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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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the attractively simple notion that violence is immoral and that government is violence.

It is a lovely idea, and if all humans were perfectly virtuous, we could try it. But there's a lot of us who don't give a damn about anything except ourselves and are happy to use violence against others to take their stuff. What do we do with these people? That's been a problem for about as long as humans have existed, and "put them in prison" is the solution we've come to most recently. It's certainly not a perfect solution, but "let them go about in society just so long as they attend a meeting once a week to have a finger wagged at them about being naughty" is not going to work, either. We've been so busy doing away with shame and then guilt that we forgot those emotions have a place; if you are ashamed of having behaved unworthily, you have an inducement to amend your ways. If you admit guilt about being in the wrong, you show you realise what you did was bad and that you can work to avoid doing the same in future.

Easy. Watch them.

"Hang them" was a solution that has gone out of fashion in our modern society, but it definitely had its merits. As is commonly commented on, there isn't much of a sliding scale - most people do nearly no crime and a small number do a huge amount of crime.

I'm anti-death penalty, because courts get it wrong sometimes and the occasional innocent person being executed is a price I'm not willing to pay. But I do sometimes wonder how different society would be if we just strung up the scumbags after their first couple of crimes.

As is commonly commented on, there isn't much of a sliding scale - most people do nearly no crime and a small number do a huge amount of crime.

Lots of people do lots of small and/or technical crimes. If you tried to implement "hang them", you'd have con men and pickpockets working the public executions of jaywalkers, speeders, and people who took home an office pencil.

From Foseti's "Review of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' by Steven Pinker":

A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.

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