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I ran into the following tweet (xeet?) over on X:
https://x.com/DaveyJ_/status/1942962076101603809
I would feel bad for simply posting this as a naked link, so I guess I have to add on some half-baked analysis and commentary on top:
This is horrifying. Rarely, so you see examples of behavior that is clearly "legal", in the sense that there's no clear crime being committed, but with so much potential for harm to unwitting bystanders. I'm unfamiliar with the scope of child endangerment laws in the US, but I'd be surprised if they covered this or, even if they theoretically did so, whether they'd be enforced in that manner.
(I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that these laws typically require a prosecutor to prove that a guardian knowingly and willfully placed a child in a situation where their life or health was directly endangered. The behavior of the sister-in-law is profoundly reckless, but it falls into a legal gray area. A defense attorney would argue she had no intent to harm her children and that the danger was hypothetical and probabilistic, not immediate and direct. Proving a direct causal link between her online activities and a "clear and present danger" to the children would be incredibly difficult until, tragically, one of the inmates actually showed up and acted on his threats.)
At the same time, is it a problem worth solving? How do you reconcile that question with my earlier claim?
Well, that's a matter of impact or scale. Laws have costs associated with them, be it from the difficult to quantify loss of freedom/chilling effect, enforcement costs, sheer legislative complexity, or what I'm more concerned about, unexpected knock-on effects/scope creep where a desperate attempt to define the problematic action results in too wide a scope for enforcement:
What if it turns out to affect single moms looking to date again? Their new partners are far more likely to abuse their kids, but should such women thus be arrested for putting their kids at risk? Should people be forbidden from writing letters to inmates, or falling in love with them, or sex with them?
Is it worth it to specifically criminalize such behavior?
Despite my abhorrence for it, I'm not sure it is. I think the fraction of people who would be stupid or insane enough to act this way is small enough that the majority of us can treat this like a horror story and ignore it.
Another way to illustrate my intuition here would be to consider being a doctor or legislator reading an account of some kind of ridiculously horrible disease. Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose). Absolutely terrible, and something no one should go through.
Yet, for how horrible it is, this hypothetical disease is also ridiculously rare. Imagining it happens to a person every ten years, and makes medical journals every time it happens because of how rare it is. I would expect that doctor, or that law maker, to both be horrified, but if they were rational individuals considering the greater good, I would strongly prefer that they focus on more mundane and common conditions, like a cure for heart disease. There are lower hanging fruit to grasp here.
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Sometimes it's worth considering the merits of informal resolution systems for settling such matters, even if they have other significant downsides. For example, how would this situation be handled in India?
(I'm not aware of a trend of Indian women being stupid enough to act this way, though I can hardly say with any authority that it's literally never happened)
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them. And if they weren't, they'd be even more sympathetic to the idea of their palms being greased. The most awful outcomes would become vanishingly unlikely.
As a wise mullah once said: "What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
This isn't necessarily an overall endorsement of such a legal framework, or societal mindset. I'm just pointing out that, occasionally, they tackle problems that an atomized, quasi-libertarian society like most of the West can't tackle. I'd still, personally, prefer to live in the latter. While it's too late for the gent in question, you can reliably avoid running into such problems in the first place by not sticking your dick in crazy. Alas, as someone who has committed that folly, it's an even bigger folly to expect people to stop...
I do not think this should be a criminal matter. There is plenty of fucked-up shit which is enough to lose you custody of your kids without landing you in jail.
If the reporting is accurate, then I would expect family court to completely cut her from her kids. If that was not enough to act as an disincentive, sending her to prison would not have made a difference either.
From my reading of the text, the main problem was that she was doing this in secret. Once she was discovered, the repercussions (divorce, loss of custody) were likely swift to follow. I do not think that another society would have dealt much better with this. Even in Saudi Arabia, though there might be norms where a husband is checking his wive's phone, she might have another phone for sexting convicts.
This is bullshit. Especially as the beatings would likely be administered by the husband with no judicial oversight. I mean, sure, if the husband had beaten his wife for no reason on the general principle that she should live in terror of him, it would have been very likely that she would not have picked up her hobby of sexting convicts. But this is like suggesting that cobalt bombs are a good way to stop wildfires in California: while technically correct, the cure would be worse than the disease.
If people only have sex with people proven sane beyond all reasonable doubt, humanity would die out in a few generations. From the reaction of the husband, it seems that he was surprised by her behavior. We do not have the context to say if he should have seen this coming, and what his other options for a spouse were when he decided to marry and have kids.
While I agree with you, for the most part:
Despite what Western media reporting might have you believe, the rate of petty crime in India is surprisingly low. People rarely get pick-pocketed or robbed. Do you know why?
Because if caught in the act, the perpetrator would be rather unceremoniously beaten to a pulp, both by whoever caught them, and any civic minded individuals present. You can get a nice crowd going, it's fun for the whole family.
This is of course, strictly speaking, illegal. Yet any police officer, if asked to intervene, would laugh, shake their head and say the criminal deserved it. If the crook had the temerity to file charges, he'd probably be taken out back and given a second helping to change his mind.
As far as I'm concerned, this is strictly superior to prevailing Western attitudes regarding property crimes or theft. A shopkeeper who discovers someone shoplifting has very little legal recourse, the police rarely do any more than file a report and then give up on pursuing the matter. Giving them the de-facto right to take matters into their own hand and recover their property? The shopkeeper wins. Polite society wins, the only loser is the thief, and in this case the process is quite literally the desired punishment.
Before you ask, the number of false positives is negligible. I've never heard of anyone being falsely accused in this manner (at least with accusations of theft), and I've never had to have that particular fear myself.
I am, in general, against husbands beating their wives. Yet, in this specific scenario, I could hardly fault the poor chap should he be forced to resort to such methods to protect his own family. At the very least, I'd vote to acquit. It's a bit moot, because with prevailing Western norms, he likely didn't even consider a haymaker as a solution to his problems. In general, that's a good thing.
I think the issue is that societies that do a good job at dis-incentivising petty crime via societal beatdowns also come along with nasty side effects like tons of rape/sexual assault, which India does a much worse (better?) job at.
I'm not sure if this tradeoff is worth it.
I think that association is more likely to be correlational, rather than strictly causal. The rates of sexual assault vary widely across India, and there are definitely large areas where you are reasonably safe from it, while also seeing small-time crooks get beatings.
Fair enough
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If you are caught stealing from an individual in Texas, you can expect severe bodily harm as a reasonable consequence(criminals are, contrary to popular belief, smaller and less fit than average), and it is explicitly legal to kill thieves here.
We still have plenty of petty theft, although not mugging(because muggers are killed off by their victims). I suspect the difference is that strong trad families(like India has, and poor people in the USA rarely do) are pretty good at keeping their members from lives of crime.
We have very few guns. That makes mugging much harder, you can run away from a knife most of the time. Mugging is very rare in these parts too, never happened to anyone I know.
In the US, being poor in the first place is a far stronger sign of serious dysfunction and inadequacy than it would be in India, where the majority of people are poor. So you have many more industrious, hard working poor people around and fewer degenerates, in relative if not absolute terms.
Of course, I think the Texan approach to such things is laudable. I'd be happy living there, even if California still has my heart.
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You're the only Indian I've met who claims that people would get beaten in the street for various transgressions and I really find it hard to believe. Every Indian woman I've met seems to have a story about getting groped in public and the offender never gets beaten by the upstanding citizens that you claim inhabit the subcontinent.
Here is a vicesplainer on the career trajectory of one Delhi pickpocket. He joins a gang that has so much opportunity for larceny that they're pickpocketing around the clock in shifts. He certainly doesn't fear retaliation from honorable bystanders, the only thing he seems to fear is the gang after he tells them he's out.
I had an Indian coworker once comment that shoplifters in India would be beaten. Rather unlike the American response of letting them do it.
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Notice that I was very careful not to make this claim about sexual harassment.
Because that wouldn't be true. But why the difference?
Because a pinched ass is not a smoking gun! If someone gropes you up, there's usually no evidence a crime was committed at all, unlike most forms of theft, where you can, at least some of the time, show that the culprit is carrying your wallet or phone. The worst they can do is try and drop the evidence, which is usually not the same as destroying the evidence. My wallet lying ten feet away from you is, shall we say, suggestive.
Also, and I hope this is obvious, being groped is far more embarrassing than being robbed. This is just as true in India than is in the West. How many women cat-called by construction workers in NYC go on to file a complaint for sexual harassment?
Another important factor is that, because of the lack of evidence, it often boils down to a he-said-she-said situation, which bystanders are usually quite loathe to become involved in.
My man, did you bother to do something as simple as Google the phrase thief beaten up India?
Or did you look up "man beaten for groping woman India"? Because yes, that has happened.
I don't have the time to watch the video right now, but my expectation is that they're preying on tourists primarily, which would be easily true in Delhi. They could also, more tentatively, simply be lying about the risks of being caught, or too dumb to care.
India, as you know, is a big place. I am confident that there's a thief beaten up in India every day. The question is, is pickpocketing and robbery rare, and is it rare because thieves are sure to be swiftly beaten? You claim it is, but again, I have met many Indians and I have never heard any of them claim that thieves are guaranteed an ass-whooping on the spot.
It's not a video, it's an article. The guy mostly picks pockets of people on public transit, which tourists are usually wealthy enough to avoid and has a critical mass of witnesses and people who would be available for administering an impromptu beating.
I can't even imagine what it means to be "too dumb to care" about being beaten to a pulp. It is possible that he's lying, but why would he lie about this? Why would he continue to be a pickpocket if he's getting beaten every day by mobs of Indians? More importantly, how could he continue to do anything but lie in a hospital?
That is not a claim I've made. I've said such an outcome was "guaranteed", merely that the risk is high enough to be a real deterrent for would-be criminals.
We don't have that many Indians on The Motte, so I don't see how it makes a difference. In the wider internet, I think I'm quite unusual in being open-minded about the benefits of such extrajudicial punishment, compared to the kind of Indians you would pay attention to online.
India is a poor country! Western tourists are probably not taking public transport except for the sake of it. That is not nearly as true for Indian tourists, in India.
Further, there's obvious selection-bias at play: Vice didn't choose to interview an ex pickpocket, did they? If someone is still up to their shenanigans, then they're either skilled or lucky. An ideal pickpocket doesn't want to be caught, if they did, they'd be a bandit.
Criminals aren't particularly known for their keen ability to do fine risk-benefit calculations. If they did, they'd probably be more likely to look for a job. That doesn't mean that they're immune to incentives.
As I've made clear, I never claimed that pickpocketing is guaranteed to lead to a beating. If literally every pickpocket was caught right away and beaten, then I think the number of pickpockets out there would be, if not literally zero, within spitting distance. Mostly because of kleptomaniacs I suppose.
To be clear, I'm not talking about online Indians, I'm talking about actual Indians I've met IRL, with who I've talked about life in India.
So why are Indian tourists, from a country where pickpockets are routinely beaten, not beating these pickpockets on the metro, where they are surrounded by other Indians, who (presumably) routinely beat pickpockets? Why is this dog not barking?
They did, he's no longer a pickpocket.
I never claimed that. I presume that they do, in fact, raise hell should they catch the culprit in the act. Unfortunately for tourists, they tend to be found in crowded places, some of which might be called tourist traps, where it's harder to notice, or figure out who the culprit was, while the latter has an easier time vanishing into the crowd.
Did you specifically ask them about the topic? It rarely comes up unprompted.
This doesn't say anything about whether or not it was a victim who caught him, whether he was roughed up during the process, or after by the police. I've never claimed that standard means of law enforcement don't exist in India.
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Zero. And zero. As far as I'm aware, no one I know has been pickpocketed or robbed in the last, uh, maybe 3 to 5 years?
Depends on when and where. In just about every major city in India, as is the case for most of the world, there are "good" and "bad" neighborhoods. I can think of a dozen places where I'd be unconcerned about being a woman wandering around after dark, and more where I would be.
There's a reason why I was careful to only talk about petty crime, and mostly property crime within that range, because, as I've elaborated in another comment, this doesn't hold nearly as true for sex crimes.
How are opportunistic thefts in India? I’m thinking of the equivalent to vehicle break ins(not car thefts- a smash thé window to steal a purse in the car type thing). How about copper theft?
I don't have a sufficiently strong intuition about what the typical base-rate is in the West to have a very helpful answer.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's nowhere near as bad as say, a bad neighborhood in SF, where leaving something expensive in the car is incredibly foolish. Copper stealing isn't as bad as in a ghetto in a big city, maybe.
I've never had to worry about my car being broke into. Never happened to any friends or family. I've never had the power go out because someone stole the cables. I probably wouldn't leave a large amount of gold bullion visibly sitting in the backseat, but I'm sure you wouldn't either.
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This is not true at all. I have frequently heard of people's houses being robbed. Pickpocketing is also present. People steal phones, pickpocket wallets and snatch purses and jewelry off of women. These are all crimes everyone is wary of in India, especially in crowded places like markets, temples, tourist places and melas. I have personally known family members who have had their phones pickpocketed, or gold chains snatched.
It's a fool's errand to trade anecdotal evidence. I'm not claiming that kind of crime happens at all, I'm stating that the amount of crime that happens is lower than it would be, because of the fear of extrajudicial punishment.
You would absolutely face more risk if you were a super-crowded environment, or if you were an obvious tourist. That's true just about everywhere where pickpocketing happens at all.
India is a very big country. I don't know anyone in my friends or extended family who was robbed or pickpocketed in maybe the last 3-5 years. That included both urbanites living in desirable neighborhoods, and family who live in villages and small towns. The latter had burglars rob them multiple times, but the last instance I can remember was at least 15 years ago, and it hasn't happened since.
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With the greatest possible respect, how would you know how low the rate of petty crime in India is?
If crime is as low as western Europe, or 1st-world Asia, or America outside a few black ghettos, then "nobody in my social circle is a recent victim of crime" doesn't imply a large enough sample size. Police-recorded crime statistics are notoriously bogus everywhere, and Indian ones are going to be more so than most. And you yourself are pointing out (correctly) that media coverage of crime is mostly sensationalist lies.
There is, for good reasons, a standing State Department advisory warning US travellers about pickpockets in London. The risk of being pickpocketed if you do not look or act like a tourist is indistinguishable from zero. I assume the same is true of India, although the wording of the respective warnings implies that State considers the problem to be worse in India than it is here. I do not think the informal enforcement you praise protects tourists, and the absence of pickpocketing against non-tourists proves its effectiveness in the same way that the lack of yeti sightings proves the effectiveness of yeti repellent.
You've just made it clear that even if I were to produce any figures, you wouldn't believe them. Which isn't even the wrong approach, since crime stats from the Third World are notoriously unreliable, and this isn't as cut and dry as murder.
That being said, the gold standard for comparative statistics when comparing crime rates between jurisdictions is the murder rate. Because, well, murder is a pretty big deal, hard to hide, and the cops, even if lazy and incompetent, are usually not that awful.
India, according to UNODC figures, had a murder rate of 2.94/100,000 in 2021.
The global average is 5.19 in 2023.
The World Bank claims 11 for "low income countries". 10.9 for all of Africa.
The United States? 5.9
I'm not bold enough to immediately jump to claims that the same ratio holds for other forms of crime, but yes, you are far less likely to be murdered as the average person in India compared to the global or third world average. We even beat the States, which is unusually awful by Western standards.
I have no objections if you wish to consider my claims to be entirely anecdotal. I stand by them regardless.
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I think in many cases the West has over-emphasized laws to the point where almost every other option for enforcing order. The shopkeepers don’t think about protecting their property because the law is almost certainly going to slam them for defending their property. But it’s a double bind because the same law is unlikely to catch the thief and if they do, the property won’t be restored and the thief gets little punishment for stealing. And so on down the line of crimes. We think “let the law deal with it” and it rarely works.
Shopkeepers often do defend their property. Wander around in the ghetto; you’ll see stores which have prominently posted photographic evidence of this as a deterrent to thieves.
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Law, and insurance.
Insurance just means that everyone pays a share for all of the robbery (plus a cut to the insurance company), and also that they're required to run their businesses in the way the insurance company (which is itself regulated by the state) demands. It's strictly inferior to stopping the crime.
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