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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.

Alright, look, my totally-serious well-considered answer is something like this: every civilization in history, before the last century or so, had an understanding that there are irredeemably useless and/or dangerous people, and found a way to dispose of them. I am not suggesting that every society in history has employed an optimal and reasonable solution to the existence of these people, nor am I suggesting that all imaginable future societies will take approaches that I would consider acceptable.

The hypothetical dystopian panopticon that arrests or punished normal citizens hundreds of times a month for utterly innocuous behavior is not a society I’d want to live in. But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality? Isn’t it much more likely that a future society will find a middle ground somewhere in between the maximally-tolerant legal regime advocated by today’s progressive elite on the one hand, and the maximally-draconian fever dream which you may imagine the hard-right is capable of implementing?

Surely the answer to “how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable? If there were a guy who’d been arrested 4,000 times, and all of them were for things you and I would both agree are antisocial and destructive, that’s someone that it’s necessary to do something about… right?

every civilization in history, before the last century or so, had an understanding that there are irredeemably useless and/or dangerous people, and found a way to dispose of them

Every civilization in history, before the last century or so, was also in many many ways a really bad place to live compared to the modern West. I do not think that these two things are completely unrelated.

I totally reject this reading of history, which is probably the main reason why you and I disagree so strongly. I accept the reality of technological/medical advancement, but reject the narrative of monotonic societal/cultural improvement. I don’t think that most societies before a century ago were “really bad places to live”, especially if you weren’t a lunatic or a criminal.

The hypothetical dystopian panopticon that arrests or punished normal citizens hundreds of times a month for utterly innocuous behavior is not a society I’d want to live in. But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality?

Have you MET the "Karens"? They'd think the ticket machine in Demolition Man was the greatest thing ever. And there's a lot of them and many have nothing better to do than to go to city council meetings.

Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."

But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality?

I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).

“how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable?

No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.

Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.

but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.

I'm fairly certain it does, unless your entire conception of civil rights is purely procedural.

I think this is just a semantic quibble. The way the phrase "civil rights" is generally used is consistent with what I wrote. Obviously putting someone in prison requires restricting their rights at that point, but we can still respect the rights against unwarranted search and seizure, right to jury trial, right not to self-incriminate, etc.

Like most things, criminality is partly heritable. Some people, when given freedom choose to defect against others.

Executing the most violent criminals before they reproduce over many thousands of years is artificial selection for civilisation.

You would expect it to increase the proportion of law abiding genes.

There are pretty big population difference is crime. Has anyone looked at historical time and percentage of executions for crime vs present day rates?

Ok, but it's partly not heritable. A majority non-heritable, if my google-fu isn't too bad. But also, heritability is kind of a tricky metric to interpret. If you reduce the effect of environment on criminality (e.g. raising the standard of living so that most people don't need crime to survive) then heritability of crime goes up, even if the relationship between genes and criminality hasn't really changed.

In any event, this seems like an extremely weak reason to start executing lots of people. High punishment and high crime are almost certainly positively correlated across time and space, because e.g. severe punishment is a natural-seeming response to high crime rates and low clearance rates, and because both reflect the level of violence in the society.

Do you have any numbers that would indicate how long it would take to see a substantial reduction in crime due to the effect of such a mass execution?

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