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W.H, liberal morality, and why co-existence is undesirable
A little while ago, I read a story of a recent scandal which I think conclusively shows that the Dems have finally gone too far. You see, the state legislature of Massachusetts passed a prisoner rehabilitation weekend pass program, in which prisoners with good behavior could obtain leave to spend time unsupervised in society and then return to serve their sentences. Unfortunately they forgot to exclude first degree murderers serving life without parole sentences who, for obvious reasons, could not be trusted to return. As such, the court said they must be allowed to participate unless the legislature specifically excluded them. The legislature passed a new bill to do so, but the Massachusetts governor vetoed the bill.
Enter inmate W.H, who with his 2 friends got bored robbing a cooperative teenage clerk, so they stabbed him 18 times and threw him in a dumpster. Sentenced to life without parole, he was furloughed from prison and escaped. But normal life was of course boring. So predictably, he broke into a woman's home with a pistol, tied up her boyfriend, stabbed him, and then raped her in front of him.
Perceptive readers will have guessed by now that by recent, I mean 36 years ago. You see W.H is Willie Horton, the governor was Michael Dukakis and this was the scandal that helped sink his campaign for president. or as the Times covered it back then:
"Foes accuse Bush campaign of inflamming racial tension": https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//www.nytimes.com/1988/10/24/us/foes-accuse-bush-campaign-of-inflaming-racial-tension.html#site-content
Now, as much as i'd like to dunk on the Times they didn't cherrypick random nobodies. Their sources for the accusation of "inflaming the nation's racial fears", Dukakis' running mate, Jesse Jackson and the future DNC chair, Dona Brazille. And of course, if you look up Willie Horton today, basically every non-conservative source including your high school teacher will tell you about the "infamous"... ad, which unlike unleashing rape and murder on your innocent citizens violates the sacred values of our Democracy or something. Some degree of deliberate unrestricted warfare is going on here, but I don't think this fully explains it. I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favor of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.
Hlynka, I'm sure, will find a way to call them hypocrites. Moldbug will ask, 'but don't these elves eat great food'? As for me, I neither desire nor expect cooperation with these people, whatever their thought process or culinary habits. I wanna see the conservative movement* draw a clear unambiguous moral line between us and them, accept those that will cross over, and to crush the opposition permanently and with the same concern they feel for their pets' victims.
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*Of course they are more concerned with saving the enemies' feti.
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Here are the two ads Bush ran on the issue.
Willie Horton ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y
Revolving door ad https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y Note how in the second one, the campaign goes out of it's way to find white criminals for it's footage.
This is it.
WELL THIS IS IT BOYS. I've been Permabanned. I appeal to the other mods not for "a second chance" but for an outright acquittal, as I believe this charge to be a travesty. Paging @naraburns, @ZorbaTHut, @TracingWoodgrains
Commenters who are tempted to draw conclusions from this ban should... do exactly that. Seriously, read @Amadan's rationale and try to defend his integrity. There are people who place no value on your life, and others who, whatever their pretensions to the open discussion of ideas and others who find pointing this out intolerable. The outer party lives on, laundering gross atrocities into respectability by demanding that you not be outraged by them. And so, in this eternal re-run of the scene from "politics and the english language" releasing monsters to slaughter innocents becomes, "a policy that resulted in a criminal doing some crime." Depicting the criminal becomes "racialized imagery", and the promise of open discussion becomes, "I'm not sure how you'd make it relevant today without being pure "boo Democrats,"...
Dukakis' running mate was Lloyd Bentsen.
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So, doing some more reading on the matter, I bumped into this 2015 article from the Marshall Project. I strongly recommend a quick read of this, it's just a perfect example of the more rehabilitation-minded approach to always finding the good in someone, even if that someone repeatedly demonstrated that they're the dregs of humanity and should definitely have been executed decades ago (from my perspective, as someone that favors retributive justice and public safety as the dual mandates of a proper criminal justice system).
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This post is a perfect example of waging the culture war, rather than talking about it. You are doing literally nothing but. Really, it's a masterclass in illustrating what kind of posts we do not want here and what this place is not for.
So your lead is "Why my political enemies are terrible." The "story" is about a policy that resulted in a criminal doing some crime. And it's disingenuous, because "a little while ago" implies you're at least talking about a recent event, which might be worth some discussion and debate, but no, your punchline is from 1988. Granted, a lot of folks here are too young to remember Michael Dukakis and the Willie Horton ad, but most people who know anything about 80s politics are familiar with it.
Perhaps this could have been pertinent, if that was actually your objective. It's a classic example which is still brought up today of a political ad that was both powerful and incurred a lot of criticism for its racialized imagery, and thus certainly has some parallels to contemporary debates about political messaging and "dogwhistling." You could have also talked about the policy that Bush was criticizing in more detail. I'm not sure how you'd make it relevant today without being pure "boo Democrats," but it's not like old political dustups from the 80s can never be made relevant for discussion today.
But you didn't even make a shadow of an attempt. It's just pure "Boo Democrats" and "boo black people" plus potshots at all the people you have petty personal grievances with.
And this is your entire schtick.
Each of your last three bans was preceded by multiple warnings in which you were told to bring more light and less heat, and each time, you just come back with another flamebait essay about why the racial group you've chosen to talk about today is anathema, your outgroup is evil, and everyone who disagrees with you is a stupid-head.
Banned, permanently unless the other mods think you deserve yet another chance.
Seconding this ban decision.
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Have people actually watched the ad? Here it is. People claiming that this ad is racist seem to be making a fully general argument that ever bringing up a crime committed by a black man in a political context is racist, full stop, no exceptions. The verbiage used isn't inflammatory, the photos are simply of Bush, Dukakis, and the murderer. The facts presented all seem to be basically accurate. The policy seems to be the most unambiguous example possible of a soft-on-crime policy that led directly to a brutal rape and murder. I have no idea how you could make the point the ad is making without it being "racist" from the people lobbing that accusation.
As someone who remembers the ad - you can certainly argue that it's not literally "racist" to state facts and show a picture of the criminal. But I think you'd have to be very naive, or disingenuous, to claim that they did not carefully select that particular crime and that particular criminal for its obvious valences, or that no one involved in the campaign gave any thought to what was being signaled.
Was it powerful? Was it effective? Was there a legitimate argument being made about soft-on-crime policies? Sure. But let's be real here, you can argue that the racial messaging was on point, but you can't argue that it wasn't intentional.
Is that crime somehow out of the ordinary? If we assume that black and white people in MA were about as likely as their counterparts elsewhere in the U.S. to be criminals, I don't think the Bush team would have had to try very hard to select a murder with a black perpetrator in 1988.
Famously, between 1980 and 2008 52.5% of all murder offenders nation-wide were black. Thus, if the Bush team wanted to spotlight an American murder and picked one at random, the perpetrator would be black slightly more than half the time. As MA was only 5% black (pdf warning) compared to the national population's 12% (pdf warning), that would make appx. 22% of all MA murderers black unless either my math is wrong or there was some factor which made the population of MA murderers not representative of national trends.
Thus, Bush would have had to work harder than flipping a coin to find a MA murderer who was black, but 1-in-4.5 is still not particularly bad odds.
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One of the youtube commenters claims "There has been a serious rewrite of history. This ad was only run in New Hampshire, on cable, a couple of times. Yet it is shown in history classes as "the infamous Willie Horton ad. The real Willie Horton ad, which was also denounced as racist, did not show a picture of Horton or mention his race." Do you remember if that's true or not?
Obviously the makers of the ad weren't "not seeing color". But racial messaging could mean "be racist! hate black people" ... or racial messaging could be "there's a crime problem, perpetrators are disproportionately black, a desire to be anti-racist is preventing the left from solving the crime problem, and it won't stop us".
I won't swear to it (memories of things you might or might not have seen on TV 35 years ago being what they are), but I think I recall actually seeing this ad (and I did not live anywhere near New Hampshire).
I would be very curious to know which "history classes" show that ad.
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I think there's two different questions getting blurred, here. I'm very skeptical that Lee Atwater, of all people, overlooked the racial implications. But I'm also very skeptical that Lee Atwater, of all people, would have overlooked a case where an opponent's tremendously controversial policy decisions (Dukakis had pocket veto'd a bill specifically meant to stop furloughs like the one Horton received!) had lead to a murderer going on a raping and stabbing vacation from jail, had it turned out that the murderer and rapist looked like Charlie Manson instead. I'm not even sure Atwater would have refused to include a picture.
And it's not like there was some wide universe where the Bush campaign carefully selected the worst one. Horton wasn't the only LWOP murderer to get furloughs, but there had been a total of 11 first-degree murderers to escape during a furlough as of 1988. While Horton wasn't the only noteworthy escapee, I can't find anything from the others talking about shoot-outs with police, nevermind the rape and stabbing.
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This is like the reverse Chinese robber fallacy. People often care about heinous crimes. Black people are more likely to commit heinous crimes in the US and when it comes to rape are very much more likely to rape victims outside of their race (even after accounting for population sizes).
Picking someone that looks like Horton was very likely to happen if it was random. Suggesting therefore that there was something racist or intentional about selecting Horton confuses something that has racial valiance with racism.
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I think the part that the objections mostly focused on was his renaming by those who sought to make political capital out of it (which I'm not saying it was wrong of them to do) to 'Willie' which supposedly he was never called, which the objections suggested was to give him a stereotypically 'black' name.
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One point that the Marshall Campaign makes out is that the ad works because Horton looks scary. Which is true. And that he looks scary due to certain African features -- in particular the wild beard and the Afro. And this is true. And that therefore people are scared because he's black and that's racist. And that's making an insane leap. But in an environment as hair-trigger about racism as todays, there's no way to get that point across.
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The argument was not so much about the ad per se, but about the entirety of the campaign re the issue. See the quotes in the article linked by OP.
The op has been wiped, do you still have the link?
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//www.nytimes.com/1988/10/24/us/foes-accuse-bush-campaign-of-inflaming-racial-tension.html#site-content
Cheers.
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You know, it is perfectly possible that both of these things are true: 1) the veto by Dukakis disqualified him from the presidency and it was perfectly fine for Bush campaign to make that argument; and 2) the manner in which the Bush campaign used the issue indeed inflamed racial tension and/or was meant to to appeal to racial prejudice. Your post includes lots of information to determine whether #1 is true, but nothing re whether #2 is true.
Here are the only two ads Bush ran on the issue as far as I'm aware.
Willie Horton ad
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y
Revolving door ad
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Io9KMSSEZ0Y
Note how in the second one, the campaign goes out of it's way to find white criminals for it's footage.
It also shows shows is how much discretion states have with sentencing and prisons versus feds, even for very serious crimes and dangerous offenders. This is why fed prisons are always worse.
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The Wikipedia article says that they originally used footage of real criminals but they thought that was too black so they reshot it with white actors. So it actually is pushing a false racial crime narrative just in the opposite way that people think.
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The Wikipedia article about Willie Horton mentions the ad but in a neutral way, it does not claim that the ad was racially motivated, it just mentions that some people alleged that it was racially motivated. Wikipedia is not a conservative source and is almost certainly one of most common places where people go to find out about this matter.
That's how Wikipedia biases articles 80% of the time.
Except the racial controversy is the only reason the ad is remembered 35 years later. How many ads from the last presidential election do you remember?
The last Presidential election had a first-party ad under the candidate's own twitter account insinuate an innocent man was a White Supremacist, so there's at least one that I'd consider people personally and deeply irresponsible for publishing. And this isn't the first time I've brought it up, or even brought it up in a conversation with you, even if I am pleasantly surprised a few other predictions related to that were flubs.
Romney was personally responsible for a woman's cancer death, Kerry had the SwiftBoat mess. Go back a little further and you have the famous Daisy ad and Confessions of a Republican (remade for the 2016 season!) in a single election. "Read My Lips" and "Act of Love" were mostly unusual for being somewhat near honest.
They don't all have wikipedia articles, but a good number are memorable; with the exception of Confessions of a Republican and maybe "Act of Love", I'd hope anyone who's been paying attention politically in the last decade is familiar with most of these. A rare few aren't even attack ads; Reagan's "bear in the woods" ad has a wiki article because... some reason? The deletionists haven't heard about it yet?
It's not like this is even specific to Presidential elections: see The Agenda Project anti-Paul Ryan ad, or the hilariously offensive attack ad on Abbott in Texas.
And the Horton ad is at least believed to have been hugely effective, along with Dukakis' infamous tank ride, as part of why he lost in a landslide. I'm not sure how much I buy that compared to the macro-economic trends or broader policy disagreements -- same for Romney and Kerry, while I think Jeb! had broader and deeper issues than immigration policy -- but at least in claimed reasoning a lot of people point to them.
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While I agree with Gwern's take on the matter, Wikipedia has also institutionally decided that it isn't a List Of All Things To Ever Have Happened. The "x pounced" framework isn't unusual (though contrast Horton with Daisy), but it is and long has been an active choice, as evidenced by the talk page.
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I think you could make posts identical to this with regard to almost any ideological leaning. So for every conservative that would cite released criminals murdering again, so could someone else cite the various cases of suicide after DWP withdrew their benefits of the depravity of their enemies, or Trump's pardoning of war criminals etc. etc.
It's not like Truth and Reconciliation was entirely one-sided though, see for instance Brian Mitchell.
Not giving someone welfare isn't the same as releasing criminals from prison (let alone when they're clearly a career criminal). Having your soldiers kill the wrong people overseas in fundamentally ill-conceived ventures is also very bad but ties into a large and complex problem with thoughtless foreign policy.
US cities have many crazy homeless people who go around harassing and sometimes killing random people. For example: https://abc7ny.com/woman-killed-subway-push-times-square-man-arrested/11471944/
https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-suspect-arrested-fatal-stabbing-penn-station-20211206-j6fdh4kjjvg2laq5hilh7dgfay-story.html
Whenever we have a public transport related post, it gets filled with Americans who will refuse to give any ground to an energetically efficient, compact and economical transport system because in their experience, train stations are where drug addicts go to enjoy drugs and harass other people. In my experience outside America, train stations are for catching trains. There are many large costs with having your very rich cities filled with these problem people, breaking into cars and houses, killing people, encouraging emigration. How much immensely valuable real estate is rendered uninhabitable by this 'urban decline'?
Now, this isn't one of the US's biggest problems. Bad diet is probably worse, in terms of general social harm. But this is an egregious and easy-to-solve program. All the US security forces have to do is get rid of the open-air drug encampments, they only have to outwit and overcome mentally ill homeless people! You can put them in an institution, you can enforce higher standards of behaviour by beating them up if they disrupt the public (Singapore doesn't have these problems), or you can shoot the problem people rather than letting them rack up lengthy criminal records. Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society, they have only a very small chance of making positive contributions and have many bad effects. They should be killed.
Things tend to reach an equilibrium. If you don't maintain your garden, it gets filled with weeds. The problems compound on eachother and it gets much harder to do anything about them. Much better to solve problems while they're small. Imagine if the US was genuinely tough on crime, if they made a serious effort to kill or detain serious criminals, permanently remove them from circulation. Take a leaf out of Bukele's book and arrest all the people with obvious gang tattoos. There's an immediate cost but a long-term gain from not having these people running around causing problems.
If people simply appeal to the 'better ten guilty go free than one innocent be imprisoned' platitude forever, what is to stop the richest cities in the world turning into uncivilized eyesores? What is the point of the legal system, what is the point of our principles if they lead us here? Murder should be very low - the US is a very rich country. Medicine is very good now. There are cameras and drones and sniffer dogs and forensics and so much more! And yet it's going up: https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homicide-records/story?id=81466453
The 'better ten guilty to free than one innocent be imprisoned' notion far precedes the richest cities in the world becoming uncivilised eyesores. If people in past times managed to have nice cities while still believing in this principle must we really do away with it if we want nice cities now?
There's a lot of nuance in 'belief'. You can believe in God and go to church every Sunday or you can believe in God and dedicate your whole life to holy war. I think in the past people had a certain level of implicit understanding that they just had to get rid of the problem people - hence they acted outside the law from time to time. There was a certain formal level on which the presumption of innocence worked as is formally described but there was an informal level too. The informal level is gone now, along with old-style community institutions in urban areas. So now we're just left with the formal level which never quite worked properly alone and certainly doesn't now it's been intensively defanged. Miranda rights for instance, amongst other innovations the US has introduced that benefit criminals. The US emphasis upon avoiding innocents being imprisoned has increased markedly, so fewer criminals are arrested. Or consider Sailer's conclusion that black exuberance has increased as a result of policing being scaled down following the racial reckoning of 2020, resulting in markedly higher crime and driving deaths.
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You say that murder should be very low but at the same time you are calling for murder. For example, you are calling for the murder of some people who sell products that others want to put in their bodies. You are calling for murdering the "problem people" even though of course some of those so-called "problem people" will actually be innocent.
I guess what is probably going on is that you think that the kind of murders that you favor happening are not actually murders, they are something quite different.
You also have not mentioned any of the almost inevitable downsides of the sort of authoritarianism that would be required to implement your preferred policies. Is it that you did not bother to mention any, or is it that you do not see them as downsides?
I mean, can't we maybe... do a better job of preventing murders and rapes and so on without turning into an authoritarian shithole? I do not see why it would be impossible to have both strong liberalism and low violent crime. That the United States is not doing a good job of it does not mean that it is not possible.
This subset of the population has very negative externalities. If you don't do anything about them, they undermine the whole country. See Mexico or other narco-states. And they commit a hell of a lot of violence as well.
Yes, mistakes happen. In the long run, fewer innocent people will die. If we don't get rid of the problem people, they'll keep killing harassing and immiserating innocent people.
How would you do this? Would you have 24/7 surveillance on everyone, as opposed to focusing just on the bad people? Put police everywhere? Give the homeless people houses (creating the mother of all perverse incentives, amongst other things)? Would you take a leaf out of Britain's book and confiscate all the weapons until they're stabbing people with knives (and then try to get rid of the knives)?
The US is already an authoritarian shithole. They've got hardware level surveillance on every modern processor and I'm willing to bet Windows 10 is riddled with spyware. People are getting their lives wrecked because they dared to have sex with a friend at work, there's a government-legislated apparatus that exists to suppress these people. Another government apparatus does the same thing, siccing lawyers on anyone who says anything negative about favoured groups like blacks or women: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lawsuits-are-the-deep-state
What downside of authoritarianism isn't yet present? It's already very difficult to recruit for US police because they're so jumpy and nervous. I've seen videos where they just randomly shoot people, one guy who popped his head out of an overturned vehicle. There's already persecution of whistleblowers of aforementioned thoughtless wars, there's already suppression of political dissidents like Trump. Payment processors are encouraged to suppress people in a coordinated fashion, presumably by some govt-coordinated mechanism.
If you're going to be an authoritarian shithole, you might at least reduce crime.
A lot of this results from the fact that these drugs being illegal causes them to be tremendously profitable to manufacture and distribute. There are no cartels fighting each other in the streets over the right to distribute alcohol.
Yes, the US is already authoritarian in many ways but it is also extremely free in many ways. For example, on the one hand a person can go to jail just for manufacturing LSD. That's really authoritarian. On the other hand, the US has the world's finest free speech protections as far as I can tell. That's really liberal.
The US would become significantly more authoritarian if we followed your ideas about how to reduce crime.
The approach that I favor is to significantly increase police funding and to use the money to improve the standards of police work. For example, I would pay police more so that I could hire a higher standard of person and so that the hires would be more incentivized to do things right rather than to cut corners. At the same time, I would completely legalize all recreational drugs except maybe a few rare ones like fentanyl that are so concentrated that they can essentially be used as weapons. This would free up police resources - maybe not immediately, since there would likely be a spike of drug-fueled asocial behavior following legalization - but eventually, as those drug users who truly could not handle their shit without being asocial would get taken off the streets. I would have more cops patrolling the streets. I would also create special tent city areas for homeless people on the peripheries of cities and provide them with police and medical services, while at the same time using police to crack down on stuff like aggressive panhandling and making a mess on the sidewalk everywhere else.
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Dealing drugs does not violate anybody's rights. Consuming drugs does not either. Please be careful before calling for the deaths of innocent people.
Drug dealers provide positive contributions to drug enjoyers.
If you had a choice between living in a society where 0% of the population used fentanyl and one where 80% did, which would you choose? Which is better?
At the end of the day, rights are there to get or avoid certain results. If the results are bad, one option is to change rights.
If 80 percent of people would use fentanyl if it were permitted, then I would rather live in the society which allows it because I would probably be one of the people using it.
The real question is if the results are worse than if those rights were not there. Even if you think it would be better if an exception to property rights was made to ban drugs in order to decrease the rate that they are consumed, exceptions to a right beget more exceptions, some of which could personally harm you. For example, there are parallels between the arguments for banning drugs and the arguments for banning firearms, so if I want to own a firearm but do not care for drugs, I could ally with people who want the freedom to consume drugs under the banner of respecting property rights.
I am totally certain that a society where 80% use fentanyl is grossly dysfunctional. The more fentanyl use you have, the more dysfunctional it gets. You'd be living in a shithole. The roads would be very bad, the medical system would be very bad, housing would be very bad. And where is the food coming from? What kind of industry goes on there - not very much aside from the production of fentanyl I'd expect. What kind of cultural life goes on there? Not a very well-developed one. Are the fentanyl addicts working together to make well-coordinated, long-term projects like computer games or book publishing industries?
The most plausible way such a society could exist is parasitically relying upon some more functional civilization, like your average US inner city drug precinct in the 1990s.
Why would good, sober people stick around providing services to drug addicts who then steal from their vehicles or break into their homes looking for something to sell? Even liberal-leaning, wishy-washy women are coming around to the 'hang them' solution, publicly on twitter.
https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1645067621191286784
I don't even live in such a society, dysfunction is not stressing me out night and day.
Firearms don't cause significant social harms in and of themselves and have many redeeming characteristics. Drugs can't help you overthrow an authoritarian govt, quite the opposite. I've still not read Brave New World but drug use was one of their foremost means of social control, of pacifying the masses.
Something in between Fremdschämen and Vernichtungswahn.
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Legalizing fentanyl would lead to a increase in rate of use among the population and however high it reaches, as long as property rights are enforced, people who do not want to use it can live pretty close to the way they would if it were nonexistent. There would be less workers to some extent, but those who do work would earn proportionally higher wages so it would not lead to impoverishment for us.
I have no problem with hanging violent criminals, my point is that selling or consuming drugs is not a violent crime. There are plenty of drug users who are peaceful and for whom drug dealers provide an important service.
You are right. Perhaps alcohol would be a better comparison, you don't support banning that too do you?
There may be health benefits from moderate consumption of wine, so I'm inclined to wait for further information. Alcoholism can be a very serious problem though - look at Russia during the 1980s and 1990s. Context is important.
But you pay a price for enforcing property rights. How many extra policemen do you need to keep people's catalytic converters from being taken? What if the police are too busy to prevent you being robbed or murdered by people who are out of their minds? In a civilized society, people shouldn't need to carry firearms to protect themselves in major urban centres.
The lady from San Francisco begs to differ, as do those who flee from these deteriorating areas.
There are drugs and there are drugs. Caffeine gives you a bit more energy but nobody is worried about people on their fifth cup of coffee going on a coffee-fuelled rampage. Certain quantities of THC can really mess you up but lesser amounts aren't too bad. I want to target people who sell serious, damaging drugs, hence my initial qualifying phrase 'Drug dealers (by which I mean fentanyl and the like) are a net malus for society,'. Biochemistry only improves with time, we need to lock things down now before we get new and worse drugs.
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I mean, I don't think it really is. Both, after all, are government provided 'services'; and I don't think it's the perpetration of the war crimes that a hypothetical person who use as evidence of the depravity of conservatives but rather their lenient treatment. Of course when conducting a war the political leaders can't be blamed for a soldier doing something awful, but he can be blamed for pardoning that man.
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Someone posted a while back that justice really should be two tiered. You have your normal clearly criminal street criminals whom you should deal with harshly. Then you have your more normal member of society. This person should receive the Blackstone Formula benefit.
That is why I strongly support three strike laws.
I can only barely make out the reasoning for opposition to them. Every time I hear someone complaining about them and they provide an example, it's that the third felony was supposedly too minor to warrant harsh punishment, and I find that I'm just baffled by the reasoning here. There was a story floating around on Twitter recently where someone driving a stolen car recklessly struck another vehicle, killing the innocent driver in the process. During sentencing, he said something to the effect of, "I'm going to jail for life for a car accident?" and that seemed like the perfect encapsulation of the mentality opposition to three strike laws, this sense of grievance that people someone manage to hold after doing everything wrong and fucking with innocent people constantly.
Well, for example, the original CA three strikes law required that a defendant with two or more previous serious or violent felony convictions had to receive a 25-life sentence for any new felony conviction. Any felony could include such crimes as a theft of an item valued at over $400 or possession of more than an ounce of marijuana. Even if you are OK with that, surely you can can imagine why some people might not be, including a majority of CA voters, who subsequently changed the law so that the third offense must be a serious felony.
No, I can’t. First off, nobody forced him to commit those first two crimes. In my preferred system, he wouldn’t have been out and about after the first one, let alone the second, so he shouldn’t even have been in the position to commit that third felony in the first place. Secondly, let’s say you have a guy who has committed two armed carjackings. That’s a guy who, if given the opportunity and enough time, will commit a third armed carjacking. Or some other serious crime. Carjacking is not something that any normal, functional person would ever do to another person even once, let alone twice.
So, do you want to wait until after he has violently carjacked a third person - or, hell, graduated to an even more horrible and traumatizing and destructive crime - or do you want to jump on the chance to get rid of him when he has done something less horrible, and save some poor individual having their life ruined before we can finally say, “Alright, D’Quandre, we’ve given you enough chances to act like a human.”
This is my fundamental issue with progressive/liberal theories of crime: they are utterly allergic to thinking probabilistically. The mainstream consensus in the Western world is so infected with the braindead Christian focus on forgiveness that they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that you can accurately and reliably predict people’s future behavior based on their past behavior. Of course, people can readily accept this idea in nearly every other walk of life, but when it comes to criminal justice suddenly they are determined to pretend that it’s some horrible delusional idea. Minority Report and the idea of “pre-crime” gets thrown around as if it’s some knock-down argument against dealing with very obviously dangerous and impossible-to-live-around individuals before they are able to ruin even more lives than they already have.
Me personally? If you’ve already committed a serious violent felony, done your time in prison for it, and then you so much as jaywalk, that’s society’s perfect chance to execute you and I won’t miss you one bit.
Huh? Evangelicals support harsher punishments overall
That’s because Evangelicals like Christians in general believe in forgiveness for those who accept their faith and offer sincere repentance. The progressive frame instead views all wrongs as caused by structural issues in society. Thus absolving all sins (except those that reinforce the structural issues like racism, etc.). These people were failed by society and therefore deserve as many chances as it takes; as long, they aren’t part of the oppressor class.
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christianity as it was originally intended and christianity as was traditionally understood in societies since shortly after becoming the state religion of the roman empire are two very different things. you can't govern a society around a religion that is based around the idea that the world is ending soon, hence the corruption was inevitable.
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The problem with that of course is the incentives it creates. If a tiny crime will get you executed, abd people commit tiny crimes all the time, then why reform? Why even try?
Its already tough for ex cons to get jobs and go straight. If you're going to follow your idea then don't even let them out in the first place. Just take rehabilitation off the table entirely. But i don't think there is the appetite for that.
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In this particular case, is it not the opposite? Individuals generally do indeed age out of violent crime, so treating all third time offenders as likely to be a threat, regardless of their current crime, does not seem to me to be thinking probablistically at all. At the very least, it is not a matter of not thinking probabilistically, but rather where to draw re what level of probability is sufficient.
Again, how accurately? Esp without taking into account other predictors of future behavior, such as age, the precise nature of the previous and current crime, etc?
Again, the point is that the original iteration of the law gave 25-life sentences to people who were not very obviously dangerous.
I understand that your personal opinion is to err on the side of public safety versus erring on the side of individual liberty. But can you really not understand why some people might disagree and weigh those interests differently?
Do you have any evidence that a significant portion of the people being imprisoned as a result of three-strikes laws had committed only three totally innocuous offenses? (Keep in mind that I do not consider drug possession an innocuous offense.) I’m not asking as a gotcha: I’m open to the possibility that this was happening more often than I assume.
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But having over an ounce of marijuana is.
Three strike laws are not always limited to serious violent felonies.
Dude… how hard is it not to commit crimes? I’m dead serious. I’m in my early thirties and have never gotten so much as a traffic ticket!
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Yeah. Normal productive people don’t find themselves in three situations where even one is BS.
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Wait, why? I knew gov Dukakis was liberal but that’s a step far.
Dukakis pocket veto'd a bill in citing interference with reform, but I'm not able to find the exact text of the change to see how broad it was. This is anti-Dukakis and quotes him saying the bill would “cut the heart out of efforts at inmate rehabilitation” but also says the bill's goal was "prohibiting furloughs for any first-degree murderers, or other violent offenders, who were never supposed to be released from prison."
Reform might seem pointless for life sentences without parole, but in practice "life" didn't really mean that. Massachusetts was (and I think still is?) one of the minority of states that requires life without parole for first-degree murder (with a judicially-created exemption for those under 21), and in practice into the 1980s this largely involved a nontrivial number of 'life without parole' cases really just having the governor's commutation board as their parole hearing, and a large majority of commutations were for lifers or lifers-without-parole under the state's mandatory sentences for first- and second-degree murder.
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Fine, they’re all monsters. You’re saying your side made a mistake, it should have defected, discount any notion of fairness, ignore the rules, engage in terrorism, street battles, coups, civil war. The last 36 years by comparison were intolerable. Is that your point?
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