"Attack From The Rear"—a hypothetical social action movement

[SorryNotSorry]

CW: if this post seems like it belongs in the Hot Box, then by all means plop it in there.

 

KCRW aired yet another segment today about the global obsession with putting people in cages, often for the pettiest shit, some of which I personally don't think should even be crimes. This time they were talking about First Nation women in Canada being locked up for various drug offenses.

 

To digress a bit, it turns out I'm far from being a lone kook when I go into the whole Harm Principle vs. Offense Principle thing. Anyone can look up John Stuart Mill on wiki. I think I've lectured enough on the 2 principles.

 

To get back on track, it pisses me off that my solution to prison overcrowding and the abuse of incarceration is, to most Americans, quite blasphemous. But as long as we keep using the Offense Principle to make and enforce laws, I don't want to hear about the unsolveable dilemma of prison overcrowding. The solution is to make things legal which don't cause injury to anyone. Punching someone in the face without provocation, or raiding someone's bank account, yeah, those things warrant punishment. But petty shit like driving through a red light when no cross traffic is coming, being naked in public, or uttering swear words on the airwaves, etc etc, injure no one.

 

The problem lies in all the people who gripe "there oughta be a law!" and wax moralistic whenever they get a little hot under the collar about some wrong, real or imagined. Attack From The Rear, a group which doesn't actually exist, has members who shout down these killjoys and humiliate them in public, with the ultimate objective of getting the Offense Principle scrapped. Moralistic killjoys would then have the choice of leaving for less-free countries, or staying and feeling persecuted.

[Prufrock, but like, worse]

Agree on everything but the red light thing. Plenty of intersections have trash visibility, so you can't tell if there's traffic coming unless it's already basically in the intersection. Places where the rule would offer meaningful benefit would often be better served with a yield or stop sign rather than a traffic light anyway, and other intersections should remain with a traffic light under the old rules.

 

Then again, you can't expect transportation planners to help communities in any meaningful way (cough TAMPA BAY EXPRESS cough) so I guess loosening the law would have some (highly questionable) benefit until someone more patient and articulate than myself can explain to the toddlers with toy bulldozers what a logistics is.

 

Before anyone asks, staying on topic is against my religion.

[Euna]

I'm an irreparably biased "killjoy," because I work in public safety.  That said... I see a lot of the day-to-day offenses.  Sometimes other crimes reveal the use of drugs, so what starts out as responding to, say, an assault turns into a drugs investigation.  Not saying this always happens, but it's not unusual (speaking for the U.S...I don't know about Canada).

[Pramana]

I agree with the harm principle over the offence principle philosophy. If it is any consolation, my reading of history is that Western jurisdictions are progressively moving in that direction.

[Skycaptain]

"Attack from the Rear", well I'll be b***ered 

 

Seriously though, criminal justice is a lot less punitive than it used to be. No more being hung or parked off to the other side of the world for relatively trivial property theft. 

Thanks to the "too much spare time on our hands, and we don't care if other people have to pay for this" brigade, prisoners often have better living standards than the working class 

[AshenPhoenix]

The thing about "common sense" rulings V. blatant and/or clear ruling in terms of criminal laws is that they can be easily abused by both sides. It's kinda like a lot of economic and political systems. Yep, you can say it and think about it and it sounds great on paper, but I doubt it will survive more than a few years, possibly even months, of contact with the general public and interaction with it's own system. 

 

At the most optimistic I think the outcome of a system like this will be many months of utter chaos where it's a bit of free reign, and then eventually enough court cases are brought in for precedent after so many people take to court "does X" harm this person?", "did I harm X by Y", etc. etc. And then, after many months and metric craptons of precedents, you end up basically back where you were, but with now precedents to be cited, instead of previously in place laws.

 

At worst, it ends up potentially very bad, as many people say to themselves, "I'm sure this won't hurt anyone." to justify something they do that ends up hurting many, many people. A good analogy for it IMO is something like littering. Sure, people for the most part know it's bad, and don't actively go "I want to throw AS MUCH shit as possible on the ground!" There are a few people who weirdly enough do, but most don't. But most people also have points in their life where they go "ehhhh... Who's it really hurting right now?" and toss something. In the scale of things, those little bits add up, and yeah, it hurt something. But people justify things and do it anyway.

 

These are the kinda laws I wouldn't mind seeing for "slap on the wrist" offences and delegated only on a town by town basis, but anything more and it... Kinda falls apart IMO. Course, this is all the practical level, if this is just a thought experiment idea I have a totally other set of arguments not revolving around that.

 

Also, pretty cool with being labelled a killjoy if it means all of the above doesn't happen. Uncool about the fact that that's what it's being called. But hey, si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more

[Sally]

There are very few laws that are not worth being laws that are prosecuted .   The italic/underline phrase means that  some useless laws are still on the books but no one gets charged with them.   Thus, you don't need to use your energy to get upset about them.    

 

But if you enjoy getting upset about that sort of thing, you're free to do so.