When people debate whether to make laws “tougher”, the discussion usually assumes that there’s a see-saw, and you just get to pick its position. You can push down on one side to make crime lower, and on the other side you’ll get tougher laws. Or you push the law side of the see-saw down to make laws looser (whatever that means in context) and you’ll get more crime.
But that’s not actually a good description of reality. For any given set of laws, there are all sorts of other factors that will massively increase or decrease crime rates without changing the law. And that means that laws-on-the-books probably aren’t a major factor for determining actual, on-the-ground levels of violence. Here’s a neighborhood-level map of murders in Baltimore:
Everybody in that map lives under the same laws. But the murder rate in some neighborhoods is 20x higher than others. The people in the gray neighborhoods with zero shooting murders could kill someone just as easily as people in the dark green neighborhoods. More easily, actually, since they’re wealthier and better educated and so could probably do a better job planning their crimes. But they just … don’t choose to kill people.
This is an unsatisfying observation. People want a big, clearly labeled button they can push to get a desired result. “<bad thing> doesn’t happen because I <took action x>.” It’s not very satisfying to realize that the actual reason the bad thing doesn’t happen is because millions of people simply choose not to do it.
The reasons they choose not to are understandable and pretty stable: they have better things to do with their life, they’re not aggrieved enough, and mostly they are too moral to go out of their way to do something truly evil. Occasionally, someone breaks from that norm and chooses to do the bad thing. That’s jarring, but it shouldn’t distract too much from the miracle that the only thing preventing violence from being 100x the current rates isn’t law — it’s a culture and norms that make people freely choose a better path. That should be encouraging. People do the right thing because they want to, not because the law forces them to.
— Open Source Defense in Why isn’t there more violence?
This may be the least immediately offensive to whoever is easily offended presentation of this concept I have ever seen. There is a lot more to explore but this is perfect for getting the idea out without immediately shutting down thinking.
Yeah but we’re supposed to celebrate all culture. There’s no such thing as bad culture. Or a culture that actively works to thwart civilization.
Hell, we’re rooting for Al Qaeda in Syria now kinda like 9/11 never happened at all.
More on the let them fight side of things but interested in who stands to benefit from that situation and what their contribution to the conflict may be.
We’ve armed every extremist group in the ME at one time or another. Then we end up fighting the people we previously armed. Rinse and repeat. While we’re helping them in some way, they’re rebels. At any other time, they’re literally designated terrorists.
We had a hand in this. We’ve had a hand in it for over a decade. Had we stayed out of it, there wouldn’t have been the humanitarian disaster we ended up having because al-Assad, with help from Russia and Iran, would have been able to end the civil war much more quickly. But the policy makers never consider the lives of Syrians, Iraqis, etc. Death and displacement is only a number to them. We obviously knew this was going to happen. Why were we bombing them, and what exactly were we bombing?
What is to gain? For the US, it’s another proxy war with Russia. For Israel, it’s a chance to control some land and destroy weapon stockpiles that could be used against them in the future. What else is to gain for the players? It’s the same thing everyone goes to war for. Control. Are we sending the Syrian refugees back home now? What a mess.
Awaiting moderation. Edit function when? Come on Dan.
Well, 6% of 13% of the population that’s a specific demographic seems culture bound to commit over 60% (its actually closer to 70% now) of the crime in the country and commits murders at over 3 times the rate of any other demographic (its actually closer to 4 times now). And that demographic is not White, or Asian, or Hispanic/Latino, or American Indian.
Just saying.
correction for: “6% of 13%”
That should have been “46% of 13%” or in other words almost half of a specific demographic that comprises 13% (actually right around 14% now) of the U.S. population.
From the article:
For people who are interested in reducing misuse of guns, this is actually good news. It means that you can spend your time on the easier problem of culture, not the impossible task of undoing technical advancement.
We should be optimistic here. The types of gun misuse that are most concerning today were once culturally unthinkable. There’s no reason they can’t be that way again.
How could you remain optimistic when you discover that the
gun safety advocatesgun grabbers are responsible for intentionally promoting the degradation of our culture? Why would they ever change?[fill in the blank] charted a course from “technically possible but culturally unthinkable” to “actually happening”
Now apply that to the current gender identity phenomenon.