Truly Scary Stuff

[Crissa]

Did Maj ever back up this argument with anything?

What pisses me off is the fact that people who commit crimes can end up with a better life than what they had before,

-Crissa

[Lago_AM3P]

What pisses me off is the fact that people who commit crimes can end up with a better life than what they had before,

I'm sure she was referring to the current administration and their incestuous relationship with Haliburton. Or white collar crime in general.

</smarmy>

[Captain_Bleach]

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And I think there's a place for that in society - namely, as punitive measures. I am not against the death penalty. I am not against castrating rapists. I am not against treating someone guilty of a crime just as they treated their victims.

Why? So you can feel better?

Mutilations, murder, and prolonged infliction of pain does not, in actual application, reduce the incidence of crime. Killing people who kill people to somehow show that killing people is wrong is an obvious - and failed concept.

Cutting the heads off of murderers in the public square does not reduce the number of murders. Or aggravated assaults. Or anything else. However "justified" it may seem or be, it is not effective. And tht means that there is no place for it in society. Society isn't about making the family of a victim of homocide feel smug about the fate of the miscreant who killed him - it's about minimizing the number of families who have to deal with one of their members being murdered in the first place.

All the discussion about "justice" and "mercy" is obscuring the point. The point is that neither of those ideas mean shit, because the correct course of action is whatever it is that makes there be less call for justice or mercy in the future. And that course of action isn't cutting the balls off of rapists. Most rapists don't ejaculate anyway, and cutting off their balls just locks them into a cycle of domination and pain infliction - a castrated rapist is a more likely repeat offender than a whole one.

Morality doesn't even enter into this debate. It's just a question of what works and what doesn't work. If for some reason the best way to reduce the number of murders was to give every murderer a hundred dollars, a lollipop, and blowjob, then that's what we as a society should do - fairness be damned.*

Eye for an Eye bullshit has consistently shown itself to increase crime. Especially violent crime. The most explosive example, of course, is the Legalist doctrine of the 2nd century BCE in China. The theory was that by increasing the severity of punishments for minor offenses, they could scare everyone away from even contemplating major offenses. This ended, naturally, in road crews overthrowing the entire country because their rain-inspired tardiness doomed them to judicial execution anyway and they had nothing to lose.

-Username17

*: It's not, btw. While I doubt that it's been tried, similar incentive programs in El Salvador and Peru have shown corresponding increases in murder rates. It is logical to assume, therefore, that the ideal course of action would be dissimilar to the example proposal.

How do you know that? How would one prove that to be true?

[Catharz]

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How do you know that? How would one prove that to be true?

You look inside of the victim.
But people have been saying for a long time that rape is a crime of power rather than lust, and testosterone have very little to do with desire for power.

[Captain_Bleach]

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How do you know that? How would one prove that to be true?

But people have been saying for a long time that rape is a crime of power rather than lust, and testosterone have very little to do with desire for power.

Thanks for the answer.

[CalibronXXX]

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What pisses me off is the fact that people who commit crimes can end up with a better life than what they had before,

I'm sure she was referring to the current administration and their incestuous relationship with Haliburton. Or white collar crime in general.

</smarmy>

I doubt that. A poor man born and raised in a poverty stricken violent ghetto where getting food every day is not a given, will have a significantly better life in prison; exercise yards, TV, three guaranteed meals a day, no freezing during the winter, medical attention when he needs it, and those're just the very basics, he may very well get free education(this is actually a good thing IMO), "extracurricular" activities like a vegetable garden, access to smuggled goods like cigarettes, alcohol, or sweets, and other things. Sure there're downsides too, but they aren't any worse, or probably very different, with what he's had to deal with before.

[ckafrica]

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Also as far as the death penalty goes, while it's true that it isn't much of a deterrant, killing someone can be more efficient than locking him up, in that he's no longer consuming resources to feed and support. You can also use that to save lives as well, by taking thier organs and giving them to people in need of a transplant. Life imprisonment is just plain stupid... Why waste resources on someone who is never going to be let back into society?

Problem with death penalty is you have to have faith in the system that puts people in prison. Because if you are wrongly convicted, which happens all the time (I don't have the numbers but Harper's did an article a few years ago on this), you might feel a little put off by your swift execution rather than having any faint hope of justice and vindication. In canada, we've had several high profile cases of convicted "murders" be let out after decades because evidence came up showing it could in no way have been them (and often that the government went out of their way to ignore the evidence and secure a conviction). If they'd been in Texas they'd have been dead a long time ago.

I mean seriously, do any of you actually trust your government enough to give them the legal right to kill you?

As for prisons, general rule in the rest world is to make them worse than not being in prison. Now for most developing countries that means worse than struggling to live is a near death sentence for anything long than a short stay. Talked to a few guys (backpackers caught with drugs) who were held in African jails (not prisons just jails) and it was enough for them not to risk getting thrown in again.

[CalibronXXX]

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As for prisons, general rule in the rest world is to make them worse than not being in prison.

That's so crazy it just might work!

[Lago_AM3P]

As for prisons, general rule in the rest world is to make them worse than not being in prison.

By increasing social services for the underclass or by making prison more brutal?

I really doubt it's the latter. The crime rate has gone down in the United States significantly over the last 15 years yet this has also been the period when people have been expressing the most concern about coddled prisoners.

Furthermore I don't have a cite but I'm almost positive prisons are harser in the United States than they are in other developed countries--which incidentally have a bigger social safety net--yet the US has a much higher incarceration rate.

While it may be a factor, I think it's an uphill battle to prove that creating a less humane prison conditions will reduce the population.

I mean, sheesh, you're trying to make this sound cushy:

poor man born and raised in a poverty stricken violent ghetto where getting food every day is not a given, will have a significantly better life in prison; exercise yards, TV, three guaranteed meals a day, no freezing during the winter, medical attention when he needs it, and those're just the very basics, he may very well get free education(this is actually a good thing IMO), "extracurricular" activities like a vegetable garden, access to smuggled goods like cigarettes, alcohol, or sweets, and other things.

What exactly would you take away from this setup? Fewer meals? Confinement to the cell all day? Kill the heating?

[CalibronXXX]

I was pointing out a fact, not making an argument. If I were making an argument it'd be something along the lines of appropriating funds from prisons and funneling them into education and community betterment programs.

[JonSetanta]

Compare to accounts of certain regions of India where a horde of angry women storm the rapist, lynch him, and justice is served. Supposedly.

My girlfriend and I were discussing this topic one day while the subject I mentioned (above) blurted out on the radio. We're still torn between opinions of which is more effective in deterring rape, jail or mod rule, when bringing up the same subject months later.
As in... both of us can't make a personal opinion on the matter for one method or the other; both seem to have benefits and consequences.

[Username17]

Mob rule is completely ineffective. Look at Pakistan, in which people actually use mob rule to get away with rape. Yes, you announce that such and such a family has done something wrong or maybe they are just a bunch of jerks and it's time to teach them a lesson by gang raping one or more of their daughters. Who's in?

This kind of crap happens every damn day, and the only remedy is the rule of law.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Torture is only permissable in hypotheticals where the proposed torturer has perfect knowledge regarding the suspect's guilt, the efficacy or torture, the efficacy of other interrogation methods, and that the knowledge gained from the tortured suspect will be pertinent to a bomb in New York, and will arrive in time to defuse the bomb.

In the meantime, just having a torture policy will cause the public to mistrust your government, gives the government reason to inflict pain (justified or not), will probably cost a shitton of money in the same way the death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment, and is just inhumane in general. All of these factors HAVE to be in place and the outcome has to be better than what we know torture already costs.

This is almost impossible criteria to meet, though. This is seriously getting into 'would you start shooting little girls in the head to see which one of them had the atomic bomb' territory here.

As in... both of us can't make a personal opinion on the matter for one method or the other; both seem to have benefits and consequences.

And what exactly would be a benefit to mob rule? Has mob rule ever done anything APPROACHING justice?

[Bigode]

Frank, could you check whether the link on Legalism still works? It's not seeming to on my side, though that may be because this computer (not mine) is chockfull of spambots.

[Username17]

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Well guess what? Slavery reduces consumer confidence. It makes things to buy without making people to buy them - it drives any Capitalist economy into the dirt. It also drives Command economies and barter economies into the dirt, and if you'd really like I can draw you diagrams for why that happens too.

I would like a diagram of this, Frank.

OK, the first thing to realize about Comand Economies is that the definition of "slavery" is different for different economic systems. For example, a Capitalist point of view considers almost everyone in an advanced command economy to be a "slave" (because they don't have the opportunity to market their labor); and from a Communist point of view almost everyone in an advanced Capitalist economy is a "slave" (because they have no ownership of the product of their labor and if they don't work they'll starve).

Nevertheless, slavery really does exist within Command Economies, and it hurts the economy. The key is that in a command economy Demand is essentially limitless. Rather than producing until you've exhausted the potential consumer dollars, you simply produce as much as you want/can and then give the citizens enough dollars to purchase everything. The limitting agents then are planning and Capital.

Seriously. I think I need to step back and reiterate that point: a command economy has virtually limitless demand. There is literally no theoretical limit to how fast a command economy can grow. We'll get back to that point.

So what differentiates a slave from a free worker in an economy where production is planned? Well, the worker actually owns all the capital goods. When the economy grows, he owns it. That means that when it comes time to distribute the produced goods and services, he gets more the bigger the overall economy has become. The slave, on the other hand, owns nothing. He gets enough food to not die, and that's about it. If the economy grows, the additional surplus is split up by the free workers - the slave doesn't get a single Tickle-Me-Elmo doll out of the deal.

So you can see how lavishing planning and capital on the free worker might pay off in a very immediate way. It pays off to the tune of "going from horse drawn wagons to space ships in 30 years" in actual practice. The worker is bought into the system, and when you give him the tools and tell him to produce more he'll probably do it because the system doing well is good for him.

But the slave is not invested. If you give him better tools and tell him to produce more he won't make any special effort to do so. Slave production is sticky and resistant to increases in efficiency. So effectively any planning and capital goods you give to your slave laborers is something which could have been given to regular workers to greater effect but instead is being given to slaves for a lesser effect.

So while cutting some people out of the pie allows you to reward other people more right now, it reduces the rate of growth of the entire system, so it becomes a bad idea extremely quickly.

Frank, could you check whether the link on Legalism still works? It's not seeming to on my side, though that may be because this computer (not mine) is chockfull of spambots.

No, it doesn't work any more. Here's a key part of the rant though:

The first famous Legalist, Lord Shang (d. 338 B.C.E.), preached the doctrine that society could be controlled by means of penalties. When he succeeded in becoming the chief administrator of the state of Qin, he divided the population into units of five or ten persons, each responsible for the actions of all the others. Anyone failing to report an offender was to be cut in two at the waist, while someone who did report offenders was to be rewarded as if he had decapitated an enemy. Those who devoted themselves successfully to the fundamental occupations, tilling or weaving, would have their taxes remitted, but those who made socially unhelpful profits, in trade and the crafts, or were poor out of laziness would be confiscated as slaves.

A country that is strong, Shang said, can remain so only by continuing to wage war, while a country administered, as Confucians preferred, with the help of history, music, filial piety, and brotherly love, sinks into poverty or falls to its enemies. Above all, he said, a government must promote order by means of rare but consistent rewards and frequent, consistent, severe punishments. Governed by the fear of punishment, people will obey the laws, be virtuous, and be kept happy by what they are allowed to enjoy.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

The first famous Legalist, Lord Shang (d. 338 B.C.E.), preached the doctrine that society could be controlled by means of penalties.

Those who devoted themselves successfully to the fundamental occupations, tilling or weaving, would have their taxes remitted, but those who made [b}socially unhelpful profits, in trade and the crafts,[/b] or were poor out of laziness would be confiscated as slaves.

How long did it take for that bullshit society to come crashing down? 10 years?

[Username17]

Fifteen years, baby! Things happened slower bck then, but also they continued to conquer more people, adding slaves like fuel to their engine until the empire got to be 40 million people and was no longer managable on conquest alone.

-Username17

[Bigode]

Thanks, Frank. The funny part's that I asked without having actually looked at the post dates - I thought that was a new thread instead of one bumped from the deepest recesses of the board.