VoiceOfRa comments on Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: elharo 03 October 2015 01:23PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (265)
Tags: quotes

Comments (265)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ike 28 October 2015 11:25:22AM -1 points [-]

It's not clear they would disagree with that. But if we think prisons are suboptimal, we're more likely to support measures that reduce them. I think this is what is meant by

Abolition makes sense, though, only if we see prisons as a site of injustice in and of themselves.

and

In abolishing prison, we force ourselves to answer the difficult question: How do we provide safety and security for all people?

and

An abolitionist framework makes us consider not only reducing mandatory minimums but eliminating them altogether. An abolitionist framework would call for us to decriminalize possession and sale of drugs. Abolition would end the death penalty and life sentences, and push the maximum number of years that can be served for any offense down to ten years, at most.

With these reforms in place, we as a society would have a huge incentive to rehabilitate those in prison, and we would ensure the incarcerated are capable of socialization when they are released. And without being able to depend on prison as a site of retribution, we would have to find new ways to address things like gender-based violence, sexual assault, and domestic violence. And we could then start making the kinds of investments in alleviating poverty that Gottschalk calls for.

But we can’t do that so long as prison exists as a fail-safe.

In other words, abolishing or severely reducing prisons would force us to come up with other ways to ensure safety, and the author can't imagine one worse than prisons.

For what it's worth, the same author wrote https://www.thenation.com/article/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/.,

Comment author: VoiceOfRa 28 October 2015 01:54:46PM *  2 points [-]

But if we think prisons are suboptimal, we're more likely to support measures that reduce them.

Suboptimal relative to what. I would prefer replacing them with mote corporal and capital punishment, but somehow I doubt that's what you want. Judging by what you latter wrote, you seem to prefer "replacements" that not only won't help with the problem prisons are designed to solve but create their own problems.

In abolishing prison, we force ourselves to answer the difficult question: How do we provide safety and security for all people?

Yes, it's amazing how any question can be made "difficult" by refusing the answer for no good reason.

In other words, abolishing or severely reducing prisons would force us to come up with other ways to ensure safety, and the author can't imagine one worse than prisons.

See my comment above on corporal punishment. If you abolish not just prisons but all punishment for crimes, then people start taking the law into their own hands. If the law won't punish someone for committing crimes against me, it won't punish me for retaliating.

For what it's worth, the same author wrote https://www.thenation.com/article/abolish-police-instead-lets-have-full-social-economic-and-political-equality/.,

If the title of the article is at all indicative of its contents, the author is an even bigger moron then I thought. Hint: the communists tried instituting full economic equality, didn't turn out so well.

Edit: reading the article it is about as stupid as I expected. For example, the author says:

 However, more frightening than [the shooting itself] is the fact that nearly every night since the shooting there has either been a police car, parked across the street with its lights flashing, or two cops posted outside my building, right at the steps, standing guard.

He never gives a rational reason why this is more frightening, the closest he comes is listing some well publicized incidents of cops shooting blacks (many of which were justified by the actions of the black in question). However, notice that the original shooting occurred in his apartment complex, whereas the police shooting were reported by the media from all over the country. This suggests that the former are much more common and the author is false alieving otherwise due to a media distortion filter.

I was going to go over the rest of the article this way, but now that I think about it, a good exercise for you to improve your rationality would be to go over the rest of this article looking for the remaining fallacies, biases, and idiocies. (It's not a particularly hard exercise.)

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit