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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Disincentivizing low-level antisocial behavior

There's a recent reddit post about someone, who contextually sounds like a woman in her 20s or 30s, living in an apartment complex and paying for a reserved parking spot. According to her, some guy has repeated parked his car in her spot, and she finally wrote a polite note and tucked under the wipers asking him to not park in the reserved spot. Minutes later, when she's inside her unit, the guy comes to her door and beats and kicks on it, and then leaves a note that says don't touch his car.

I'm sure billions such peccadillos take place every day around the world. I'd guess 95+% of these don't amount to anything consequential, and only result in hurt feelings, and that in turn explains to a large extent why they keep on happening, because it's unserious enough to amount to any consequences. People respond to incentives, and if you don't disincentivize peccadillos, well, they keep multiplying.

In this specific case, the reddit thread mostly has people suggesting she call the apartment complex to tow the car next time this happens, and to file a complaint so there is a record of potential violence and intimidation. Another upvoted comment says to put up a camera near her car so she'd know if he retaliates, maybe by keying her car or something.

Here's the thing, all this sounds like a major headache for the poor woman. It sounds like a major headache for a man who has a life he values, too. Most apartment complex reserved spots merely mean convenience, and if yours is stolen, you can just park in an unreserved spot and walk a few more feet. Inconvenient, and perhaps infuriating, but if the alternative is stressing over an angry man beating on your door or keying your car, I mean, is it really rational to stand your ground? If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.

There was a post high up on reddit featuring a clip from Jack Reacher season 2's opening, where a man deduces that a woman in front of him at the ATM is being held hostage by a carjacker. For extra morality simplification in case the audience is thinking too hard, her kid is in the car too. The hero then walks over, smashes the window, and beats the shit out of the carjacker. Very cathartic, and the reddit post is titled as something like this is every guy's fantasy.

Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?

My point is this: society has systems in place to disincentivize felonies, and to a lesser extent, misdemeanors. We don't end up with too many serial killers because it's so egregious. We suffer misdemeanors, especially in blue cities, because it's tolerable. We breathe in peccadillos because no one can be bothered to do anything about it. And that seems incredibly inefficient and unjust.

Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off. And the victims won't be the upper class or middle class intellectuals, but working class women, children, seniors, and any man who doesn't want to escalate at every turn, and also can't afford to pay to leave the failed environment.

The formal legal system is useless here. The guy's sticky note on the poor woman doesn't directly threaten violence. But she's now strongly disincentivized to escalate because there is an implication of retaliation. All the guy has to do is to come across as a little unhinged, and a little willing to throw his life away, and every rational man or woman backs off, and rightly so. This strategy works brilliantly in a society that's just safe enough--if the apartment is known to have multiple unhinged individuals, each unhinged individual may think twice about beating on the wrong door. But if everyone else is a law abiding citizen, well, it's free real estate!

How are you supposed to prosecute this? Cops and DAs have bigger fish to fry, and most apartment complexes aren't typically managed by brilliant problem solvers who go out of their way to attend to residents' needs. All I can do is to send thoughts and prayers to the poor lady.

I can think of three divergent environments that manage this problem.

  1. Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.
  2. Japanese homogeneity. Stop outsiders and troublemakers from entering society. Then in this cohesive society, everyone pitches in to punish low level offenses without the additional complication of being accused of discrimination.
  3. Semi-failed state where the stakes are high for low level offenders themselves. Some guy parks in your spot? Shoot up his car windows. No legal consequence will come because that's considered a misdemeanor here. Perhaps things escalate, but perhaps not, but at least he won't park in your spot again.

Surely a rich society has a fourth option?

Society already offers a solution if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state to the problem of someone trying to beat down a door - she simply has to exercise it.

I think there's a difference between kicking a door out of anger to get someone's attention - what this guy did - and actually trying to break it down? I don't think the former is a situation allowing for self-defense shootings today, and it probably isn't something you want escalating to homicide, especially since some of the people evaluating when to shoot under the new standard will be the kind of person who would kick that door in the first place.

I might be wrong, but as I recall the castle doctrine doesn't typically apply beyond the threshold A man in the common hallway might be beyond it.

YMMV, IANAL, please don't take legal advice from the internet.

if the woman lives in a castle doctrine state

Sounds like a big if. An lot of people don't live in castle doctrine states. And while on a societal level this could be fixed by adding this to more states, that's not super realistic for an individual person in this situation. An individual solution would be to move to a castle doctrine state, but that has some pretty high costs depending on how their social circles, family, and careers are structured.

Another valid solution is state sanctioned "beating the shit out of bad human beings until there is no more shitty behaviour left in them". This is surprisingly effective at getting those who are immune to reason to see sense. Operant conditioning works just as well on humans as it does on lower animals.

Six lashes for his rude behaviour followed by a solemn promise that he's going to get another sixty lashes if anything untoward was to happen to the woman afterwards would set him straight very quickly.

sixty lashes

You wanna kill him or what? You know the lashes are in the range of like 5-12 ish.

You don't give the sixty lashes all in one row. Six lashes every Friday until the sentence is discharged, and he is kept in prison until that happens.

I can see this working against most offenses. But sure are we that the bottom deciles of undesirables won't just take the beatings as a badge of honor?

Also, this still requires the state to know about the offenses, necessitating cameras everywhere, even if privacy-respecting like scott's raikoth. OP's "Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.". And when you have that technology, it seems easier to manage said offenses with 'denial of access to services', rather than direct punishment, and I'm not sure punishment is even more effective for most cases.

Besides the lashing part, this solution requires fairly significant efforts at distinguishing (at reasonable accuracy) who is the bad human being in each instance. Given that the rules are not very complicated, it becomes a lot of factual investigation into tiresome details. Did he really park there? Is she just made he dumped her friend harshly? Did he really "bang and yell" or did he politely explain that he was in a rush.

Easy to adjudicate in a single instance, but really banal at scale. And even worse, whoever you empower to do this dumb job will themselves be tempted (or at the very least, power attracts the corrupt). Who's gonna enforce against them.

I guess this just slides down to solution (1) and just make it easy and legible for all by pulling the cameras of all the parking lots and hallways.

Unironically normalize beating up thieves and pickpockets. In India (and your corner of this shitty subcontinent), the cops won't give a shit if you turn in a robber with a few broken bones. Saves them the trouble. Ensures justice is swiftly and efficiently delivered. It's fun for the whole neighborhood.

Hence why, despite being so goddamn poor, we don't have the same level of flagrant antisocial or low level criminal behavior as some more colorful parts of the West.

Corporal punishment should be brought back anyway. I'd rather take a dozen lashes than a month in jail, and it dissuades criminals with low time preferences better, while being less expensive for the taxpayer.

Remind me, how common are acid attacks in that corner? Because that type of antisocial assault is something the subcontinent is infamous for. Not interested in starting the "if I'm getting beat up by the townies anyway, let's give them a real reason for it" ball rolling.

how common are acid attacks in that corner

Extremely rare. Just becuase the west points to them whenever they happen and uses them as a sign of how they are "oh so much better and safer" than us doesn't mean they happen with any regular frequency.

Would it surprise you if I were to say my home city is safer for women to walk around alone at night than London?

I do not know anyone who has been acid attacked, or anyone who knows anyone who has been acid attacked.

It's not that they don't happen, but it's a rarity and found more in honor-cultureish parts of the country than something you need to wear alkaline sunscreen to guard against.

In other words, a non-issue to the average Indian, no matter how it might get signal boosted.

Hence why, despite being so goddamn poor, we don't have the same level of flagrant antisocial or low level criminal behavior as some more colorful parts of the West.

Reddit could have fooled me. The way they portray it, it's like an episode of Star Trek and the gang is visiting that world with the rape gangs.

India is a normal country. Like it's obviously Third World, but it's not like middle class and UMC people get chased down by rape gangs and gored by cattle.

I wouldn't even call it unsafe. The rate of violent crime is probably nothing to worry about, and the troubles faced by Western visitors are the same kind as anyone considered an easy mark by poor and avaricious locals.

The country has problems, but Jesus Christ it's not that bad haha. The primary problems are poverty, corruption, a conservative society, and general dirtiness, but it's not unsafe by any sensible standard, even for women.

I guess I'm kinda shocked -- won't people with a grudge (for whatever other reason) beat people up and accuse them of theft? After all, anyone can take their victim to the cops and say whatever.

Hasn't happened where I've seen it.

There's certainly a bit of common sense and due diligence involved, hopefully there are witnesses, the stolen item is found on the thief's person, they're caught red handed and so on.

The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.

Maybe let me ask the other Popperian question -- if it happened, how would you tell? Surely if most of the time it's truly a miscreant (undoubtedly so) then you'd be (correctly) far less likely to believe it when someone says they were mistakenly or maliciously accused.

That is to say, you may have seen it and not noticed.

The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.

A backpack seems like an almost uniquely bad example. You just separate the parties and ask each a few questions about its contents and it's easy to figure out which one it belongs to.

One person is gonna know everything in and say the other guy stole it. He is going to say this whether or not the other guy actually did steal it.

The other guy said he's never seen the backpack before in his life and never stole it. Of course, he is going to say this whether or not he actually stole it.

I was envisioning a scenario where one person has it and the other says they stole it. But even in a scenario where there isn't a clear current possessor like this, in any such situation I've been even tangentially involved in, laying blame is a distant third on the priority list, behind getting it to the rightful owner and keeping the overall peace.

Frankly you're also overestimating the intelligence and planning of most people who do stuff like stealing backpacks. In my area, frankly, you're more likely to get drug-addled confusion about what's wrong with walking off with someone's backpack and why the fact that they don't own it is even relevant.

More comments

We have strong social networks where reputation matters a lot. If you with minimal proof accuse someone of theft that everyone knows to be a good upstanding citizen who wouldn't do such a thing then you'll be ignored completely, and if you already beat them up and they can make a convincing case they weren't in the wrong you run the risk of getting beat up even harder by those who have an interest in maintaining these social networks (basically everyone, because these networks are all we have protecting us against anarchy). And you get ostracised from polite society too and lose a ton of social standing, which you can argue matters more than losing your entire net worth in a society like ours.

Plus there's the usual social standing differences that have to be taken into account. You can never get away with beating up someone at a higher (or even the same, most of the time) social station than you, even if you really dislike them and they deserve it. E.g. if you are a low level factory worker you'd never be able to beat up a manager at a respectable company on your own, even if they were in the wrong (though why such a manager would be stealing from the house of a factory worker I have no idea, which again gives the manager an alibi and makes me more inclined to take his side if he was so accused). You'd have to build a case against them by banding together with other low level factory workers and getting someone even higher than the manager to notice the injustice and take action.

This does run the risk of the higher classes being able to tyrannize the lower classes willy nilly, which can sometimes be a problem. However on net in a completely free society the lower classes tyrannize the higher classes a lot more than the reverse (by virtue of their greater numbers and generally being shittier human beings) so this state of affairs is good for you even if you are at a middling station: the small additional risk that someone high up with unjustly bring the boot down on you is well worth the very real reduction in the probability you'll have a bad encounter with a low level scumbag, or at least it's worth it to give you the tools to deel with the scumbag. The only people who really lose out in this situation are the true lowlifes (and the very unlucky) but they deserve everything coming to them anyways.

This sounds like the perfect anarcho-tyranny.

Sub-state organization. Possibly sub-legal. Vigilance committees, neighborhood watch but tooled up. You saw this a lot in Hispanic neighborhoods during BLM. The Roof Koreans during the RK riots. You have to organize and strategize to defeat both retaliation and arrest.

The current failure is only of social pride and excessive legalism. People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more. Get realistic, look at your sub-legal options.

Go the other way. Find a group you won't snitch on. Teach each other, train each other, police each other. Street crims ain't shit to three guys who know what they're doing.

You know what? I might have a story for this.

People near the edge of the law cling to it all the more.

Because once you've crossed that edge you can't cross back. You can be a white-collar professional, allowed into the good jobs and (maybe) the good clubs and parties, but to do so you have to scrupulously follow the laws which count (which include those against vigilantism). Break one of them and get caught and you're done -- your professional licenses go up in smoke, you're legally barred from various industries and (for many crimes) any jobs dealing with kids, and where you're not legally barred most companies will bar you anyway. At that point, you'll likely realize that you lack the skills to survive either in the part of the working class which accepts these things, or the precariat. So perhaps some of your former friends will cluck their tongues about the tragedy when they hear about your suicide... but most likely not even that.

The state is typically far more dangerous to those it protects than the rioters. (and I mean that in both senses).

professional licenses

Shouldn't be a thing. You should be prevented from doing a profesion only if you commit a crime to harm a customer directly.

They are a thing though; they're part of how the government keeps control of the professional classes.

And this is why people live in gater communities where they can outsource the "beat up shitty human beings" to security who stop shitty human being from entering inside in the first place, mostly made up of hardened members of the lower classes who're never going to get professional licences etc., so the security guards are fine if they beat up shit tier human beings.

Win win for free trade if you ask me.

I wrote a Dethklok-style song during the pandemic about that trend. It was cathartic to fantasize about burning those kinds of HOAs (and their contracts) to rubble.

The existence of keycard-locked and gated neighborhoods is a strong signal that most of the Americans that can afford them believe their surrounding society deserves low-trust interactions. This, in turn, earns a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy.

strong signal that most of the Americans that can afford them believe their surrounding society deserves low-trust interactions

How does this at all possibly follow? The cart is before the horse here. People have bought into these communities because the surrounding communities are already so low-trust enough to force them into protective enclaves.

When was the last time you've heard of people making real decisions based on fiction they've read or seen? Or based on news articles from only one color of the spectrum?

If kids see a cartoon about bullies targeting people with glasses, they're less likely to wear glasses. Adults are nowhere near immune from that kind of false-positive threat modeling. They're just a lot more effective at overreacting. See: post-9/11 reactions to Arabs & Muslims, Japanese internment camps, Pizzagate, parental advisory stickers.

People can and do put the cart before the horse when making decisions on which neighborhoods to move into. It's common, and no amount of 'rational threat analysis' will change that.

People can and do put the cart before the horse when making decisions on which neighborhoods to move into. It's common, and no amount of 'rational threat analysis' will change that.

Can you elaborate on what "putting the cart before the horse" means specifically, in this context? It seems you're claiming that crime and general social dysfunction isn't that big of a deal, and so organized efforts to exclude these things from one's immediate community are misguided, apparently because they only solve the problem for themselves rather than for everyone. Is that the general idea?

...But then here you seem to be claiming that the people doing this are mistaken about how low-trust and dysfunctional the surrounding communities actually are, that they've been propagandized into a fear response that is not warranted by the situation. Is this also accurate?

...But it seems these two points contradict each other. If the security they obtain is illusory, because it's really not that bad, then why does paying more and restricting oneself to gain this illusory "security" earn "a disgust response from me and others who cannot afford the security you buy." If they don't need the security, then you and the others who can't afford it don't need it either, right?

Straightforwardly, and from direct personal experience as well as observed experience of those close to me, low-trust areas are in fact absolutely awful, and the crime and dysfunction they engender makes living a decent life far, far harder than a reasonable person should or will tolerate. The people who take positive action to exclude such crime and dysfunction from their communities are doing what they can with what they have where they are. Those who cannot enjoy such coordination could, if they wished, get the same effect through the powers of the state; not doing so is a decision that a majority of them have made and continue to make, because they consider the steps necessary unacceptable. I see no reason to consider your disgust toward the people who wall themselves off from such dysfunction legitimate in any way.

And reading your comment just makes me even more convinced about the goodness and necessity of having a gated community to live in, far away from those with fantasies like yours. First the lower classes take away the surplus we generate through taxation and spend it on themselves, showing precisely zero gratitude for what we are giving them and then they fantasize about hurting us for using what portion of the fruits of our labour we have left over to create a healthy, functioning society for ourselves.

Nothing we do inside our gated communities precludes you from creating a similar thing for yourself on the outside. It is the bad behaviour of the lower classes which led to the necessity of gated communities in the first place, and now you hate us for doing exactly what you would have probably done were you in our situation... Gated communities don't create low trust societies but rather low trust societies create the need for gated communities in the first place.

We are the ones paying for your continued existence and in return you treat us like this? I've always felt that the higher classes are fundamentally better human beings than the lower classes (and therefore if you were to turn the tables and give the current lower classes stewardship over the resources of society the world would get much worse very quickly because every single vice the common man accuses us of is present in even greater quantities amongst the lower class) but I guess it's good to get some vindication for my belief.

Are we LARPing, or just throwing speeches at each other? 🤣

Consider the following:

  1. The benefit cliffs from tax subsidies are real, and most technician jobs pay in the shadow of them. Competent contributors without a strong social network seem to get the worst of both worlds. Especially if the work is structured to have compulsory overtime to meet legal deadlines, and face-to-face socializing is rarely possible during work hours.

  2. Everyone fantasizes about violence. Some people sublimate it better than others. I appreciate your honest distaste. It's less exhausting to communicate with masks off.

You're welcome to believe we deserve our hell, as I believe you've invented one for us by relying on Internet art and thirdhand stories.

Now, this might not be the thread for it. But are you ready for some productive conversation after we've puffed our chests at each other?

Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?

For this to happen, you'd have to stop punishing heroes when they arise. I'm reminded of that case of the guy restraining the addict on the subway who was making everyone uncomfortable. Or the numerous cases of people being prosecuted for self defence against criminals.

Point is, it's not worth it for most people to step in when chances are they'll get a harsher punishment than the criminal they apprehend.

I'm reminded of that case of the guy restraining the addict on the subway who was making everyone uncomfortable.

He killed the homeless guy. I'm sympathetic to the issue of nuisances on subways, but the right solution isn't literally killing them. From the Wikipedia page, it seems like he didn't choke the guy for less than 5 minutes. Depriving the brain of oxygen will start causing permanent damage after 1 minute, and will just about always be lethal by 5 minutes.

This could have been prevented by making it fine and legal to beat the shit out of the nuisance instead of having to restrain him. The guy would still be alive today (well unless he overdosed later, which is a very real possibility) had he gotten the shit beat out of him in that encounter rather than being restrained.

If beating the shit out of nuisances was legal, I'd be rather concerned about the amount of "Oh Officer you don't understand, he was being slightly annoying in a public space, that's why I broke two of his bones and gave him internal bleeding". Sure it's a step up from literal murder, but still very far from any ideal outcome.

I would support police having the option to whip people who commit minor crimes, like Singapore does. But only by a well trained and disciplined police force who can actually determine who deserves it, not any rando who doesn't like the look of a hobo.

As others have touched upon it's not homogeneity that drives Japan's relatively low levels of criminality, it's culture, customs, and habits.

Both the guy and the girl in the described story could be the most Ashkenazi of Jews and the guy would still be an asshole in need of an ass-whooping.

Likewise surveillance doesn't mean shit if it isn't backed by the will to do something about it, see the current state of the UK.

The missing fourth option on your list is "reject modernity and embrace tradition" not in the silly RETVRN sense peddled by gay-presenting euro-poors who self-identify as perverts on twitter, but in the understanding that maybe grandpa knew something you don't. Maybe all those backwards seeming customs that you chafed at because you're a good little liberal who believes in self-actualization and fighting the power actually serve a critical role. Maybe life is better when you make a conscious effort to say what you mean and mean what you say and refuse to tolerate anything less from those around you. Maybe "suiting up" to leave the house isn't just for you and contra liberal sensibilities, the old man (or woman) who tells the kids to "knock it off", wear a belt, watch thier language, etc... is serving a vital social function.

What if George S Patton was right about everything?

Could you make your comment a little more concrete?

Are you conjecturing the man in this story didn't respect his parents enough, and that that is the fault of liberal policy? Or that his parents didn't teach him self-control, and that is the fault of liberal policy? That this kind of aggravation happened less often in the 1950s because people went to church, and liberal policy is driving people away from Christianity?

Right now the your fourth option is vague, and it is appropriately supported with a vague appeal to some idealized past.

The fourth option is what relatively secular Asian countries have. A strong shame culture with a very explicit and detailed set of expectations on their behavior. You can have that without religion and with a fairly liberal government. They have strong social norms enforced through shaming.

If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.

That is probably correct individual level advice, but my gut reaction is to let my Cajun side come out and show up in numbers and intimidate him right back.

And that's the thing, obviously- our society strongly disincentivizes honor-culture retaliation moreso than it does the initial offense, which benefits bad actors. If we really wanted we could set a different equilibrium where the law considers provocation a sufficient mitigating factor to reverse the equilibrium. We don't, though. It probably comes at the cost of much higher levels of assault and murder and the like. We could also set a different equilibrium where our society has a much laxer attitude towards police brutality as long as he had it coming, and gentlemen like this(who, after all, didn't commit a serious crime) could get a beating from police instead of getting arrested to be released later with no charges. The black community's collective neuroticism about police brutality probably takes this option off the table, however.

Now obviously you can't try and prosecute every asshole in the world. You have to pick a set of tradeoffs, and the tradeoff our society picked is one where assholes get a lot of leash. In places like much of Africa assholes don't get much protection from the law, because the law gives only minimal protections to anybody. In East Asia the law cracks down on assholes at the expense of the rights of the accused and general privacy rights. I don't see much of a fourth option. Maybe ancaps have a nice theoretical framework, but every time it's been tried organized crime and/or powerful clans brought us back to "places like much of Africa". I guess in theory you can have a very nice clan-based society where the state prevents actual feuds, but it seems like it's A) not very compatible with liberal individualism and B) prone to the same failure modes as that nice theoretical framework.

our society strongly disincentivizes honor-culture retaliation moreso than it does the initial offense, which benefits bad actors

This is by design. The initial offense here just isn't that bad. It can coexist with a society that has OpenAI. The problem with honor culture retaliation is it escalates and it's indifferent / symmetric with respect to who was actually "in the right" from the perspective of society's interest in preserving large-scale systems from interference. Allowing such retaliation if a court later judges you're in the right ... well, everyone thinks they're in the right in the moment.

If we really wanted we could set a different equilibrium where the law considers provocation a sufficient mitigating factor to reverse the equilibrium

The current equilibrium poorly with "you can't punish the underclass for being violent or antisocial because that's bigoted (not just racist, it's more general than that)", but everything mixes badly with that.

Part of the problem is that things in between 'honor-culture retaliation' and 'shutting up and taking it' are highly discouraged both legally and culturally.

I've often thought we should bring back the idea of an outlaw. Literally a person with no legal protections that can be dealt with as the citizenry sees fit. There should be crimes that grant you that status, like rolling coal on a pedestrian in a modded diesel truck, or listening to loud music on public transport on a boombox instead of headphones. If you choose to act outside the law for no reason other than to antagonize your fellow man, the law should not protect you.

Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.

You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.

Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.

A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.

Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.

High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.

High conscientiousness bubbles don't need a low level bossman. Highly religious communities and certain firearms-centered communities do quite well with minimal lower management, despite being broadly average in IQ and SES, because they're high in conscientiousness.

The trouble is we have a major ideological tendency which objects to the concept of conscientiousness and labels it as "whiteness", and other ideological tendencies which think that's ridiculous but do nothing to promote conscientiousness per se.

I think the problem with tolerate the bad behavior is that it pretty much normalizes that behavior. And this guy has been emboldened to act like a bully and intimidate this woman because it has worked numerous time for him in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future. So my answer is that the bad behaviors are stopped by either the apartment complex owners, or the cops enforcing a fine for parking in a reserved spot.

I’m firmly in favor of broken windows approaches to social norms — if you tolerate low level breaking of norms, you’ll eventually get higher levels of norm breaking. And ideally starting young. Don’t let your kids or anyone else’s kids be rude to you, or to be rude to other people. Insist on not only minimal expectations but higher ones. Teach your kids to call adults sir, ma’am, and Mr/Mrs Last Name, and insist on being called that yourself. Don’t let them go out looking sloppy. This is what happened in the high societies of the past. People respected themselves and others because it was something that was drilled into people with a high degree of formality. You can read the etiquette books from privous eras, and while some of it is probably outdated (like having house uniforms for your servants) a lot of it would create the social norms we actually want. A society where it’s drilled into your head to not be late to the movie and not climb over people during the show is likely one where people will respect others enough to not have conversations, chew loudly, or pull out their phones. And a child who learns at five to not touch other people’s stuff and faces a couple of groundings for doing so isn’t going to take people’s stuff or park in their spaces without permission.

What we’ve done instead is create a slovenly slacker culture in which expectations are basically in the toilet. There’s no insistence on any social norms. In 1950, informal was clean blue jeans. In 2024, it’s pajama bottoms. In 1950, no kid would be allowed to talk back to an adult, in 2024, it’s normal to argue with them. And it doesn’t actually shock me that a culture that has very few social norms around showing respect for other people somehow is creating a culture of entitlement in which if you can get it or intimidate others into giving it to you, then you get yours and screw everyone else.

There was a post high up on reddit featuring a clip from Jack Reacher season 2's opening, where a man deduces that a woman in front of him at the ATM is being held hostage by a carjacker. For extra morality simplification in case the audience is thinking too hard, her kid is in the car too. The hero then walks over, smashes the window, and beats the shit out of the carjacker. Very cathartic, and the reddit post is titled as something like this is every guy's fantasy.

My fantasy is keeping myself out of trouble and to avoid injecting myself in such situations so that I can live to die another day. I rather enjoy living and having my body bereft of stab wounds and bullet holes. A random woman certainly wouldn’t reciprocate to provide free protection services if the situations were reversed.

Well, this is very dramatic, but I'd rather wish more lower-level heroics took place. Instead of beating up a carjacker to save a child, can we have a hero who beats on the door of the reserved parking spot thief and leave a note that says to never intimidate the poor woman ever again?

I’m more than down with normalizing vigilantism against antisocial behavior in the spirit of a general “fuck around and find out”edness. It should be open season for motorists to provide mostly peaceful love-taps to groups of “teens” riding their bicycles dangerously in the streets, for storeowners or third-parties to Rooftop Korean-away looting flash mobs like the compound outbreak scene in 28 Weeks Later. In the current state of affairs, this is largely restricted by Who? Whom? concerns, as a certain NYC subway marine found out the hard way.

However, I don’t like the gender-biased nature of it. Women already feel entitled to random men serving as their white-knights, meat-shields, and bodyguards; I’d prefer not to exacerbate that. If women are to be regarded as Strong Independent #GirlBosses with the rights and status of men, they can solve their own problems and fight their own battles. Fists, knives, and bullets hurt men too. I’m not a fan of Schrodinger’s feminism, where women are #GirlBosses one moment and damsels in distress the next, depending on what’s more beneficial and emotionally convenient for them.

If the Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s were instead a small man in his 20s or 30s, hardly would anyone call for a “hero” to step-up on his behalf. Beating on some hot-head’s door may result in it opening for a fist or knife fight. Who knows what might happen to your defeated body if you lose the fight. If you win, it may result in protracted legal, social, and professional troubles, especially if the hot-head is a member of a favored class. It’s also a great way to get yourself shot right through the door. You’d deserve it too for white-knighting, fucking around and finding out, when you’re not a peak human with borderline supernatural powers like Jack Reacher.

If she were my daughter, I think my system-level advice would be to try to escape that environment entirely, which might mean moving to a safer city/town, or paying more to go to a higher end apartment complex, etc.

Yes. To paraphrase Steve Sailer, the tough part of being poor in Western countries is not for lack of essentials or material goods, but rather having to live next to other poor people. And violent, low impulse control, and generally antisocial behavior is far more common among the poor.

In this specific case, the reddit thread mostly has people suggesting she call the apartment complex to tow the car next time this happens, and to file a complaint so there is a record of potential violence and intimidation. Another upvoted comment says to put up a camera near her car so she'd know if he retaliates, maybe by keying her car or something.

If moving is not an option, these are reasonable solutions for a woman (or a man, for that matter).

Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.

The cure might be worse than the disease here. The surveillance and social credit system could be readily turned against you in anarcho-tyrannic fashion.

Japanese homogeneity. Stop outsiders and troublemakers from entering society. Then in this cohesive society, everyone pitches in to punish low level offenses without the additional complication of being accused of discrimination.

Without mass deportations (or something more... drastic), the ship has already set sail on this front in the United States and Europe. Eugenics would work, but might take too long depending on what degree of eugenics is deployed, even if it somehow could be.

Semi-failed state where the stakes are high for low level offenders themselves. Some guy parks in your spot? Shoot up his car windows. No legal consequence will come because that's considered a misdemeanor here. Perhaps things escalate, but perhaps not, but at least he won't park in your spot again.

Tempting, but escalating when you’re less crazy and have more to lose than your opponent is a risky venture, to say the least.

Surely a rich society has a fourth option?

Calling for and voting in a manner for politicians, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. For a Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s, chances are this is a leopard-eating-her-face situation.

I don’t think you need anything that dramatic. You just need to coordinate society such that people who are rude and do disrespectful things are shunned. If he’d lost friends for doing that he wouldn’t be doing it. And as long as it’s tolerated it continues to get worse. My guess is, based on observation, that this isn’t the first time he’s done that. More than likely he’s been pushing on social norms for a long time and not getting any negative results. And if we stop tolerating it, it stops.

You just need to coordinate society such that

"Just"? Pardon me, but you might as well say that to lift mount Everest you just need to push up very hard.

Hmm? My suggestion was to call for and vote for politicans, DAs, and the police to just do their jobs. Hopefully that's not considered that dramatic in ${CurrentYear}, but Cthulhu swims left...

I don’t think anything he did amounts to a crime in most jurisdictions. The DA can’t do anything if it’s not illegal to bang on a door.

Banging on a door for the purpose of threatening the occupant is absolutely a crime in most jurisdictions. (In England and Wales, it is legally an assault).

But even that isn't necessary. The point of banging on the door is to claim escalation dominance by sending a credible signal that if she escalates to calling for a tow he can counter-escalate to a beatdown. The appropriate response by the authorities is to send a cop to the guy's house to politely inform illegal parking guy that actually the Westphalian State has escalation dominance round here and that if he escalates to a beatdown the cops will counter-escalate to a jail term, felony record etc. If that threat is credible, then it doesn't need to be followed up. And if the cops tell the unfortunate lady what they have done, then she now has escalation dominance in the original dispute. This is easy police work that a rookie cop could handle.

In a place with minimally effective policing (which, for example, included 95% of the UK in the nineties and 99% of the UK in the noughties, and in the present non-ghetto neighbourhoods of most Continental European or Australian cities, and all of 1st-world Asia) a threat of a beatdown by one adult neighbour against another is empty. I haven't seen the Reddit post that the OP is referring to, so it isn't clear to me if this was a case of a place where there is no effective policing (far too much of the US because the US is, for reasons that are not clear to me as a Brit, shockingly bad at basic police work) or whether this was a case of a woman scared into submission by an empty threat (in which case someone who knew the local situation should have told her to call the cops).

Who is we?

Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.

I don't believe this. Go to any parking lot no matter how crowded and there will be handicapped parking spots open. You don't need to purge the genepool to fix parking violations. You just need to make the problem legible to the authorities.

A panopticon society might fix the problem everywhere, but if you're talking about just a single implementation of the legibility fix then you're only resolving the surface aspect of the problem. If you simply wish for parking spaces to not get stolen, sure, it would work. If you're viewing the problem as 'bad actors use intimidation and bullying to create unfair, anti-utilitarian outcomes', then implementing the fix in one place will simply squeeze the problem out elsewhere.

Problem here is you can't blame genes as such, not if you mean "low level criminality means poor people who are poor because their genes are bad". The guy with the car is living in the same apartment complex and owns a car, so presumably he's getting the same kind of income in the same general level of job the woman has. He's not an underclass thug, he's someone who has no sense of community or the unwritten rules of society because of - well, what? I think we can take it that the traditional methods of discipline and social ostracization have gone by the board. 'Question authority' means that teachers, pastors, cops, you name it, including now parents, are no longer unquestioningly accepted.

Now it's "if the parking space is open, I take it, I don't care someone else is paying for it, this is me being smart and taking advantage of the rule-following fools. If someone touches my property, I am offended and retaliate, but I have no problem taking other people's things, including their parking spaces".

I honestly don't know the solution, it does seem to me that there's a huge gap between the assumptions under which I (early Gen X) was raised, and the way Millennials/Zoomers were raised. There's a ton of "of course this thing is bad and should not be done" assumptions that are just not in common anymore. Things like "well you don't take someone else's parking space even if it's free" is one such example.

I'd say the eugenics would be more about promoting pro-sociality. I don't think East Asia has as much trouble as the West, let alone other parts of the world, with these kinds of perennial bad actors. The OP specified two approaches that only East Asian countries have so far achieved, Japan's acceptance of insularity and its attendant low immigration and economic stagnation, and China's social credit authoritarian system. Both are quintessentially East Asian systems. You need an East Asian-style populace to even get to the point where such approaches are plausible, as otherwise you are dealing with whacky Westerners and their preferences.

In America there's plenty of underclass thugs who own cars, and he might be sharing that apartment with eg a more functional girlfriend or something. There's also plenty of normal working class people living in shittier apartments than they could technically afford.

The guy with the car is living in the same apartment complex and owns a car, so presumably he's getting the same kind of income in the same general level of job the woman has. He's not an underclass thug, he's someone who has no sense of community or the unwritten rules of society because of - well, what?

It’s not uncommon for the PMC-adjacent, or the PMC to-be, to live alongside the working class (or even the underclass), especially temporarily when they’re young. For example, graduate students with little income or net-worth, or those who work low-paying PMC jobs such as at a non-profit (more common among women than men).

As has been discussed quite a bit here, many working class men can out-earn members of the middle-class or even the lower rungs of the PMC—plumbers, policemen, electricians can very well match or out-earn teachers, librarians, back-office workers in corporations. It’s also not uncommon for working class men to have… spirited… modes of self-expression, albeit at lesser rates and severity than the underclass.

The guy, whether under or working class could also be living with a girlfriend/wife, which might mean greater household income and reduced per capita housing costs relative to the presumably solo-living Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s. He could also be living paycheck to paycheck, while she's able to save money net of living expenses.

Society has a straightforward solution for her - contact your apartment complex, they'll contact a tow company, and the tow company will happily haul the vehicle away and charge him for it. The initial warning was a kindness, his response was aggression, so the appropriate escalation is just following policy and procedure. If she genuinely thinks that the guy in question might beat or murder her, yeah, the intimidation portion of things is going to be a problem that there isn't a straightforward solution to; anti-social lunatics that are willing to throw their lives away over parking spots are indeed a difficult problem. If (and I think this is much more likely) his approach would be lower-level threats, one must bring law enforcement in on it. If something fails to work here, it's simply a lack of enforcement of existing rules. There isn't any need for a new surveillance society, just recording the lunatic banging on your door and threatening you is covered by the existing legal system.

If someone is too intimidated to take the recourse that is available, well, that certainly does suck, but there's only so much society as a whole can do for someone that isn't even willing to outsource their conflict resolution to a third-party.

But the problem is it shouldn't get to the level of "we need a third party to intervene", under a civilised world we should be "oops sorry didn't know it was your space" when he got a polite note (and the initial note should be polite, not aggressive or spouting insults), not "fuck you bitch" unless penalties are imposed.

Good God, the older I get, the more I understand original Obi-Wan Kenobi. And this clip is all that is wrong with current mores. Civility is not pretentiousness, it's living like we are not chimpanzees flinging shit at rival troupes.

If you want to keep your civilized world, you need to at least occasionally deal with those acting in an uncivilized manner. Having them is inevitable, because assholes are everywhere. Whether dealing with them is the modal experience depends on incentives -- if there are strong incentives against acting uncivilized, the assholes will either cool it or get forced out. If instead the "civilized people" decide "don't sweat the small stuff and it's all small stuff" is the proper way to act, the assholes will run roughshod over them.

To have a civilized world, however sanctions must be enforced. Sub-criminal behaviour should be matched by sub-judicial sanctions. Put a video up of how scared you were, use the camera footage of him keying your car or pounding aggressively on your door, put it on Twitter and tik-tok and the like. In the old days, he would have been sanctioned by the village giving him the cold shoulder, now in a more atomized society social media shaming is the go to. In other words, he should be cancelled. Maybe the management company will evict him when the story goes viral, or he will lose his job. Therefore disincentivizing his behaviour.

Depends if the perpetrator is a member of a left favoured group or not. If he is I think you run an even greater risk that you will be the one who ends up cancelled instead for "perpetuating oppressor dynamics/punching down" etc. etc.

Sure, there are other social dynamics as well, but the idea is still sound. And indeed as Jonathan Majors showed a woman making an accusation against a man can still bear fruit.

Of course we shouldn't, but expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous. I also shouldn't have to lock my car, or remove valuables from plain sight, or any number of other things that I do because they are unfortunately necessary. The question here is one of remedy, the implication being that receiving justice is so involved that it's often not worth it for relatively minor inconveniences. Which can be true, since this isn't one of those cases. It's a shame that she has to call the property management company to get somebody to do something about it, but it's a phone call. The initial concern wasn't that the thing was happening but that it was too minor for the police to get involved.

The old Hobbesian/Trad-Right take would be that the sort of people who believe that "expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous" create the environment where you need to remove valuables from plain sight because how you approach the little things informs how you approach the big things.

expecting everyone to be courteous all the time is ridiculous

Why? I was born in a house without running water, and my mother taught me not to eat in the streets as that was common and bad manners. Then something changed in society, we dumped all the old rules, and today this is what we've got: 'please don't park in my space' engenders a guy trying to kick your door down.

And all the assumptions that he must be a working-class/underclass thug? Not warranted. Middle-class people can be mannerless sons of bitches too. Don't put it all on the poor, the college boys and girls who grew up to make the new rules are the ones who brought this situation about.

If we lower our expectations to "of course asking people to behave with common courtesy in public all the time is ridiculous", then this is what we get.

I think we might be talking past each other here. I don't mean ridiculous in the sense that it's unreasonable on an individual level, I mean ridiculous in the sense that, on a societal level, expecting a world where there are no assholes is hopelessly naive. It's like the whole defund the police thing; I personally don't like the idea that it's necessary to dedicate so many of my tax dollars to funding an apparatus to protect society from the very worst possible sort of person. But I don't think that defunding the police is a reasonable position on the basis that it's not ridiculous to expect people to behave all the time. Or like the idea during MeToo that instead of teaching women basic precautions we should just teach men no to rape. A nice sentiment, but easier said than done. As a practical matter, it isn't realistic for me to live my life with the expectation that everyone will always be acting courteous and in good faith, because no matter what we try to do, there are always going to be assholes out there.

I certainly don't expect a society with no assholes, but right now I think we've slid all the way into "how dare you accuse me of being an asshole, I'm a minority/a victim/rules are for suckers/other stupid reason for why I shouldn't have to abide by social norms" acceptance of bad behaviour.

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