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We Can't Outlaw the Mainstream

Suppose hypothetically that approximately all parents are child abusers. And you're a political leader. You can't just arrest the all the child abusers or take all their kids away because who is gonna raise the kids instead? The foster parents or social workers or orphanages are no better – they too are part of the same culture that mistreats children. You can only realistically target the bottom couple percent of bad parents, that way if you get those kids to be raised by even 20th percentile quality parents it's a significant upgrade.

In principle, you think child abuse is unacceptable. Parents must not e.g. hit their children. Physical violence violates the children's right and is abuse. But if 99% of parents hit their children, there isn't much you can do about it besides trying to educate people. You can share better ideas with books, articles, lectures, etc.

So although something is unacceptable in principle, if too many people are doing it wrong, it's hard to take direct action to fix or change it. For lots of practical purposes, you can't have standards for society that 99% of people (or even 30% of people) can't meet. You can't arrest 99% of 30% of the population or sue them all into oblivion or whatever. You can only do that to small outlier groups, not to the mainstream, or you're just creating a civil war.

It's similar with the rioters/protestors today. There are too many. It's too popular. Yes they are crossing lines into initiation of force. In a better world they'd be stopped so that I could safely walk along any public street in the country with a MAGA hat and speak my mind. But arresting or otherwise forcibly controlling so many misbehaving people is unrealistic in this world.

One potential solution is to arrest and punish a small fraction of them as examples. If you have really draconian punishments for a few of them at random, maybe you can scare the rest into stopping. This is kinda like how armies used to hang a few deserters to discourage other people from deserting. There were armies where over 50% of the soldiers would like to go home and stop fighting, but harsh enforcement against a few people was scary enough to keep the rest in line. I don't like this strategy with suing a few people for sharing music and movies online, and I don't like it with the protestors/rioters either. It's harsh and unfair to some unlucky people who get made examples of. It's mean and it alienates the people it intimidates into obedience. It doesn't seek to actually get them on our team/side.

Another potential solution is to only punish the much smaller group of leaders and true believers, not the masses of mostly-ignorant (but not totally innocent) dupes and fools. This seems to me like roughly what should happen. And punish people who cross major lines (that not many people cross) like severely beating someone up.

But if we mostly aren't punishing the rioters/protestors, then what do we do when they are causing trouble? How do we get them to stop? Maybe they'd listen to reason more if we had better explainers and teachers as political and cultural leaders, but we don't. The good guys here aren't all that wise and are contributing to the problem too.

So that's hard. The protests/riots are too mainstream and widespread, they're too big a part of society. And to make things harder, the opposition is wrong and flawed in lots of ways (but the opposition is more civilized and better at not being a puppet of uncivilized causes).

Are there things wrong with police policies? Yes. Does racism exist? Yes. But the protestors don't know what the flaws with police policy are or what changes should be made. And it isn't being explained to them very well either. They don't even know who is in charge of the police. It's the leftists they voted for who are behind lots of the problems. They're yelling at the wrong people. But not many are trying to share key info and talk about e.g. the role of unions in not firing bad cops. And the mainstream media puppet masters are sharing misinformation and they have so much control over communication channels that it's hard to speak to the protestors/rioters and give them better info.


Elliot Temple on June 9, 2020

Messages (4)

Most of the rioters/protestors will stop when circumstances change: when they aren't constantly exposed to the same barrage of manipulation and misinformation.

They'll mostly stop when it's socially unacceptable instead of something they're being encouraged to do.

Most of them, to some reasonable approximation, just do what they're told and don't think much.


curi at 1:39 PM on June 9, 2020 | #16651 | reply | quote

The number of people who somewhat approve of the riots/protests is much higher than the number who attend.

Most of them think they are anti-violence. You can get low poll support for specific questions like should be burn lots of stuff, but that doesn't say how much support the so-called anti-racism anti-cop agenda has.


curi at 1:42 PM on June 9, 2020 | #16652 | reply | quote

Tucker Carlson is one of the better and bigger mainstream voices speaking out against the current attempt to destroy civilization (that is seen as edgy and rebellious ... and supported by most large companies and Democrats):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv6Y3a4BV6E


curi at 7:34 PM on June 9, 2020 | #16653 | reply | quote

re reparations for slavery: they seem to think being born as the child of an oppressor is a good thing. not merely better than the child of a victim, but actually like better than neutral – an advantage. who the fuck wants to be parented by a slave owner?

i'd rather have been parented by jewish victims of the nazis than by nazis.


curi at 7:35 PM on June 9, 2020 | #16654 | reply | quote

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