My lord, what a mistake. What a terribly misconceived idea. Horribly timed, inspired by short-term frustration and a genuine, frustrated desire to understand, offered with no consideration of the logistics…. A major undertaking launched on a pure whim, with money attached, meaning that I had a duty to take it seriously and really evaluate the various entries. Here’s some issues that immediately became clear with the (paid!) challenge I issued:
The murder rate would explode. So long as a person is willing to do community service for the rest of their life - not much of a punishment - they can take vengeance on anyone. Bosses and ex-wives look out.
What about blowing up a plane full of kids because you don’t their religion? You have pick up garbage for an hour every weekday for the rest of your life?
This choice is thought provoking but can't be intended as a serious option to move forward, right? Because this just creates gangland? Commit crime, bail on community service, commit more crimes and band together with other outlaws for group protection.
Which is maybe the point? The best suggested option is brutally flawed?
Let’s set aside the community service for a moment, as that is unlikely to be much of a deterrent or much of a hassle for the offender, nor much consolation for the victims or their families.
Vigilante justice is what human society had for thousands of years. The record shows that much higher levels of violence are the result of that approach.
So, this does not seem like a very good answer to me, but I can believe it was the best. There is no real solution to this challenge.
So once you're outlawed, you're no longer protected by *any* of the law, or just the laws against violence?
Seems like people are jumping to the assumption that outlaws would mostly get murdered -- but why murder them when you can capture them, enslave them, and extract the value of their labor? Now your Outlaw class is actually a slave class. I'm sure that'll turn out fine.
Chauvin was a good example for the challenge because many “defund police” types wanted him to be convicted. But other killers better illustrate the problem with this.
As far as we know, George Floyd was Chauvin’s only victim. I think it’s possible that in this hypothetical scenario, Chauvin would do his community service until someone murdered him.
But what about a compulsive serial killer like Jesse Matthew (the “UVA killer”) who raped and murdered several young women before he got caught? If he were sentenced to community service, it’s likely he would take the opportunity to kill again. Someone in the community would probably shoot him to prevent this, but in that case it’s essentially the death penalty with extra steps.
So as long as I'm confident I can defend myself from retribution I can do whatever I want? Yeah I guess if I'm ostracized from society I can't get a job, but that shouldn't be a problem with all the stealing I'm going to be doing. Plus I bet I can find a few other outlaw friends for my gang, and we should be able to handle all the disorganized vigilante parties of random family members and small business owners pretty handily.
This implies such a weird, soft, naïve perspective on human nature.
Your description of all the difficulties you ran into reminds me of whenever I've started new kinds of projects and realized I missed a lot of small simple things that would have made it much easier.
How does this solution avoid a cycle of revenge? Couldn't one of Floyd's relatives easily kill Chauvin while he's serving his sentence, knowing he will serve only a similar term of community service, then Chauvin's brother (or son or uncle) kills that guy, and so on and so on...? Isn't that basically how gang beefs or feuds work? (Hatfields/McCoys) If the perpetrators remain in the community, doesn't that run the risk of endless cycles of retribution? (happens in prisons, too, but less so)
This is hilarious. You want to pay a bunch of lawyers $300 bucks an hour to sit around watching guys pick up trash and planting trees.
And the whole premise is based on the assumption and implicit threat that the "justice" that communities would mete out to outlaws would be so violent and horrific that it would serve as a sufficient deterrent for them not to violate their community service sentence. Which is rather funny if the whole defund philosophy is based on an intuition that the "community" would apply more humane and non-violent forms of justice than the evil police and prison system does.
But if community justice wasn't a terrifying alternative, no one would serve their sentence and you'd just get a bunch of tough guys choosing to be outlaws because that would be more fun and profitable than being "inlaws". So now you've got outlaw gangs terrorizing the public.
Anyway, I'm curious. What percentage of the entries indicated that the contestant:
A. Suffers the delusion that there is no such thing as a person who is just naturally aggressive and/or anti-social and simply enjoys mayhem and violence for the inherent pleasure it brings them, or at the very least doesn't mind those things if it profits them in some other manner?
versus
B. Secretly hopes to bring back mob and vigilante justice because they thirst to watch people tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, executed etc. in the public square, and would love the chance to legally mete out these punishments?
Seems that decarceral/defund proponents must fall into one of those two camps. With the added irony that people in Camp A seemingly don't believe that people in Camp B even exist.
One side-effect of incarceration that we don’t think about much is that it protects the offender from retaliation (except in extreme cases, eg mob hits).
Additionally, it provides housing, food, medical care, and other services to individuals who might otherwise struggle to care for themselves.
So as much as people might want to treat it as an unmitigated evil, it does serve useful functions that would be difficult to replicate.
What's to stop Chauvin from rounding up a group of like minded individuals and settling in a remote and heavily armed village in the backwoods of Idaho or Washington?
Winner: The Derek Chauvin Defund Challenge
My impatience with the state of this comments section cannot be overstated.
... everybody understands that I am very explicitly not a defund/decarcerate kind of guy, right?
The murder rate would explode. So long as a person is willing to do community service for the rest of their life - not much of a punishment - they can take vengeance on anyone. Bosses and ex-wives look out.
What about blowing up a plane full of kids because you don’t their religion? You have pick up garbage for an hour every weekday for the rest of your life?
Freddie- any chance we can see the top-10?
This choice is thought provoking but can't be intended as a serious option to move forward, right? Because this just creates gangland? Commit crime, bail on community service, commit more crimes and band together with other outlaws for group protection.
Which is maybe the point? The best suggested option is brutally flawed?
Let's just hope no one looks like Chauvin and could be mistaken for him during some vigilante outlaw punishment.
So, community service and vigilante justice?
Let’s set aside the community service for a moment, as that is unlikely to be much of a deterrent or much of a hassle for the offender, nor much consolation for the victims or their families.
Vigilante justice is what human society had for thousands of years. The record shows that much higher levels of violence are the result of that approach.
So, this does not seem like a very good answer to me, but I can believe it was the best. There is no real solution to this challenge.
So once you're outlawed, you're no longer protected by *any* of the law, or just the laws against violence?
Seems like people are jumping to the assumption that outlaws would mostly get murdered -- but why murder them when you can capture them, enslave them, and extract the value of their labor? Now your Outlaw class is actually a slave class. I'm sure that'll turn out fine.
(Sees article is up. Before reading it, checks Venmo.)
Rats
Chauvin was a good example for the challenge because many “defund police” types wanted him to be convicted. But other killers better illustrate the problem with this.
As far as we know, George Floyd was Chauvin’s only victim. I think it’s possible that in this hypothetical scenario, Chauvin would do his community service until someone murdered him.
But what about a compulsive serial killer like Jesse Matthew (the “UVA killer”) who raped and murdered several young women before he got caught? If he were sentenced to community service, it’s likely he would take the opportunity to kill again. Someone in the community would probably shoot him to prevent this, but in that case it’s essentially the death penalty with extra steps.
So as long as I'm confident I can defend myself from retribution I can do whatever I want? Yeah I guess if I'm ostracized from society I can't get a job, but that shouldn't be a problem with all the stealing I'm going to be doing. Plus I bet I can find a few other outlaw friends for my gang, and we should be able to handle all the disorganized vigilante parties of random family members and small business owners pretty handily.
This implies such a weird, soft, naïve perspective on human nature.
Your description of all the difficulties you ran into reminds me of whenever I've started new kinds of projects and realized I missed a lot of small simple things that would have made it much easier.
How does this solution avoid a cycle of revenge? Couldn't one of Floyd's relatives easily kill Chauvin while he's serving his sentence, knowing he will serve only a similar term of community service, then Chauvin's brother (or son or uncle) kills that guy, and so on and so on...? Isn't that basically how gang beefs or feuds work? (Hatfields/McCoys) If the perpetrators remain in the community, doesn't that run the risk of endless cycles of retribution? (happens in prisons, too, but less so)
This is hilarious. You want to pay a bunch of lawyers $300 bucks an hour to sit around watching guys pick up trash and planting trees.
And the whole premise is based on the assumption and implicit threat that the "justice" that communities would mete out to outlaws would be so violent and horrific that it would serve as a sufficient deterrent for them not to violate their community service sentence. Which is rather funny if the whole defund philosophy is based on an intuition that the "community" would apply more humane and non-violent forms of justice than the evil police and prison system does.
But if community justice wasn't a terrifying alternative, no one would serve their sentence and you'd just get a bunch of tough guys choosing to be outlaws because that would be more fun and profitable than being "inlaws". So now you've got outlaw gangs terrorizing the public.
Anyway, I'm curious. What percentage of the entries indicated that the contestant:
A. Suffers the delusion that there is no such thing as a person who is just naturally aggressive and/or anti-social and simply enjoys mayhem and violence for the inherent pleasure it brings them, or at the very least doesn't mind those things if it profits them in some other manner?
versus
B. Secretly hopes to bring back mob and vigilante justice because they thirst to watch people tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, executed etc. in the public square, and would love the chance to legally mete out these punishments?
Seems that decarceral/defund proponents must fall into one of those two camps. With the added irony that people in Camp A seemingly don't believe that people in Camp B even exist.
One side-effect of incarceration that we don’t think about much is that it protects the offender from retaliation (except in extreme cases, eg mob hits).
Additionally, it provides housing, food, medical care, and other services to individuals who might otherwise struggle to care for themselves.
So as much as people might want to treat it as an unmitigated evil, it does serve useful functions that would be difficult to replicate.
What's to stop Chauvin from rounding up a group of like minded individuals and settling in a remote and heavily armed village in the backwoods of Idaho or Washington?
Getting outlaw status sounds really bad. Imagine anyone being able to brutally assault, rape, or even kill you without fear of community service