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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36291 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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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!

If you're so confident that it is hard to commit crimes, I have a proposal for you that will allow you to demonstrate the correctness of your position, and it'll only take a few days. We'll make a recording of your entire day - every action taken, every little thing you do or say etc, and then hand it over to a veteran prosecutor, who will go over the footage and make sure you didn't actually commit any crimes. Do you think you would have a clean bill at the end of a typical day?

you dont understand why people commit crimes. the reason is that they are chasing status and being a successful criminal gives them more status in the eyes of their communities than does working at some minimum wage job for their entire life. you can't really blame them for choosing the criminal route, as they are just trying to make the best of their lives in an inherently unfair society, why should they respect the rules of a society that is set up such that they fail and you succeed? now of course im not saying you are wrong for supporting their elimination, but that you dont understand what motivates them.

a society that is set up such that they fail and you succeed

Source?

wealth inequality is probably the biggest factor, and society is set up so that certain people can not make as much money as they want because of lack of intelligence, disinterest in the available options for highly compensated work, mental illness, etc. even though criminality pays less than working as a menial laborer on average, a successful criminal is more attractive in the eyes of some women being seen as a 'bad boy', so higher status where it matters, than a law abiding drudger.

Going from "serious violent felony" to "not so much as a traffic ticket" is a really big moving of goalposts.

But that’s my point - people seem to be acting like criminals are getting tripped up by these three-strike rules almost by accident, but I’m pointing out that it’s extremely easy for most people not to end up on the wrong side of the law even in far more minor ways, let alone more serious crimes. It really seems like someone would have to go pretty far out of his way to do stuff bad enough to fall afoul of three-strikes laws, barring a series of very unfortunate and atypical events.

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