Which is more important?

[osan]

Well?

[idiom]

Third option, Its okay if the government executes the wrong people, as long as the government is strong and stable.

- Chinese attitude.

[TheTexan]

I voted

Guilty should be punished. If "innocent" people get convicted its probably because they were of low moral character to begin with, e.g. drug users or anarchists

[Todd]

I voted

Guilty should be punished. If "innocent" people get convicted its probably because they were of low moral character to begin with, e.g. drug users or anarchists

Yep...and we all know that they probably had done something previously that went unpunished. You know...if someone get's caught doing one thing then there's probably 10 other things they didn't get caught doing.

[AuH20]

In what context? In the general universe, the guilty needs to burn slowly, considering how much brazen evil is at work.

[timosman]

It's already codified in our law as Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.

[Swordsmyth]

There must be a balance but that balance should lean towards the protection of the innocent.

[CaptUSA]

There must be a balance but that balance should lean towards the protection of the innocent.

"balance"

[Swordsmyth]

"balance"

That is the balance.

He didn't say it is better for 1,000,000 guilty men to go free.

[CaptUSA]

That is the balance.

He didn't say it is better for 1,000,000 guilty men to go free.

"Sorry, SS... I know you didn't kill that girl, but we've already let 99 guilty men escape. So, we have to kill you. Thank you for your understanding."

[Swordsmyth]

"Sorry, SS... I know you didn't kill that girl, but we've already let 99 guilty men escape. So, we have to kill you. Thank you for your understanding."

Since men are not omniscient then it is possible under any set of legal standards that a few innocent men will be mistakenly punished.

That doesn't mean that we should punish nobody for anything ever.

[timosman]

"Sorry, SS... I know you didn't kill that girl, but we've already let 99 guilty men escape. So, we have to kill you. Thank you for your understanding."

Progressive strategy:

1. Set up non-achievable goals. (e.g eliminate crime)
2. Remain forever committed to achieving them.
3. Blow through the ever increasing budgets.
4. Profit?

[osan]

That is the balance.

He didn't say it is better for 1,000,000 guilty men to go free.

It would appear you have missed the point, which would be precisely the same even had he said "one million" or "ten googolplexes". If you are not familiar with "googol", see wikipedia for the skinny.

[Swordsmyth]

It would appear you have missed the point, which would be precisely the same even had he said "one million" or "ten googolplexes". If you are not familiar with "googol", see wikipedia for the skinny.

I don't understand, tell me how you are going to ensure that not a single innocent man is ever punished accidentally without being omniscient.

[osan]

There must be a balance but that balance should lean towards the protection of the innocent.

"Balance"? What does that mean?

Is it OK to send a single innocent man to a cell or the gallows for the sake of "getting" the bad guys?

Where is that line to be drawn? How many innocents, proportionally speaking, constitute "acceptable losses" for the sake of "balance"?

That's some right dangerous speak you've written there. Please elaborate, because as things stand I see nothing good coming of this notion of "balance".

[Swordsmyth]

"Balance"? What does that mean?

Is it OK to send a single innocent man to a cell or the gallows for the sake of "getting" the bad guys?

Where is that line to be drawn? How many innocents, proportionally speaking, constitute "acceptable losses" for the sake of "balance"?

That's some right dangerous speak you've written there. Please elaborate, because as things stand I see nothing good coming of this notion of "balance".

Man is not capable of perfection, we must do our absolute best to ensure that the innocent are protected without abandoning any attempt to punish the guilty.

The old saying is that we must let 100 guilty men go free that not 1 innocent man be punished NOT that we must let 1,000,000 guilty men go free let alone ALL guilty men go free.

[osan]

Man is not capable of perfection, we must do our absolute best to ensure that the innocent are protected without abandoning any attempt to punish the guilty.

Who says?

Seriously? Who says that this is so? Upon what objectively provable basis do you make the assertion?

The old saying is that we must let 100 guilty men go free that not 1 innocent man be punished NOT that we must let 1,000,000 guilty men go free let alone ALL guilty men go free.

The precise number is irrelevant to the underlying point that we NOT punish the innocent.

[Swordsmyth]

Who says?

Seriously? Who says that this is so? Upon what objectively provable basis do you make the assertion?

Life says, history says, logic says, not only can circumstances conspire to make an innocent man appear guilty but evil men can do so deliberately.

Prove me wrong, explain how perfection can be achieved without omniscience.

[timosman]

Great job so far guys! Some of you sound like members of the "lesser intellect" group however this should not stop us from going to the next exercise where we will be discussing the minimum IQ required to vote.

[timosman]

In the interest of self-preservation, in a society where majority are not criminals, the obvious choice is not punishing the innocent as this is the most likely encounter with the law most of the members of such society will have. In a criminal society, on the other hand, you would definitely want guilty to be punished. I would like to believe our society is of the first kind.

[osan]

In the interest of self-preservation, in a society where majority are not criminals, the obvious choice is not punishing the innocent as this is the most likely encounter with the law most of the members of such society will have. In a criminal society, on the other hand, you would definitely want guilty to be punished. I would like to believe our society is of the first kind.

We ARE of the first type. Were it otherwise, the "state" would be unable to contain us. We are too large and far too well armed.

Our problem is that we are corrupted with some very ill-considered assumptions about life and human relations. They are appealing because they speak to our weaknesses, including our vanity.

I maintain that if people were freed with no recourse to a corrupt and wildly evil/misguided "state", they would shape up in short order. Those who didn't would be consumed, most likely unto death and thereby cleansing what is now a deeply polluted gene pool. The weak, of course, will hate such a turn of events, but even they will have the opportunity to become strong enough, given today's technologies. Those choosing otherwise become fair game for Darwin. So be it.

I would also point out that those who take the "weak" without just cause would eventually run out of luck by picking the wrong target and being themselves reduced to ash at the hands of strong and righteous freemen. The balance would be established in accord with the mean nature of the population. At that point it is all a matter of choice.

We choose, even when we don't.

[ThePaleoLibertarian]

These are not in conflict, but necessary for one another to really exist. If you have a society that cares nothing for the innocence of the accused, you're going to have a lot of guilty people going free while the wrong people rot in prison. You need to protect the innocent to go after the guilty. You also need to go after the guilty to protect the innocent. Allowing criminal degenerates roam free is hardly going to help the people whose communities they defile.

[osan]

These are not in conflict, but necessary for one another to really exist. If you have a society that cares nothing for the innocence of the accused, you're going to have a lot of guilty people going free while the wrong people rot in prison. You need to protect the innocent to go after the guilty. You also need to go after the guilty to protect the innocent. Allowing criminal degenerates roam free is hardly going to help the people whose communities they defile.

Once again I see the false dichotomy trap - if you're not falsely imprisoning innocents for the sake of making sure you get the guilty, then criminals will roam freely on the streets and there will be chaos.

I do not believe this would be the case in a world that had readjusted itself to proper responsibilities for one's own wellbeing. In such a world, those committing crimes are more likely to get their just deserts at the hands of "civilians" who choose to defend themselves against predation and other violations.

Bear this in mind: the vast majority of crimes are committed by those who count on the ready cooperation of their victims. This directly leads one to correctly infer that most of these rubes are not of a stomach for a real fight. The net is rife with video examples of the "oh $#@!" moments of low-rent criminals when their chosen targets give even mild fight. Being so threatened themselves, the crooks flee. That is the vast and overwhelming proportion of such events and the people who perpetrate the crimes in question. If the good people cease their corrupted reliance on cops and other groups to bail them out when the poo hits the fan and start learning how to care for themselves, the rates of crime would plummet from those petty, up to and including murder. What would be left are those who would be criminals in any event because they are the hardcores who are willing to assume the risks, perhaps due to brain lesions or whatever other hardware or software stupidity that managed to take root.

If we are to be serious about freedom, and I find that most whom I encounter are not, then the sanctity of innocence must stand as a highest virtue for all men. The very thought of imprisoning a man who has committed no crime should fill one with the same revulsion as does the thought of a woman aborting her pregnancy in the eighth month or a child being brutally raped.

I say tis better that every criminal escape the courts than so much as one innocent be caged without just cause. The criminal will get his eventually - that is a statistical certainty. The more crimes you commit, the greater the likelihood your wick is going to get snuffed.

Now, as for the "Ooooo, but the criminals will get away..." nonsense, consider all the other crimes that some have committed prior to having been caught. The mindset in question, if taken to its reductio ad absurdum, would justify "pre-crime". After all, how unjust that criminals ever get away with so much as even a single crime! Let us take Ted Bundy as a prime example. Estimates of the number of women he murdered run as high as 300++, the believable number hovering around 100. Imagine that, one hundred lives taken without authority, yet he was punished for only a handful. Is that not unjust? How's about we go the Minority Report route? THAT'S THE TICKET!!!

Not.

The world is often not a just place. Think "entropy"; the very best one can do in life is to break even where justice is concerned, not to mention that the best case is probably never realized at any time. We all get screwed in one way and degree or another at some point in our lives. Do we go on rampaging campaigns about it? Well, sometimes, but mostly we eat the losses and move on.

It is no different in the cases of real crime, and I reiterate my conviction that it is better that ever criminal escape the justice of the "state" than a single innocent man be held to pay for that which he has not committed. There are no "buts" or other exceptions to this.

Now consider this: a man becomes a pillar of his community with generosity that defies credulity. He is a billionaire who has showered his community with very good paying jobs, built housing for the poor, developed animal rescue services, shelters for battered women, built three hospitals each operating as a non-profit, rendering the finest medical care on the planet at affordable cost such that nobody needs health "insurance". The list of his accomplishments and contributions is so long as to make the reader weary-bored. Then one day, in a fit of uncharacteristic anger, he murders his wife and confesses openly. What do we do? Is he to be held accountable? The answer to that must perforce be "yes", lest the basis for all other prosecutions and the holding of men to a standard of behavior be otherwise reduced to the status of a farce to which no man is then to be credibly held.

The point here is that no matter how much good one does, it cuts little muster when one does even a single act of evil.

Now apply this to "the state". If we assume the "state" otherwise does nothing but good, but has in a single case punished a man for a crime he did not commit, ought "the state", or more specifically, the individuals who perpetrated this injustice against one of their fellow human beings, not themselves be held to an equal standard as that to which they so enthusiastically held their victim? Are they somehow immune from the consequences of the sorts of act for which they themselves place others into concrete cages, sometimes for decades, or for which they even take lives?

Is "justice" so much more valuable than freedom and respect for the rights of all men that we would dash the latter two on the rocks of our desire for the former? Are not those very rights and the freedom whence they spring the very reason for our concept of justice, thereby and perforce reducing justice as fully subordinate thereto? HERRO?

We have raised "justice" as supreme, having suborned liberty and our rights to that which was created to serve them, replete with our weak-tea supplementations of "as we make the best efforts not to bring the innocent to harms". Those supplementations indicate that at the bottom of it all, we know that what we do in those cases is inexcusably evil. But we want what we want and will not allow righteousness to get in our way. NO SIR! By damn it, we WILL have justice! Rather, we will have the LIE and illusion of justice, for how can we be just on the balance when we who claim to be the arbiters of justice perpetrate such injustices against the innocent, however unintentionally?

I defy anyone here or anywhere else to explain how this is acceptable. Lets see the proof of it. Demonstrate how this is an acceptable policy generating acceptable outcomes. I say it is pure tyranny; muck; shyte; falderal; evil.

Methinks some folks need to think on this a bit more carefully than apparently they have to date.

Just my plugged wooden nickel's worth.

[r3volution 3.0]

I'm saying that somewhere between punishing everyone who might be guilty without caring to protect the innocent and punishing nobody for fear of ever accidentally punishing 1 innocent man out of 1,000,000 there is a correct balance point.

Convicting innocent people involves aggression.

Failing to convict guilty people causes aggression (by less effectively deterring criminals).

The balance is then the point at which the total incidence of aggression (from wrongful convictions or crimes not deterred) is minimized.

Exactly what kind of judicial system meets those criteria is a practical question.

You'd want to research existing systems and compare the data.

[osan]

Convicting innocent people involves aggression.

Failing to convict guilty people causes aggression (by less effectively deterring criminals).

The balance is then the point at which the total incidence of aggression (from wrongful convictions or crimes not deterred) is minimized.

Exactly what kind of judicial system meets those criteria is a practical question.

You'd want to research existing systems and compare the data.

So you are of the school of thought that feels there is some number of false convictions that is acceptable... the greater good and all that nonsense.

Sad.

[A Son of Liberty]

Failing to convict guilty people causes aggression (by less effectively deterring criminals).

Bizarre notion of 'cause'...

[r3volution 3.0]

Bizarre notion of 'cause'...

How so?

[ThePaleoLibertarian]

Once again I see the false dichotomy trap - if you're not falsely imprisoning innocents for the sake of making sure you get the guilty, then criminals will roam freely on the streets and there will be chaos.

No, I said that you need to have a society that cares about innocence in order to properly police and punish the guilty

I do not believe this would be the case in a world that had readjusted itself to proper responsibilities for one's own wellbeing. In such a world, those committing crimes are more likely to get their just deserts at the hands of "civilians" who choose to defend themselves against predation and other violations.

Bear this in mind: the vast majority of crimes are committed by those who count on the ready cooperation of their victims. This directly leads one to correctly infer that most of these rubes are not of a stomach for a real fight. The net is rife with video examples of the "oh $#@!" moments of low-rent criminals when their chosen targets give even mild fight. Being so threatened themselves, the crooks flee. That is the vast and overwhelming proportion of such events and the people who perpetrate the crimes in question. If the good people cease their corrupted reliance on cops and other groups to bail them out when the poo hits the fan and start learning how to care for themselves, the rates of crime would plummet from those petty, up to and including murder. What would be left are those who would be criminals in any event because they are the hardcores who are willing to assume the risks, perhaps due to brain lesions or whatever other hardware or software stupidity that managed to take root.

This is exceptionally short-sighted. Of course, individuals and communities should be allowed to deal with criminals when they so choose, but that can't be the totality of the criminal justice system. History is replete with riots, pogroms, lynchings, and other mob violence when the masses decide to right some perceived wrong. You can't put the task of punishing the guilty in the hands of random people who can be whipped into a frenzy. We've seen where that leads.

Giving the ability to punish crime to a mob wouldn't keep people from being falsely punished. On the contrary, a mob has no standard of evidence, asks for no warrants and usually has little to no concern for guilt. Your "cure" worsens the disease.

If we are to be serious about freedom, and I find that most that I encounter are not, then the sanctity of innocence must stand as a highest virtue for all men. The very thought of imprisoning a man who has committed no crime should fill one with the same revulsion as does the thought of a woman aborting her pregnancy in the eighth month or a child being brutally raped.

I say tis better that every criminal escape the courts than so much as one innocent be caged without just cause. The criminal will get his eventually - that is a statistical certainty. The more crimes you commit, the greater the likelihood your wick is going to get snuffed.

You seem to have a Rousseauian conception of freedom, where man is born free, but has it stripped from him by society everywhere he goes. I have the opposite conception. Liberty is a concept that evolved slowly in a specific context over millennia. It needs to be engineered and applied carefully. It has many prerequisites. One of those prerequisites is stability. A free society needs to pass the Civilization test, name, if you can walk around without being accosted by violent thugs. Order and liberty -- properly understood -- are sister virtues, not enemies.

Now, as for the "Ooooo, but the criminals will get away..." nonsense, consider all the other crimes that some have committed prior to having been caught. The mindset in question, if taken to its reductio ad absurdum, would justify "pre-crime". After all, how unjust that criminals ever get away with so much as even a single crime! Let us take Ted Bundy as a prime example. Estimates of the number of women he murdered run as high as 300++, the believable number hovering around 100. Imagine that, one hundred lives taken without authority, yet he was punished for only a handful. Is that not unjust? How's about we go the Minority Report route? THAT'S THE TICKET!!!

Not.

It was just because that what could be proven in court and he was already given the death penalty.

The world is often not a just place. Think "entropy"; the very best one can do in life is to break even where justice is concerned, not to mention that the best case is probably never realized at any time. We all get screwed in one way and degree or another at some point in our lives. Do we go on rampaging campaigns about it? Well, sometimes, but mostly we eat the losses and move on.

I think we can do better than 50-50, but I mostly agree with this. It's all a tradeoff. You seem to be arguing against any sort of tradeoff, though.

It is no different in the cases of real crime, and I reiterate my conviction that it is better that ever criminal escape the justice of the "state" than a single innocent man be held to pay for that which he has not committed. There are no "buts" or other exceptions to this.

This is a standard that quickly lapses into absurdity. Let's say there was a functional, safe, relatively free civilization that was threatened by roving bands of criminals that the populace couldn't handle. Would it be better to watch this civilization descend into barbarism and chaos than to go after these criminals in a way that might punish an innocent person? You would let a society perish over this ideal?

[osan]

No, I said that you need to have a society that cares about innocence in order to properly police and punish the guilty

And you also wrote:

The balance is then the point at which the total incidence of aggression (from wrongful convictions or crimes not deterred) is minimized.

The statement is clear. You believe it is acceptable to falsely imprison some people for the sake of getting the guilty. You subscribe to the typical weak-tea, feel-good supplementation "so long as false convictions are minimized", as if that makes things acceptable. I bet those who today rot in prison cells on false convictions, however few they may be, do not share your view. I'd love to see you face those people at less than arm's length and tell them to their faces how it's sad, but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. You might be lucky to walk away with all your teeth.

Either what you wrote was an intentional lie, or you need to work on your sentence structure for semantics because the statement is quite clear in its meaning. I will assume you did not intend to lie.



Then I wroted:

I do not believe this would be the case in a world that had readjusted itself to proper responsibilities for one's own wellbeing. In such a world, those committing crimes are more likely to get their just deserts at the hands of "civilians" who choose to defend themselves against predation and other violations.

Bear this in mind: the vast majority of crimes are committed by those who count on the ready cooperation of their victims. This directly leads one to correctly infer that most of these rubes are not of a stomach for a real fight. The net is rife with video examples of the "oh $#@!" moments of low-rent criminals when their chosen targets give even mild fight. Being so threatened themselves, the crooks flee. That is the vast and overwhelming proportion of such events and the people who perpetrate the crimes in question. If the good people cease their corrupted reliance on cops and other groups to bail them out when the poo hits the fan and start learning how to care for themselves, the rates of crime would plummet from those petty, up to and including murder. What would be left are those who would be criminals in any event because they are the hardcores who are willing to assume the risks, perhaps due to brain lesions or whatever other hardware or software stupidity that managed to take root.

To which you responded:

This is exceptionally short-sighted. Of course, individuals and communities should be allowed to deal with criminals when they so choose, but that can't be the totality of the criminal justice system. History is replete with riots, pogroms, lynchings, and other mob violence when the masses decide to right some perceived wrong. You can't put the task of punishing the guilty in the hands of random people who can be whipped into a frenzy. We've seen where that leads.

Giving the ability to punish crime to a mob wouldn't keep people from being falsely punished. On the contrary, a mob has no standard of evidence, asks for no warrants and usually has little to no concern for guilt. Your "cure" worsens the disease.

CAN'T be? Says who, exactly? In what unquestionable tome is it so written?

You want something so badly, you are willing to sacrifice innocents for the sake of having it.

FAIL^FAIL^FAIL - the dreaded FAIL-plex-plex... beyond all ultimate FAIL.

It is reasonable to infer from what you have written thus far that you are a pragmatist, willing to turn his back on valid base principles for the sake of what you feel is the "greater good". It is precisely in that place where all the vast evils of the world have sprung. Your view on this leads inevitably to death, destruction, impoverishment, disease, and endless misery, all the while failing to see it because your base assumptions could not possibly be wrong. The world has operated on your assumptions for an age and then some. Consider the shape it's in. We have courts and they have meted out at least as much injustice as justice. Your faith in them is dangerously naive and very poorly considered.

How about all those poor bastards who have gotten twenty and thirty year sentences for possession of a single joint? There's your price. And don't attempt to blame the legislators because at the end of the day it is the courts who ultimately enforce legislation. But who cares eh? Just so long as we get a handful of real bad guys.

Sweet Jesus, man - broaden your vision a bit and try to see the larger picture.

Then you further assume that justice is perforce handed to a "mob". More FAIL. It may happen in some cases... or not. There is nothing to suggest it would become systemic - not with a properly educated populace. Recall what either Franklin of Jefferson said about freedom and stupidity and bad attitudes being fundamentally incompatible. A nation in love with proper freedom doesn't devolve into mobs and when a mob forms and performs poorly, they are taken care of by the greater body of the people.

Once again, you want something for nothing - you think you can have freedom and order with a population if immoral/amoral dumbasses with shyte attitudes. FAIL. A free people must be a moral people, willing to bear the fatigues of maintaining their liberties for not only themselves, but their fellows as well. Without critical mass, liberty dies, whether slowly or precipitously. That bit matters no whit.

Then I scribbled:

If we are to be serious about freedom, and I find that most that I encounter are not, then the sanctity of innocence must stand as a highest virtue for all men. The very thought of imprisoning a man who has committed no crime should fill one with the same revulsion as does the thought of a woman aborting her pregnancy in the eighth month or a child being brutally raped.

I say tis better that every criminal escape the courts than so much as one innocent be caged without just cause. The criminal will get his eventually - that is a statistical certainty. The more crimes you commit, the greater the likelihood your wick is going to get snuffed.

To which you reacted:

You seem to have a Rousseauian conception of freedom, where man is born free, but has it stripped from him by society everywhere he goes. I have the opposite conception. Liberty is a concept that evolved slowly in a specific context over millennia. It needs to be engineered and applied carefully. It has many prerequisites. One of those prerequisites is stability. A free society needs to pass the Civilization test, name, if you can walk around without being accosted by violent thugs. Order and liberty -- properly understood -- are sister virtues, not enemies.

Not that up on Rousseau.

We ARE born as free beings. Demonstrate that we are not. The case is prima facie. Otherwise, your assertion is that one is born as chattel to another. Which other? By what authority? What valid moral standard justifies one man lording over another? Please demonstrate these.

Liberty did NOT "evolve". $#@!'s sake man, get a grip on yourself. Men lived for many millennia in tribal units prior to some men becoming "civilized". If we assume that the walled city of Sumer was indeed our first jaunt into civilization, then prior to that men lived in small filial units, what we commonly call "tribes". Nineteenth century scholars studied the remaining tribal people very extensively and documented their studies well. Nearly all were anarchic. There were warlike tribes that were anarchic. There were a very few that were warlike tyrannies with a king who ruled by typical violence. All this is very much to be expected as part of the Gaussian for human characteristics. The big, fat middle of the curve was composed of comparatively peaceable anarchies where the social structure most often consisted of a chief (NOT a ruler, but a trusted leader), a shaman, and the rest of the commonly found distribution of hunters, gatherers, possibly warriors, housekeepers, and so forth. The chief remained as such only so long as the tribe accepted him as such. Anyone was free not to do as a chief recommended. Any chief commanding another usually lost his status forthwith. "Justice" was often settled between individuals, and sometimes by community action. Punishment was often exile from the group. There's more but this is the agoristic gist of things. The books are available to anyone for reading at university libraries. I'm sure some of it is available for free online as well.

And once again you fall for the trap of the false dichotomy - if you don't have a "state" enforcing order, there will BE no order, but only chaos. Much-0 FAIL-0.

Necessity is the mother of correction. People, generally, behave as idiots these days. Why? Because the diseased environment not only allows it, but encourages. Remove the disease and return people to their proper state and they would either wise up quickly, or be consumed in the flames of the initial trouble of the period of adjustment. I have absolutely NO problem with people being killed as the result of their intransigence toward intelligence. If you insist on living as an imbecile, then by all means do so. When your ass goes from frying pan to fire, I will toss a few more shovelfuls of coal on just to make sure you don't escape the consequences of your very poor choices. And just to be clear, I would expect the rest of the world to do the same in the event I also pooched in such stubbornly willful fashion.

It was just because that what could be proven in court and he was already given the death penalty.

It appears you missed the salient point.

I think we can do better than 50-50, but I mostly agree with this. It's all a tradeoff. You seem to be arguing against any sort of tradeoff, though.

No. I am arguing against a very SPECIFIC tradeoff that says it is acceptable to punish some innocents for the sake of the "greater good" of getting the bad guys. That is NEVER acceptable. To accept this is to accept the most deeply heinous form of felony ever. It is precisely the same as executing an abortion on a woman late in her third trimester: the destruction of INNOCENCE. Jesus man, how can anyone not see this?

Let me put it this way: imagine you had before you 100 men, 99 of whom were guilty of abducting, raping, torturing, flaying small children alive and leaving the skinned victims to die in horrifying agony and shock and one of whom was a wholly innocent and good man. If you were given the choice of being able to send all those evil bastards to their justice, but only if you do so to all 100 men, or letting everyone go, how would you choose? You KNOW that letting the vermin go may result in more murders of small children.

How would you choose and why?

This is a standard that quickly lapses into absurdity. Let's say there was a functional, safe, relatively free civilization that was threatened by roving bands of criminals that the populace couldn't handle. Would it be better to watch this civilization descend into barbarism and chaos than to go after these criminals in a way that might punish an innocent person? You would let a society perish over this ideal?

What is your proof of this lapse?

"Relatively free"? One is either free, or is something else. There are NO degrees of freedom. There are only degrees of servitude. The imposition of ANY unwelcome obligation by one man upon another is tyranny, regardless of how innocuous, how insignificant, how "just" it may appear to naive or careless eyes. You CANNOT escape this simple fact: no man is born to lord over another and no man is born subservient to a lord. Try as you may with all the usual phony baloney justifications, you cannot validly get around that most simple truth. All the rest is pure bull$#@!.

You are damned right I would allow a civilization to perish over the principle. Why? Because any people corrupt enough to descend into chaos merits destruction.

The validity of ANY civilization turns on the quality and character of its people. "Civilization" is nothing in itself - a mere idea. PEOPLE make it real and if they are of so shabby a moral fabric, then yes, let them perish as a civilization. There are always those who will survive as individuals to rebuild. And if not, them's the breaks. There is nothing quite so special about humanity that it should be sacrosanct and thereby immune from evaporation if men choose to live as evil vermin. Each of us are faced with choices every second of every day as to what kind of men we shall be. We choose. We are responsible; accountable. If we fail to cut muster, then let us die for we are become unworthy of the gift of life.

For me, freedom is far and away more important than justice. Justice is "nice to have", if and when it can be honestly and validly achieved. To destroy the innocent in pursuit of justice tells me people are unworthy of both freedom and justice, and worthy only of destruction, for their corruption has lapsed into deep evil.

No sir, you will have to do a formal proof to demonstrate to me how the acceptance of one evil in exchange for justice is itself just. Good luck with that because I already know that it is not possible, having considered the basic underlying patterns which show me that dog don't hunt.

[ThePaleoLibertarian]

And you also wrote:
The statement is clear. You believe it is acceptable to falsely imprison some people for the sake of getting the guilty. You subscribe to the typical weak-tea, feel-good supplementation "so long as false convictions are minimized", as if that makes things acceptable. I bet those who today rot in prison cells on false convictions, however few they may be, do not share your view. I'd love to see you face those people at less than arm's length and tell them to their faces how it's sad, but that's how the cookie crumbles sometimes. You might be lucky to walk away with all your teeth.

Either what you wrote was an intentional lie, or you need to work on your sentence structure for semantics because the statement is quite clear in its meaning. I will assume you did not intend to lie.

I did not write that. That was r3v. You either confused us or believe I'm his alt, which is not true.

Then I wroted:
To which you responded:



CAN'T be? Says who, exactly? In what unquestionable tome is it so written?

You want something so badly, you are willing to sacrifice innocents for the sake of having it.

FAIL^FAIL^FAIL - the dreaded FAIL-plex-plex... beyond all ultimate FAIL.

We know this because we can look at history. Which, again, is replete with mobs committing acts of violence against groups of people they consider to have done some sort of wrong. This mob inclination is eternal within humanity and institutions do not change human nature.


[qupte]It is reasonable to infer from what you have written thus far that you are a pragmatist, willing to turn his back on valid base principles for the sake of what you feel is the "greater good".[/quote]
Pragmatism is the wrong word. I just realize that when it comes to statecraft that all you have are tradeoffs. Perfection is not for this world.

It is precisely in that place where all the vast evils of the world have sprung. Your view on this leads inevitably to death, destruction, impoverishment, disease, and endless misery, all the while failing to see it because your base assumptions could not possibly be wrong. The world has operated on your assumptions for an age and then some.

I'm not sure what this even means. What do you think my assumptions are and how does the world run on them?

Consider the shape it's in. We have courts and they have meted out at least as much injustice as justice. Your faith in them is dangerously naive and very poorly considered.

Your ideal of mobs of easily angered people policing themselves has never lead to anything but savagery, but somehow I have to take the blame for the failings of the criminal justice system, while you only take credit for some amazing ideal where no innocent is hurt and everyone takes care of criminals themselves. Nice standard you have there.

How about all those poor bastards who have gotten twenty and thirty year sentences for possession of a single joint? There's your price. And don't attempt to blame the legislators because at the end of the day it is the courts who ultimately enforce legislation. But who cares eh? Just so long as we get a handful of real bad guys.

Sweet Jesus, man - broaden your vision a bit and try to see the larger picture.

You have this feminine dramatic streak in your posts, but of course, I have never argued for the drug war or endorsed our current justice system, Not remotely. Any justice system I designed would not look anything like what we have today.

Then you further assume that justice is perforce handed to a "mob". More FAIL. It may happen in some cases... or not. There is nothing to suggest it would become systemic - not with a properly educated populace. Recall what either Franklin of Jefferson said about freedom and stupidity and bad attitudes being fundamentally incompatible. A nation in love with proper freedom doesn't devolve into mobs and when a mob forms and performs poorly, they are taken care of by the greater body of the people.

Ah yes, and there it is. The quasi-Marxism of utopian libertarians. What suggests it will become systemic is the history of humanity and just how willing people are to join mobs when they feel there's some sort of threat - whether there actually is or not. Let me make this clear; a system does not change human nature. And the mob inclination is part of human nature, a part that needs to be guarded against. It has fed the worst brutalities in human history and you do not -- under any circumstances -- give a baying mob power with no check.

Once again, you want something for nothing - you think you can have freedom and order with a population if immoral/amoral dumbasses with shyte attitudes. FAIL. A free people must be a moral people, willing to bear the fatigues of maintaining their liberties for not only themselves, but their fellows as well. Without critical mass, liberty dies, whether slowly or precipitously. That bit matters no whit.

Yes, immoral people will always exist and stupid people are the majority. If liberty can't weather that fact then it can't exist at all.

Not that up on Rousseau.

We ARE born as free beings. Demonstrate that we are not. The case is prima facie. Otherwise, your assertion is that one is born as chattel to another. Which other? By what authority? What valid moral standard justifies one man lording over another? Please demonstrate these.

Liberty did NOT "evolve". $#@!'s sake man, get a grip on yourself. Men lived for many millennia in tribal units prior to some men becoming "civilized". If we assume that the walled city of Sumer was indeed our first jaunt into civilization, then prior to that men lived in small filial units, what we commonly call "tribes". Nineteenth century scholars studied the remaining tribal people very extensively and documented their studies well. Nearly all were anarchic. There were warlike tribes that were anarchic. There were a very few that were warlike tyrannies with a king who ruled by typical violence. All this is very much to be expected as part of the Gaussian for human characteristics. The big, fat middle of the curve was composed of comparatively peaceable anarchies where the social structure most often consisted of a chief (NOT a ruler, but a trusted leader), a shaman, and the rest of the commonly found distribution of hunters, gatherers, possibly warriors, housekeepers, and so forth. The chief remained as such only so long as the tribe accepted him as such. Anyone was free not to do as a chief recommended. Any chief commanding another usually lost his status forthwith. "Justice" was often settled between individuals, and sometimes by community action. Punishment was often exile from the group. There's more but this is the agoristic gist of things. The books are available to anyone for reading at university libraries. I'm sure some of it is available for free online as well.

Yes, exactly like Rousseau, including his childlike belief that the State of Nature is some uncorrupted bastion of morality and freedom. There's been lots of anthropological research on tribal warfare, from Africa to the Amazon, and it was extremely bloody. Estimates from the Amazon for example, are that upwards of a quarter of all deaths were from tribal warfare, before European contact.

And once again you fall for the trap of the false dichotomy - if you don't have a "state" enforcing order, there will BE no order, but only chaos. Much-0 FAIL-0.

Necessity is the mother of correction. People, generally, behave as idiots these days. Why? Because the diseased environment not only allows it, but encourages. Remove the disease and return people to their proper state and they would either wise up quickly, or be consumed in the flames of the initial trouble of the period of adjustment. I have absolutely NO problem with people being killed as the result of their intransigence toward intelligence. If you insist on living as an imbecile, then by all means do so. When your ass goes from frying pan to fire, I will toss a few more shovelfuls of coal on just to make sure you don't escape the consequences of your very poor choices. And just to be clear, I would expect the rest of the world to do the same in the event I also pooched in such stubbornly willful fashion.

People have always been stupid, but we used to have social norms and institutions that guided us away from these behaviors. We also used to have the good sense not to subsidize it. Stop subsidizing degenerate behavior and a whole lot of it will clear up on its own.

No. I am arguing against a very SPECIFIC tradeoff that says it is acceptable to punish some innocents for the sake of the "greater good" of getting the bad guys. That is NEVER acceptable. To accept this is to accept the most deeply heinous form of felony ever. It is precisely the same as executing an abortion on a woman late in her third trimester: the destruction of INNOCENCE. Jesus man, how can anyone not see this?

Let me put it this way: imagine you had before you 100 men, 99 of whom were guilty of abducting, raping, torturing, flaying small children alive and leaving the skinned victims to die in horrifying agony and shock and one of whom was a wholly innocent and good man. If you were given the choice of being able to send all those evil bastards to their justice, but only if you do so to all 100 men, or letting everyone go, how would you choose? You KNOW that letting the vermin go may result in more murders of small children.

How would you choose and why?

I'm not entirely sure how I would decide, and I may very well let them go. But, neither choice is a remotely optimal way to deal with criminals. A just system would:

A) In as rigorous a way as possible, try to determine who among the 100 men was actually guilty
B) Figure out whether the burden of proof has been met to punish the perpetrators even if they are guilty.

You need strong and capable institutions to do such things. And to be clear, I am not saying that the modern US court system are strong or capable. Most of what it breeds these days is anarcho-tyranny.

What is your proof of this lapse?

The lapse is that you're willing to let a functional and free society be taken and destroyed by roving barbarians because you are fundamentally unwilling to have an institutional response to crimes against person or property, just because it might hurt an innocent.

"Relatively free"? One is either free, or is something else. There are NO degrees of freedom. There are only degrees of servitude. The imposition of ANY unwelcome obligation by one man upon another is tyranny, regardless of how innocuous, how insignificant, how "just" it may appear to naive or careless eyes. You CANNOT escape this simple fact: no man is born to lord over another and no man is born subservient to a lord. Try as you may with all the usual phony baloney justifications, you cannot validly get around that most simple truth. All the rest is pure bull$#@!.

This is ridiculous. Switzerland is relatively free compared to North Korea. In fact, it's exactly backward; freedom only exists on a spectrum. Nothing can ever be compared favorably to some ideal you have in your head. You have to compare systems to history and to contemporaries, not fanciful utopias that exist only in your mind.

You are damned right I would allow a civilization to perish over the principle. Why? Because any people corrupt enough to descend into chaos merits destruction.

All people are corrupt enough to descend into chaos. Civilizational entropy applies to all systems, everywhere, for all time. History comes in cycles and eventually, the greatest societies fade. What you can do is build institutions strong enough to slow the process down, with statecraft advanced enough to optimize human flourishing.

The validity of ANY civilization turns on the quality and character of its people. "Civilization" is nothing in itself - a mere idea. PEOPLE make it real and if they are of so shabby a moral fabric, then yes, let them perish as a civilization. There are always those who will survive as individuals to rebuild. And if not, them's the breaks. There is nothing quite so special about humanity that it should be sacrosanct and thereby immune from evaporation if men choose to live as evil vermin. Each of us are faced with choices every second of every day as to what kind of men we shall be. We choose. We are responsible; accountable. If we fail to cut muster, then let us die for we are become unworthy of the gift of life.

But I wasn't talking about civilization falling due to its own turpitude, but outsiders coming in and brutalizing a functional society to the point of destruction, or at least extreme degradation.

For me, freedom is far and away more important than justice. Justice is "nice to have", if and when it can be honestly and validly achieved. To destroy the innocent in pursuit of justice tells me people are unworthy of both freedom and justice, and worthy only of destruction, for their corruption has lapsed into deep evil.

No sir, you will have to do a formal proof to demonstrate to me how the acceptance of one evil in exchange for justice is itself just. Good luck with that because I already know that it is not possible, having considered the basic underlying patterns which show me that dog don't hunt.

To have liberty without order or justice is just the rule of the mob. They are sisters, not enemy combatants. A free society not only should have both, it needs to. Modern America lacks liberty, order and justice in seemingly equal measure.