The elaborate set-up of a scam HQ, staffed by people forced to scam
channelnewsasia.com
channelnewsasia.com
A corollary to this are the infamous fish processing boats of Thailand, where illegal immigrants (mostly from Myanmar) are held as slaves and simply pushed into the sea once they outlive their usefulness.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/jul/20/t...
B) A substantial amount of people in Asia live in rural areas. In India, nearly 920M people live in rural areas. The lack of infrastructure in rural areas means that things can happen that never ever reach the local authorities. People can simply slip away without a trace.
C) State power is weak outside of major population centers. Corruption is rife. Povery is rampant. Earning opportunities are limited. Combined, it means that criminals know they can get away with anything as long as they bribe the right people.
D) A substantial percentage of Asian population lives under failed states (same for Africa). State power isn't just weak; it's absent.
E) Asia is just way too large and geographically diverse. Easy to hide away illicit activity in a dense rainforest or deserted mountain than in wide open plains and farmland.
The Confederacy, for example, was militarily and economically a very weak state. It couldn't even supply shoes to its soldiers. It was unable to pierce the blockade on them by the Union. And so on.
I remember our commanders telling us that there used to be a trafficking route through the border of Egypt, but it stopped when the border patrol improved, couple years back. They were smuggling Eastern European girls to prostitute.
Did something change to your knowledge? Or are you talking about another route?
https://polarisproject.org/2020-us-national-human-traffickin...
To be clear though, what you’re hearing (or at least what I’m hearing) from the US right wing is not referring to this. It’s referring to a theory that specifically cultural elites are specifically trafficking children for sex. There’s no reason to believe this is a large issue, though obviously there were systemic failures in the whole Epstein ordeal that gave conspiracists a lot of ammunition.
The majority of trafficking is of laborers, which the right wing generally opposes protections of, and immigrants, which again the right wing generally opposes easy paths to legal citizenship and legal protection for illegal immigrants wherever possible (leading victims to believe they cannot contact law enforcement). Having grown up in a US border state I strongly suspect labor trafficking is dramatically underreported because a lot of immigrant laborers don’t even know they’re being trafficked. They’re essentially told they have no rights in the US and that’s just how it is. The reality of course is that you have ~100% of the legal protection offered to citizens the moment you set foot on US soil.
All of this applies equally to another large source of trafficking which is sex work. US right wing is fixated on the morality of sex work rather than the morality of building a system that rewards and enables coerced sex work.
In Europe trafficking happens in tomato fields in Italy, online prostitution in Scandinavia, and everywhere in between. Victims can be in the country legally or illegally. I remember a case in Finland where an Indian restaurant hired a foreign worker legally, but then they took away his passport and coerced him to work 18-hour shifts using lies and threats of being sent back. That’s trafficking too.
The left and right have somewhat different ideas for solutions of course, with the usual recipes being further labor laws on one side and further limits on immigration on the other side. But probably such small tweaks won’t do anything to address the root issue, and in that sense it transcends left and right.
Trafficking is what enable slavers to stay hidden.
But either way trafficking is typically shorthand for slavery in practise. The thing with trafficking specifically is that it is more likely to go somewhere that it can be spotted. Airports have signs in the bathrooms saying "if you're being held against your will try to get to this part of the airport" because it's the trafficking piece of the slavery/trafficking combo that takes the victim into the airport in the first place. Being trained to spot trafficking in jobs like TSA agents is thus very useful regardless of the slavery situation.
It's as absurd as creating a special term for whipping slaves using sticks of a certain color.
I think this idea is quite dangerous and reeks of superiority. It has happened before and it could happen again.
Sister comment made a point about forced prostitution and human traficcing being common.
I want to make a point that to get rid of this as a matter of policy, we've had revolutions and guillotines. To enforce this, we have well armed, strong goverments with long reach.
The fact that this keeps happening in every area without a strong government -from failed states to international waters - undercuts libertarian argument quite a bit. Youd think they would move to somalia en masse and turn it into the promosed land
Myanmar is a hardcore communist military dictatorship, I'd hardly call that a weak government.
Sure, I wasn't implying that it couldn't happen here, I'm just clumsy with words. I was trying to say it's hard to imagine it happening at similar scale _right now_, i.e. Danish fishing vessels buying slaves and throwing them overboard when they're too weak to continue working, in 2022.
I'm aware of trafficking, forced prostitution and indentured servitude with work in nail salons etc, but as far as I understand, the scale is (currently) very different, and it's much less extreme (assuming there are no secret mass graves we'll find in the future).
Somalia is not a libertarian country by any stretch of the imagination.
But we're starting to grow out of it, and tech is helping us track down crimes that were near-impossible to track down.
I'm leaving out the developing countries on purpose here: they may have had it even worse but it doesn't feel fair to blame them.
Nazi Germany and Soviet/USSR (the whole time more or less) can't blame anyone else for the insane scale of human suffering that they created. Both are representatives of centrally planned economies where companies either don't exist in a western sense (Soviet), or only exist to serve the country (Germany).
There are major differences.
Weird little anecdote: my mother-in-law had her feet x-rayed in a shoe shop to check the fit of her new shoes circa 1943 in Essen. Absolutely no military benefit to ensuring that a 3 year old’s shoes fit, but definitely a market advantage for a shoe shop competing for sales (remember, we didn’t know that casual x-ray usage by non-radiologists was a terrible idea).
The big industrials were geared for military production, especially after 1939, but their owners often helped support the Nazis on their way to power, because they were more worried about Communists and Socialists, and either didn’t take the Nazis seriously, or figured the conservatives could get them under control… or actually agreed with them.
There’s a reason that the modern Social Democratic Party in Germany is the same organization that existed pre-NS era, but the Christian Democrats (conservatives) and Free Democrats (market liberals) were completely new post-war organizations.
The only thing unnatural about capitalism is external enforcement of property claims, and that's not what causes slavery.
The emergence of free markets coincided with a dramatic decline in slavery.
Free markets are an analytical fiction like frictionless surfaces; they don’t exist in the real world. The emergence of the real-world economic system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (which is not the same system as the modern mixed economy that has generally replaced it, though both critics and defenders of the modern mixed economy conflate it woth capitalism, with which it shares some core elements) corresponds with the expansion of chattel slavery and the development of the slave trade, and pressure for its abolition corresponds with (and often involved the same people as) early organized opposition to capitalism.
Yes, they do exist. They aren't perfect. Nothing human is perfect.
Slavery goes back to the dawn of man. In America, slavery was the norm (including among the native americans) until the US was formed. Yes, I know that only half the colonies had abolished slavery when the union was formed, it was forcibly abolished in the rest in 1865.
It had to be forcibly abolished because "free" market capitalism failed to bring about abolition itself; plantation owners had a vested interest in maintaining the institution of slavery.
In fact, said vested interest is sufficiently strong that we never actually abolished slavery in the US; we simply replaced plantations with private prisons, and chattel slaves with penal slaves. Said private prisons, penal slavery, and the broader prison-industrial complex are all the direct consequences of "free" market capitalism as applied to the American penal system.
Actually, the whole point of the Confederacy seceding was it needed to protect itself from free market capitalism, because it made the Southern economy uncompetitive.
> we simply replaced plantations with private prisons
The numbers don't remotely compare with the number of slaves in the Confederacy.
> private prisons, penal slavery, and the broader prison-industrial complex are all the direct consequences of "free" market capitalism
They are consequences of the government, not free markets. The Soviet gulags were penal slavery camps, which the communists liked because they could work people to death in them, saving money on food, housing, and medical care.
Penal slave labor long predated free markets.
A theory I see all the time is that slavery is somehow more efficient than free labor. The most obvious refutation of that is the United States during WW2. The US free market was able to not only conduct a war on both sides of the planet, it also supplied the British and Soviet war machines. The US didn't just win, it buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
No slave based labor could possibly compete with that.
P.S. The Union also buried the Confederacy under a similar avalanche.
The Confederates would disagree; from their point of view, they seceded to protect their "free" market - that being of chattel slaves - because their capitalist profit motive gave them a vested interest in minimizing labor costs to the bare minimum with which they could get away.
What the Union capitalists figured out (and the Confederate capitalists didn't) is that it's just as profitable (if not more so) to replace those chattel slaves with wage laborers, especially if you can get away with paying those laborers less than what it would cost to house and feed them. No need to care about their working conditions, either, since wage laborers are rentals and therefore (if you care more about profit than morals) entirely disposable (unlike chattel slaves, which had to be purchased upfront). Said laborers predictably recognized this to be effectively slavery/serfdom with extra steps, and thus organized into unions for better bargaining/negotiating power.
> The numbers don't remotely compare with the number of slaves in the Confederacy.
There were about 4 million chattel slaves by the Civil War, v. 1.6 million incarcerated today. Sure, it's lower nowadays, but not so much as to be incomparable.
> They are consequences of the government, not free markets.
They are consequences of the government seeking to save money by deferring government functions to privatized replacements competing in a "free" market.
You might've noticed those scare quotes I keep using around "free"; those are there because capitalism is at odds with an actually-free market (contrary to capitalists' claims); given the opportunity, a capitalist would vastly prefer to have absolute control over the market (a.k.a. monopolization) than to have to actually compete, because said control allows the maximization of profit for oneself.
> The US free market was able to not only conduct a war on both sides of the planet, it also supplied the British and Soviet war machines. The US didn't just win, it buried the Axis powers under an avalanche of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
> [...]
> P.S. The Union also buried the Confederacy under a similar avalanche.
If I had a nickel for every confounding variable underlying those outcomes, I'd be able to bury the Axis powers and the CSA under avalanches of advanced military equipment and supplies of every sort.
Hey! Ayn Rand has joined the chat.
But what’s so horrible in today’s tech is that a lot of people working on things like 15-minute delivery and cryptocurrencies pretend that they’re solving fundamental problems, improving the world, and rescuing third world people from poverty. Both gig apps and crypto are very much guilty of such overblown rhetoric.
But a lot of people spend a lot of time working on things that make things worse for a lot of people in order to enrich a few people, and I think maybe that's not okay.
Hard agree on the second clause, though.
Like, I generally pride myself on never having worked for any company I wouldn't admit to working for later, but even some of those are kinda bad. (I contracted at a daily fantasy sports company for a while, and I'm not proud of that.) The recognition that labor is frequently if not generally in a compromised position is kind of the point when people are talking about "unrestrained late capitalism".
> " And where do you work?"
This is not an appropriate response.
> The recognition that labor is frequently if not generally in a compromised position is kind of the point when people are talking about "unrestrained late capitalism".
Some jobs are much, much worse than others. Finding corporate tax loopholes is hugely evil, if hugely banal. That those people do it for a *relatively* meager salary does absolutely nothing to change the fact that it's evil.
It is wildly destructive to society to spend all day working to funnel money from social services to the yachting class. While it's very weird that they aren't seen as the hugely banal, hugely evil jobs that they are, once it's pointed out you might start thinking about it more.
I don't see how this is relevant, given that it's not what corporate tax accountants do? All they're doing is figuring out how to use the tax system designed by the government to minimize the amount of money going to the government.
The government does not, as a matter of fact, spend all of its money on social services - vast amounts go to administration, national defense, social security (which is supposed to be self-sustaining), and other things, so this entire line of argument is invalid.
Moreover, the very fact that there are exceptions intentionally added to the tax code means that they're explicitly meant to be used, and therefore that using them is not evil.
Meanwhile, the fact that there are enough exceptions in the tax code and therefore less wealthy individuals and smaller businesses without the resources to make use of them are disproportionately disadvantaged is bad, and solely the fault of those who wrote the code in the first place.
You have a problem with the corporate tax rate and want it to be higher? Sure, that's valid. But randomly, axiomatically claiming that some people using the system the way it was designed are evil because they make too much money? Invalid.
While the US government may agree with you on that - other than the part where the law writer is at fault whatsoever - it's still very, very fucking evil to torture people. As is playing an essential part in the theft (morally and in reality, if not legally) of hundreds of billions of taxes.
Once again - legality is not morality. People seem confused on that point often, and it's very weird.
If you're talking about "Moreover, the very fact that there are exceptions intentionally added to the tax code means that they're explicitly meant to be used, and therefore that using them is not evil." - that's because the government is the writer, enforcer, and beneficiary of tax code - they have completely control over it, unlike someone who being tortured, who is none of those things. Completely different scenarios.
> As is playing an essential part in the theft (morally and in reality, if not legally) of hundreds of billions of taxes.
This is literally factually incorrect. There's no "theft" here - the government wrote the law to explicitly include these exception that corporate tax lawyers are using. "Theft" is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Taxes are the government asserting that some of the money that you earn belongs to them. When the government writes an exception into the tax code, that's them asserting that they do not own the money covered by that exception, and therefore it is not theft by definition.
You haven't even provided a single justification for your baseless assertion that this is "evil" - just a lot of misdirection and emotionally manipulative statements like "People seem confused on that point often, and it's very weird."
In any case, I work at a small (< 100) company, with very selective clientele. I am unwilling to disclose exactly who. I have explicitly resisted recruiters from FAANG (well, neither Netflix nor Apple) because of the immoral work I would expect I would be doing, at a significant salary penalty.
Both accountants and programmers have immense freedom to make a decent living, while using their expertise, even while choosing to avoid ethically questionable roles and activities. At some point, yes, economic coercion is unavoidable. That's understandable for someone whose realistic prospects are $50k or nothing. $200k or $150k is a very different matter.
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8410489.stm
You can call the study 'socialist' if you like, but the disparity between what corporations ought to be paying and what they are paying is staggeringly vast.
Yet their loophole finding tax accountants are generally respected. WHY? This, while we STILL treat nurses like dirt.
While what corporate tax accountants do is 'legal', it's one of the most destructive roles possible.
You can blame this aspect of society on the politicians, the lobbyists, the voters - but at the heart of it, some twat is using his education and training to funnel money from social services to luxury yachts.
Why is it ok for me to write off some tax breaks the government gave me, but the corporate tax lawyer is evil?
How do you figure? Every dollar a corporate tax accountant saves Walmart gets redirected from food stamps and building public transport to the yacht class.
> Why is it ok for me to write off some tax breaks the government gave me, but the corporate tax lawyer is evil?
Scale and intent.
This is a non-argument. You can use the exact same emotional pleading to claim that its not ethical for corporations to do anything except donate all of their profit to the government (by overpaying their taxes) because every dollar is going to "food stamps and public transport" instead of "the yacht class".
> Scale and intent.
Whether something is evil or not is scale-invariant, so that doesn't matter, and there's no difference in intent between an individual trying to reduce their taxes and a corporation - the intent for both is "give the government less money".
Unless you have actually logical arguments against it, I think that the GP was pretty clearly correct in claiming that the root cause is overly complicated tax codes. US tax rates are set by the government ostensibly acting on behalf of its citizens and setting a fair tax rate. Companies and individuals are not only allowed but expected to take advantage of clauses that work in their favor (assuming that they're not behaving dishonestly to do so) - otherwise there would be literally no reason for those clauses to exist in the first place (it's obviously insane to add a tax clause to give tax breaks to college students and then condemn/prosecute them when they try to use it), so it's pretty clearly not wrong to do so.
Given that it's not wrong to (honestly) minimize your taxes, and the fact that complicated tax codes give a unique advantage to those able to spend lots of time and money on them (the wealthy and large corporations), you'd have to be crazy to think that it's not the fault of the authors.
(not to mention that complicated tax codes reduce government transparency, which is, uh, a bad thing)
The metaphor for me is that you have a code base with 1000 contributors, minimal pr reviews, no integration testing at all, and lots of global state. It is spaghetti and nobody is incentivised to simplify it
Not only do I think that's a small part of the harm done in the world, and that the vast majority of the harm done in the world is done through simple selfishness (with possibly overwrought moralistic rationalizations), but also that it's important to make the distinction that this is the source of none of the evil.
Evil can't include people trying to be kind badly, or else it's just become a general euphemism to give every petty grievance one has a grand, millennialist, Manichean cast. Or to be realistic, it's usually just warmed over early-mid 20c anti-New Dealer, anticommunist bullshit.
> Evil can't include people trying to be kind badly
Oh, yes it can, and often is. I just gave you an example. How about another one? Trying to cure people of homosexuality.
> anticommunist bullshit
Communism has wrought more evil than about any other ideology. All with good intentions, of course.
The communists simply made everyone poor and hopeless.
It's testament to how effective the right kind of propaganda can be on the right kind of person. In a lot of these cases it seems to be founded on someone following base motives (e.g. personal greed) adopting a false, ego-protective narrative to justify their actions to themselves. But then they're so forceful and vocal about that narrative, a lot of other people are duped through repetition into believing it too.
Friedman: tell me is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. This the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry in that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history is where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worst off it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by free enterprise.
Donahue: so it seems to reward not virtue as much as ability to manipulate the system.
Friedman: and what does reward virtue? You think the Communist commissar rewards virtue? you think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think, excuse me, if you'll pardon me, do you think of American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of the virtue of the people appointed on the basis of their political clout? Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? You know, I think you're taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us well now I don't even trust you to do that let alone myself
I know he meant it in a different way, but I find it makes more sense to think of political appointees as rewarding virtue. Of course, often times that virtue is simply personal fealty or loyalty to the party ideology, but I do believe that a despot rewards those he finds most virtuous -- as opposed to those that are the most productive or the most capable.
Why wouldn't he select those that are the most productive or the most capable in the context of the job he has for them? I.e. if he's looking for an enforcer that will, with an iron fist, reign in a province that's talking about self-determination a bit too loudly, will he choose someone who's very virtuous, or will he choose someone who's happy, maybe even eager, to rule with an iron fist?
Did Putin make a deal with Kadyrov because he found him virtuous, or because he found him the most capable person available at the time for the job he needed him to do?
[EDIT] Guess I should explain what's wrong with it. There are two chief problems:
1) It's not entirely clear which of these is going on without more context, but he's definitely either very wrong about a bunch of stuff or is operating, selectively on a definition of greed that is far too broad. I suspect the latter. This is what lets you pull tricks like "proving" that greed (extremely broad sense) is what makes the world run and then conclude "greed is good" like Michael Gecko (but you mean, specifically, the more narrow, generally-considered-a-vice kind—"huh, maybe not all greed is good" yeah, exactly my point, we have the word "greed" to describe the bad kind, it is all it describes). This and similar tricks are a favorite in... a certain crowd, let's say. You see it again with "This the world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests." Well... sure, if you do some tap-dancing with words you can make this seem true, but you're just playing games with semantics. "This world runs on individual cells pursuing their separate self-interests". I mean... yes, and also very much no.
2) This argument displays some major blind spots about the role of government in making markets function well, and in the nature of firms, such that several of his examples fall apart as soon as you think for half a second and some of his points should also apply to firms, but he refrains from taking that step, presumably because it would ruin the appealing simplicity of his argument. Again, pretty common error and/or deliberate trick to encounter in a certain category of writing.
It's Gordon Gekko.
More to the point: so much of this human suffering is dependent on the existence of this technology.
To say that only morals and values work to address these problems seems to imply that the suffering of these people in poor countries originates from a deficiency in morals and values.
It seems more likely to me that the root cause is their awful material conditions. Technology can help with improving material conditions (although it is not guaranteed to do so).
Part II [1] looks at the victims
[1] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/cna-insider/online-love-inve...
These operations are often in failed / significantly less free states and ignored or otherwise protected by them.
Regime change?
Just arrest them seems like a very simplistic idea here...
To your comment, that stick is required at all is kinda +1 for humanity.
They work for free until they prove they can get results under such a system. I think most orgs would like to only pay for employees that actually generate revenue and given the lack of regulation of the black market they have that opportunity.
Also trafficking in people from elsewhere means that the local police are much more willing to co-operate because they're not getting as much hassle from locals about the foreigners suffering as they would if locals were being treated as shittily.
My experience with online dating and the catfishing that I received (is that even the correct verb?) ranged between poor and mediocre (if I drank as much alcohol as I did in my 30s, I suspect that I could have been scammed out of lots of money - I am a bit too cynical and analytical these days). What I see on videos about "pig butchering" is orders of magnitude more intense. What the article documents is frightening.
The underwritten currency of human society is violence. Using it, you can take what you want and the only way to stop you is more violence. If you are part of an ideological tribe that wants to protect humans from each others' petty brutality you must seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge your regime.
Organized crime like gangs, cartels, the mafia, corrupt cops--these are not "unfortunate byproducts of imperialism and capitalism", they are the basest, fundamental expression of human dominance. If they central government weakens, they will take over.
I deeply hate people who violate the safety and freedom of civilized society, and it sometimes frustrates me that so many westerners who believe in "human rights" are convinced these problems can be solved with a light touch.
Isn't that just people who care generally? And if they do what should they do differently?
> If you are part of an ideological tribe that wants to protect humans from each others' petty brutality you must seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge your regime.
If people care about human rights abuses, they need to seize land, establish the rule of law, and murder or expel people who challenge their regime.
For instance: there are known sex traffickers inside the United States who are sent to prison for years when they're caught and then they get out. If you want to curtail that practice to a greater degree than it is, you need to murder or expel people who do it, not just give them an official time-out and then make life more difficult for them afterwards by reducing their employment options and curtailing their right to vote. Another option is indefinite containment, but that's a large drain on resources and extremely difficult to operate without simply ending up with a prison system like the US has, which is low-status and overtly corrupt and underfunded (in the sense that the funding goes to profit rather than to the effective operations of the prisons).
In short: the safety of civilized people who participate in society in good faith needs to be violently protected from people who take advantage of them. This is obviously not the case in the US, and it's certainly not the case in outlying rural regions in Asia and Africa, where people are forced to scam under threat of punishment.
That doesn't have a history of good outcomes for anyone.
You have described the history of every single western country, within which the majority of dominant-ethnicity citizens enjoy a physical safety and quality of life unprecedented in world history.
Modern human rights campaigns and progressive philosophy spring mostly from western countries with ideologies downstream of the Enlightenment. (Note that I am not claiming that only Europeans ever developed sub-societies where human rights were respected, merely that out of the surviving capable violent states today, the western ones are the ones more focused on progressive ideals.)
The Western countries were invented after violent conquer and rebellion against regional warlords by sub-factions within their own lands, and the rule of law and power of finance was allocated mostly to people who had ties to the most powerful warlords at the time of the founding of the countries. One example is England, which conquered Wales, Ireland, and Scotland through a military alliance of the internal (English) territories that recognized a seat of power based in London and an ethnic identity manufactured whole-cloth to encompass Danish, Angle, Saxon, and Scandinavian immigrants to the Isle. The "United Kingdom", once a brutally violent and despotic place, is now one of the number one immigration targets for people freeing lawless, economically depressed war-torn regions.
Interesting. Upstream you said that human rights was mostly a progressive issue, but this is a decidedly conservative, perhaps even regressive, approach.
edit - later, I see that you refer to yourself as conservative
> the safety of civilized people who participate in society in good faith needs to be violently protected from people who take advantage of them
I associate civilization with staunch defense of the humanity and dignity even of the worst of us. It might for me even be the primary defining characteristic of the term. We could publically behead those who "take advantage", but then, that would be uncivilized. Medieval and barbaric, actually.
Or, we could create the circumstances to enable atonement and redemption. A "time out", as you say, followed by a reintegration into society. The effects can be monitored for optimal outcomes, empirically. Use only the bare minimum violence necessary to maintain actual, real civilized society, constantly vigilant against its overuse
> The majority of people in the US who bother to care about human rights abuses and exploitation of vulnerable populations are "progressives".
What I am interested in is an effective approach, regardless if it's considered progressive, conservative, regressive, old-fashioned, etc. I am tired of watching the primary discourse over human rights in the US play out between uneducated "conservatives" who would establish a Christian fascist state in a week if left to their own devices and naive "progressives" who think that violent criminals just need "access to resources" in order to civilize themselves.
> Or, we could create the circumstances to enable atonement and redemption. A "time out", as you say, followed by a reintegration into society. The effects can be monitored for optimal outcomes, empirically.
Sure, good luck with reintegrating a slaver into society with those they enslaved or a violent rapist into society with those they raped. I am not opposed to an atonement/reintegration cycle, but it needs far more rigorous severity than I've seen any "progressive" ever argue for.
Out of the people labelled "criminal" or "legally deviant" in the US, I believe there is a big split between people who could reintegrate given a safe prison sentence and people that I think need to be exiled or executed. If prison was safe for the prisoners we could absolutely use a "light touch" for some offenders.
A lot of the worst damage to society, though, is orchestrated by chronic offenders who through whatever mix of genetics and environment have developed a set of beliefs and motivations that I think are unacceptable to keep around. To quote the example from the original article, forcing someone to commit crimes under pain of punishment or death simply isn't someone I have any interest in rehabilitating. Second-order organized crime is almost always worse for society than first-order crimes of passion or need.
We do that already. Level 1 yards (in California-ese) are quite safe and filled with white collar criminals, fraudsters, drunk drivers, drug-dealing doctors, etc. Some facilities don't even have perimeter fences. The safest are the fire camps, because nobody there wants to get kicked back to general population (these inmates voluntarily work as wilderness firefighters).
OTOH, Level 4 yards are filled with murderers serving life sentences and the like. As a visitor or staff, you can't even go on the yard without wearing stab-resistant armor. Some particularly troublesome inmates don't even get yard time — they exercise in cages or isolated rec areas, never leave their cells without full shackles, and are never escorted by fewer than 2-3 correctional officers (depending on the facility). They are strip searched every time they leave their cells. That kind of treatment is generally "earned" by one's behavior on the inside, with few exceptions — we sometimes treat convicted spies (e.g. Ames, Hanssen) like this as a deterrent to others contemplating betraying their loyalties.
Also, mentally ill inmates are (at least in California) generally put into their own housing units to prevent predation by the rest of the population. They have access to medication but cannot be forced to take them.
[0]: https://www.prearesourcecenter.org/about/prison-rape-elimina...
I forget what this fallacy is, and I cannot be arsed to look it up. False dichotomy? The choice is not atonement and redemption OR reintegrating slavers and violent rapists into society alongside their victims.
If you think that way for real, no wonder you think the only real option is death or exile.
The state elected to give him a life sentence. (That's just exile except now someone has to take care of him the entire time.)
From your point of view, what are the other options here?
First, understand that we now live in an era of unprecedented personal safety. Death from homicide-by-nitwit is generally less likely now than at any time in the past. Obviously not true in specific situations like adopting a murderous nitwit, but it's true in general.
So, if we're accepting the premises so far, then whatever we have now is better than the past.
Second, understand that throughout history "death or exile" were the only real criminal punishments ever meted out, discounting "torture or mutilation". It's not like it's a radical idea you have there.
Even the arguing style of bringing up the most horrific shit possible and using it to argue for harsher punishment in general is not new. In fact, it's basically used every single time someone advocates for =>
Imprisonment as a genuinely sincere attempt to redeem criminals is pretty radical, and I would argue has not been tried with conviction, so to speak, in the US. Wherever it's genuinely practiced, crime is low.
Still, even prison-as-deterrence- through-horror is a step up from medieval-era death-or-exile.
Why, if your goal is reduce crime, would you seriously advocate for returning to methods used during a time of more crime?
Ok, I think I'm done here. Know that I promise to read and think carefully about whatever you write in response, but I will probably not reply.
It seems that you don't like continuous internal exile via imprisonment, and that you're in favor of "re-integration", but you have no real plan for what happens when re-integration proves impossible besides "create a massive, resource-intensive cycle to continuously attempt to re-educate violent criminals and then put them back in the communities they terrorized". If you put them in other places, it's exile. If you put them in prison only, it's internal exile. As I've stated, the only real options are death, exile, or re-integration into the community they came from. You have not provided another option.
It doesn't matter what the frequency of "murder-by-nitwit" is; if your society experiences that phenomena, you have to handle the "nitwits", although "dangerous sociopaths" is the phrase I would use. Murder rates depend on historical epoch. Is living in a cartel-controlled area in Mexico any more or less dangerous then living on the same patch of land before the invention of the country of Mexico? It doesn't matter what era it is or whether or not your technique for controlling it is "old-fashioned". The important legal and moral practices are the ones that lead to the protection, safety, and flourishing of people who collaborate with the rest of society in good faith.
You said elsewhere that "the definition of civilized behavior is defending humanity in each person, even the wickedest and worst among us". I disagree; I think the definition of civilized behavior is "the deliberate, collaborative practice of law, agriculture, and retention of wisdom via knowledge transfer". We seem to have little common ground on this idea, and as a result of our ideological differences you are willing to welcome people who have committed murder, rape, thievery, slavery, intimidation, corruption, etc. back into your community and I am not.
It's also curious that you choose to paint the man I described as a "nitwit", lessening his moral culpability for what he did by alleging his stupidity. If I, an intelligent and educated man, committed the same crime, would you call me a nitwit, or would you grant me enough humanity to actually hold me responsible for my narcissism and cruelty?
Your question is a poison pill logical fallacy. It elides essential detail to channel your interlocutors into your predetermined conclusions. These conclusions are bundled with other assumptions. You might as well ask if torture is ok when you have only 24 hours to stop a planet-busting bomb in which billions will die. It sounds very serious and sober but is fundamentally unserious. Rather than clarifying, these questions are designed, intentionally, to prompt dramatic, emotional answers.
Answering "well of course in the very unlikely scenario you describe, we should [execute|torture|sentence-to-life-plus-cancer]" and then the slippery-slope chipping begins, leading inevitably to "well, sure execution can be useful to deter bread-stealing".
It might help your case if you, first of all, abandon that kind of rhetorical trickery, really define your terms and then grapple with the edge cases yourself, such as:
What do you mean by exile? How is that different from jail? Is exile permanent? What happens during exile? Can someone earn a living? Are they physically safe?
Who is a "dangerous sociopath"? Is it someone who is predisposed to violent behavior and is completely resistant to any intervention? What interventions were tried? Medication? Gene therapy? Hormones? Threats of exile and death?
What did this dangerous sociopath do? What defines her as a sociopath in this case? No expression of remorse? What if the expression of remorse is fake? What if it is real but comes off as fake?
What about the case of someone who robs her adoptive parents? What if the parents had inflicted 20 years of horrific abuse? What if the abuse were sexual? What if her abuse were filmed for distribution? What if she murdered them? What if the murder were accidental, occurring in the course of the robbery? What if she asked her boyfriend to help? What if the adoptive daughter and boyfriend are themselves loving and caring parents? What to do with their children? Should the children also go into exile? Should the children also be executed, as fruit of a poisoned womb?
What about false accusations? What about prosecutorial misconduct? What about the case of stealing food to feed a starving child? What about when something that you think is beneficial to society is redefined as a crime? What happens when "dangerous sociopathy" is redefined in political terms to control political opposition?
What if, in order to address these issues, a well-meaning judge had only "Death. Or exile!"
* The caveat here is that I do think there is a significant minority of people who call themselves conservative or progressive or whatever, who are not on the side of a better society, but are only for themselves.
Libertarianism holds human rights above all else. The entire purpose of a libertarians government is guaranteeing peoples' rights.
Libertarianism holds a very particular and highly contentious conception of human rights (which differs radically, but with some common elements, between different flavors of libertarianism) above everything else. So do several other ideologies, with different conceptions of human rights.
Those are slogans, not substantive conceptions of rights, and the last of those a slogan that was used because the thing many then-contemporary liberals would have preferred and that reflects (but still does bot substantively specify) what they and most modern libertarians value most, property, was too contentious even at the level of a slogan.
> most modern libertarians value most
That's an invention on your part.
> property
Yes, I know the original wording was "pursuit of property". Property rights have turned out to be a very fundamental right. Not being allowed to own anything has proved disastrous again and again and again.
Only through a bizarre redefinition of peoples' rights. Same thing they do with "violence" by saying that the only justification for violence is as a reaction to violence, which when translated ends up only justifying (unredefined, classical) violence against "violence."
What is bizarre about them, and how does it "redefined" rights?
I don't think any progressives deny the state's "monopoly on violence". Of course the state must establish the rule of law, and possibly murder (or is it not murder before the rule of law is established?) those who seek to overthrow the state.
>it sometimes frustrates me that so many westerners who believe in "human rights" are convinced these problems can be solved with a light touch.
But do you really need to murder scammers and slave owners unless they try to resist with insurrectionery violence? A light touch of a long prison sentence can work. I feel you want the state to gun down these people immediately without a trial or anything. I don't think that's right, and you haven't argued for why it's right, just ranted on barely related things.
A light touch only ensures that people who are effective at manipulation of those with better goodwill than them can avoid the two fair sentences. Long prison sentences are unnecessarily cruel and a net drain on resources. The only reason to forgive slave-owners is if you're grandfathering them into a new nation-state and offering amnesty under threat of death for their participation.
But Britain did this and it wasn't a new state at all. It worked out well enough and was apparently cheaper than the American Civil War.
Perhaps this should be changed to life in general, with a possible exception for the forms of life that produce their own energy. All others engage in some form of violence to secure their energy, even if it is against plant life, something we don't often consider as violence.