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Thieves and other "bad actors" are often a consequence of deeper underlying problems. People don't tend to steal that much when they are economically comfortabl

• cedws 3y ago
  Nah, thieves are scum. People don't steal cars and bikes to buy food, they do it because they're selfish and want a shortcut to get the things they want. In any first world country there are ways to get food without resorting to taking other peoples' possessions that they worked hard for. There are many people out there having a really hard time who would never even think about stealing because they were raised with a functioning moral compass.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    This is why we can't have nice things.
    • cedws 3y ago
      I don't know how I'm supposed to have any sympathy for thieves when myself and my family have been victims of multiple thefts totalling tens of thousands of pounds over the past years. I comforted my mum while she bawled her eyes out for hours when her car was stolen off of our driveway at the crack of dawn. Fuck thieves.
      • BizarreByte 3y ago
        One a thief always a thief, there's a reason it was punished so severely throughout history. Theft has the highest recidivism rate too[1]. You can never trust someone who has stolen again, thieves are the scum of the earth and only hurt good people. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-to-march-2021/proven-reoffending-statistics-january-to-march-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/proven-reoffending-...
        • jdthedisciple 3y ago
          Hmmm maybe there is a good reason they chop off thieves' hands in Islam...
          • BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
            Jesus guys
      • asylteltine 3y ago
        Exactly. Being a thief is a personality. We need to lock them up forever. How dare someone take something that isn’t theirs.
    • vt85 3y ago
      [dead]
  • hypeatei 3y ago
    Both can be true: thieves are scum and modern society exacerbates the problem. Sure, we should punish crime but never solving the root problem and taking a "hardline" approach towards the symptoms feels good. But, it puts us in a perpetual state of law enforcement and anxiety about crime.
    • tored 3y ago
      Please explain what is the root problem and how solve it.
      • hypeatei 3y ago
        Healthcare should be universal and require almost no paperwork from the patient. Our current system is too bloated and either requires a job with good insurance or weeks/months of research into your options. Agencies like the DEA should be abolished and possession/use of drugs should not equal prison time or anything on your record. Of course, things like driving impaired are still punished because you're endangering others. College should not be expensive or put you into debt for decades. In the US, we need a general cultural shift away from hyper individualism and unregulated capitalism.
        • tored 3y ago
          Sweden has universal healthcare and education is free, but still Sweden suffers from massive crime wave. Sweden's welfare state is a left wing dream come true, however the bad news for the left is that it empirically disproves every left wing idea about crime and society.
          • Kiro 3y ago
            You're getting downvoted, but the current situation in Sweden is a good example of why universal healthcare and free education are not enough.
  • BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    It’s a matter of degree. We often put people in the position where they need to do some pretty terrible, degrading work just to eat. In my view as the alternatives you have get worse, it gets less morally questionable to steal. Furthermore, I think it should largely be evaluated by the harm it does to others, e.g. stealing a car from a sheltered rich person who can afford an uber in an emergency does them much less harm than from a poor person, who may not be able to get to work and put food on the table. Im not even saying it’s fine to steal the rich person’s car, just relatively okay. Thieves are definitely selfish, but so is everyone else in our free market system. We consider it a virtue when the right people do it. Look, most of the time I agree that like, fuck thieves. I just also agree think that the underlying issues are inequality, alienation, and other socioeconomic shit, and that condemning thieves morally is counterproductive because it distracts from the useful changes to prevent them from becoming thieves.
    • pdonis 3y ago
      > Thieves are definitely selfish, but so is everyone else in our free market system. In a free market, all transactions are voluntary. "Selfishness" just means that you only agree to a transaction if it benefits you. But the other party will only agree if it benefits them, so it's a win-win. Thievery, OTOH, is not voluntary for the victim, and is, at best, a win-lose. Not at all the same as a free market transaction.
• overboard2 3y ago
  If you were poor, you'd be carjacking people?
  • radlad 3y ago
    This looks like a ridiculous strawman's argument. For example, there's a large difference between stealing food from a produce stand (which I would certainly do if the alternative was to starve) and "carjacking people." I agree with the OP - as a society, we should look more at aligning incentives rather than instilling morals. Another huge area this comes up is the war on drugs - if you're caught with drugs, we slap you with a felony that ensures you can't get a real job... pushing you right back to drugs.
    • tored 3y ago
      Why don’t thieves stop being thieves after they can afford food?
      • radlad 3y ago
        I suspect they often do.
    • Jiro 3y ago
      >if you're caught with drugs, we slap you with a felony that ensures you can't get a real job... pushing you right back to drugs. I could say the same thing for any sort of crime. If you're an accountant, and you get put in jail for embezzling, that conviction is going to prevent you from getting another job as an accountant. While there have been a few controversies about jobs that the law excludes felons from, in a lot of cases there's nothing preventing you from hiring a felony drug criminal. If you personally are fine with drugs and you think that committing the crime doesn't make him a danger to your business, go ahead and hire him. If you won't, it isn't the conviction that's keeping him from being hired, it's the crime; the conviction just lets you know that he committed a crime.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
• darthvervet 3y ago
  I think the original commentor used thieves as an example of a general problem. There are other ways to arrive at the same outcome. Mistakes Greed, ambition, sociopathic tendencies lead to the same overly complex rules and regulations. There will always be a small minority of people that break the social contract . People who share a password without knowing any better may not be evildoers,but the outcome of their actions is the same.
• cjs_ac 3y ago
  I try to avoid making moral judgements as much as possible, because moral judgements are thought-terminating clichés.
• tored 3y ago
  If what you are claiming is true then the welfare state of Sweden wouldn’t experience almost any crime at all because no one in Sweden suffers from food insecurity. The educated middle class can afford to hold the most out of touch abstract theories because they don’t need to suffer the consequences.
• cooperadymas 3y ago
  I know the GP used "thieves" as a comparison, but I think it took the conversation here a different direction than intended. You can justify some thievery due to social problems - stealing for food is one thing. But if you eliminate "fairytale concepts" like "bad actors", how do you explain the people constantly attacking managed services and trying to gain access to other people's accounts? These surely aren't the guy on the street looking for their next meal.
• asylteltine 3y ago
  But they don’t steal food they steal TVs and power tools or cars. It’s a lifestyle not a survival mechanism. When I was poor I stole food so I wouldn’t go hungry. I never stole money or robbed people… those are just lame excuses that allow them to keep committing crime.
• ncruces 3y ago
  In a society that considers most rich people "bad actors" or "evildoers" (i.e. they'd never be that rich if this was a fair game), that's pretty erm… rich of you to say.
• Levitz 3y ago
  >Thieves and other "bad actors" are often a consequence of deeper underlying problems. People don't tend to steal that much when they are economically comfortable. As time goes on I believe this less and less. I don't even think it's supported by the data. Spain or Sweden have way more thefts per capita than, say, Poland. Am I to believe a poor person is better of in Poland than in Spain or Sweden? They literally freeze to death sometimes. I'm Spanish, I remember visiting Helsinki and finding toys in a wooden trunk in a small park for children. My first thought was "How is nobody stealing these?" and the second, immediate thought was how utterly sad the first one was. Am I to believe it's poverty pushing people to steal children's toys? I think social cohesion is a factor often ignored, which is amazing in a way because it gets alluded to all the time, "They are tourists, who cares?", "Yeah but that guy is rich", "it's a supermarket", "They have insurance", "they are non-gypsies". Any of these has an implied "I don't care about that person because...". And this generates a feedback loop. It's harder to care about other people and have sympathy for them when you don't trust anyone not to steal your stuff if you leave it unattended for five minutes. In retrospect, I do think those toys got "stolen" frequently, just because children grab stuff all the time and I'm sure it ended up lost more than once, but there must be an insistence to trust your fellow man, to trust that if a good is lost there must be a good reason. I don't think we have that trust anymore.
  • jampekka 3y ago
    I'm from Helsinki and very much think it's safe because of relative lack of poverty, equality, relatively good opportunities regardless of background and social safety net that can be mostly trusted on. The social cohesion is the product of this. We aren't some master race with pure souls. Finland was a shithole until about after WW2 after which the society was deliberately built to not be a shithole.
• bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Both things can be (and are) true. There are deeper underlying problems which give thieves incentives to steal. Thieves are also acting badly (thus, are bad actors) when they steal.