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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Another valid solution is state sanctioned "beating the shit out of bad human beings until there is no more shitty behaviour left in them". This is surprisingly effective at getting those who are immune to reason to see sense. Operant conditioning works just as well on humans as it does on lower animals.

Six lashes for his rude behaviour followed by a solemn promise that he's going to get another sixty lashes if anything untoward was to happen to the woman afterwards would set him straight very quickly.

sixty lashes

You wanna kill him or what? You know the lashes are in the range of like 5-12 ish.

You don't give the sixty lashes all in one row. Six lashes every Friday until the sentence is discharged, and he is kept in prison until that happens.

I can see this working against most offenses. But sure are we that the bottom deciles of undesirables won't just take the beatings as a badge of honor?

Also, this still requires the state to know about the offenses, necessitating cameras everywhere, even if privacy-respecting like scott's raikoth. OP's "Chinese surveillance / social credit state. Use technology and broad public support to directly manage against low level offenses.". And when you have that technology, it seems easier to manage said offenses with 'denial of access to services', rather than direct punishment, and I'm not sure punishment is even more effective for most cases.

Besides the lashing part, this solution requires fairly significant efforts at distinguishing (at reasonable accuracy) who is the bad human being in each instance. Given that the rules are not very complicated, it becomes a lot of factual investigation into tiresome details. Did he really park there? Is she just made he dumped her friend harshly? Did he really "bang and yell" or did he politely explain that he was in a rush.

Easy to adjudicate in a single instance, but really banal at scale. And even worse, whoever you empower to do this dumb job will themselves be tempted (or at the very least, power attracts the corrupt). Who's gonna enforce against them.

I guess this just slides down to solution (1) and just make it easy and legible for all by pulling the cameras of all the parking lots and hallways.

Unironically normalize beating up thieves and pickpockets. In India (and your corner of this shitty subcontinent), the cops won't give a shit if you turn in a robber with a few broken bones. Saves them the trouble. Ensures justice is swiftly and efficiently delivered. It's fun for the whole neighborhood.

Hence why, despite being so goddamn poor, we don't have the same level of flagrant antisocial or low level criminal behavior as some more colorful parts of the West.

Corporal punishment should be brought back anyway. I'd rather take a dozen lashes than a month in jail, and it dissuades criminals with low time preferences better, while being less expensive for the taxpayer.

Remind me, how common are acid attacks in that corner? Because that type of antisocial assault is something the subcontinent is infamous for. Not interested in starting the "if I'm getting beat up by the townies anyway, let's give them a real reason for it" ball rolling.

how common are acid attacks in that corner

Extremely rare. Just becuase the west points to them whenever they happen and uses them as a sign of how they are "oh so much better and safer" than us doesn't mean they happen with any regular frequency.

Would it surprise you if I were to say my home city is safer for women to walk around alone at night than London?

I do not know anyone who has been acid attacked, or anyone who knows anyone who has been acid attacked.

It's not that they don't happen, but it's a rarity and found more in honor-cultureish parts of the country than something you need to wear alkaline sunscreen to guard against.

In other words, a non-issue to the average Indian, no matter how it might get signal boosted.

Hence why, despite being so goddamn poor, we don't have the same level of flagrant antisocial or low level criminal behavior as some more colorful parts of the West.

Reddit could have fooled me. The way they portray it, it's like an episode of Star Trek and the gang is visiting that world with the rape gangs.

India is a normal country. Like it's obviously Third World, but it's not like middle class and UMC people get chased down by rape gangs and gored by cattle.

I wouldn't even call it unsafe. The rate of violent crime is probably nothing to worry about, and the troubles faced by Western visitors are the same kind as anyone considered an easy mark by poor and avaricious locals.

The country has problems, but Jesus Christ it's not that bad haha. The primary problems are poverty, corruption, a conservative society, and general dirtiness, but it's not unsafe by any sensible standard, even for women.

I guess I'm kinda shocked -- won't people with a grudge (for whatever other reason) beat people up and accuse them of theft? After all, anyone can take their victim to the cops and say whatever.

Hasn't happened where I've seen it.

There's certainly a bit of common sense and due diligence involved, hopefully there are witnesses, the stolen item is found on the thief's person, they're caught red handed and so on.

The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.

Maybe let me ask the other Popperian question -- if it happened, how would you tell? Surely if most of the time it's truly a miscreant (undoubtedly so) then you'd be (correctly) far less likely to believe it when someone says they were mistakenly or maliciously accused.

That is to say, you may have seen it and not noticed.

The stolen item is just ... an item. Anyone can produce a backpack and say that guy stole it and my friend here saw them.

A backpack seems like an almost uniquely bad example. You just separate the parties and ask each a few questions about its contents and it's easy to figure out which one it belongs to.

One person is gonna know everything in and say the other guy stole it. He is going to say this whether or not the other guy actually did steal it.

The other guy said he's never seen the backpack before in his life and never stole it. Of course, he is going to say this whether or not he actually stole it.

I was envisioning a scenario where one person has it and the other says they stole it. But even in a scenario where there isn't a clear current possessor like this, in any such situation I've been even tangentially involved in, laying blame is a distant third on the priority list, behind getting it to the rightful owner and keeping the overall peace.

Frankly you're also overestimating the intelligence and planning of most people who do stuff like stealing backpacks. In my area, frankly, you're more likely to get drug-addled confusion about what's wrong with walking off with someone's backpack and why the fact that they don't own it is even relevant.

With respect, I don't think you actually read my post, or you appear (?) to be responding to something completely different.

We have strong social networks where reputation matters a lot. If you with minimal proof accuse someone of theft that everyone knows to be a good upstanding citizen who wouldn't do such a thing then you'll be ignored completely, and if you already beat them up and they can make a convincing case they weren't in the wrong you run the risk of getting beat up even harder by those who have an interest in maintaining these social networks (basically everyone, because these networks are all we have protecting us against anarchy). And you get ostracised from polite society too and lose a ton of social standing, which you can argue matters more than losing your entire net worth in a society like ours.

Plus there's the usual social standing differences that have to be taken into account. You can never get away with beating up someone at a higher (or even the same, most of the time) social station than you, even if you really dislike them and they deserve it. E.g. if you are a low level factory worker you'd never be able to beat up a manager at a respectable company on your own, even if they were in the wrong (though why such a manager would be stealing from the house of a factory worker I have no idea, which again gives the manager an alibi and makes me more inclined to take his side if he was so accused). You'd have to build a case against them by banding together with other low level factory workers and getting someone even higher than the manager to notice the injustice and take action.

This does run the risk of the higher classes being able to tyrannize the lower classes willy nilly, which can sometimes be a problem. However on net in a completely free society the lower classes tyrannize the higher classes a lot more than the reverse (by virtue of their greater numbers and generally being shittier human beings) so this state of affairs is good for you even if you are at a middling station: the small additional risk that someone high up with unjustly bring the boot down on you is well worth the very real reduction in the probability you'll have a bad encounter with a low level scumbag, or at least it's worth it to give you the tools to deel with the scumbag. The only people who really lose out in this situation are the true lowlifes (and the very unlucky) but they deserve everything coming to them anyways.

This sounds like the perfect anarcho-tyranny.