[MD] Heads or tails?

[David M]

Hi Ian/Platt

Also a question about why most people do not commit crimes?
Social norms, morals, lower risk ways to achieve ends, respect/
sympathy for others, recognising benefits of ownership rights.

David M


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "ian glendinning" <psybertron at gmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 12:05 AM
Subject: Re: [MD] Heads or tails?


> Yes Platt, I know the words ... the problem is how narrowly you
> interpret their intended meaning - dumb (ergo) logic or enlightened
> reason.
>
> Where to start ?
>
> He's talking (in the first and third paras) about the paralysis of
> political correctness refusing to accept the biological nature of any
> crimes. I'm not doing that. I asserting that crimes of robbery can be
> largely social.
>
> I can accept that pretty well any crimes against the biological person
> are largely biological - the raping and murder (and any lesser crimes
> by white-trash or ethnic-thugs disrepecting the rights of human
> individuals) - but even there I'd have to qualify that with the motive
> - as any court of law would do in deciding sex was rape and killing
> was murder.
>
> Robbery in the grand scheme of things is often not (nay rarely)
> against the individual, but often against an institution. Clearly as I
> said above, the victims of biological crimes are individual humans.
> Some crimes are against society though.
>
> In any event I totally agree with (the second para) the right of
> society to enforce it's laws by force against biological (or social)
> crime. That's the point of static latching, it's pragmatically useful
> to enforce the law now and intellectually debate the philosophical
> values later, rather than fiddle whilst Rome burns.
>
> The fact that theft / robbery is a game or a psychological disorder
> for some, [as Krimel suggests] does not mean anyone is saying ALL
> crime is a socio-intellectual game. Only an idiot would suggest that
> anyone might suggest that.
>
> As usual you show us the sad limits of all or nothing logic.
> Ian
> (PS - excluded middles)
>
> On 5/10/07, pholden at davtv.com <pholden at davtv.com> wrote:
>> 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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