I’m sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that

Friday, May 28th, 2021

Starship Troopers by Robert HeinleinCommenter Kirk recently suggested that I address Heinlein’s Starship Troopers — or certain parts of it, which address an article he shared:

If Isegoria wanted to treat the bits and pieces of the referenced work (Starship Troopers, R.A. Heinlein) that don’t address his hypothetical “future government by veterans” in a manner similar to how he has done Fehrenbach’s seminal work, I think it would be a good idea.

Starship Troopers has aspects that tend to distract people reading it from the ground truths that were contained therein, some of which the linked article mentions. The overall trend towards “de-civilization” that Heinlein outlines as the backstory/justification for the world he creates in the book is something you can observe going on all around you, in the general insanity prevailing the day.

I have my doubts about the prescription he came up with, but the bastard damn sure got the diagnosis right…

Long-time readers — and new-but-astute readers — might realize that I’ve discussed Heinlein here many, many times.

Heinlein’s Starship Troopers presents many ideas through the character of Mr. Dubois:

I thought about it during the last session of our class in History and Moral Philosophy. H. & M. P. was different from other courses in that everybody had to take it but nobody had to pass it — and Mr. Dubois never seemed to care whether he got through to us or not. He would just point at you with the stump of his left arm (he never bothered with names) and snap a question. Then the argument would start.

But on the last day he seemed to be trying to find out what we had learned. One girl told him bluntly: “My mother says that violence never settles anything.”

“So?” Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. “I’m sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that. Why doesn’t your mother tell them so? Or why don’t you?”

They had tangled before — since you couldn’t flunk the course, it wasn’t necessary to keep Mr. Dubois buttered up. She said shrilly, “You’re making fun of me! Everybody knows that Carthage was destroyed!”

“You seemed to be unaware of it,” he said grimly. “Since you do know it, wouldn’t you say that violence had settled their destinies rather thoroughly? However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue — and thoroughly immoral — doctrine that `violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.”

He sighed. “Another year, another class — and, for me, another failure. One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think.”

You can quickly see why Heinlein’s Starship Troopers would get labelled fascistit mocks communism:

He had been droning along about “value,” comparing the Marxist theory with the orthodox “use” theory. Mr. Dubois had said, “Of course, the Marxian definition of value is ridiculous. All the work one cares to add will not turn a mud pie into an apple tart; it remains a mud pie, value zero. By corollary, unskillful work can easily subtract value; an untalented cook can turn wholesome dough and fresh green apples, valuable already, into an inedible mess, value zero. Conversely, a great chef can fashion of those same materials a confection of greater value than a commonplace apple tart, with no more effort than an ordinary cook uses to prepare an ordinary sweet.

“These kitchen illustrations demolish the Marxian theory of value — the fallacy from which the entire magnificent fraud of communism derives — and to illustrate the truth of the common-sense definition as measured in terms of use.”

Dubois had waved his stump at us. “Nevertheless — wake up, back there! — nevertheless the disheveled old mystic of Das Kapital, turgid, tortured, confused, and neurotic, unscientific, illogical, this pompous fraud Karl Marx, nevertheless had a glimmering of a very important truth. If he had possessed an analytical mind, he might have formulated the first adequate definition of value… and this planet might have been saved endless grief.

“Or might not,” he added. “You!”

I had sat up with a jerk.

“If you can’t listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether ‘value’ is a relative, or an absolute?”

I had been listening; I just didn’t see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn’t read that day’s assignment. “An absolute,” I answered, guessing.

“Wrong,” he said coldly. ” ‘Value’ has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human — ‘market value’ is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible.” (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard “market value” called a “fiction” — snort in disgust, probably.)

“This very personal relationship, ‘value,’ has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him… and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted… and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.” He had been still looking at me and added, “If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier… and much richer. As it is, with some of you, I pity the poverty of your wealth. You! I’ve just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy?”

“Uh, I suppose it would.”

“No dodging, please. You have the prize — here, I’ll write it out: ‘Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.’ ” He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. “There! Are you happy? You value it — or don’t you?”

I was sore. First that dirty crack about rich kids — a typical sneer of those who haven’t got it — and now this farce. I ripped it off and chucked it at him.

Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. “It doesn’t make you happy?”

“You know darn well I placed fourth!”

“Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you… because you haven’t earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it. I trust that some of the somnambulists here understood this little morality play. I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money — which is true — just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself — ultimate cost for perfect value.”

This passage most directly addresses Kirk’s point about our societal decline:

I found myself mulling over a discussion in our class in History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the XXth century.

According to him, there was a time just before they went down the drain when such crimes as Dillinger’s were as common as dogfights. The Terror had not been just in North America — Russia and the British Isles had it, too, as well as other places. But it reached its peak in North America shortly before things went to pieces.

“Law-abiding people,” Dubois had told us, “hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons… to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed.

This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places — these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.”

I had tried to imagine such things happening in our schools. I simply couldn’t. Nor in our parks. A park was a place for fun, not for getting hurt. As for getting killed in one — “Mr. Dubois, didn’t they have police? Or courts?”

“They had many more police than we have. And more courts. All overworked.”

“I guess I don’t get it.” If a boy in our city had done anything half that bad… well, he and his father would have been flogged side by side.

But such things just didn’t happen.

Mr. Dubois then demanded of me, “Define a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ ”

“Uh, one of those kids — the ones who used to beat up people.”

“Wrong.”

“Huh? But the book said — ”

“My apologies. Your textbook does so state. But calling a tail a leg does not make the name fit ‘Juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms, one which gives a clue to their problem and their failure to solve it. Have you ever raised a puppy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you housebreak him?”

“Err… yes, sir. Eventually.” It was my slowness in this that caused my mother to rule that dogs must stay out of the house.

“Ah, yes. When your puppy made mistakes, were you angry?”

“What? Why, he didn’t know any better; he was just a puppy.

“What did you do?”

“Why, I scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him.”

“Surely he could not understand your words?”

“No, but he could tell I was sore at him!”

“But you just said that you were not angry.”

Mr. Dubois had an infuriating way of getting a person mixed up. “No, but I had to make him think I was. He had to learn, didn’t he?”

“Conceded. But, having made it clear to him that you disapproved, how could you be so cruel as to spank him as well? You said the poor beastie didn’t know that he was doing wrong. Yet you indicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?”

I didn’t then know what a sadist was — but I knew pups. “Mr. Dubois, you have to! You scold him so that he knows he’s in trouble, you rub his nose in it so that he will know what trouble you mean, you paddle him so that he darn well won’t do it again — and you have to do it right away! It doesn’t do a bit of good to punish him later; you’ll just confuse him. Even so, he won’t learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle him still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it’s a waste of breath just to scold him.” Then I added, “I guess you’ve never raised pups.”

“Many. I’m raising a dachshund now — by your methods. Let’s get back to those juvenile criminals. The most vicious averaged somewhat younger than you here in this class… and they often started their lawless careers much younger. Let us never forget that puppy. These children were often caught; police arrested batches each day. Were they scolded? Yes, often scathingly. Were their noses rubbed in it? Rarely. News organs and officials usually kept their names secret — in many places the law so required for criminals under eighteen. Were they spanked? Indeed not! Many had never been spanked even as small children; there was a widespread belief that spanking, or any punishment involving pain, did a child permanent psychic damage.”

(I had reflected that my father must never have heard of that theory.)

“Corporal punishment in schools was forbidden by law,” he had gone on.

“Flogging was lawful as sentence of court only in one small province, Delaware, and there only for a few crimes and was rarely invoked; it was regarded as ‘cruel and unusual punishment.’ ” Dubois had mused aloud, “I do not understand objections to ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment. While a judge should be benevolent in purpose, his awards should cause the criminal to suffer, else there is no punishment — and pain is the basic mechanism built into us by millions of years of evolution which safeguards us by warning when something threatens our survival. Why should society refuse to use such a highly perfected survival mechanism? However, that period was loaded with pre-scientific pseudo-psychological nonsense.

“As for ‘unusual,’ punishment must be unusual or it serves no purpose.” He then pointed his stump at another boy. “What would happen if a puppy were spanked every hour?”

“Uh… probably drive him crazy!”

“Probably. It certainly will not teach him anything. How long has it been since the principal of this school last had to switch a pupil?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. About two years. The kid that swiped — ”

“Never mind. Long enough. It means that such punishment is so unusual as to be significant, to deter, to instruct. Back to these young criminals — They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. The usual sequence was: for a first offense, a warning — a scolding, often without trial. After several offenses a sentence of confinement but with sentence suspended and the youngster placed on probation. A boy might be arrested many times and convicted several times before he was punished — and then it would be merely confinement, with others like him from whom he learned still more criminal habits. If he kept out of major trouble while confined, he could usually evade most of even that mild punishment, be given probation — ‘paroled’ in the jargon of the times.

“This incredible sequence could go on for years while his crimes increased in frequency and viciousness, with no punishment whatever save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly, usually by law on his eighteenth birthday, this so-called ‘juvenile delinquent’ becomes an adult criminal — and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder. You — ”

He had singled me out again. “Suppose you merely scolded your puppy, never punished him, let him go on making messes in the house… and occasionally locked him up in an outbuilding but soon let him back into the house with a warning not to do it again. Then one day you notice that he is now a grown dog and still not housebroken — whereupon you whip out a gun and shoot him dead. Comment, please?”

“Why… that’s the craziest way to raise a dog I ever heard of!”

“I agree. Or a child. Whose fault would it be?”

“Uh… why, mine, I guess.”

“Again I agree. But I’m not guessing.”

“Mr. Dubois,” a girl blurted out, “but why? Why didn’t they spank little kids when they needed it and use a good dose of the strap on any older ones who deserved it — the sort of lesson they wouldn’t forget! I mean ones who did things really bad. Why not?”

“I don’t know,” he had answered grimly, “except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to a pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’ It was too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy. I have sometimes wondered if they cherished a vested interest in disorder — but that is unlikely; adults almost always act from conscious ‘highest motives’ no matter what their behavior.”

“But — good heavens!” the girl answered. “I didn’t like being spanked any more than any kid does, but when I needed it, my mama delivered. The only time I ever got a switching in school I got another one when I got home and that was years and years ago. I don’t ever expect to be hauled up in front of a judge and sentenced to a flogging; you behave yourself and such things don’t happen. I don’t see anything wrong with our system; it’s a lot better than not being able to walk outdoors for fear of your life — why, that’s horrible!”

“I agree. Young lady, the tragic wrongness of what those well-meaning people did, contrasted with what they thought they were doing, goes very deep. They had no scientific theory of morals. They did have a theory of morals and they tried to live by it (I should not have sneered at their motives) but their theory was wrong — half of it fuzzy-headed wishful thinking, half of it rationalized charlatanry. The more earnest they were, the farther it led them astray. You see, they assumed that Man has a moral instinct.”

“Sir? But I thought — But he does! I have.”

“No, my dear, you have a cultivated conscience, a most carefully trained one. Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not — and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

These unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. This truth is mathematically demonstrable, everywhere verifiable; it is the single eternal imperative controlling everything we do.”

“But the instinct to survive,” he had gone on, “can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. Young lady, what you miscalled your ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children, when you have them. Of your nation, if you struggle that high up the scale. And so on up. A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.”

“We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.

“These juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures,’ to ‘reach them,’ to ‘spark their moral sense.’ Tosh! They had no ‘better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral.’

“The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.’ ”

“The results should have been predictable, since a human being has no natural rights of any nature.”

Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. “Sir? How about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What ‘right’ to life has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save his own life, does he do so as a matter of ‘right’? If two men are starving and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man’s right is ‘unalienable’? And is it ‘right’? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called ‘natural human rights’ that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.

“The third ‘right’? — the ‘pursuit of happiness’? It is indeed unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can ‘pursue happiness’ as long as my brain lives — but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs, can insure that I will catch it.”

Mr. Dubois then turned to me. “I told you that ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‘Delinquent’ means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue — indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.”

“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’… and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”

Steve Sailer calls Heinlein the Moses of the Nerds and notes that Heinlein was not an ideologue, but rather an artist whose medium was ideas, an intellectual provocateur.

Comments

  1. VXXC says:

    The Light dawns…

    https://theworthyhouse.com/

    This fellow — and he’s a serious man — actually owned a company once upon a time thinks the project is over — very true, ended Jan 20 — and the next likely step is Caesarism. Normal history actually.

    Caesar who? Who cares. Including if it’s ;) Bad Uncle ;) I honestly don’t care what happens to the Progs and their fetching pets now. Let it be ‘bad uncle’, bought this all on themselves. Whatever happens you brought this on yourselves and brought it on all of us.

  2. Goober says:

    I’ve read this passage of the book many times. I used to think it was pure, unadulterated TRUTH.

    But then crime rates started dropping. They’ve been dropping every year. Property crime is down to pre-1960 rates. Murder went from 40 per 100,000 in blacks, to 20. The rate dropped very slightly for whites also, however, it was always pretty low so that comparative change, while similar in total % delta, is small in X per 100,000 delta simply because it was never that big to begin with.

    The upshot here is that the seemingly silly criminal justice system of the “bygone era” described by Heinlein’s grizzled veteran civics instructor here, at least seems to be working, without the need to flog anyone.

    I’m actually not against flogging as a punishment, by the by, for a simple reason: when done in a careful and prescribed way, I feel like it is a much more humane punishment than locking someone in a cage with a group of violent criminals for years of their precious life. It’s quick and punctuated, the punishment is clear and unambiguous, and you aren’t taking a car thief and making him into a violent monster by forcing him into a general population of other monsters.

    I promise you that were I ever nicked for stealing, and was given the choice of a flogging or a year behind bars, I’d jump at the chance to be flogged. A few weeks of pain and recovery, and I have my life back.

    This would at least partially resolve another issue, which is that at least part of the reason our crime rates have dropped so much is that the population of incarcerated people has likewise gone up, which I’m sure has something to do with crime rates going down.

  3. Michael Towns says:

    “But then crime rates started dropping.”

    Have you checked the crime rates recently? Might want to re-think your point.

  4. Szopen says:

    Goober: “But then crime rates started dropping. They’ve been dropping every year. Property crime is down to pre-1960 rates. Murder went from 40 per 100,000 in blacks, to 20.”

    What about incarceration rates? Did they go down too?

  5. Gavin Longmuir says:

    Goober: “Property crime is down to pre-1960 rates.”

    We always have to be careful with FedGov statistics. The potential for “Accurate but misleading” is always there.

    If a San Francisco DA decides to stop prosecuting all kinds of activities such a shoplifting, vandalism, minor thefts; and the police & individuals consequently stop reporting issues or bringing charges — does that mean the crime rate has gone down?

  6. TRX says:

    It’s normal for some jurisdictions to pre-determine the acceptable crime rate for the next year, and then fail to count any criminal acts past that point.

    Other jurisdictions use monolithic reporting systems, New York’s CompStat being the first and most famous. Ever since it went online, there have been people who have questioned discrepancies between its reports and what was being logged at the individual precincts.

  7. Goober says:

    Szopen,

    Read the last paragraph of my comment.

    As for current crime rates, they’re still lower than the were. The recent uptick is so far a smallish blip. Time will tell if it corrects or keeps going.

  8. Szopen says:

    Goober,

    Sorry, you are right, somehow I missed totally the last paragraph. Stupid me. I should right away go at the conclusion: the thing is the criminal system in your country seemed and still seem to incarcerate people x at very high rates.

    As you surely know, most crimes are committed by small percentage of people; usually young males. If large part of young males, those most likely to commit crimes, is confined in prisons, then it’s really hard to argue that the system is in fact quite lenient. Moreover, looking at when incarceration rates start to go up, it’s even not that too far to think that system in 70s and later was acting differently than system in early 60s.

  9. VXXC says:

    Et Goober and Szopen,

    The Incarceration rates are dropping and crime is actually exploding, and Goober is incorrect that this is a small blip. It’s a blip in the Pearl Harbor air raid sense. > It is only a small blip if you count over a year, instead of decades. The last crime wave lasted from the mid 60s to the mid 90s, and only finally broke because of mass incarceration and kill offs of the criminals.
    I quite remember those days. NYC is currently ‘reeling’ under 447 homicides because it doesn’t remember a good straight 2000-2500 killings year that began in the 1960s and lasted to the 1990s.

    So currently YES the system is lenient compared to the previous generation and we’ve got the homicides to prove it. This is a rerun, history as tragic farce. You can play games with the statistics all you want, but yes incarceration is strangely related to crime going up or down.

    Those of us who lived through those times heard it all before, yes all your arguments above dears …heard it all before.

    The incarceration rates began to rise in the 1980s at the behest of the Black Congressional Caucus, who’s constituents got tired of having to sleep in the bathtub hiding from stray bullets. See you the efforts of Charles Rangrel, and one Senator Joe Biden. Biden asked Reagan for crack to have 87X the amount of years mandatory sentencing compared to powder cocaine, Reagan aghast got it down to 23 times. The mandatory minimums were pushed through by Democrats. Combined with common sense policing of not ignoring small offenses as those encourage large ones and the stop-n-frisk policies, along with Section 8 vouchers and gentrification all eventually ground down the criminals into the prison or scattered their ‘communities’ to the wind ala section 8 housing vouchers. So that’s how the NYC murder rate dropped from 2500 to under 300 in a few years.

    Now the Goobers of the World shalt troubleshoot this…but as noted I and others have heard this all before. Higher Incarceration=Lower Crime.

    The Szopens of the world who have absolutely no idea personally of why Detroit is Mogadishu, USA but Winsdor Canada’s biggest crime is Air Pollution [comparative murders 2018: Detroit 261, Winsdor 9] the Szopen’s of the world can amuse themselves with ‘incarceration statistics’…but as noted sorry kiddos we’ve heard all this bullshit before.

    How about an old joke who’s time has come again?
    Q:What’s the most confusing day in _______ ?
    A: Father’s Day!!

    As far as kids getting the switch, that would require actual functioning families and Fathers…and…look there’s only so much farce to go around ok? Those kids get PLENTY of violence growing up, half the gang members join to get protection from their own houses. No it’s not the father [whoever THAT is]…it’s whoever Mama is sleeping with this week beating up [and often enough raping] the kids. They flat out join gangs to get protection, not from gangs..but their own ‘families’.

    So don’t worry, we shan’t attempt a return to corporal punishment. Heinlein was writing about a world that cannot and does not apply to them..it’s far too late. Only so much farce to go around.

  10. Szopen says:

    “The Szopens of the world who have absolutely no idea personally of why Detroit is Mogadishu,”

    I am not quite sure what you are saying here. I was saying only that higher incarceration rates necessarily reduced criminality and that higher incarceration rates in 80s than in 60s meant that it’s hard to compare system of 60s to 80s and declare: “see, system was ok all the time”.

    If you are trying to say that certain populations have differential risk and that, say, Poles (my ethnos) can be expected to have, so to say, “base criminality” higher than, say, Swiss, then this is not I was discussing at all and it’s absurdly wrong of you to conclude anything about whether I think that this is either true, or false — because, once again, that was not the topic here.

  11. VXXC says:

    Szopen,

    If only we had Poland’s crime rate.

    And in fairness it became the topic here…so guarded apologies for shifting subjects. it is now the topic, that is increased incarceration means less crime in the USA. It did, it does.

    “I am not quite sure what you are saying here. I was saying only that higher incarceration rates necessarily reduced criminality and that higher incarceration rates in 80s than in 60s meant that it’s hard to compare system of 60s to 80s and declare: “see, system was ok all the time”.”

    We can exactly compare the incarceration rates, and we don’t even need to compare the ethno crime rates. The ethno in question is on the rate of violent crime, nonpareil. No other ethno even comes close. See Wichita Horror. Or White Girl Bleed a lot.

    There is almost no non-elite person in the USA who lives even near those ethnos who has not been a victim of crime or their family members have been a victim of crime of said ethnos. Murder, rape, robbery — it’s entertainment. It’s called ‘the weekend’. This isn’t a secret over here, just unspeakable ground truth. Call it our version of Communism.

    Now it’s a workable problem, but it requires force and incarceration.

    Or Bad Uncle. Bad uncle is fine, it’s time to close the account.

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