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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Depends on if we're talking anarcho-tyranny where the laws are only applied on the pro-social, or genuine commitment to police abolition. If it's the latter, I made a post on TheSchism about that a while back:

There is no progressive utopia where the man who rapes my tween daughter gets rehabilitated with kind, gentle counseling, because I would have hunted him down and Blood Eagled him on livestream. Oh no, I've been sentenced to kind, gentle counseling. I decline to acknowledge my wrongdoing by attending. Are you going to send the social workers to not arrest me?

In the real world, I would not do so because I fear and respect the government's monopoly on retribution. Even if I were enraged by the outcome of the trial, I would have to weigh vengeance against the consequences for violating that monopoly.

A world with no police and no prisons is not one free of brutality. It's not even free of brutality against criminals! It would instead be a world where thieves are savagely beaten by enthusiastically vicious mall cops, rapists are castrated, and there is a vigorous subculture focused on videos of pedophiles being tortured to death.

I've argued elsewhere that no serious proponent of police abolition actually wants anything like 'no lawkeepers period, love-ins only'. At the risk of weakmanning: they just percieve (not inaccurately) that the current monopoly on force is held by a hostile/indifferent tribe, and they would like it to be held by their own tribe.

Normally the short route to this goal is some form of independence movement, but for various reasons that's a nonstarter at the moment, and liberal-white outgroup bias opens up the nontraditional route of minority coup. But, as we saw, said outgroup bias didn't extend quite so far as some hoped.

Realistically, this gets expressed as police abolitionism because the blue tribe doesn't have anyone who actually wants to be a cop. Well, probably like three. In the whole country. Given the choice between "no enforcement of the law" and "enforcement of the law by people who resent us and aren't motivated to do it the way we want", they choose "no enforcement" because they honestly haven't considered that if a strongly worded letter isn't backed by force, people can just fucking call your bluff and will.

And, of course, that doesn't account for the vast majority of blue tribers who don't actually want to abolish the police.

Agreed and I think that this is actually one of the major gaps in inference between the tribes. Is the law there to protect the public, or is it there to protect the criminal from the public? Notions like "burden of proof" and "innocent until proven guilty" are valuable pro-social norms to have, but they are also entirely unworkable in a world without police. As I used to argue back on SSC "democracy in it's purest form is a lynch mob, and that is why I will never consider myself a democrat".

there is a vigorous subculture focused on videos of pedophiles

Suspected pedophiles at that. Rationalists rightly complain about bad reasoning by juries, but vigilante gangs are probably even worse, and much better armed.

I once spoke to a guy who was a cleaner in the West, but who came from a Taliban-heavy part of Pakistan. As well as being very smart and friendly, they were a repository of horrific stories about coming from a place that (we agreed) was very similar to Medieval Europe. Once, he came back from the West and he was going to see his family. He was travelling on a train at night, when several men with handguns sat down with him and started questioning him: "Why are you wearing Western clothes?" "Why do you look so rich?" "Are you an unbeliever?"

Eventually, they started questioning him about specific parts of the Qur'an. Only his madrassa education, which had involved otherwise useless mechanical memorization of particular passages (without attention to the meaning) saved him from being taken to a dark spot by these men and killed, with no hope that they would ever be even punished for their actions by the local "police".

He also once came across a (probably) dead body in the street at night. Rather than report the killing or see if the man was still alive, he ran away as fast as he could. Why? If he was the person who found the body, then the man's family would consider him as a suspect, and possibly come after him/his family. So the body presumably rotted in the summer heat until a policeman or a member of the man's family saw it.

Indeed, the taliban’s willingness to put rigid adherence to sharia above tribal blood feuds is, in Afghanistan, a key selling point.

The Ghaznavids built interesting and impressive structures at around the same time.

Afghanistan's problem today is that it's state is probably poorer now than it was then. Trade routes that made Medieval Afghanistan potentially wealthy have dried up. Also, monumental architecture has kind of gone out of fashion everywhere.

Yes, but it was also a very violent time with a lot of family feuding and vigilante "justice".

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