| ▲ | oefrha 7 hours ago |
| It’s pretty amazing when you get the worst of both worlds—total surveillance, yet still rampant crime. |
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| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| That's the only way it can be in a system with thousands of crimes on the books. People commit minor offenses, and often felonies without knowing it, on a regular basis. If surveillance was consistently used to actually enforce the laws, people would a) notice the surveillance[0] and then actually object to it and b) start objecting to all the ridiculous and poorly drafted laws they didn't even know existed. But they don't want the majority of people objecting to things. They want a system that provides a thousand pretexts to punish anyone who does something they don't like, even something they're supposed to have a right to do, by charging them with any of the laws that everybody violates all the time and having the surveillance apparatus in place so they can do it to anyone as long as it's not done to everyone. That doesn't work if the laws are enforced consistently and the majority thereby starts insisting that they be reasonable. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1zhe85spsw |
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| ▲ | joebates 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I wonder if this is a technique used by certain leaders of authoritarian regimes to take out people in power they they deem threats. Everyone in the party routinely breaks laws, knowingly or otherwise. The person in charge can decide they don't like someone and start an investigation, knowing they'll eventually find something illegal. Then they can delegitimize and remove them under the guise of "corruption". | | |
| ▲ | antod an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Absolutely. It's often more calculated than that though. The only way (by design) to succeed in the regime is through corruption - you're giving the leader the rope to hang you with if you ever fall out of favor. | |
| ▲ | acdha 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Very much so: “everyone does it” means that the leader can destroy anyone who doesn’t toe the line while seeming to be following a reasonable law. | | |
| ▲ | generic92034 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | And only a few steps further and the leader rarely needs to employ the service of obedient judges, but opponents "just" fall out of windows. |
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| ▲ | CamperBob2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly. See also underposted speed limits, for example. It's not about being able to stop everybody, it's about being able to stop anybody. |
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| ▲ | harimau777 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the other hand, those thousands of crimes on the books exist because American society operates under a norm of "if its not explicitly illegal then its fine for people to do it". See for example, the rhetoric around maximizing shareholder value. If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal. IMHO, that's one of the core failures of modern Libertarian/Objectivist influenced thought. | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal, then the logical outcome is to make more and more things explicitly illegal. Except that that isn't the only way to protect yourself from selfish people and the assumption that it is is the source of a significant proportion of the dumb laws. There is a narrow class of things that have to be prohibited by law because there is otherwise no way to prevent selfish people from doing them, like dumping industrial waste into the rivers. What these look like is causing harm to someone you're not otherwise transacting with so that they can't prevent the harm by refusing to do business with you. And then you need functional antitrust laws to ensure competitive markets. The majority of dumb laws are laws trying to work around the fact that we don't have functional antitrust laws, or indeed have the opposite and have laws propping up incumbents and limiting competition, and therefore have many concentrated markets where companies can screw customers and workers because they have inadequate alternatives. Trying to patch that with prohibitions never works because in a concentrated market there are an unlimited number of ways the incumbents can screw you and you can't explicitly prohibit every one of them; the only thing that works is to reintroduce real competition. | | |
| ▲ | iamnothere 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | I will add this: the number of ways in which humans can harm one another is immeasurable, and every law comes with an associated cost. At the bare minimum the cost is enforcement plus the harm imposed by occasional false accusations and convictions. But bad laws can also dampen legitimate economic activity, making social problems worse. As a society plunges into dysfunction due to economic stress, the number of people harming one another increases. If the society responds using more laws, and fails to correct the source of the dysfunction, it will eventually collapse under the weight of those laws as enforcement becomes uneven and politically driven. (This is the failure mode of legalist and bureaucratic states.) Alternatively, if the society responds with a more arbitrary case-by-case system of punishment, it will collapse into mob rule or dictatorship, so lack of structured law isn’t a solution either. The only real solution is to fix the root problems facing the society. Antitrust helps with this because it can “unstick” parasitic incumbents who are preventing the market from dynamically responding to real economic conditions. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If the only way to protect yourself from selfish people is if their actions explicitly illegal It's not. You're asking for contract law. |
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| ▲ | gmuslera 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And the people in power not facing the consequences of their crimes even if they come to broad light. In fact the people in charge of the surveillance is the same that hide those crimes, or convince population that there is nothing to see there. |
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| ▲ | tonymet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The surveillance protects the regime, which mostly involves the US Federal government. Street crime, unless it’s organized by Cartels, is not a political threat. You can see the counter example during the 40s-70s when the FBI targeted the mafia and local political corruption to take out the remaining organized crime strongholds . Today organized crime doesn’t have much political influence. A sort of truce. So there’s no longer incentive for the feds to pursue street crime. Street crime yields no longer funnel into influence. In fact, most political corruption today is coming from entitlements , which further bolsters political control. |
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| ▲ | 127 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| ...because the point of surveillance was never to solve crime. |
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| ▲ | kgwxd 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The rampant crime is largely made up. |
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| ▲ | jb1991 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Compared to other major western countries, the US has a serious problem with violent crime in particular. | | |
| ▲ | WarmWash 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you remove like 250sq mi of land from that stat you can cut the violent crime stat by 90%. There are some neighborhoods with more murders in a month than some whole states see in a couple years. | | |
| ▲ | hugh-avherald 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can't you do that for any epsilon? (i.e. for every e > 0 there exists a area of the United States such that 90% of the crime is in an area < e) | |
| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not popular. We know exactly where the majority of crime is in the US, you are correct, down to the neighborhood. Now… let’s say you were to call the national guard in to safeguard those areas, how do you think that would go over by those cities governors and reaction media? I guess the answer depends on the year. | | |
| ▲ | hypeatei 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This comment really confirms the "everyone is twelve years old now" theory. "If there's crime, let's send in the army!" Of course you'd suggest that, you're twelve. | | | |
| ▲ | throwworhtthrow 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Tim Walz and Jacob Frey are both on record saying they'd love to have federal help with reducing violent crime. That is not Donald Trump's / Stephen Miller's objective in Minnesota, nor is it the outcome. |
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| ▲ | jeffrallen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And quality of life crimes. In my country, I can get a package left on my property and it is not stolen. | |
| ▲ | iririririr 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And science already told you the best improvement ever, in the world history with regards to violent crime, came from unleaded gasoline. So, are you using your brain and demanding other systemic changes like free mental-health care and housing? or are you just being a tool and wanting more police violence? |
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| ▲ | ericmay 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What are you basing this claim on? | | | |
| ▲ | danesparza 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Really? Rampant white collar crime is made up? | |
| ▲ | oefrha 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who’s making up the homicide and other violent crime statistics and for what purpose? | | |
| ▲ | ori_b 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Which statistics are you looking at? Crime has been dropping since the 90s, with the exception of short term regressions. https://jasher.substack.com/p/crime-is-likely-down-an-enormo... | | |
| ▲ | oefrha 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | You do realize these are still crap compared to other countries right? | | |
| ▲ | ori_b 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Agreed, the world overall is pretty safe these days. | | |
| ▲ | oefrha 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you’re being sarcastic, well, congratulate yourself for being better than shitholes I guess. If you’re not, yes it is, unfortunately same can’t be said about the U.S., where my not very large social circle have experienced robbery at gun point at a gas station, street mugging, home break-in with everything stolen, smashed car window, all within the past decade. I was more fortunate but still got my bike stolen. |
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| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Small rich counties with vast majority homogeneous populations? |
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| ▲ | Brian_K_White 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What statistics? These? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/me... https://ncvs.bjs.ojp.gov/year-to-year-comparison/crimeType | | |
| ▲ | jb1991 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | You should look at a comparison of American violent crime to other major western nations. |
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| ▲ | ses1984 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How do the stats look compared to 5, 10, 20, 40 years ago? |
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