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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   34022 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Matthew Yglesias has a post about fare evasion. I especially love this part:

In theory, if you’re out on bail but you skipped your court date, you ought to be extra-cautious in your day-to-day behavior. In practice, a lot of people who commit crimes don’t make that decision. The police walking around the street aren’t clairvoyant; they don’t know which passersby have outstanding warrants. But if they catch someone jumping the turnstile, that’s a perfectly valid reason to run them through the system. Police can catch bail skippers or people who are already wanted for some other reason — they can also catch people carrying illegal guns.

I know he's moved away from Vox/Slate towards the center, but just this year, places like Philly and Oregon no longer allow the police to pull people over for broken lights because it is racist, and here is Mr Yglesias, literally advocating for more terry stops. I actually think it's a good thing: if both neolibs and neocons are trying to re-center and narrow down the Overton window, this thread might get slow and boring.

Reading the piece jogged some thoughts for me, so I wanted to sketch them out here. I think the following questions lie under the surface of this issue, that being:

  • How many people in a civil, metropolitan society are defectbots?

  • How should a civil, metropolitan society deal with defectbots? Or, rather, what is the appropriate amount of violence to do to defectbots? (After all, you could argue that any response is violent, and that's the frame I'm going to work from here, insert that quote about energy consumption from Dune: Messiah here.)

  • In what way should this violence be done?

Different parts of the political spectrum have different answers to these: neoliberals would push for solutions that attempt to extract the just result while inflicting the least violence (within a sort of continuum of options/force, starting with a warning or a small fine), neocons would push for harder solutions that maximize along the "severity as deterrence" theory, opting for a good and large dose of violence (harsher fines and jail time).

But there's also the way in which the violence is done: Iglesias refers to gun control and illegal handguns. Putting aside the moral or practical arguments for metropolitan gun control, this perhaps reveals deeper depth in the political spectrum: neolibs/cons would generally prefer that the violence be carried out by a centralized power (after all, states and governments should retain a monopoly on violence), while libertarians would prefer for decentralized violence to allow a sort-of self-policing (basically: everyone gets to carry a gun or at least be able to hire someone to protect them; anyone trying to pull a gun on someone else ideally filters themselves out of the gene pool), authoritarians believe in hardcore centralization of violence backed up with maximal violence for any defection (see: Singapore), and progressives/id-pols can be characterized (however (un)fairly or (un)charitably) as thinking that doing violence to clearly-in-the-wrong defectors is immoral to begin with.

I don't personally really believe this for myself, if only because of the uncomfortable conclusions (again: see Singapore), but if it boils down to law-and-order (and even seemingly-insignificant things like fare-jumping or littering or smoking or public drinking or drug use all fall under law-and-order), this is perhaps the best map I spontaneously thought of.

(But also, this doesn't get into certainty-of-punishment vs. severity-of-punishment, second-order effects or unintended consquences, so don't take this as some Grand Theory of Law and Order. And of course, the "opacity" of this train of thought also lies within that first question: if the vast, vast majority of people aren't the kind you need Terry stops to catch because they don't even go down the path of dumb, destructive criminality, then this is all mu.)

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