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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35553 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I'm not from Britain, but to me the intended meaning was clearly "it is now all too common that they go out armed with knives with the intent of using them on humans." Maybe in your world everything is about constant conflict and you obviously need weapons with you but for people who have lived their lives in general stability where you could mostly trust the people you meet in your town in your evening stroll, for them the idea that people are out there at night with knives intended against humans is a definite step backwards, further from ideal society. If your philosophy is "every man must fight for his foothold in this universe", I can see how the desire for knifelessness is repulsive.

Also, there's no clear boundary between knives and swords. And I for sure don't want people walking about carrying samurai swords, machetes or katanas in the streets. Some kind of blade length restriction seems good.

There are no blade length restrictions in California, and yet I've never seen anyone walk around with a sword or even an impractically large knife. Even when I was threatened by people with knives, the blades weren't especially long. It just doesn't seem to be an issue in practice

Maybe because the sort of people who would carry swords rather carry guns in the US, as they are easily available.

a definite step backwards, further from ideal society.

It's a definite step backwards in one particularly constrained sense. For two societies with "willingness to carry knives as a function of threat level" fixed while "threat level" can vary (the distinction you might see if you looked at correlations between similar cultures without knife restrictions), certainly more willingness to carry knives means there must be more threats and more danger and so is further from ideal. But, for two societies with "threat level" fixed while "ability to carry knives" varies (the distinction you see when you're able to decide on knife laws for the law-abiding but you can't so easily reduce criminality), being unable to defend yourself increases the danger from every threat, whereas more knife carrying means there's more deterrence and less repeat offense and so is closer to ideal.

Every now and then the idea is floated that many of our problems can be traced to STEM nerds who won't study enough humanities, but personally I'd also feel safer about our political trajectory if I knew our humanities-nerd overlords all had had an intuitive understanding of partial derivatives with different constrained variables...

Lacking that, any other analogy feels more hand-wavy. Would a society with more people getting chemotherapy be a step forwards or a step backwards? It's impossible to say without more information - it might be a higher incidence of cancer, or it might be the same population of cancer victims but more of them getting treated. But even if we've been traveling down the "more cancer, less ideal" direction on that manifold, even if we're right to be saddened by the expanding cancer wards, to thereby conclude that we should crack down on those damn oncologists would still be a big mistake.

I get what you mean. Knives on the streets may also be considered an effect, not a cause of a bad society and so on. Perhaps just brute force banning them isn't the right course of action towards a nicer trustful society where people don't (feel the need to) carry knives.

(This btw feels similar to the often-had discussion on whether something is victim blaming, should women wear skimpy clothes in dark alleys etc.)

So yeah you can spin this to seem as complex as you want, but my comment was specifically an answer to another comment, whose author seemingly couldn't imagine why someone would think it's bad that it's becoming "all too common" that people carry knives to the streets, and surely this must mean that they want to ban the sale of knives or ban people from using them at home or for camping etc.

Also, only thought experiments can keep one thing fixed. In real life it's not like one thing is ever fixed (by who?) and others are left to vary. Everything tends to change and things are interconnected in complicated, loopy causal networks.

This is what I intended!

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