You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
Yes, they complain about it, but then they generally support Republicans, who pass a huge amount of those bad laws in the name of being 'tough on crime'.
But you (and they) are quite correct about the pernicious effects of such a system (which dovetails nicely with the current brouhaha over NSA surveillance). It's not that the NSA is listening in real time to every one of your conversations, the idea is that they simply store all the information needed and then if you ever become inconvenient to anyone in power (say, you find yourself on Nixon's List) then they have all the recorded data needed to find you in violation of *something*.
And of course, such systems have very racially disparate results, as we can see all around us.
You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
The war on drugs is ruining not only our own country, but Mexico as well, which was a reasonably prosperous, reasonably well run country until we pressured Calderon into declaring war on the drug cartels.
Then we wonder why people don't seem to like us very much.
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Yes, public caning is absurd. We have much better ways of dealing with criminals, like reducing the value of their life so much they all live in the woods like a leper colony (See: Florida and sex offenders).
Honestly, a public caning seems more humane that a bunch of the shit our overwrought puritan laws seek to implement.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
"We do the best we can with the knowledge and tools we have*" is a bit different, philosophically, from "If you don't want to get punished, don't break the rules," don't you think?
* We really don't, but that's a matter for another time.
I really had to think on this one. One bourbon, one old fashioned, and one gigantic portion of short ribs later, I think I have digested this post.
I agree that there is a difference in philosophy, if not in practice, between the two. If we had a more perfect ability to determine who has a diminished capacity to choose to follow the law then I would want the state to intervene and try to find the least restrictive means of protecting society from these people. For most that would hopefully mean a mix of therapy and medications, but for some it would mean a refusal to allow them to live on their own, requiring them to be in group homes or other institutionalized settings. Like I said, I would want the least restrictive setting, but if it is a choice of more freedom for the man we know to have a hair trigger violent response or ensuring he does not attack people, I will always choose the later.
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
Which is why I'm of the belief all laws should have sunset clauses. This doesn't mean they won't continuously get extended (please see the PATRIOT ACT) but at least legislators have to spend political capital to keep the controversial ones on the books.
All punishments are intended to inflict pain. That's why they are called punishments.
If you are saying caning inflicts PHYSICAL pain while the others do not, that's true, but I also think it's pretty self evident that a day of physical pain is far more humane than ruining the entire rest of your life (and potentially the lives of any loved ones or dependents).
If our current practices of giving criminals records that deny them jobs, fines that place them in poverty if they aren't already there, and jail sentences that steal the best years of their lives and leave them unemployable and unable to re-integrate into society leads to a life that is full of pain and suffering down the line, I think that's clearly a less humane approach.
I mean, which would you prefer: brief physical pain, or endless psychological pain being locked up for 25 years in barbaric conditions? (You'd also experience physical pain too, as a bonus!)
The prisoners hunger striking at Guantanamo are enduring a lot of physical pain via the force feeding methods. Do you think they'd take a bargain where they get a public caning but then can go free? I bet they'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I would, if I was there.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
Which is why I'm of the belief all laws should have sunset clauses. This doesn't mean they won't continuously get extended (please see the PATRIOT ACT) but at least legislators have to spend political capital to keep the controversial ones on the books.
really? what political capital has been spent renewing PATRIOT?
I remember when sunset clauses was a 90s libertarian sort of thing, and then that happened, so...
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
An infliction of pain that the person can then go home and live their lives how they see fit after, not miss their kids (or dogs or whatever) birthdays so many times.
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
Physical pain is far from the worst kind of pain. I'd rather have someone cut off my finger with a machete than watch my wife die of cancer, for example.
Ruining someones entire life, taking them away from their spouse, kids and loved ones, so that it ruins their lives too, over trivial minor non violent offenses, inflicts far more pain, I'd argue than a caning.
You seem to be staking out a position that any amount of psychological pain is better than even the smallest amount of physical pain. I think that's a pretty indefensible position.
All punishments are intended to inflict pain of some kind or another. If it's not unpleasant or undesirable, it wasn't a punishment.
I can't say I entirely disagree with Vorpal. I abhor physical punishment, but brief extreme pain may beat some of the things our less brutal punishments do to people.
You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
Which is why I'm of the belief all laws should have sunset clauses. This doesn't mean they won't continuously get extended (please see the PATRIOT ACT) but at least legislators have to spend political capital to keep the controversial ones on the books.
really? what political capital has been spent renewing PATRIOT?
I remember when sunset clauses was a 90s libertarian sort of thing, and then that happened, so...
I think it's still important to make these guys keep re-upping it/amending it and having continued debate over it if they want to keep it a law. At least they have to go on the record as continuously supporting it every couple election cycles instead of ignoring the fact it's still on the books or making some kind of claim that repeal is just too difficult.
We'd also get a census on exactly where these guys stand beyond just rhetoric. I think it's useful information.
Ok, I think there is quite a bit of talking past each other where I've acknowledged that multiple offenses of minor crimes become a major or serious crime and harsher punishment often becomes warranted.
Exile or long term imprisonment or god striking dead is still harsher than I think necessary or effective, but not...not as absurd for a person who isn't a chronic offender.
In the real world, not talking ideals, I think that our prison sentences tend to be much longer than they should be. I think that realistically, three strikes rules should only apply to crimes that result in jail time. If we jail you and let you out twice and you still commit a crime that will land you in jail again, I think its time to recognize that we are not rehabilitating you, and whether you spend life in jail or in some sort of group home or in a mental hospital (whatever is appropriate) you shouldn't be let back out again, because the risk of recidivism is just too high now.
Ah, yes, because clearly it is John Doe's fault that he has mental illness, and further it is clear that because nobody has ever tried to help him, he can't be helped, is a danger to society, and should be locked up forever.
You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
Which is why I'm of the belief all laws should have sunset clauses. This doesn't mean they won't continuously get extended (please see the PATRIOT ACT) but at least legislators have to spend political capital to keep the controversial ones on the books.
really? what political capital has been spent renewing PATRIOT?
I remember when sunset clauses was a 90s libertarian sort of thing, and then that happened, so...
I think it's still important to make these guys keep re-upping it/amending it and having continued debate over it if they want to keep it a law. At least they have to go on the record as continuously supporting it every couple election cycles instead of ignoring the fact it's still on the books or making some kind of claim that repeal is just too difficult.
We'd also get a census on exactly where these guys stand beyond just rhetoric. I think it's useful information.
don't you guys pass farm bills every five or so years? How's that working out for you?
I think regular renewal only promotes the continued viability of civil-social lobby groups that perform the 'baptist' part of the bootlegger dynamic.
ronya on
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
Ok, I think there is quite a bit of talking past each other where I've acknowledged that multiple offenses of minor crimes become a major or serious crime and harsher punishment often becomes warranted.
Exile or long term imprisonment or god striking dead is still harsher than I think necessary or effective, but not...not as absurd for a person who isn't a chronic offender.
In the real world, not talking ideals, I think that our prison sentences tend to be much longer than they should be. I think that realistically, three strikes rules should only apply to crimes that result in jail time. If we jail you and let you out twice and you still commit a crime that will land you in jail again, I think its time to recognize that we are not rehabilitating you, and whether you spend life in jail or in some sort of group home or in a mental hospital (whatever is appropriate) you shouldn't be let back out again, because the risk of recidivism is just too high now.
Ah, yes, because clearly it is John Doe's fault that he has mental illness, and further it is clear that because nobody has ever tried to help him, he can't be helped, is a danger to society, and should be locked up forever.
Please see my earlier posts in response to feral.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
Physical pain is far from the worst kind of pain. I'd rather have someone cut off my finger with a machete than watch my wife die of cancer, for example.
Ruining someones entire life, taking them away from their spouse, kids and loved ones, so that it ruins their lives too, over trivial minor non violent offenses, inflicts far more pain, I'd argue than a caning.
You seem to be staking out a position that any amount of psychological pain is better than even the smallest amount of physical pain. I think that's a pretty indefensible position.
All punishments are intended to inflict pain of some kind or another. If it's not unpleasant or undesirable, it wasn't a punishment.
I was going to say that the purpose of jail is not pain but rehabilitation/isolation from society, but fines are explicitly intended to inflict economic pain. It's the sole reason they work. Hmm. Need to consider further.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
Tell that to the guy who froze to death outside the Circle K I worked at because there was no room anywhere in shelters.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
I'm fairly certain humans can be in a state where if they don't eat anything they will die immediately. Or where if they don't find shelter they will die immediately. Or where if they don't have medical care they will die immediately.
I'm not familiar with either of those references. Is that a veiled way of saying my post was a wall 'o text? I can trim it down.
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
Physical pain is far from the worst kind of pain. I'd rather have someone cut off my finger with a machete than watch my wife die of cancer, for example.
Ruining someones entire life, taking them away from their spouse, kids and loved ones, so that it ruins their lives too, over trivial minor non violent offenses, inflicts far more pain, I'd argue than a caning.
You seem to be staking out a position that any amount of psychological pain is better than even the smallest amount of physical pain. I think that's a pretty indefensible position.
All punishments are intended to inflict pain of some kind or another. If it's not unpleasant or undesirable, it wasn't a punishment.
I was going to say that the purpose of jail is not pain but rehabilitation/isolation from society, but fines are explicitly intended to inflict economic pain. It's the sole reason they work. Hmm. Need to consider further.
No one really thinks jail works well to rehabilitate people - except in the limited sense that pain acts as a corrective.
And isolation from your friends and family is obviously meant to cause psychological pain. That's why solitary isolation, which is isolation from even your fellow inmates, is used as a disciplinary tool inside prisons.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
I'm fairly certain humans can be in a state where if they don't eat anything they will die immediately. Or where if they don't find shelter they will die immediately. Or where if they don't have medical care they will die immediately.
People need more than agency to stay alive.
But even if you are nearly starving to death, there will still be options other than stealing the particular food you steal. Maybe you beg. Maybe you can go to a soup kitchen. Maybe you can find discarded food in a garbage can. There will likely be any number of alternatives.
But this is all tangenital. The discussion was whether someone with a diminished capacity for self control should be viewed as having agency in choosing whether or not to key a car or commit other vandalism. My replies to feral set out my feelings on this matter.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
If you stripped me of all my belongings and emptied my bank account and fired me from my job I'm positive I could go get a decent job relatively quickly and work my way back up the food chain.
Why? Because I have an education and don't speak in slang and don't have tatoos all over my face and have social contacts that can assist me in being professionally successful.
If we're talking about "poverty" as an all encompassing definition like zagdrob did then it's a different story. I was discussing the notion if you just took away people's money and assets. If you're talking about brain wiping them entirely that's a different story.
I have highlighted the part of that that ensures you wont end up being homeless
the rest is barely important, certainly less so than you being a white guy
TBH I've worked a couple jobs where I've had none as well. I just sent out my resume and got called by a company that nobody I know happened to work at. I did that in 2010 in this recession we are/were apparently having. Sorry for not fitting the narrative.
How do you know I'm a "white guy"?
Edit: and if your point is less about employment and more about just sleeping on people's couches instead of shelters then yes I'll concede that point. Having friends helps.
I'm just playing the odds that you're a white guy
regardless, immediately getting jobs is kind of not exactly common
But what your saying is tantamount to wondering what new yorkers were complaining about during the hurricane when you're in montana, because you look outside and the weather's fine
And frankly it's kind of really insulting to a lot of us with friends and family (or maybe ourselves) had or have trouble finding work
I don't see how sharing my experience is insulting. If you're insulted I think that's a personal problem. I realize my experience isn't everyone else's experience. I just am fortunate to work in an industry (and have an expertise) where jobs are all over the place. Note it wasn't always that way for me. I originally graduated school with an English degree and was working at the fucking mall.
You indicated that people who can't find work must have slang or tattoos or fuck up their resume or make a bad impression on the interview or something, by pointing those out as things you didn't do
well lots of people do those things right too and still have a really hard time, even in a better economy than this one
Well the first point is true. Don't do those things. And yes I realize there are a lot of people who do all the right things and can't get a job. Not that it's entirely their fault but the reality is they are probably looking for the wrong jobs. Tech is woefully under-staffed right now. I realize it's not as easy as going to school to "learn the computers" but if you're working in an industry where jobs simply don't exist, maybe people should stop doing that and position themselves to look in another one.
Dude. The current job-market is so fucked up you don't even know. And switching to another field is totally not a thing available for most people. It's not that it's not as easy as going to school to learn computers, it's that it's basically impossible to now go to school and learn computers. Reeducation costs money. Money that someone not currently having a job doesn't have.
If you stripped me of all my belongings and emptied my bank account and fired me from my job I'm positive I could go get a decent job relatively quickly and work my way back up the food chain.
Why? Because I have an education and don't speak in slang and don't have tatoos all over my face and have social contacts that can assist me in being professionally successful.
If we're talking about "poverty" as an all encompassing definition like zagdrob did then it's a different story. I was discussing the notion if you just took away people's money and assets. If you're talking about brain wiping them entirely that's a different story.
I have highlighted the part of that that ensures you wont end up being homeless
the rest is barely important, certainly less so than you being a white guy
TBH I've worked a couple jobs where I've had none as well. I just sent out my resume and got called by a company that nobody I know happened to work at. I did that in 2010 in this recession we are/were apparently having. Sorry for not fitting the narrative.
How do you know I'm a "white guy"?
Edit: and if your point is less about employment and more about just sleeping on people's couches instead of shelters then yes I'll concede that point. Having friends helps.
I'm just playing the odds that you're a white guy
regardless, immediately getting jobs is kind of not exactly common
But what your saying is tantamount to wondering what new yorkers were complaining about during the hurricane when you're in montana, because you look outside and the weather's fine
And frankly it's kind of really insulting to a lot of us with friends and family (or maybe ourselves) had or have trouble finding work
I don't see how sharing my experience is insulting. If you're insulted I think that's a personal problem. I realize my experience isn't everyone else's experience. I just am fortunate to work in an industry (and have an expertise) where jobs are all over the place. Note it wasn't always that way for me. I originally graduated school with an English degree and was working at the fucking mall.
You indicated that people who can't find work must have slang or tattoos or fuck up their resume or make a bad impression on the interview or something, by pointing those out as things you didn't do
well lots of people do those things right too and still have a really hard time, even in a better economy than this one
Well the first point is true. Don't do those things. And yes I realize there are a lot of people who do all the right things and can't get a job. Not that it's entirely their fault but the reality is they are probably looking for the wrong jobs. Tech is woefully under-staffed right now. I realize it's not as easy as going to school to "learn the computers" but if you're working in an industry where jobs simply don't exist, maybe people should stop doing that and position themselves to look in another one.
Dude. The current job-market is so fucked up you don't even know. And switching to another field is totally not a thing available for most people. It's not that it's not as easy as going to school to learn computers, it's that it's basically impossible to now go to school and learn computers. Reeducation costs money. Money that someone not currently having a job doesn't have.
That's not getting into the fact that new graduates of any age are pretty much screwed because there is a glut of already experienced workers. Add to that the current fetish for requiring five years experience for entry level jobs, and there is a reason why something like 80 percent of new college graduates are still living at home.
It is the absolute worst time to be switching careers, unless you have a guaranteed position when you finish retraining. Even then, I'd make sure you got that shit in writing and had a copy of your future firm's financials to make sure they'll still be around to back up that promise.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
Tell that to the guy who froze to death outside the Circle K I worked at because there was no room anywhere in shelters.
I can't say I entirely disagree with Vorpal. I abhor physical punishment, but brief extreme pain may beat some of the things our less brutal punishments do to people.
Ruminating...
Yeah it's not so much "oh that would be a better punishment" as it is "holy shit the current way we deal with that shit is so fucked up that I'd rather take a fucking caning.".
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
This is a good argument for use in deciding what is or isn't legal.
It is a poor argument for use in deciding what to do with someone who has committed a crime.
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
Being poor may limit those choices, but it does not rob you of your agency.
How much does agency weigh? Can you measure it by putting a human being on a big scale at the moment of death, when agency leaves the body?
About as much as your sense of self or memories?
People make choices and are responsible for them. Being I poverty does not alter this. Everyone has the exact same capability not to break the law.
Eh, not really.
I mean, agency isn't a binary thing. It's not something you either have or you do not. Human behavior is as much situational as it is individual. See: fundamental attribution bias. Also see: old adages about walking in another man's shoes.
At the most dramatic level, poverty is associated with mental illness, and the legal framework for dealing with mental illness's effects on behavior are pretty rough. (As they have to be, at our current level of understanding.) An individual with, for example, bipolar disorder, does not have same capacity to follow the law... even if that individual passes the blunt legal sanity check that they know right from wrong.
But that's a dramatic example, just to illustrate the point. Mental illness is one extreme end of the scale - in the middle, between illness and health, there is a huge spectrum of both personal and contextual issues that can affect a person's ability to follow rules. Anger issues, impulse control issues, difficulties dealing with authority, etc.
Even a relatively normal person can be driven to extreme behavior by extreme circumstances. If you get into a car wreck, get yelled at by your boss, come home to an abusive spouse - your ability to follow rules like "don't break shit" and "don't hit people" is impaired.
So somebody broke a car window. Obviously, we may imagine an alternative history where this person did not break the car window. But they did, and they did so for reasons. (Whether those reasons are morally defensible or not is another story.) There was a causal chain of events both endogenous and exogenous to that person leading up to that broken window. To blame the behavior on "agency" without acknowledging that 'agency' means different things in different contexts, you might as well be talking about a soul. If you're not at least a little bit determinist when discussing human behavior, you're being simplistic.
I agree that it is a complicated issue, but we can't do anything but simplify and hold people blameworthy, because we need to be able to count on people to follow the rules, and the alternative to trusting someone to follow the rules is to lock them up (we used to use asylums) right off the bat, because we can't just have people who are not capable (or not capable enough) of following the rules walking around endangering other people. Put another way, if we don't subscribe to a person having the choice to follow the rules, how can we even give them the chance to do so?
Question: Do you believe that coercion diminishes mens rea?
You are coming across as saying you do not. That, in the extreme example, someone holding a gun to your head and demanding you do something does not, in any way, restrict your ability to choose. And that is a completely indefensible position.
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
Tell that to the guy who froze to death outside the Circle K I worked at because there was no room anywhere in shelters.
that's the worst thing i've heard in a while
One of my coworkers found him by tripping over his corpse the next day.
You should read Three Felonies A Day. Basically, the rapidly increasing number of crimes of which you can be convicted (particularly with the hideously misplaced War on Drugs) has made criminals out of everyone. I maintain it's basically impossible to not break any laws. There is almost a 100% chance that an IRS agent could find one of your tax returns for the past 10 years to be incorrect, for example, even if you did your best to obey all laws.
The privileged and the rich do not mind this situation so much, as they are not apt to be prosecuted. But it lets authorities target the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities, extremely ruthlessly. It's not that the poor are less capable of following the law than the rich, it's that we enthusiastically throw the books at poor people for trivial offenses, while ignoring these trivial offenses when they are committed by the rich and famous, while simultaneously ignoring great huge honking big offenses committed by the wealthy and powerful.
Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
Which is why I'm of the belief all laws should have sunset clauses. This doesn't mean they won't continuously get extended (please see the PATRIOT ACT) but at least legislators have to spend political capital to keep the controversial ones on the books.
really? what political capital has been spent renewing PATRIOT?
I remember when sunset clauses was a 90s libertarian sort of thing, and then that happened, so...
I think it's still important to make these guys keep re-upping it/amending it and having continued debate over it if they want to keep it a law. At least they have to go on the record as continuously supporting it every couple election cycles instead of ignoring the fact it's still on the books or making some kind of claim that repeal is just too difficult.
We'd also get a census on exactly where these guys stand beyond just rhetoric. I think it's useful information.
don't you guys pass farm bills every five or so years? How's that working out for you?
I think regular renewal only promotes the continued viability of civil-social lobby groups that perform the 'baptist' part of the bootlegger dynamic.
Those are just spending bills. That's not really a renewal of an existing bill. The vast majority of laws don't have sunset clauses.
I think your concern is more about lobbying in a general sense. That's going to occur either way under the current rules.
If you stripped me of all my belongings and emptied my bank account and fired me from my job I'm positive I could go get a decent job relatively quickly and work my way back up the food chain.
Why? Because I have an education and don't speak in slang and don't have tatoos all over my face and have social contacts that can assist me in being professionally successful.
If we're talking about "poverty" as an all encompassing definition like zagdrob did then it's a different story. I was discussing the notion if you just took away people's money and assets. If you're talking about brain wiping them entirely that's a different story.
I have highlighted the part of that that ensures you wont end up being homeless
the rest is barely important, certainly less so than you being a white guy
TBH I've worked a couple jobs where I've had none as well. I just sent out my resume and got called by a company that nobody I know happened to work at. I did that in 2010 in this recession we are/were apparently having. Sorry for not fitting the narrative.
How do you know I'm a "white guy"?
Edit: and if your point is less about employment and more about just sleeping on people's couches instead of shelters then yes I'll concede that point. Having friends helps.
I'm just playing the odds that you're a white guy
regardless, immediately getting jobs is kind of not exactly common
But what your saying is tantamount to wondering what new yorkers were complaining about during the hurricane when you're in montana, because you look outside and the weather's fine
And frankly it's kind of really insulting to a lot of us with friends and family (or maybe ourselves) had or have trouble finding work
I don't see how sharing my experience is insulting. If you're insulted I think that's a personal problem. I realize my experience isn't everyone else's experience. I just am fortunate to work in an industry (and have an expertise) where jobs are all over the place. Note it wasn't always that way for me. I originally graduated school with an English degree and was working at the fucking mall.
You indicated that people who can't find work must have slang or tattoos or fuck up their resume or make a bad impression on the interview or something, by pointing those out as things you didn't do
well lots of people do those things right too and still have a really hard time, even in a better economy than this one
Well the first point is true. Don't do those things. And yes I realize there are a lot of people who do all the right things and can't get a job. Not that it's entirely their fault but the reality is they are probably looking for the wrong jobs. Tech is woefully under-staffed right now. I realize it's not as easy as going to school to "learn the computers" but if you're working in an industry where jobs simply don't exist, maybe people should stop doing that and position themselves to look in another one.
Dude. The current job-market is so fucked up you don't even know. And switching to another field is totally not a thing available for most people. It's not that it's not as easy as going to school to learn computers, it's that it's basically impossible to now go to school and learn computers. Reeducation costs money. Money that someone not currently having a job doesn't have.
I kinda know because I got laid off almost 4 years ago (company closed it's office) and then again a year later (company shuttered it's doors completely) and had to find a new job. Technically the first search was a gimme because the first company splintered off into a smaller one and I picked up a job there with a lot of the same people. But the second lay off happened and I was forced to find something completely out of network. So yeah I'm in a field where jobs are plentiful and far enough along experience-wise where finding one isn't a problem. Re-education does cost money, but it's still better to take out yet another loan than just be unemployed forever or wait for a position in a line of work that's never going to recover.
It's also notable that when you're looking for an entry level job it's always been really difficult regardless of the market. College grads with little to no work experience not being able to find jobs isn't a new thing or finding something under their education level isn't really a new thing at least for non ivy league students.
spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I guess that caning is meant to be a straight up deterrent, like fines. But the fact that people are so eager to say they would prefer a caning to jail makes me think that msybe caning isn't that good of a deterrent.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I guess that caning is meant to be a straight up deterrent, like fines. But the fact that people are so eager to say they would prefer a caning to jail makes me think that msybe caning isn't that good of a deterrent.
Last I checked its not possible to get a criminal education for the few minutes it takes to get caned.
See? Other things not considered. Max jails are basically Crime U.
Look, either caning can be an absurdly brutal punishment that is too painful to contemplate, or it can be not enough of a deterrent. You can't have it both ways
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
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Libertarians have been screaming about this fact for years. The more laws you pass the more impossible they all simultaneously become to follow. It becomes less about the laws are on the books and it simply comes down to authority discretion. If they want to nail you for something, anything at all, they will find something that sticks. If totally fucks the poor because you usually need money to be in compliance with a lot of this stuff and you also need money to buy your way out of the fines that result.
But you (and they) are quite correct about the pernicious effects of such a system (which dovetails nicely with the current brouhaha over NSA surveillance). It's not that the NSA is listening in real time to every one of your conversations, the idea is that they simply store all the information needed and then if you ever become inconvenient to anyone in power (say, you find yourself on Nixon's List) then they have all the recorded data needed to find you in violation of *something*.
And of course, such systems have very racially disparate results, as we can see all around us.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
the problem, of course, is that moral panics do happen, as a fact of human social behaviour - and a legislative system that deliberately impedes legislation makes it easy for moral panics to add laws, but makes it hard for these laws to be dismantled once the panic ebbs
there is no crack epidemic in the modern US, but the civil society it created thunders on nonetheless
Then we wonder why people don't seem to like us very much.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
It's a pretty overt way of saying that the idea of public caning is so absurd that I immediately assume you're writing satire.
Honestly, a public caning seems more humane that a bunch of the shit our overwrought puritan laws seek to implement.
I really had to think on this one. One bourbon, one old fashioned, and one gigantic portion of short ribs later, I think I have digested this post.
I agree that there is a difference in philosophy, if not in practice, between the two. If we had a more perfect ability to determine who has a diminished capacity to choose to follow the law then I would want the state to intervene and try to find the least restrictive means of protecting society from these people. For most that would hopefully mean a mix of therapy and medications, but for some it would mean a refusal to allow them to live on their own, requiring them to be in group homes or other institutionalized settings. Like I said, I would want the least restrictive setting, but if it is a choice of more freedom for the man we know to have a hair trigger violent response or ensuring he does not attack people, I will always choose the later.
Why is it absurd when it is currently practiced in countries with far less crime problems than our own, and was practiced for hundreds of years before that, and is clearly potentially less damaging than what we currently do to people convicted of crimes?
I honestly, sincerely, without satire of any kind, would rather be publicly caned than convicted of a felony and sent to jail for years.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
I don't follow. Why would this be relevant in defending what is illegal and not in sentencing?
At literal gun point, yes. Hungry and stealing bread? No.
Because caning is literally intended to inflict pain, while none of our punishments are?
Ask the people who get tortured in prisons by other inmates how much non-pain their sentence carries.
Which is why I'm of the belief all laws should have sunset clauses. This doesn't mean they won't continuously get extended (please see the PATRIOT ACT) but at least legislators have to spend political capital to keep the controversial ones on the books.
If you are saying caning inflicts PHYSICAL pain while the others do not, that's true, but I also think it's pretty self evident that a day of physical pain is far more humane than ruining the entire rest of your life (and potentially the lives of any loved ones or dependents).
If our current practices of giving criminals records that deny them jobs, fines that place them in poverty if they aren't already there, and jail sentences that steal the best years of their lives and leave them unemployable and unable to re-integrate into society leads to a life that is full of pain and suffering down the line, I think that's clearly a less humane approach.
I mean, which would you prefer: brief physical pain, or endless psychological pain being locked up for 25 years in barbaric conditions? (You'd also experience physical pain too, as a bonus!)
The prisoners hunger striking at Guantanamo are enduring a lot of physical pain via the force feeding methods. Do you think they'd take a bargain where they get a public caning but then can go free? I bet they'd take that deal in a heartbeat. I would, if I was there.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
At what point is hunger a biological gun to your head? Coercion is not binary. You are trying to draw a line where none can be drawn.
Edit: A formal proof of the concept:
Assume that:
1)There exists some distance away at which a drawn gun is universally equivalent to a gun to your head
2)Moving the gun an arbitrarily small fixed distance further away does not make it cease being a gun to your head
It then follows:
3)Formalizing the premises, a gun X meters away is to your head, and if a gun is Y meters away and to your head, a gun Y-a meters away is a gun to your head, where a is the aforementioned arbitrary distance
4)By induction, 0 grains of sand is a large pile of sand (Admittedly, I have to choose an actual, fixed distance in 2 or else the series is uncountably infinite. However, there is a physical minimum length below which length has no meaning, and choosing that still works)
5)Since 4 is obviously ridiculous, either 1 or 2 is false
6)2 is not false, since its truth is obvious
7)Therefore 1 is false.
That is to say, the notion of a gun to your head cannot be defined in absolute terms (Call this 0, I suppose, and 1 follows naturally - and thus negating 1 negates 0 by modus tollens). This shouldn't require proof, but I don't have anything else at this point (though I find the idea that "I can offer nothing but a formal mathematical proof" rather odd).
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
His is a flaw in the system that should be rectified. It is a national point if shame that it has not been. With caning, the intended punishment is the infliction of pain.
really? what political capital has been spent renewing PATRIOT?
I remember when sunset clauses was a 90s libertarian sort of thing, and then that happened, so...
An infliction of pain that the person can then go home and live their lives how they see fit after, not miss their kids (or dogs or whatever) birthdays so many times.
Physical pain is far from the worst kind of pain. I'd rather have someone cut off my finger with a machete than watch my wife die of cancer, for example.
Ruining someones entire life, taking them away from their spouse, kids and loved ones, so that it ruins their lives too, over trivial minor non violent offenses, inflicts far more pain, I'd argue than a caning.
You seem to be staking out a position that any amount of psychological pain is better than even the smallest amount of physical pain. I think that's a pretty indefensible position.
All punishments are intended to inflict pain of some kind or another. If it's not unpleasant or undesirable, it wasn't a punishment.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
Ruminating...
I think it's still important to make these guys keep re-upping it/amending it and having continued debate over it if they want to keep it a law. At least they have to go on the record as continuously supporting it every couple election cycles instead of ignoring the fact it's still on the books or making some kind of claim that repeal is just too difficult.
We'd also get a census on exactly where these guys stand beyond just rhetoric. I think it's useful information.
Ah, yes, because clearly it is John Doe's fault that he has mental illness, and further it is clear that because nobody has ever tried to help him, he can't be helped, is a danger to society, and should be locked up forever.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
don't you guys pass farm bills every five or so years? How's that working out for you?
I think regular renewal only promotes the continued viability of civil-social lobby groups that perform the 'baptist' part of the bootlegger dynamic.
Please see my earlier posts in response to feral.
A gun to your head creates a binary choice. You must obey immediately or die immediately. Hunger, poverty, etc. may limit your options, but they never reduce them to an immediate life or death decision.
I was going to say that the purpose of jail is not pain but rehabilitation/isolation from society, but fines are explicitly intended to inflict economic pain. It's the sole reason they work. Hmm. Need to consider further.
Tell that to the guy who froze to death outside the Circle K I worked at because there was no room anywhere in shelters.
I'm fairly certain humans can be in a state where if they don't eat anything they will die immediately. Or where if they don't find shelter they will die immediately. Or where if they don't have medical care they will die immediately.
People need more than agency to stay alive.
No one really thinks jail works well to rehabilitate people - except in the limited sense that pain acts as a corrective.
And isolation from your friends and family is obviously meant to cause psychological pain. That's why solitary isolation, which is isolation from even your fellow inmates, is used as a disciplinary tool inside prisons.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
But even if you are nearly starving to death, there will still be options other than stealing the particular food you steal. Maybe you beg. Maybe you can go to a soup kitchen. Maybe you can find discarded food in a garbage can. There will likely be any number of alternatives.
But this is all tangenital. The discussion was whether someone with a diminished capacity for self control should be viewed as having agency in choosing whether or not to key a car or commit other vandalism. My replies to feral set out my feelings on this matter.
Dude. The current job-market is so fucked up you don't even know. And switching to another field is totally not a thing available for most people. It's not that it's not as easy as going to school to learn computers, it's that it's basically impossible to now go to school and learn computers. Reeducation costs money. Money that someone not currently having a job doesn't have.
That's not getting into the fact that new graduates of any age are pretty much screwed because there is a glut of already experienced workers. Add to that the current fetish for requiring five years experience for entry level jobs, and there is a reason why something like 80 percent of new college graduates are still living at home.
It is the absolute worst time to be switching careers, unless you have a guaranteed position when you finish retraining. Even then, I'd make sure you got that shit in writing and had a copy of your future firm's financials to make sure they'll still be around to back up that promise.
that's the worst thing i've heard in a while
Yeah it's not so much "oh that would be a better punishment" as it is "holy shit the current way we deal with that shit is so fucked up that I'd rather take a fucking caning.".
One of my coworkers found him by tripping over his corpse the next day.
He froze to death. In Phoenix.
Those are just spending bills. That's not really a renewal of an existing bill. The vast majority of laws don't have sunset clauses.
I think your concern is more about lobbying in a general sense. That's going to occur either way under the current rules.
I kinda know because I got laid off almost 4 years ago (company closed it's office) and then again a year later (company shuttered it's doors completely) and had to find a new job. Technically the first search was a gimme because the first company splintered off into a smaller one and I picked up a job there with a lot of the same people. But the second lay off happened and I was forced to find something completely out of network. So yeah I'm in a field where jobs are plentiful and far enough along experience-wise where finding one isn't a problem. Re-education does cost money, but it's still better to take out yet another loan than just be unemployed forever or wait for a position in a line of work that's never going to recover.
It's also notable that when you're looking for an entry level job it's always been really difficult regardless of the market. College grads with little to no work experience not being able to find jobs isn't a new thing or finding something under their education level isn't really a new thing at least for non ivy league students.
Last I checked its not possible to get a criminal education for the few minutes it takes to get caned.
See? Other things not considered. Max jails are basically Crime U.
Now, the most notorious country that practices caning, Singapore, has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.
It's not like caning is a walk in the park. It fucking hurts and it can take days, even a week, to recover.
But I'd take a week of physical agony over the years and years of both mental and physical agony that result from rotting away in our overcrowded, underfunded, barbaric prison system.
Splitting up families and locking up low level, non violent offenders for decades for trivial bullshit is just appallingly bad. It would be terrible if our prisons were great. They aren't.
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