- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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US is the worst place to live in. After Israel and some other dictatorships, sure. But on par with many. And worst than some.
The crazy part is that Hollywood and some other propaganda machines make us believe the opposite.
If cops are going to run out with guns drawn over fucking diapers, they shouldn’t have guns.
They’re paid to protect capital.
An important note here, the family says they have the receipt for the diapers.
So it’s an accusation of shoplifting. Not actual shoplifting.
Thank you for the correction I will edit the title
The role of police is - in theory - meant to make arrests based on the notion that someone may be guilty of a criminal act. It isn’t for the police to prove guilt or innocence, that’s for the courts. Now that being said, the police in all forms in this modern age are fundamentally nothing more than thugs of the state.
The role of police is - in theory - meant to make arrests based on the notion that someone may be guilty of a criminal act.
Exactly. It’s not to try to execute them on the spot for being suspects of a non-violent crime.
In any nation with Rule Of Law that police officer would’ve been sitting in jail right now for murder for having pulled and fired a gun in that situation.
Were I live (Portugal), merely pulling the gun out would’ve landed that officer in hot water. Shooting it and killing somebody would’ve landed him in jail (whilst there would have been a weeks/months long outrage on the Press for what he did and the police leadership that let such a person through the cracks).
Shit, the other day a small group of riot police charged some demonstrators against housing costs who had set up in a square in Porto a camp with some tents very lightly wounding 1 person and it was massive news and a formal Inquest has now been openned on it by the Public Prosecution Service (which can lead to criminal charges). Now, I’m not saying it will lead to criminal charges, I’m saying the level of what’s considered acceptable police violence is WAY lower than in the US.
Zero reason for this response (3 dudes with guns drawn?) when the goods are insured. Call in another cop, one who is in a vehicle, to follow the car and pull them over if you care that much. Having the AG say this is “justified” is a horrendous misjudgment on her part.
Zero reason for this response if the goods aren’t insured. In what sane universe is it morally justified to hurt anyone over material items??
FFS on top of that it was diapers. Meaning mom and friend were desperate to care for their baby. The system is so disgustingly broken.
How about the fact that in some states, if someone is invading your home in the middle of the night and you shoot them you can be convicted depending on if you give them an avenue of egress, but these guys jumped in front of a moving car and their “reaction” was “justified?”
Wouldn’t that depend though?
It is the responsibility of the police to make arrests, not prove guilt or innocence - that is the job of the courts. The police gathered what information they could, rightly concluded that someone had committed theft and attempted to make an arrest. This means that if they can use their bodies to stop the perpetrator from escaping that arrest, they should.
The question then falls on the idea of, was the car already going 30MPH and an officer jumped in front of it not giving them enough time to stop, and that was seen as an act of violence? That then would have been two poor decisions on behalf of that officer. First, jumping in front of the car, and two, in assuming the car’s not stopping to be an act of aggression upon them that warranted a returned act of agression.
If someone came into my home, robbed me and my family then ran out to their car and I was standing at the end of my driveway by the time the car started moving (I own firearms) and they clearly held no intention of not running me over, I would shoot to kill and I would be completely justified in doing so. Not because they robbed me (though that can actually be warranted too, it just depends), but because they made an attempt on my life, or at the very least, on my physical well-being.
No man should be made to accept another’s attempts to strip them of their life or well-being. I should not be made to suffer a broken body because the only way to have stopped that would be to have taken the life of the assailant who had no qualms with crushing my body.
Also regarding what you posted, many states are wholly nonsensical in the vast majority of their laws. What is rational is that if someone were to enter your property, you are justified in analyzing the threat as rationally as you can, given the circumstance, and acting accordingly. If you shoot the 8 year old running across your yard, you’re in the wrong and just murdered a child, but there are many different situations that can arise. If someone walks into my home (I have young children) and I see that they are carrying a knife or firearm, I’m not going to speak with them, warn them, or otherwise give them an “egress”, I am going to shoot to kill, period, the state be damned.
The 3 seconds it might take me to ask questions and wait for a response could be all it takes before my toddler is shot dead. I don’t have that time, I don’t know this person, I don’t know their intentions, and this is the single most horrific and pivotal moment of likely my entire life - the notion that I should be held more accountable for how I react than the individual who entered my home armed is utter nonsense. NOBODY matters to me as much as my children, and that should be a universality across the whole of humanity. If you don’t believe that, you’re doing “human” wrong.
The 3 seconds it might take me to ask questions and wait for a response could be all it takes before my toddler is shot dead.
Like the 1 year old in the video? So the mother would have been justified running those cops over, right? When someone runs at me shouting with a gun drawn should I assume they just want to talk?
Police in the USA regularly shoot and kill people who pose no threat. The only threat in this situation was entirely brought by the police: they drew weapons and they put themselves in harms way by stepping in front of a moving vehicle.
“Police in the USA regularly shoot and kill people who pose no threat.”
Evidence for this claim? I am a scientist and researcher by profession, as well as a formally trained, collage educated researcher. My own past research does not support this claim. Quick current searches can find data that contrasts your proposition:
In 2025, 1,201 people were killed by police in the US. 90% of those killed by on-duty police are armed with a firearm or other weapon, according to data compiled by Everytown Research. Only 98 are from cases where an individual is completely unarmed.
And even if we were to argue that half of all police killings are completely unjustified, we’re talking about 601 deaths.
Over 4,500 people die from unintentional drowning each year. 450 people die each year from falling out of bed. 72 die each year from hornet, wasp, and bee stings.
The “solution” proposed in this thread is “more training”, but what training, exactly? Current “quality” training is noted to reduce the tendency for violence used by police by roughly 30%, but that doesn’t mean it reduces killing by 30%. Not all violent altercations end in a shell discharge. So what are we talking about for a fix here? This ethereal training that will reduce physical altercations by 30% that reduce killings by 20%, dropping the number from 1,201 to 961. So you maybe save 241 lives at the cost of what, exactly?
Enhanced police training programs are primarily funded through local property taxes, state sales and income taxes. The total cost to recruit, equip, and provide advanced field training to a single officer can exceed $100,000 in their first 18 months. This excludes their salary.
Municipal budgets tend to go over capacity for salaries and overtime as it is today. Large-scale training updates also require physical equipment upgrades which cost multi-millions in costs. Such trainings often require simulation infrastructure. And keep in mind that there is no such thing as universal federal law on policing, policing conduct, rules, structure, hiring practices, and training are rooted at the state and local levels, so everywhere you go they have different criteria. So how do you make these trainings a universality? How do you get people to pay for it in Las Angeles vs. say, New Square New York, a village known for its high poverty rate and a low average family income near $20K? Is the proposed answer just to, “eat the rich”?
So again what is your ACTUAL proposal? You can’t just raise taxes, that will not work. You also can’t mandate that training changes happen universally across the country. Nobody has that authority. Districts hold their own authority independent of one another. And even if you could get the funding AND make it universal, the average American will not vote for it. You propose a cost of say, 3 billion to give all officers in the US enhanced training and tell them this is estimated to save 241 lives annually and they will scoff at your proposal and assume 75% of those people saved are likely hardened criminals anyway, so why exactly are we putting 3 billion to save the lives of known felons?
If you want to make change, you have to convince your fellow man to live righteously, which is no easy task. Change doesn’t happen overnight because some government mandate was put in place or because some money was thrown at some police districts for “enhanced training”.
Hell, simply removing laws that have no victim would reduce all police altercations by anywhere from 20-80% (impossible to strictly judge this with any available data). Don’t arrest someone for drug possession for example because there’s no need to. Let people live their lives the way they want and put into their body what they want because its their life and their body and these things would organically reduce anyway. The government IS a HUGE part of the problem alone.
I never said that she wouldn’t have been justified in running a cop over if he drew a gun on her depending on the situation. She could be completely, 100% justified.
I’m going to assume you are discussing in good faith.
Yes, it is the policy’s responsibility to enforce the law. But they are also not supposed to escalate or use unequal force. Jumping in front of a moving car is “dont do this 101.” She had diapers in her car and was trying to get away, not hurt people. In this case gunfire is never an appropriate and justified force. If she had a bomb in her car and said “I’m going to go blow up the elementary school” and sped off towards the school, I’d understand using lethal force to stop her.
Your home invasion part created a lot of unnecessary arguments. In most states, if you shot someone fleeing in their car when they were no longer threatening your life, you’d be convicted of murder. You then conflate accepting an attack on you with shooting someone that was clearly fleeing because they previously threatened you. I’m also not sure why you even brought up shooting an 8 year old running across your yard, that isn’t relevant to this situation and I think everyone can agree that’s wrong no matter what, no matter how old the person is.
It doesn’t matter if states laws are nonsensical, and that’s kind of the point. You also confuse what you’re willing to accept to do to protect your family with what is legal. In some states you have a duty to warn them or allow them to retreat if they are not directly threatening you, and being in your home unlawfully is not automatically threatening you.
Your emotional conviction to protect your children is not being argued. The point was that even in a situation, where a civilian such as yourself fears the safety of their children, you could have a duty to warn or allow an invader to flee your house depending on the state you live in. While a trained and professional police officer escalated a nonlethal situation by jumping in front of a moving vehicle, and then further escalated it by using lethal force and murdered a person. Even worse, it was legally “justified” despite being completely unreasonable.
I am discussing in good faith.
I agree completely. Police should use their best judgement and not immediately gravitate to force.
My argument unfortunately is coming from a place of not understanding the whole situation. I would need to investigate far further. For example, was she driving in a way meaning to escape police custody where she was almost running over innocent people? I don’t know. Did a cop simply leap in front of her car stupidly? I don’t know.
I remember a big debate on Reddit some years ago about a couple of Mexican men in a shootout with police where there were thousands of posts all bashing cops. I was very interested (and I believe police are fundamentally just thugs of the state, and I am anti-government, keep in mind) so I investigated further and found videos where police had instructed the men to do certain things something along the likes of 27 times before they open fired.
I felt like nobody took the time to actually know what happened. They heard a quick article in some liberal or conservative news network who only shared what they wanted to share and then listened to some people on Reddit and Tiktok and made entire assumptions of what clearly happened.
And it wasn’t much different of a discussion than what I’m seeing in this thread except that I haven’t viewed any recordings or other information (don’t know what information there is in whole) yet. I’m simply playing devil’s advocate because I’m not one to jump to conclusions assuming all cops are evil racists who just want to murder babies. I mean, that’s absurd. Then these same people are saying we should make laws/changes to stop this.
OK so the solution to I hate evil thugs of the state is to use the state? There’s a cognitive dissonance that I feel goes on too readily in societies today.
“Your home invasion part created a lot of unnecessary arguments. In most states, if you shot someone fleeing in their car when they were no longer threatening your life, you’d be convicted of murder.”
But it doesn’t matter what the government says. Just because something is set into law does not make it moral nor even logical/rational. If the government made rape legal tomorrow, should we accept that?
If someone breaks into my home and tries to murder my family I am wholly justified to end their life, even if they fled and I hunted them down. There is no government, keep that in mind. The notion of government is illusory. It’s propaganda that the ruling class has entire swaths of people believing that they can enact control over their lives and that this control is legitimate because they slapped a stamp on a piece of paper that looks official.
What’s the difference between a cop killing a fleeing murderer, or me? Nothing. There is no such thing as a civilian - that’s more government propaganda, just like the notion of public property. You cannot take money from me, buy a lawn mower, tell me who gets to use that lawn mower, then say you didn’t rob me because that mower is public property. All of that is sheer nonsense. You robbed me, used the money on something I didn’t consent to, then tried to trick me into thinking it’s legitimate because you have my best interest at heart and you did it for me.
There are no government officials, there are only people. If it would be patently insane/immoral for your neighbor to do it, it’s just as patently insane/immoral for your neighbor to do it if he’s given a badge. The badge is the brainwashing. It isn’t legitimate and it never has been.
A good person cannot suffer the ongoing threat of the murderer. If you can cage the murderer, so be it, but even then morally it depends on who is agreeing to pay for the murderer’s incarceration. What if I tell you I am not? Well, then you can either set them free or forcibly take my money to pay for it. So you have to be evil to cage evil or you have to commit to inaction and set the murderer free. And what exactly do you think I’m going to do if you do that and I see them in my neighborhood again, near my kids? I will kill them. I won’t give them a trial. I won’t ask them questions. I won’t see if it’s “ok” with anyone else. This person tried to kill my family once and other people decided they didn’t want to pay to keep them imprisoned and nobody else was strong enough to kill a murderer.
There is no system, there are just people. And is it justified to hurt people over theft? Of course it is.
All legality ends in killing when taken to its end result. If you get a speeding ticket, what happens if you don’t pay it? You get a warrant for your arrest. What happens when you’re stopped for speeding again and the officer, noticing your warrant, goes to arrest you but you, believing the state has no business apprehending you for something you never agreed not to do on roads nobody actually owns (which is a legitimate and objective claim, mind you), resist that arrest?
One of three things can occur:
- You are arrested, which means that another human being placed their hands upon you and did things to you that you do not consent to. If your neighbor did this to you you would consider it both insane and immoral, and you would be wholly justified in that consideration.
- You escape arrest, but you will most likely be arrested in the future.
- Your resistance utilized some level of force which was reciprocated by the officer, and you were shot and killed.
And what do you think happens if you do successfully resist arrest? Now you have a warrant for your arrest not only for speeding, but also for resisting arrest. And what do you think would happen if say, you successfully resisted arrest say, 5 times? Do you think the state is going to just throw its hands up and say, “well, we tried but that bugger got away so what can we do!?” No, of course not. Eventually the criminal escalation will be so great that you would be seen as a violator of the law wholly need of processing, which means violence used against you to ensure your capture. What happens then when those escalated officers draw weapons on you and demand your surrender and you try to escape a sixth time? They throw up their hands?
Of course not, they open fire.
ALL criminal acts eventually lead to death unless you succumb to the will of the authoritarian structure or you’re successfully captured and processed, it just depends where along that line you are.
Is it rationally justified to open fire on someone for stealing from a Walmart? Of course not. But it would have been justified to arrest the woman and punish her to the fullest extent of the law, barring that the law is just, and by just, keep in mind, simply being that in which violates the will of another through a logical order of operations. I.E: Murder, rape, theft, fraud, etc.
An officer who shoots at a car to prevent someone from getting away with petty theft at a Walmart should be tried and convicted of murder, but the woman who stole from that Walmart should be tried and convicted of theft, at least barring that the Walmart wanted to press charges at all.
This has to be slop.
Boot lickin’ Javert, doing his favorite thing: Lickin’ boots!
Are you calling me a boot licker, or referring to someone else? I am an anarchist/anarcho-capitalist/voluntarist. I am anti-government. If you took that I am pro government from my post, then I either didn’t communicate my point across adequately, you didn’t understand my point, or you don’t understand what government is at its most fundamental level.
Yes, you are a boot licker. No, you are absolutely not an anarchist. Sticking feathers up your ass doesn’t make you a chicken. It takes more than just saying that’s what you are, Javert. You are applying legalist morality as justification. Do you not understand why multiple people keep calling you Javert, Javert?
Ah, but I never said I was a commie. Communists anarchists are nonsensical. An anarchist is to monarchy as an atheist is to theism. It simply means no rulers. I believe the best state to exist in would be one without rulers. Communism is a nonsensical state as the abolition of the state and of money is a nonsense proposition.
And yet you are arguing that it is never acceptable to steal from a walmart.
Have fun with those feathers, Javert.
Why are the municipal police insuring Walmart’s bottom line using taxpayer dollars?
why are they protecting any property? oh yeah because people don’t like getting things stolen from them.
As if some megacorporation doesn’t have the money to pay for it themselves and instead has to rely on corporate welfare from the local municipality.
Following them turns into a high speed chase now endangering other people. Not really a better option when random people get killed.
Or they could do some police work and, y’know visit the address associated with the plate number.
That said, police shouldn’t be doing loss prevention for Walmart.
Yes, that is a much better option than following let alone shooting.
Oh yeah, now instead of just getting the license plate and putting out a BOLO, they just killed a 1 year old.
Never said shooting is a good/better alternative, what is it with you people here commenting that? I said an alternative that got mentioned is shit.
This comment is dumb. You are saying she should be executed to prevent a crime she has not committed yet. Use your head.
Nice strawman.
So you gotta get the boot soaking wet before you shove it up your ass or does it just slide up there easily?
Why even comment this garbage if you can but comprehend what you reply to?
what kind of vile motherfucker would call the cops on a mother for stealing fucking diapers?
There needs to be a massive overhaul of hiring and training for police. Their gun needs to be a LAST DITCH EFFORT to de-escelate the situation. That cop should be in jail. Bare minimum. This should have never happened.
No amount of training will prevent this sort of thing, ever. There is nothing anyone can do to stop travesties like this from happening. We can likely limit it, some of it, but not outright stop it from happening.
No amount of training will prevent this sort of thing, ever.
Really, like not even prevent some of it?
We can likely limit it, some of it
Oh so some amount of training will prevent this from happening just not completely eradicate it.
Your statements are directly contradictory - idk why I’m pointing this out just that it bugged me I guess but I agree with you that elimination of all violence carried out by the state is impossible. We can definitely limit it!
My point is that there are far too many people who have different views, beliefs, and levels of thinking to find a sure-fire method of ensuring all agents of the state have sufficient “training” for this and anything else they might come across that’ll be in tomorrow’s news.
And when placed into a delicate situation where your fundamental job is answering the call to and making arrests, full-well understanding that every perpetrator is a potential threat to themselves and those around them (as you work in these situations every day), it can become very stressful if placed into a situation such as this.
Now don’t get it twisted, I’m not in any way saying these cops are in the right - they are not. What I am saying is if you had 2 years of training I don’t think things would universally change much. I own firearms for example and I go shooting, and nothing is ever going to prepare me for a day if I ever needed to use one of those firearms. I don’t ever want to be in such a situation. I don’t want to shoot anyone, I just want to protect my family, myself, and the innocent, in that order. I couldn’t imagine how awful it would be to have to make split second choices filled with anxiety, fear, and fight or flight responses in the heat of a moment such as that. Could I make a mistake? Of course! I mean, what if there’s a shooting somewhere and suddenly I have to consider so many variables. Where’s the shooter? Is my family in danger? Where do we go? Should I draw my weapon? If I do, could police or another armed individual think I’m the shooter? If I saw the shooter, how safe would it even be to shoot them to try to stop them? Could I hit an innocent person? What if I do? Will I go to prison for murder? What if I hit the shooter and take them out? Will I be a hero, or marked as a villain and imprisoned so I never see my family again?
I can think about these things time and again (and I have), but I know nothing I could do would fully prepare me for being in that moment.
And again, I’m not saying that any of that means the cops in this example were justified. I’m just saying I can see how impossible this task could be. Up training to 2 years and you’re going to need to increase what we pay cops or many people are going to just go into other professions. What would the value of say, 2 years of training be, exactly? Does it actually reduce the level of police killings? I got this off a quick web search:
“Specialized and targeted training—such as de-escalation, procedural justice, and reality-based tactical training—can reduce police use of force, but simply increasing total training hours alone does not automatically or reliably eliminate fatal police shootings.”
That’s apparently from NBC News. And the data isn’t being very concrete here. It says that better training provides a “measurable drop” in use of force, but it won’t say by how much. Deeper searches reveal a reported 28.1% in overall use-of-force incidents, but use-of-force isn’t only use of deadly force. Stats say that cops in the US kill an average of 1,150 people annually. A 28.1% reduction (let’s assume that’s all deadly force, but it wouldn’t be), would be roughly 323.15 people. Around 300 people die each year from ladder-related falls. So not only would this reduction be negligible, but what would the cost be? Why not invest that into say, cancer research, traffic safety awareness (39,254 people died in 2024 to traffic accidents), or so many other things.
We look at situations like this - which are egregious, don’t get me wrong - and we ask ourselves as if we ARE the collective, “what could WE do?” But there isn’t a collective, and there is no “we”, there is only what can YOU do. One thing I do is not put myself in situations where police may be involved. Now that doesn’t mean this woman deserved what happened, I’m not saying that at all, nor do I believe that, but as terrible as this kind of thing is, rationally as I said, there’s often not much that can be done about it, and watch, nothing will be done about it.
People will scream about it for a while, politicians and talk about what we’re going to do about it, things may even be put into place around it, but it won’t change anything, and if it does, it’ll be so negligible that the next time it happens even AFTER the proposed changes are put in place, it’ll seem like nothing was ever done at all.
That is so many words to say you’re okay with the status quo and making no changes.
Making what change, exactly? You and I cannot control the choices that other people make, we can only control our own choices. I flex my control by teaching my children how to live a moral life, by myself, living by that example and living a moral life. I come to boards like this one and try to convince people through well thought out and articulated arguments what is objective, logical, rational, and moral, without dodging to emotion.
You could start by voting for politicians who want to enact laws requiring more police training. Or at least not saying nothing ever will change, because if that were true the world would look a hell of a lot different.
Do I expect one person to make systemic change from the bottom up happen? No, I’m not a total moron. However, being defeatist and saying police reform, or any other thing that needs to happen, is simply impossible is not helping anyone.
What would I want, personally? Reduction in government and taxation across the next 50-100 years until the government is completely gone.
This would give the market the opportunity to move into those sectors that the government currently controls.
This along would slowly solve many of these problems - at least to some degree.
Remember folks: If you think you see someone shoplifting food or basic supplies, no you didn’t.
Theft is immoral and should always be stopped. Saying I get to violate your will because it helps my well-being does not justify my immoral actions.
How’s that boot taste loser?
I’m an anarchist. I am anti-government.
You’re an anarchist but you’re against shoplifting??? Holy shit I met the most pathetic fucking loser on Lemmy and that’s saying something
You’re an anarchist but you’re against shoplifting???
I am against theft, that is correct. Theft is immoral, yes.
Can you tell me when theft is not immoral? When you want it bad enough?
Yeah man you stick it to those immoral shoplifters. Better snitch to the pigs even though you oppose government but it’s fine cause of what? Boosting diapers from walmart is worse than state violence?
Where did I outline my own personal, subjective scale of what immoral acts were more or less heignous, exactly?
There is a right way to live and a wrong way to live. Murdering, stealing, raping and committing fraud is wrong. Everything else is some semblance of “right”. You and I might not agree on who you should be kind to and when, or who you should help and shouldn’t, or even how much an assailant should be punished, but that’s not the same thing as a fundamental understanding that theft is wrong.
Theft is always objectively wrong because you would never want to be robbed, ever. It is not logically possible for you to **WILL **to be robbed, because the second you hope someone will take something from you, the act of doing so no longer manifests as theft. If you **HAND **me $10, I did not steal it from you, but if you don’t WANT me to take that $10 from you and I do, that is theft.
This is higher level thinking (level 5), in psychology. Fundamentally, it is the concept of understanding that what’s ***subjectively ***right or wrong differs for different people, and in understanding that, we do not demand that you live the way I command or I live the way you command, instead, we both accept that you simply do not steal because IF either of us did not want to be assailed in that way, then we shouldn’t opt to wish it upon another.
Most people in the world exist at a lower level of thinking, usually around level 3. The first stages typically being pure selfishness, then an understanding that there are other people with wants and needs, then an awakened understanding that you can exert control over the wants and needs of others, and thinking that everyone is only self-interested and thus, you must be self-interested as well. This is why most third world countries exist in dictatorships, usually around the third or fourth level of thinking. The fourth level is when a general community all agrees on some set of rules. Think of a strictly religious state where the government created rules meant to prevent the bad, selfish behavior of people who only think at levels 2 and 3. This is level 4 thinking. Stealing is wrong and you won’t steal or else, and by the way, we get to decide what stealing is.
Level 5 starts to become more “enlightened” in a manner of speaking, where you begin understanding that your way of looking at the world isn’t the “only” way. Thinking continues evolving past this, mind you, and can still be dangerous at these upper levels, such as when you hit level 6, which is where wokeism/social justice tends to land. It’s the idea that since everyone has their own views, no views can be wrong, so for example, a woman could say that **men **are dangerous to woman, but because this level of thinking isn’t high enough yet to prevent conflict, will flat out refuse to say that illegal immigrants - who are often majority men - are dangerous to woman. If you point out the cognitive dissonance in that reasoning, it will usually lead directly to anger because it strikes a conflict within that individual’s ego that they cannot resolve. Usually they will just divert by making up some other nonsense claim that may not even be related to the original declarative.
But the highest tiers of thinking realize that while different subjects hold different values, that there is one fundamental cardinal attribute we all share: We do not want our wills violated. But conflict IS will violation. Maybe you and I both want the same thing but only one of us can have it. One of us has to get what they want and the other cannot. So the fundamental here is that the only “fair” way to discern conflicts of will is to do so logically. For example:
You already own that $10 and do not want me to take it so I should not take it.
Now if you take $10 from me and I take it back, you may not have wanted me to take it BUT logically, you originally violated my will to obtain that $10, so in already violating that logical enterprise of justice, I am entitled to right that wrong and recreate justice.
This is what self defense is, or when you imprison a murderer, rapist, robber, or fraudster.
Murder is wrong, KILLING, on its own, may not be. Understanding that if you try to kill my child and I try to stop you from doing so and in that attempt I kill you, I was just in killing you, even though your will was not aligned in that happening. But if your will is aligned in trying to kill my daughter, who did not want to be killed (a state set long before your desire to kill her), you are not just in committing the act.
This is actually fundamentally already how all societies on earth behave. In no culture ever has murder, rape, theft, or fraud been OK, but the “elite” (usually politicians) often still do these things - this is what we usually tie the word “corruption” to.
Corruption is a good word to use too, because it is the idea of “corrupting” the core principles of justice. You cannot murder. That is a core principle. If you find a loophole where you kill and are not punished, you are corrupting that system.
I hope some of this makes sense and is relative to your perspective of the conversation.
Large corporations are stealing from individuals on a grand scale. The argument is that if they aren’t being held accountable then they shouldn’t be protected under the laws they evade.
The commenter above wasn’t clear but the popular sentiment was about shoplifting essentials from large companies, not small shops and people’s homes.
It’s about solidarity with the poor. We don’t have to excuse the immorality but we should see that the companies that exploit us don’t deserve our help.
You’re talking about deeper issues here though. What you really mean is that the underlying problem is the government and how they’re in bed with big business.
That doesn’t mean it’s OK to steal. Robin Hood - you know the story of Robin Hood, ya? Stole from the rich and gave to the poor? But he didn’t, not at all. Robin Hood was a friend of King Richard, the richest of all. He took back what the Sherriff stole from the people - which isn’t theft. You cannot steal that in which does not belong to you.
And your claims are grand so they require grand evidence. What is an example of a large business stealing from individuals on a grand scale? Disliking your pay or disliking the cost of goods/services isn’t theft, that’s consensual adult human interaction. If you don’t like the deal, don’t consent to it. You can vote with your wallet and labor.
You can’t vote while you’re starving. Wage theft is theft
Theft is theft. What theft is, fundamentally, is when a person enacts an action upon another in which violates the will of the other within a logical order of operations as it pertains to their property.
For example, if you find a diamond in the woods that nobody else even knows exists and you desire exclusive authority over it then you own it. You don’t own it because I say so, you own it through a logical system because it literally cannot exist in any other feasible structure that isn’t wholly arbitrary. You own it because you did not violate the will of another in order to own it, and you own it because you desire to own it.
If someone else came along and picked up a rock that was lying next to that diamond and you do not care at all about it, then you did not own that rock to begin with and thus, the other person did not rob you in order to claim ownership over that rock.
But if you are with that diamond and someone else comes along and thinks they deserve that diamond more than you but the only way they can manifest their desire of exclusive authority over the diamond is to engage in an action of which violates your will, they would need to steal it from you, and you cannot own that in which you’ve stolen, nor can you steal that in which you own.
No other claim can be made rationally that dictates who should own that diamond. It doesn’t matter if the other person has 10 other diamonds and you have none. It doesn’t matter if that other person has food and you do not and that diamond could get you food. None of that matters, and you actually agree that it doesn’t matter because you already understand and act out in this world per a cardinal rule that you could never suffer another to violate your will, whatever it might be.
This is like the golden rule but ‘The Golden Rule’ is the ethical principle of treating others as you would want to be treated, but that concept is wholly flawed, because it does not take into account that humans have conflicting wills. Maybe I want to be punched in the fact, so the golden rule would then stipulate that I get to punch you in the face. Or what if you want a beautiful woman to have sex with you, do I get to rape her, then?
This principle is similar to the golden rule except that you have to understand that it is go unto others as THEY would want you to do to them, plus a little extra. More or less, human conflicts of wills are always contradictory and there are only two ways to resolve a will conflict, either arbitrary, or logically.
We both want X but only one of us can have X. How do we figure out who gets X?
Well I can murder you and take X, and that’s arbitrary because I just decided I want X more which is not a quantifiable stance. OR we understand that if I had X first I would not want you to take it from me and since you have X first, realizing this, I choose not to take it from you. That is the fundamental principle of ownership vs. theft.
Theft is when will is violated as it pertains to ownership. Ownership is a desire to own where you did not violate the will of another to obtain exclusive authority over. it’s that simple.
Everything else is nonsense.
we both can have X if we work together against the bourgeoise
This is nonsense though. There is no bourgeoise. Bourgeoise is a placeholder for whatever it is you decide it is. I’ve studied Marx extensively. Marx’s constructs were fundamentally rooted in a notion outlined in an older age where there were individuals who owned things like factories, and workers in those factories. Today, what constitutes as capitol could be construed as anything that can make someone money. My computer is capitol, because I make a lot of money with it. in fact, different leftists will argue this exact concept. The “movement” can’t even all agree on what socialism should start as and what the end-game of communism would actually be.
The notion of communism is in no small part utterly nonsensical. The spiritual concept of communism being a system without government or money, but to stipulate that is to assert a nonsense argument and shows a lack of fundmental understanding of what either government or money is.
Government could be fundamentally described as any relative force monopoly. If the formal government dissolved tomorrow and the people in my neighborhood got together and agreed to protect one another from others vandalizing, stealing, or doing harm to the people therein, that is a small government. If another neighboring government came with threats of violence and overtook them and forced their rules upon them, that was just a small war where one government prevailed. You cannot “do away with government”. Money is similar. You cannot do away with money. Money isn’t even real. Roughly 90 to 92% of the world’s money is actually digital - 1’s and 0’s. It isn’t real stuff, it’s basically some kind of merit that trades had happened or are promised to happen in the future. If I mow your lawn in the summer and come winter ask you to plow my driveway and you keep refusing, I’ll mentally tally how unwilling to return my favors to you are until eventually I start refusing to help you. This is money - it’s just another way of looking at it.
Removing money means removing hierarchy, and that isn’t possible. The mere thought that you believe communism is even a workable system in concept shows a lack of understanding of concept. There isn’t a single human alive who will not put things into a hierarchical structure of some sort based on how they feel in the moment or their fears of the future, whatever they may be.
If we both want X we have to figure out how X is made and either work together to make X or trade consensually with those who can make X.
What is bad? Murder, rape, theft, fraud. We can work together to stop the bad. That should be our goal. In doing so, we will, through proxy, reduce the problems that arise in our modern societies.
Holy fuck are you doingthestuff’s new account since his got nuked for being Nazi bootlicking scum like you?
I don’t know who that is. I’m not a Nazi. I am anti-government, in fact.
So anti-government that you want them to come and prosecute someone who allegedly stole a pack of diapers?
Lol. Lmao.
I never said that.
A cop’s role should be to analyze a situation and if given probable cause, make an arrest. That detained individual is then given a trial - assuming the victim(s) wants to press charges - and if convicted of the crime through due process, punished accordingly.
I never once said what I felt should have happened in this particular situation. Not once. In fact, I’ve openly admitted that I do not have enough information to know what went wrong.
If police are gonna shoot babies for shoplifting, then I’m not gonna report shoplifting :P
Now this I would agree with 100%.
No. No you wouldn’t, that’s a lie, you just now said you disagreed with that concept entirely.
You literally just said the opposite of that. The exact opposite of that. You just now said that stealing is always wrong and should always be stopped.
It should always be stopped. There’s a difference between what is objectively moral and what is subjectively moral.
Theft is objectively immoral.
Stealing to feed your children is subjectively moral and objectively immoral.
Both can be true at the same time.
The reason why theft is objectively moral is because you would never want anyone to violate your will and thus, you should never want to violate the will of another.
Well said, Inspector Javert. Enjoy your downvotes.
Oh my goodness, downvotes? :)
Do people really care about that? That seems so utterly petty and ridiculous.
Theft is immoral, correct. But taking back what was stolen is not
I agree completely, but you need to understand cardinally, what the fundamental essence of the constructs of the ideas of ownership and theft are, which I’ve outlined twice I believe, in this thread.
If ownership is arbitrary - thus, it is whatever a ruling class stipulates, then theft is arbitrary. I, as the ruler, can simply tell you what ownership is, so I can take from you, say you didn’t own it, then declare that what I did is not theft. The state already does this universally throughout the world today in the form of taxation.
But that is a semantics problem, not an ideas problem. Theft and ownership remain only what they CAN be logically, not what someone arbitrarily thinks they are. You cannot own that in which is stolen and you cannot steal that in which you own. To own, you require two fundamental criteria: Desire to own, and that you have not engaged in any actions of which violated the will of another within a logical order of operations as pertaining to that thing.
Theft is any act of which violates the will of another as it pertains to property.
In short, if I desire to own a thing nobody else desires, I own it. If you come along and want it and I do not want to give it to you, you have to rob me in order to get it. There is no alternative. Saying you deserve it more because of X, Y, or Z is irrelevant. Even if I own 10,000 years of food for example and you’re starving, this does not mean to stole your food and you’re just taking it back.
So if you’re going to make a claim of theft, you have to be able to both support it logically, AND support it with evidence. For example, how is Walmart stealing from you? Because it won’t give you the deal you want if you were to seek consensual employment? That isn’t theft.
If I have food and I want $100 for it and you want me to give it to you for $10 I’m not robbing you. You don’t get my property without my consent. I have to either agree to gift it to you, sell/trade it to you, or throw it away so I no longer want it whereas you claim it after. Anything other means of which you obtain exclusive authority over my property is theft.
if you hoarde 10,000 years of food whilst everyone else is starving, …
But what’s the situation here?
What if we know a famine is coming and so I create a food stand and sell burgers at $5 a burger to everyone and 1 billion people buy a burger from me when they could have bought something else to eat pre-famine. Now I’ve made 5 billion dollars (we’re going to greatly simplify this thought experiment) and I buy up tons of food.
How did I obtain all of that food? Well, 1 billion people consented to a trade with me for burgers in exchange for money. So now what if those people all get together and say, we want you to give us 50% of your food!
Well, why the hell did you all consent to $5 a burger then? You could have literally negotiated it at $2.50 a burger and then saved the other $2.50, couldn’t you? Or why didn’t you all buy $1.00 salads at the other shop instead and save up the remaining $4.00? Do you understand that to demand what I have now is to simply say you consented to $5 then decided to show back up with a mob and threaten me unless I sold it for $2.50? And what if I wouldn’t have consented to $2.50 so I stopped selling burgers and went out of business? Then everyone could have just got that $1 salad instead and saved that money for future food.
So now we’re in a famine and people are without food and I’m to blame because I have food? I need to give everyone back because everyone changed their mind due to future circumstances?
And hell, I would personally be more than happy to help GOOD people in need, but how do I know who’s good? Would you feed the child rapist if you had the food? Would you let them into your home and feed them? Or just expect someone else to do all of that for you and assume you’re playing your part because you vote and get taxed?
So some people don’t deserve your food even if you have an abundance, do they? And what if I let someone into my home and they don’t just take what I offer, but they try to take all of it? What if they try to kill me and my family? Should I trust the next person who comes by asking for food? If a mob shows up at my door with pitchforks and demands - the same ones who CONSENTED to pay me for my burgers before, do I just open my doors happily?
You’re simplifying a hugely complex construct. Life isn’t as simple as this and people aren’t as trustworthy as this. I’d see all rapists and murderers dead. The ONLY reason I am actually NOT in favor of the death penalty is because I do not want a single innocent person murdered for something they did not do. If we had an unequivocal way of knowing rapists and murderers committed the acts, I would say immediate death penalty for each and every one without question.
Not all human life has the same value. We all know this and we all live this way, we just don’t want to think about it and certainly don’t want to talk about it in public because it’s not the politically correct thing to talk about.
I would feed the child rapist
And that would be your choice, but then what? Do you let them share a bed with your child? Or do you even have limits? Do you detain them and cage them after? Do you just let them go free? What if it was your child they raped?
the burgeoise steal billions of dollars a year in wage theft. All humans deserve food and water.
But this is only your opinion, not an objective fact of life.
Do ALL humans deserve food and water? What about child rapists? And if you say yes even to that, what about child rapists who are not incarcerated? Does the child rapist who is currently raping a child right now deserve life? If you had a gun and you were there to stop it and you couldn’t stop it without the gun, would you kill that rapist?
I hope so, and if so, then what you’re declaring there is that you DO have limits on who deserves what and it has nothing to do with being human and everything to do with what KIND of human you are. We all do this all the time, but most people haven’t given it any level of high-end thought, so it defaults to this generic idea of “human life has value”, which is nonsense.
SOME human life has value. Did Hitler’s life have value? Did it when he was 1 years old? How about 10? 20? Pre Nazi Germany? Post? Where’s the line? When does he stop being deserving of life? You know the answer, or at the very least you’re likely not so stubborn or stupid to think you don’t have some idea.
And therein lies the rub. You’re saying that you - the wise and just ruler - will take from me - the sinister and selfish barbarian - because you see me as such as see yourself as ordained to make decisions you believe me incapable of making. This just makes you an unjust and unethical tyrant.
You are entitled to NOTHING from me unless I agree, and therein lies your fundamental problem in this argument. You are not all wise and understanding of all that which is just and moral. You are a human, possibly not even as moral or educated as I am. For all we know, YOU are the barbarian in this conversation but your ego will refute that until our last typed words.
Being able to accept that you do NOT have all the answers and that other people are NOT the barbarians so long as they don’t do as your worldview pervades is a step closer to understanding how to live an actually just and moral life. There are other ways to see and live a human life and one of those does not intrinsically have to be that other people value what you value in the manner in which you value them.
I can see for instance, my life’s work as having more value than the life of a rapist. But it’s just work. But it’s also my life. So we’re comparing the fruits of one life to the fruits of another. Maybe my life’s work is a cure for cancer, or maybe it’s just a new alternator for a Toyota. It isn’t for you to choose how I value - my property can hold more value than a human life if I want it to, because it’s MY value.
And you’re free to disagree with me, and so be it! So give up your money and feed and water whomever you like. I will do the same, and maybe I’ll feed more than you will, or less, but the bottom line is you do not have the right to tell me what is valuable and what isn’t. That notion is nonsensical, not to mention irrational.
Human life is not negotiable and debatable. That is it. Humans deserve to live. “My property is worth more than human life” is not a respectable opinion.
That’s your opinion.
The life of a child rapist has no value - that is my opinion.
There is no such thing as an objective value of human life. The mere notion that you could believe that a child rapist’s life has value is not a respectable opinion to me either, and neither of us are ordained by some god to be the wiser here in what is a respectable opinion.
Did Hitler’s life have value? How much value, exactly? If killing him would save the lives of others, did his life have less value? If so, then you’re already agreeing that you have a measurement for human value. What about Hitler at 1 years old? 10 years? After he became the Nazi dictator? So Hitler’s life has different value levels depending on his choices? Would you kill someone else if it was the only way to save the life of your child or significant other? If so, then you are also enacting a relative and arbitrary structure of human value onto others. My guess is you already do this but wouldn’t admit it here because it would nullify your previous statement there, which would make you feel foolish.
So you value the way you want to value and I will value the way I want to value. And if you try to stop me from killing a child rapist who enters my home I will kill you for being evil and trying to stop me from protecting my family from evil, because in my view, that renders you too, as evil.
But I’m not about to go seek you out for your values. I would only use violence to protect myself, my family, or the innocent. As a good person, I believe I should not be made to suffer the existence of a rapist or murderer. Goodliness and weakness are not an intrinsic combination.
Also, gods don’t exist, so if your argument is related to some kind of god-being, just know I am **always **going to throw your argument out the window.
Hitlers life had the same value during his entire lifetime. I would shoot to disable (for the child rapist question) and yes, a child rapist deserves life and rehabilitation
You didn’t answer my questions though.
You dodged because you’re not stupid enough to not understand the ramifications against your ego.
You will either dodge entirely, or make some other quandary up like, “there’s always a non-violent way”. Which is false. Sometimes the only way to stop someone from committing an atrocity is to kill them.
What would you have done in the case of some of these school shootings if you were there and armed? Would you just try and talk to the shooter, who is probably undergoing some level of psychosis, who while you’re talking, is currently murdering children? Or do you shoot them to save lives?
If you cannot answer that question and do it honestly, just admit that. Don’t give me some spiel here about how you would find a way to win over their heart and get them to not kill kids. If that is truly your outlook then you are delusional. It’s that simple.
