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Notes -
Turning to some good news:
Article link
This is a WSJ article about the rise in justified homicides in the US in recent years. Much of it is about "Stand Your Ground Laws." I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of the more lawyer-brained Mottizens on those kind of laws and their proliferation over the past decade or so.
On the culture war angle, this article is maybe the starkest example of "erosion of trust in society" that I've come across. A few of the anecdotes are pretty hair raising. They're cherry picked, I know, but the idea that a kid loses his father over an argument about a a fence and a property line made me sad. The "road range" incident they cover in detail seems like it was unfortunate but when one guy levels a gun at another, there's only one reasonable reaction.
Violence must be tightly controlled for a society to function. This is something that's bone deep in humans. We've developed methods of conflict resolution that fall short of violence for our entire existence as a species. Even within the context of violence, there are various ways of controlling it. Duels and so forth. Even informal ones; basic Bro code dictates that when one guy falls down in a fight, the other one backs off.
But this article hints at the idea that people are zooming past any of that to full lethality. It's impossible to compile the stats to determine if that's actually the case or not, but the larger point remains; in a society with plunging basic trust, you're going to see levels of interpersonal violence spike. How should state laws governing violence respond to this? Stand Your Ground is something I generally still support, but my mind could be changed if simple Bad Neigbor fights end up with more orphans.
The furor over "stand your ground" remains silly, as it's not really implicated in most of these situations. Bashing SYG is a way of introducing a presumption of flight to every civilian interaction, which is ludicrous.
The fundamental question being asked seems to be if self defense is worth some single-digit number of edge cases per year in a country with more guns than people.
The answer is yes.
The better question is how much better or worse off the country would be with several thousand more "justified homicides" per year. Is not having to uselessly prosecute a lifetime felon for the umpteenth time worth some fractional enabling of a more tragic scenario? What's the optimal ratio?
We need something different and more proactive. When a guy has been picked up by the cops for random violence and felonies and given the catch and release run-around for the umpteenth time, maybe the state should give him a shit test. Ask him point blank if he's released if he will punch/stab/shoot some one for dissing him or stepping on his new sneakers. If he answers yes throw him in the slammer for a minimum of 2 years and then ask him again before he gets out.
Same for racialized(I hate that word) violence. Is whitey the devil who should be killed, quick and easy yes/no question. Is the solution to not getting your EBT on time a justified looting? Congrats, you just bought yourself a trip to prison.
An idea I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is offering elective euthanasia to these people. On a certain level -a level removed enough that I don’t feel morally reasonable to empathize with- I do think high-impulsive, highly reactive, highly violent people are “suffering”, and if faced with a a short prison stint you should “put both silver and lead on the table” and give them an easy way out of their existence. I think a good fraction will take it.
They don't need to be suffering for the rest of society to suffer from them. If we want them gone, we should be upfront about it, formulate clearly what our problem is, why ending a life resolves it, take the responsibility and pull the trigger. Not wink and nudge and see what kind of perverse psychological manipulation schemes spring up while we pat ourselves on the back for how we've helped the poor wretch reduce his own suffering.
That said, sure, make the offer. It probably won't make the world worse. Fewer of them should usually be good, unless you make the next Baron von Ungern-Sternberg kill himself and rob the future world of some amazing history.
I am upfront about wanting them gone: the argument that convinces me is that the state shouldn’t have the power to choose if a person dies. If it’s going to imprison someone for their entire life, let them decide if they want to die it easily. This gets around the capital punishment counter argument very effectively for me
The state also shouldn't have the power to decide that someone will spend the rest of his possibly quite long life as a drain on peaceful, productive taxpayers, and yet here we are.
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