Man, people should have a right to defend their shit. The idea that someone should be allowed to take your things in front of you and you should be charged if you beat them up is pretty unhinged tbh
There are people who steal no matter how wealthy or comfortable they are. Theft is not stopped by making people happy. Reduced significantly, yes. But absolutely not stopped. Wage theft is the largest form of theft in the world, done exclusively by the better off and rich. Never forget that
(And yes, I’m saying that people should have the right to beat up their employers to get back their stolen money)
Man, it’s just shit. Life should be of higher value than an object, even if it’s a really cool object or useful. You beating someone for taking something is a bigger problem then things being taken. You can’t commit a crime because someone else also committed a crime first. Get it?
What’s really lost in this whole conversation is how its… 2025 and almost nobody walks around with cash anymore?
You can literally call your bank and credit card companies and have all your cards cancelled and locked within minutes? Any money spent by the thief will be returned to your accounts?
If it’s your phone stolen instead of your wallet… You didn’t have it set to be locked or auto-lock when theft is detected? You didn’t have find your device set up? You don’t have it set to be able to be remotely wiped? Pretty sure you can also get your phone insured for theft.
One of the few valuable things Tyler Durden said in Fight Club was “You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis.” Yet Americans still love to extend the concept of who they are to the things they own.
Insurance exists to allow thieves to get off with your stuff with no recourse? Ignoring anything that could be unrecoverable ~ and that insurance is overpriced for it.
What about a pickpocket that stole a stupid iPhone from a rich teen who would get a new one the very next day? And, in some less frequent cases, the pickpocket may have had actual needs like buying medicine…
That’s the reason we have a judicial system. Not even police are supposed to do harm, only prevent harm and bring into justice system.
I know the system has many flaws. That’s beyond the point. Those who prefer to go vigilante are calling for making it worse. Specially if we take into account the effects of inequality on a hands-on self-service judicial approach…
Why can’t the pickpocket go get a job and buy his own damn iPhone. My stuff is mine, you try to take it and I’ll hit you. This is like basic human behavior.
What about a pickpocket that stole a stupid iPhone from a rich teen who would get a new one the very next day? And, in some less frequent cases, the pickpocket may have had actual needs like buying medicine…
How’s the pickpocket to know the person in question’s situation? That’s one of the top justifications scammers in india use as to why they pretend what they do is reasonable. But reality is they don’t know, and they don’t care. They’ll steal from anyone.
I know the system has many flaws. That’s beyond the point.
That isn’t beyond the point. That is the point.
Also you can make up sob stories about those people all day if you want to. Got nothing to do with reality but if you like to feel sad for them knock yourself out.
USian checking in, and you’re absolutely right. We somehow have the biggest police budget, while simultaneously having the most violent crimes & incarceration rates of all the developed nations.
The other day, I was learning about the private prison system in the UK. It was grim seeing how that whole process leads to the proliferation of crime. Things are a damn sight better here than in the US, but it’s clear that our current trajectory is taking us closer to the US on that front.
It’s a self reinforcing cycle, because the rhetoric of crime leads to the proliferation of prisons, and a system that finds it profitable to criminalise people. I’m not even talking about prisons in terms of rehabilitation Vs punitive justice here, but almost the stage before that — people who probably shouldn’t be considered criminals at all. I suppose what I am positing is that we should be applying preventative medicine" lens towards crime and criminals. But of course, where’s the profit in actually addressing socioeconomic inequities?
My most American belief is that society fell apart when we got rid of dueling. Assholes need the threat of violent retribution to contain their assholery, and without that, they just shit everywhere.
Of course, that belief falls apart the minute that you realize that assholes can be good at dueling, too…
It also falls apart when dueling did not generally cross classes. If you were a rich guy your “defense of your honor” was either petty or eliminating competition, sometimes both. No poor person was going to take out a “rich asshole” by any other means than being charged with murder. The only violent retribution available to the masses is revolt accompanied by a guillotine.
The public largely supported the abolition of duelling. The reason it disappeared was because it was largely associated with slave owners in the south and it disappeared after they lost the Civil War.
Watching 60 days in is an absolutely insane thing to watch as a non american. People living like cockroaches in moldy shit stained rooms. People just sleep on the floor because they are over capacity, violence, food that looks just downright like a hazard to eat. And people in there are like: yeah, i’ve been here 10 times. I can’t get a job so i do crime and then i land here again. Or guys like: i grew some weed, so obviously i’m in this slave hole for 10 years.
What I find worse is how many Americans refuse to accept that our society can and should treat prisoners better. Like I’m not advocating for luxury hotels or unrestricted freedoms for them, just humane conditions, reasonable sentence lengths, and a focus on rehabilitation. What we’re doing isn’t working and is a stain on our collective soul.
Though I will say most Americans have odd understandings of quality of life. Owning a car is seen as so fundamental that people feel attacked at the idea of building cities where it’s not a necessity, while the idea that we should provide free meals to schoolchildren or providing medicine to prisoners is seen by many as government waste. Even our fundamental and foundational rights such as state appointed lawyers for the indigent accused of crimes are nickel and dimed to uselessness, and the idea of providing these lawyers for all accused who want them is seen as radical.
This is hardly a bright side to the fucked up cloud that is the modern prison system, but something I have found notable is that some of the most interesting stuff about restorative justice has come from American scholars and activists. It’s notable to me because whilst America seems to distill all the things I hate most about how society treats crime and prisoners, I recognise a heckton of these things in the justice systems of other countries too — including my own. However, there does not seem to be as much appetite for digging into these problematic aspects in countries where things are perceived to be on the more moderate side.
Like I say, it’s hardly a “bright side”, but I think there isn’t an easy answer to “how do we respond to people who transgress against society?”. Even if we agree that we should focus on rehabilitation, the question of how to do that is a pretty complex one. It would be wrong to say that I’m hopeful when there’s so much fucked up stuff deeply entrenched in modern justice systems (especially the American one), but I do feel bolstered by how much I have personally had my perspectives challenged by the aforementioned scholars and activists resisting unjust “justice” in the US.
Yeah I’ve been seeing a lot of folks act like all Americans are absolute barbarians who revel in our nation’s cruelty, but prison abolitionists still operate here and plenty of communities here are actually putting rubber to road for rehabilitative justice.
And as you say, it’s fucking hard. You want to give people chances but you need to prioritize victims safety and rights, and the fact is there are bad actors in every group. And that’s not even getting into situations where life is a hell of a lot easier when you keep giving one person more and more chances.
I’ve been fortunate enough to know some folks in the prison ab scene and they’re good folks trying to do right by the sorts of folks nobody else is gonna. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you can judge a society by how it treats its criminals. Who will defend the unsympathetic? Someone’s gotta, otherwise you’re a hop skip and a jump away from having a role where the worst people can get official sanction to be their worst selves. Round here the prison guards are often just as bad of people as the prisoner.
The saddest/funniest thing to me about this whole bit is how every. single. US. person defending their right to righteously beat the shit out of someone for picking their pocket never, ever, even considers the idea that they might lose.
It’s just like gun owners in general. They all think they’re a perfect shot and the other guy must be like a Storm Trooper in Star Wars and can’t hit the broad side of a barn.
Everyone thinks they’re the hero and that they don’t need cops and laws until they’re the one bleeding out in an alleyway on the verge of death because they were stupid enough to “fight back.”
US Americans are completely fucking unhinged and live in a fantasy land where somehow every single one of them is the biggest and strongest with the biggest dick and will always win because their cause is righteous.What a crock of shit.
Willingness to stand up for oneself is not necessarily the same as one overestimating their ability to fight.
I was bullied regularly as a kid. I was no match at all for most of the bullies, they easily had strength, size, numbers, and fighting experience over me, but since the schools wouldn’t or couldn’t do a damn thing to protect me, especially when the bullies followed me well away from school grounds, the only choices I had were to either endure it, or to try to change the situation by standing up for myself. Even if I got my ass beat even worse just for standing up for myself, at the very least it made it clear to them that I was no longer guaranteed to be a frictionless target and that sometimes changes things for the better.
It’s not about winning. It’s about putting up the fight, because the potential outcomes of not fighting back aren’t always much better than standing up for oneself.
That said, I personally wouldn’t want to put a foreign trip in jeopardy by assaulting anyone if it wasn’t an actual self defense situation, much like back at home. I’m just responding to this idea that willingness to fight is not the same thing as being overly confident that one will come out on top.
I don’t think you understand what it’s like to be constantly bullied and constantly on guard. At some point there is no concept of “worse”. At some point there is only the sense of “literally anything in the world except this.”
As do I. Sometimes the bullies genuinely have the upper hand. Like the Nazis versus the people in their concentration camps. Fighting back just lead to more violent retribution against those who were already being mistreated. You can’t magic your way into suddenly winning a losing battle. It’s absurdity after absurdity in here.
Fighting back just lead to more violent retribution against those who were already being mistreated
This is what I meant when I said there’s no “worse”, just “different”. In a concentration or extermination camp I think it’s insane to blame any of the victims for what their captors do.
Omg, this turned out to be a thread with plenty explanations to USians that societies have laws, police, judges…
You can blame the orange guy all you want, but your culture is completely derailed. Murder (under whatever “reasons”) can’t be a national sport.
Weapon manufacturers really did a good job in the land of the free…
I mean obviously the gun laws are insane but the act of collectively beating the shit out of pickpockets has my respect.
Violent retribution as a core principle might contribute to your completely insane murder rates.
Man, people should have a right to defend their shit. The idea that someone should be allowed to take your things in front of you and you should be charged if you beat them up is pretty unhinged tbh
I fully disagree and enjoy living in a society free of such barbaric tendencies.
Make your people happy and maybe they’ll stop stealing your shit.
There are people who steal no matter how wealthy or comfortable they are. Theft is not stopped by making people happy. Reduced significantly, yes. But absolutely not stopped. Wage theft is the largest form of theft in the world, done exclusively by the better off and rich. Never forget that
(And yes, I’m saying that people should have the right to beat up their employers to get back their stolen money)
Also not really a thing here, and that’s fucking insane
It is a thing there, in fact.
Not nearly at the same scale. Unions actually work and the legal system isn’t designed to benefit the rich.
Welfare is a thing!
Where do you live? I want your shit
Not rhetorical, I personally want your shit
I bet you would, but assuming you’re American, you’ll never get anywhere close to it
Where is that? Turkmenistan? Russia? Bhutan?
It’s Denmark. Let’s compare literally any statistic and see how your third world country fares
Man, it’s just shit. Life should be of higher value than an object, even if it’s a really cool object or useful. You beating someone for taking something is a bigger problem then things being taken. You can’t commit a crime because someone else also committed a crime first. Get it?
Quite simply, that should be the thief’s decision to make. It’s their risk to undertake, it was their decision to make that choice to rob and steal.
Legality is not morality.
What’s really lost in this whole conversation is how its… 2025 and almost nobody walks around with cash anymore?
You can literally call your bank and credit card companies and have all your cards cancelled and locked within minutes? Any money spent by the thief will be returned to your accounts?
If it’s your phone stolen instead of your wallet… You didn’t have it set to be locked or auto-lock when theft is detected? You didn’t have find your device set up? You don’t have it set to be able to be remotely wiped? Pretty sure you can also get your phone insured for theft.
One of the few valuable things Tyler Durden said in Fight Club was “You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis.” Yet Americans still love to extend the concept of who they are to the things they own.
People are fucking unhinged, man.
No individual should be expected to use insurance to protect themselves from theft as a solution to it. That’s a crazy take.
That’s literally why insurance exists and is a foundational principle in most modern societies, but uhm, go ahead and keep living in the stone age.
Insurance exists to allow thieves to get off with your stuff with no recourse? Ignoring anything that could be unrecoverable ~ and that insurance is overpriced for it.
Insurance is to spread out risk over time to prevent ruinous losses. So every time you make a claim, your rates will go up.
What about a pickpocket that stole a stupid iPhone from a rich teen who would get a new one the very next day? And, in some less frequent cases, the pickpocket may have had actual needs like buying medicine…
That’s the reason we have a judicial system. Not even police are supposed to do harm, only prevent harm and bring into justice system.
I know the system has many flaws. That’s beyond the point. Those who prefer to go vigilante are calling for making it worse. Specially if we take into account the effects of inequality on a hands-on self-service judicial approach…
Likewise, a pickpocketing victim may also need to buy medicine.
Are you actually defending thieves?
Why can’t the pickpocket go get a job and buy his own damn iPhone. My stuff is mine, you try to take it and I’ll hit you. This is like basic human behavior.
But the judicial system famously doesn’t differentiate between people doing what they need to for good reasons and those doing it for bad reasons…
Wouldn’t that be factoring in motive and mitigating circumstances during sentencing?
Fuck Em.
How’s the pickpocket to know the person in question’s situation? That’s one of the top justifications scammers in india use as to why they pretend what they do is reasonable. But reality is they don’t know, and they don’t care. They’ll steal from anyone.
That isn’t beyond the point. That is the point.
Also you can make up sob stories about those people all day if you want to. Got nothing to do with reality but if you like to feel sad for them knock yourself out.
USian checking in, and you’re absolutely right. We somehow have the biggest police budget, while simultaneously having the most violent crimes & incarceration rates of all the developed nations.
there’s no “somehow” about it. police don’t stop crime.
Right, they punish ex post facto & not judicially
The other day, I was learning about the private prison system in the UK. It was grim seeing how that whole process leads to the proliferation of crime. Things are a damn sight better here than in the US, but it’s clear that our current trajectory is taking us closer to the US on that front.
It’s a self reinforcing cycle, because the rhetoric of crime leads to the proliferation of prisons, and a system that finds it profitable to criminalise people. I’m not even talking about prisons in terms of rehabilitation Vs punitive justice here, but almost the stage before that — people who probably shouldn’t be considered criminals at all. I suppose what I am positing is that we should be applying preventative medicine" lens towards crime and criminals. But of course, where’s the profit in actually addressing socioeconomic inequities?
My most American belief is that society fell apart when we got rid of dueling. Assholes need the threat of violent retribution to contain their assholery, and without that, they just shit everywhere.
Of course, that belief falls apart the minute that you realize that assholes can be good at dueling, too…
It also falls apart when dueling did not generally cross classes. If you were a rich guy your “defense of your honor” was either petty or eliminating competition, sometimes both. No poor person was going to take out a “rich asshole” by any other means than being charged with murder. The only violent retribution available to the masses is revolt accompanied by a guillotine.
Very true.
The public largely supported the abolition of duelling. The reason it disappeared was because it was largely associated with slave owners in the south and it disappeared after they lost the Civil War.
When seconds matter, the police are only minutes away.
And now the police (ICE) are disappearing people. Can you blame people for wanting guns?
Watching 60 days in is an absolutely insane thing to watch as a non american. People living like cockroaches in moldy shit stained rooms. People just sleep on the floor because they are over capacity, violence, food that looks just downright like a hazard to eat. And people in there are like: yeah, i’ve been here 10 times. I can’t get a job so i do crime and then i land here again. Or guys like: i grew some weed, so obviously i’m in this slave hole for 10 years.
What I find worse is how many Americans refuse to accept that our society can and should treat prisoners better. Like I’m not advocating for luxury hotels or unrestricted freedoms for them, just humane conditions, reasonable sentence lengths, and a focus on rehabilitation. What we’re doing isn’t working and is a stain on our collective soul.
Though I will say most Americans have odd understandings of quality of life. Owning a car is seen as so fundamental that people feel attacked at the idea of building cities where it’s not a necessity, while the idea that we should provide free meals to schoolchildren or providing medicine to prisoners is seen by many as government waste. Even our fundamental and foundational rights such as state appointed lawyers for the indigent accused of crimes are nickel and dimed to uselessness, and the idea of providing these lawyers for all accused who want them is seen as radical.
This is hardly a bright side to the fucked up cloud that is the modern prison system, but something I have found notable is that some of the most interesting stuff about restorative justice has come from American scholars and activists. It’s notable to me because whilst America seems to distill all the things I hate most about how society treats crime and prisoners, I recognise a heckton of these things in the justice systems of other countries too — including my own. However, there does not seem to be as much appetite for digging into these problematic aspects in countries where things are perceived to be on the more moderate side.
Like I say, it’s hardly a “bright side”, but I think there isn’t an easy answer to “how do we respond to people who transgress against society?”. Even if we agree that we should focus on rehabilitation, the question of how to do that is a pretty complex one. It would be wrong to say that I’m hopeful when there’s so much fucked up stuff deeply entrenched in modern justice systems (especially the American one), but I do feel bolstered by how much I have personally had my perspectives challenged by the aforementioned scholars and activists resisting unjust “justice” in the US.
Yeah I’ve been seeing a lot of folks act like all Americans are absolute barbarians who revel in our nation’s cruelty, but prison abolitionists still operate here and plenty of communities here are actually putting rubber to road for rehabilitative justice.
And as you say, it’s fucking hard. You want to give people chances but you need to prioritize victims safety and rights, and the fact is there are bad actors in every group. And that’s not even getting into situations where life is a hell of a lot easier when you keep giving one person more and more chances.
I’ve been fortunate enough to know some folks in the prison ab scene and they’re good folks trying to do right by the sorts of folks nobody else is gonna. And I’ve come to the conclusion that you can judge a society by how it treats its criminals. Who will defend the unsympathetic? Someone’s gotta, otherwise you’re a hop skip and a jump away from having a role where the worst people can get official sanction to be their worst selves. Round here the prison guards are often just as bad of people as the prisoner.
have they tried not doing crime?
The saddest/funniest thing to me about this whole bit is how every. single. US. person defending their right to righteously beat the shit out of someone for picking their pocket never, ever, even considers the idea that they might lose.
It’s just like gun owners in general. They all think they’re a perfect shot and the other guy must be like a Storm Trooper in Star Wars and can’t hit the broad side of a barn.
Everyone thinks they’re the hero and that they don’t need cops and laws until they’re the one bleeding out in an alleyway on the verge of death because they were stupid enough to “fight back.”
US Americans are completely fucking unhinged and live in a fantasy land where somehow every single one of them is the biggest and strongest with the biggest dick and will always win because their cause is righteous. What a crock of shit.
Willingness to stand up for oneself is not necessarily the same as one overestimating their ability to fight.
I was bullied regularly as a kid. I was no match at all for most of the bullies, they easily had strength, size, numbers, and fighting experience over me, but since the schools wouldn’t or couldn’t do a damn thing to protect me, especially when the bullies followed me well away from school grounds, the only choices I had were to either endure it, or to try to change the situation by standing up for myself. Even if I got my ass beat even worse just for standing up for myself, at the very least it made it clear to them that I was no longer guaranteed to be a frictionless target and that sometimes changes things for the better.
It’s not about winning. It’s about putting up the fight, because the potential outcomes of not fighting back aren’t always much better than standing up for oneself.
That said, I personally wouldn’t want to put a foreign trip in jeopardy by assaulting anyone if it wasn’t an actual self defense situation, much like back at home. I’m just responding to this idea that willingness to fight is not the same thing as being overly confident that one will come out on top.
And a lot of times it changes it for the worse, too. What even is this argument?
I don’t think you understand what it’s like to be constantly bullied and constantly on guard. At some point there is no concept of “worse”. At some point there is only the sense of “literally anything in the world except this.”
And I think you’d be shocked to find out how wrong you are. You’re describing my high school years. Guess what? Fighting back made it worse.
I’m genuinely sorry to hear that and I’m glad you made it out of there. But I stand by my point.
As do I. Sometimes the bullies genuinely have the upper hand. Like the Nazis versus the people in their concentration camps. Fighting back just lead to more violent retribution against those who were already being mistreated. You can’t magic your way into suddenly winning a losing battle. It’s absurdity after absurdity in here.
This is what I meant when I said there’s no “worse”, just “different”. In a concentration or extermination camp I think it’s insane to blame any of the victims for what their captors do.
I think it’s actually a symptom of a small penis. Huge truck, big gun, itty bitty peepee.
People!! Ugh. Downvoting me is letting your internalized opression taking over your moral!
I don’t downvote much. I logged in today just so I could downvote you.
Not sure why other folks did it, but for me, you seemed to like the attention.