Posted by dahsdebater on 6/23/2020 12:46:00 AM (view original):

Posted by wylie715 on 6/22/2020 6:04:00 PM (view original):
um, don't the police have to catch someone before that someone can face prison time? Or do they voluntarily turn themselves in?

Prisons predate police in this country by hundreds of years.

and your point? you can't compare society hundreds of years ago to society today.

I disagree. I think people are basically people. We do know that aggregation seems to breed criminality, so that's a factor. IIRC, crime rates scale with metro population on a power law with an exponent of ~1.15, meaning that for every doubling in city size you'd expect per capita crime rates to increase by ~15% on average. The Santa Fe Institute released some research briefs on this 6 or 8 years ago showing surprisingly good fit of the data (crime rates in cities vs. city size) to this trend in a number of countries. Since we first instituted police departments our biggest cities have grown by a factor of ~10, so we'd expect a tendency to criminality about 60% higher than in the past. It's not an insignificant increase, but it's also not an order of magnitude type increase. I don't think underlying human nature has changed. As I said, neurotypical humans are hardwired for prosocial behavior. Our default is to push the rules, but generally follow the spirit of the law if we perceive it to be generally regarded as a good law. Laws our social circle perceives to be "bad laws" we'll be happy to ignore, or even intentionally violate. Fortunately, most people think proscriptions on theft, rape, murder, etc. are good laws.

To clarify - I'm not suggesting that this 60% increase in any kind of crime vs., say, 1850, is a quantitative prediction of how much crime we could expect if we just stopped policing. That's not the point. We're absolutely not going to just totally stop policing, so having a quantitative picture of what would happen isn't important anyway.

The point is that it's a close enough description to give us a sense of what we might expect. Maybe crime rates would be as much as 3 times as high, rather than 1.6. Maybe only 25% higher. It's not important. What's important is that if it's even in this neighborhood, then the picture all3 painted of everyone planning for their wives to be raped and their children to be murdered is unrealistic. Even with no policing, humanity has proven to be reasonably self-regulating. At least while we continue to live in a resource-rich reality, a world without policing is not a dystopian Hell.

Getting the lead out of our water helped a lot too.

I think some of you guys are giving today's society way too much benefit of the doubt, I don-t think any of you would argue that there has never been a more "ME, ME, ME" society, yet you will not agree that means getting "your's" given whatever method needed and at whoever else's cost.

I disagree.

I would argue that. Again, I think people have always been people.

People have also been writing about how everyone "used to" be more socially conscious since they've had written languages to express the sentiment in. People have always been selfish. If anything, increase in excess available resources leads people to be a little bit less self-absorbed. But not much.

The increase in globalism and taxation should also benefit this point. People are working together in society more today than they ever have been before.

Not relevant to this discussion:

-><- Hot Take Alert !! -><-

I'm a Christian, and I think taking down statues of Jesus is completely acceptable.

Unjust is the accusation that this century is more covetous than past ones. From the very beginning gold has been the most sought after god upon the earth.

Emmanuel Rhoides, 1866

Nature … has born and reared all men alike, and created them genuine brothers, not in mere name, but in very reality, though this kinship has been put to confusion by the triumph of malignant covetousness, which has wrought estrangement instead of affinity and enmity instead of friendship.

Philo, ~30 AD

When one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be ... the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.

William James, 1902

One of the federal prosecutors who withdrew from Roger Stone’s criminal case after senior officials at the Department of Justice intervened in the sentencing recommendation for President Donald Trump’s longtime associate will tell Congress that he and other career prosecutors were heavily pressured to "cut Stone a break." The allegations contained in Aaron Zelinsky’s opening statement for Wednesday’s House Judiciary hearing left legal and government experts dismayed, with many saying the described conduct should result in the removal of Attorney General William Barr.

Zelinsky, when testifying about "improper politicization" of the DOJ, will allege that he and the other prosecutors on the case–all of whom resigned in protest–were told that then-acting U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea had "political reasons" for intervening on Stone’s behalf. They were also advised to go along with the instruction "because this case was ‘not the hill worth dying on’ and that we could ‘lose our jobs’ if we did not toe the line."

Republicans in Congress pulled off an elite political stunt. Blocking the Democrat CJR bill, introducing a watered-down version, and then crying when Democrats reject it. The so-called "liberal media" is going along with it, too.

Kinda proves my point about the difference in the ability of both sides to create compelling narratives. Oh well.

Louie Gohmert really shrouded himself in decency as always today it looks like. Shrouded in decency means being a baby troll, right?

Far-right extremism has consistently been more deadly and more supported than left wing extremism since the 1980's. The logical conclusion to nationalism is terrorism. Yet, the left is worse because they are taking down statues.