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In this episode, an authoritarian and some anarchist(s) have an unhinged conversation about policing.
Participants: Yassine, Kulak, & Hoffmeister25 [Note: the latter's voice has been modified to protect him from the progressive nanny state's enforcement agents.]
Links:
About the Daniel Penny Situation (Hoffmeister25)
Posse comitatus (Wikipedia)
Lifetime Likelihood of Going to State or Federal Prison (BJS 1997)
The Iron Rule (Anarchonomicon)
Eleven Magic Words (Yassine Meskhout)
Blackstone's ratio (Wikipedia)
Halfway To Prison Abolition (Yassine Meskhout)
Defunding My Mistake (Yassine Meskhout)
Recorded 2023-09-16 | Uploaded 2023-09-25
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Notes -
That was a great guest pairing; both positions are comically extreme but balanced in a way that allowed me to think about the space in between without getting my hackles up. Let's see...
The repeated visits to "low murder clearance rates" were not challenged in the way i wanted to hear: If you instituted the death penalty for serious crimes that currently are punished in a way that encourage repeat offenses (theft, regular assault, etc) it won't take all that long for the murder rate to start dropping - gonna accidentally net yourself the murderers eventually!
Dramatically fewer limits on self defense strikes me as a far less morally perilous way (compared to turning the state into an efficient murder factory) to reduce the number of criminals dragging down society.
Both H and K are overly worried about the "feminization" of modern men. We're all descended from thousands of generations of murdering rapists and that capability is just waiting for the opportunity to be deployed again. if anything they should be worried polite society is breeding sociopaths that are capable of hiding these latent abilities/inclinations.
An epiphany! There is a parallel between gun owernership and public defenders - both do small harm to society's interests on a day to day basis, but their existence prevents the government from trying to overreach and abuse (well, more than it does). Seemed interesting as probably those things are supported by opposite sides for the most part?
I’m glad you enjoyed the pairing! When I approached Yassine about having me and Kulak on together to discuss policing, I figured that if nothing else it would provide an example of how we as a country could be having a radically different conversation about policing than what’s being pushed in the mainstream. The three of us all disagree very strongly about big and important issues related to the topic, but our disagreements don’t map onto the current “national conversation” at all.
Right-wing anarchists/libertarians have little to no representation in the general discourse, and unabashed authoritarians such as myself have even less; we’re the designated boogeyman that all sides of the mainstream take great pains to distance themselves from. But I hope that if nothing else we showed that not so long ago, viewpoints like ours were very much welcome within the Overton window, and at various junctures in history both my and Kulak’s approaches to policing have been the norm. (Presumably Yassine’s preferred approach was also dominant at some point in human history prior to the advent of agriculture.)
As for your specific points:
Regarding #1, this is one of the strongest arguments in favor of my position, I think: by removing delinquent elements of the population when they begin their life of crime - after their first major theft or assault or whatever - we get rid of them before they can graduate up to even more serious crimes. This is also why I support pretextual stops by police, a topic which we unfortunately didn’t have time to discuss. When a cop pulls over a car for minor infractions, the real point is often just to give the officer the opportunity to ask the driver for identification, attempting to discover warrants and apprehend people who are wanted for more serious crimes.
Regarding #2, I’m not opposed to widely expanding the capability for self-defense, but that still doesn’t do anything to address my question of what I’m supposed to do if I’m the victim of a crime and I’m not able to successfully defend myself in the moment. We still need some larger structure in place in the many situations wherein self-defense is unsuccessful or impossible. Hell yes, private citizens should be able to shoot burglars dead, but that’s not really what the main debate is about.
Regarding #3, another topic which I had hoped to discuss, but which ultimately would have taken too much time and involved getting deep into the speculative weeds of HBD and difficult-to-interpret historical research, was the massive and sustained drop in crime rates in Tudor England after the application of the Bloody Code, a sweeping set of draconian penalties which led to the executions of tens of thousands of young men (and a much smaller number of women) for a wide variety of crimes. As harsh as these penalties may have been, they do genuinely appear to have selected out some level of heritable proclivity to crime within the population, such that during the later Victorian population the country had dramatically low crime rates despite very limited policing. Now, there could be plenty of non-HBD explanations, but I don’t think we can rule out that it is indeed possible to influence how crime-prone a population is, at least temporarily, through a heavy-handed and eugenic approach to criminal justice.
Regarding #4, I’ll just reiterate that I estimate the possibility of genuine “tyranny” in this country as dramatically lower than what you, like my two podcast episode partners, estimate it to be.
Thanks for responding; sorry I failed to reciprocate in a timely fashion.
There is an analog here in any technical profession; any time you need to investigate a minor problem you take the opportunity to poke around and make sure there isn't something big brewing in the vicinity. Borderline negligent to not do that in fact. "Where there's smoke there's (often) fire."
I get it - I am old enough to have mostly become disabused of my childhood plans to become a Navy Seal. But even if only... one in ten? civilians were capable of lethally defending themselves the pool of in-your-face criminals would still drop fast.
I am defintely not an anarchist, but when I look around I see most political parties predicated on oppressing their "enemies". Maybe a better election system than First Past the Post could help soften that... I dunno, only seems marginally better in countries with different systems.
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