people who commit minor crimes is not a valid way to get serious criminals off the street. Arresting serious criminals who have outstanding warrants for serious crimes when they happen to get caught committing a minor one is. These are not the same thing.

Well, I don't like people disagreeing with me on the internet, and I would assume you don't get a lot of opportunity to post from prison either...

(Quips aside, "I don't like it" really doesn't amount to much as an argument to remove "it" entirely in the general case. Have you thought through all the different contexts in which the same argument would lead to clearly nonsensical conclusions?)

I think they're much less opposed to it than white progs, frankly.

Saw a recent poll, 82 percent of black dem voters consider crime to be a high priority to them. For white Dems, the number is 31 percent. They live in wildly different spheres, totally disconnected in terms of exposure to the ass end of these high minded but out of touch policies.

Not disputing that. But even inside the frame of reference, the decision to prioritize the feelings of black people over real world crime control is, well, a choice, and not an obvious one either, and needs to be called out as such.

The fact that the choice happens not to be grounded in any particular real world data about the feelings of black people is irrelevant to that point- crime control is more important than the feelings of any one group.

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