[MD] Heads or tails?

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting ian glendinning <psybertron at gmail.com>:

> > Robbery is a biological pattern.
> >
> 
> What !?! Nice try Platt to roll that into a passage of Pirsig's words,
> but it precedes the quotation marks. (Nasty dishonest trick by the
> way.)
> 
> Anyway, robbery is social, presuming a society that has adopted the
> concept of property rights.
> 
> If a rat "robs" an egg from a bird's nest - that's biological, but the
> word "rob" is chosen by a member of human society, not by the rat or
> the bird. The rat is simply "taking" the egg in order to live. The rat
> is the bad guy thanks to human metaphors only.
> 
> Robbers in human society have a wide range of possible biological,
> social and, dare I say, intellectual reasons to do so, but mostly
> social.

Crime is a biological pattern. Robbery is a crime. Ergo, robbery is a biological
pattern. Read Pirsig and learn:

"Thus, throughout this century we have seen over and over again that intellectuals
weren't blaming crime on man's biological nature, but on the social patterns that had
repressed this biological nature." 

"The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk
crime to death, doesn't work. Intellectual patterns cannot directly control
biological patterns. Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the
instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument
of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier
and his gun."
 
"A second part of the paralysis probably came from the fact that the criminals were
black. If it had been a group of trash whites moving into the neighborhood, robbing
and raping and killing, the response would have been much fiercer, but when whites
denounced blacks for robbing and raping and killing they left themselves open to the
charge of racism."

"What's coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian social moral codes are
almost completely destroyed, isn't any new paradise the revolutionaries hoped for,
but a reversion to rule by terror, violence and gang death-the old biological
might-makes-right morality of prehistoric brigandage that primitive societies were
set up to overcome."



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