(August 24, 2020 at 8:33 pm)Eleven Wrote: On a friend's timeline, people are starting to get it:

I mostly agree with this meme but like most memes it simplifies a complicated reality. The idea that if there was enough opportunity that everyone would just peace, love, dope their way through life totally misses the point that even when Maslow's hierarchy is satisfied people are weird as fuck and some of us will STILL find a way to fuck things up so bad that we need people with guns to intervene.

Certainly the best way to decrease crime would be to level the playing field to provide for what people need, but many people, like me for example, are deterred by law and the idea that if they did what they wanted they would be subdued by cops and so they avoid breaking laws.

Think about it... the biggest deterrent for murder is that it is illegal.

If murder was legal...

(August 24, 2020 at 8:45 pm)SUNGULA Wrote:

(August 24, 2020 at 8:41 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: All else being equal, but Without the deterrence effect of police, it is hard to imagine crime would not Be worse.     

It is tempting to say the other side’s half truths have no truth in it.    But In fact their half truths are often not any more false than yours own cherished half truths.

Police are a poor deterrence. For the same reason the death penalty is a poor deterrence

Police are far less poor a deterrence than death penalty.    

The difference between doing time and not doing time For most offenses is much greater to the perspective offender than In prison for life or in prison for a marginally shorter life for the very serious offender.

(August 24, 2020 at 9:03 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:

(August 24, 2020 at 8:45 pm)SUNGULA Wrote: Police are a poor deterrence. For the same reason the death penalty is a poor deterrence

Police are far less poor a deterrence than death penalty.    

The difference between doing time and not doing time For most offenses is much greater to the perspective offender than In prison for life or in prison for a marginally shorter life for the very serious offender.

I disagree

The biggest deterrent to murder, is that people aren't murderers. If a thing being illegal actually stopped people from doing it there would be no crime in the world.

(August 25, 2020 at 4:33 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote: The biggest deterrent to murder, is that people aren't murderers.  If a thing being illegal actually stopped people from doing it there would be no crime in the world.

not really.  The biggest deterrent to murder is the credible system that Clearly defines it as some equivalent of illegal, and demonstrates the Reliable capability to  Incur a cost for doing illegal things that would be out of proportion to the gains that would have motivate the illegal thing

Only after the credibility of such a system have become so long I nternalized That accommodating It became part of the reflexive framework inside which people seeks to explain the world do people Begin to make lemonade out of lemon by proclaiming  “I am not a murderer”.

If you were born into system where murder had never been vigorously punished, the frame work to make murder “Bad” wouldn’t exist and you would not be a murderer If you had the opportunity only If you were murdered first. 

There wouldn’t have been something like its prohibition in the 10 commandments had murder not already been so thoroughly discouraged by  long established convention Of social judgement and punishment that it would not have seemed strange And presumptions to have restriction against It hoisted upon the recipients of 10 commandments.

We are moral creatures only because it has long been accepted the price of immorality is too high.   All other reasons for being moral creatures are flaky self-justifications for operating within a practical constraint that In general will fall away within a relatively short time, say a few years, A generation at most, if it is convincingly demonstrated the constraint doesn’t exist, ie the price is not going to Be too high.

I hope we don't prove just how much of a deterrent the police were, when we had them.

(August 25, 2020 at 6:49 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: We are moral creatures only because it has long been accepted the price of immorality is too high.   All other reasons for being moral creatures are flaky self-justifications that will fall away within a relatively short time, say a few years, A generation at most, if it is convincingly demonstrated the price is not going to Be too high.

I don't think that the murder issue began as a question of cognitive moral assessment or deontology - and would point to prohibitions against murder among our earliest writings as indicative of how we already felt about murder.  Push the dial back 50k years at least and...if you could translate, you would hear recognizable positions on the issue of killing.  Likely further, much...muuuuuuuch further.

We fail to have identical thoughts and hold to identical facts or use identical systems of qualitative assessment and there is still universality to human moral propositions and behavior (whether we believe them to be objective, subjective, or something else).  These, very credibly, are human behaviors and preferences in search of a rationalization.  We don't like murder.  Maybe we don't like it because it's bad, maybe it's bad because we don't like it.  Either way, we're pretty clear on murder.

That we weigh the practical cost of behaviors with moral import and decide against the self described moral behavior is unsurprising.  We're rational (or rationalizing) agents...and also compromised agents.  We can have good reason to be bad just as we can fail to see bad.  What you're observing in the hypothetical above isn't moral discontinuity, but the spiraling behavior of a moral agent -like a human being- as the decision fields presented become more and more and then/or exclusively sub-optimal.  We could skip the middle entirely and propose that in a choice between moral behavior and life a great many people would choose life in any generation.  That doesn't mean that they stopped having moral intuitions about what they're doing, or that their moral intuitions have changed.

There are people who murder - not very many. If we think of it like a scale where we can slide that number up by adding compromising circumstances, we have to wonder whether or even how the police would or could help in those circumstances. I doubt that officer friendly is going to be handing out tickets on fury road. I doubt that -especially- if humans are, as your comments could suggest - morally incompetent. Cops are people too - in a world with more murdery people there would be more murdery cops. Adding more cops to murder world only adds more murderers.

Wisconsin police shoot black man

Quote:Wisconsin’s governor on Monday called in the National Guard to help quell unrest after police shot an unarmed Black man in the latest incident this summer to stir cries of injustice and divide a nation over the urgency of bringing fundamental change to law enforcement.

Police shot Jacob Blake, who witnesses said had been trying to break up an argument between two women, as he walked back toward his silver SUV on Sunday, an officer trailing behind. As three of Blake’s sons looked on from the vehicle, the officer fired seven times toward Blake’s back at close range. The incident was caught on video, which immediately ricocheted across the Internet.

I've seen the video, three police officers were screaming at him to freeze and put his hands on his head etc while pointing guns at him. He just flat out IGNORED them, walked straight past them and walked to his car - what a fucking MORON!!! The police were clearly afraid this TOTAL NUTJOB was going to his car for a weapon so bla bla bla blam blam blam ensues.

I dunno.


Looks like a case of whacked out on drugs to me.

You can't tell me that a guy who staggers away from being tasered and ignores a cop with drawn guns is acting normally.

...

The video looks damning - as it is edited to look so.

We don't have context. We don't know why the cops had guns drawn. What happened that we didn't see?


A situation cannot be understood by just watching the gory 10 seconds......