this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
54 points (85.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36757 readers
3670 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] njm1314 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They're enforced now but murder still happens.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

That doesn't prove that not enforcing them would somehow make murder disappear, it just proves that you can't absolutely eliminate a behavior. Every action has diminishing returns.

I can remove some of the heat from an object by putting it in the fridge. I can remove more by putting it in the freezer, but that requires more energy. I can remove even more by using more and more sophisticated scientific equipment, but I can never reduce the temperature to absolute zero. That doesn't mean the soda in my fridge isn't colder than one on the counter.

Perfect results aren't obtainable except in trivial cases.

[–] njm1314 -1 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

To your point though diminishing returns. When is it worth it. You've just a conceded that enforcing said laws don't actually prevent the crime. I would say enforcement never prevents any crime and enforcement is about punishment not prevention. So when is it worth it? What level totalitarianism an authoritarianism is worth it? How much abuse and Injustice is necessary to assuage your fears about the other? Surely you're not going to sit here and tell me only fear of punishment is what stops you from murdering people?

[–] thebestaquaman 2 points 17 hours ago

Saying "enforcement never prevents any crime" is just naive. Say what you want about the american justice system, but even over there, they've incarcerated repeat offenders of assault, robbery, etc. where the incarceration itself most definitely prevents them from harming more people.

If you're talking about actual prevention, just look to the programs enforced in several European countries that have provably been very effective in taking people who have been living off crime and turning them into productive citizens of society.

Yes, it's been shown several times that fear of punishment is extremely ineffective at preventing crime. That doesn't mean law enforcement doesn't prevent crime. Putting a person that abuses their family in jail most definitely prevents them from continuing to abuse their family.

[–] theparadox 1 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

I would say enforcement never prevents any crime and enforcement is about punishment not prevention. So when is it worth it? What level totalitarianism an authoritarianism is worth it? How much abuse and Injustice is necessary to assuage your fears about the other? Surely you're not going to sit here and tell me only fear of punishment is what stops you from murdering people?

What if we focused on resolving systemic issues that might provide motivation to prevent crime? What if we focused on rehabilitation instead of punishment for those that commit crimes anyway?

Sure, you can take any idea to an extreme strawman and shriek things like "authoritarianism!" but that means nothing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

we should do all that and have law enforcement

[–] [email protected] 0 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

You've just a conceded that enforcing said laws don't actually prevent the crime

Except I didn't concede that? I said enforcing laws doesn't totally eliminate crime, in the same way that putting a soda in the fridge doesn't drop the temperature to 0K. Enforcing laws reduces crime.

I would say enforcement never prevents any crime

I would say you're demonstrably incorrect.

and enforcement is about punishment not prevention.

Punishment is the method of prevention. Additionally, incarceration is in part about removing law breakers from polite society so they do not continue to break laws. We quarantine the murderers so they don't keep murdering people.

So when is it worth it?

As with most things in life, we decide on a reasonable compromise. Putting a soda in the fridge is beneficial, putting it in the freezer is too much, and causes more problems than it solves. We decide these things collectively as a society, by electing representatives to draft laws. When they overstep, we elect new representatives to change the laws.

How much abuse and Injustice is necessary to assuage your fears about the other?

What's abusive and unjust about trying to prevent murderers? Where's the justice for victims and their families if as a society we just say "Golly, sorry this guy killed your children, but if we punished him we'd be just as bad"? How do you recommend reducing the injustices people enact against each other?

Surely you're not going to sit here and tell me only fear of punishment is what stops you from murdering people?

Me personally? Of course not. But obviously some people want to do crimes. You can't build a society based on everyone behaving just like you all the time. Some people are more violent, or greedy, or deceptive. We are barely domesticated apes, jungle impulses course through us all. Some more than others. Without some mechanism to curtail that, consequences that outweigh the benefits of selfish behavior, you wind up back at might-makes-right anyway when the selfish behave selfishly with no recourse.