Honestly, I rarely see violence done to the protestors. And most reporting that I read, even in widely read newspapers, only reports on the law breaking protestors, not on the physical force used on them. I think it's more likely that law breaking protestors are seeking attention and status from other people like them
Agree, peer signaling is the more important component. I was arrested by riot police in college and I remember feeling very proud that I "stood my ground" … I didn't expect my arrest to be reported in the media (it wasn't) but on reflection, my desire to be uncompromising mostly had to do with wanting to affiliate as strongly as possible with the cause.
One thing to consider is that when people go to college there's really a sense that you have no kin, which is a socially unstable and instinctively scary situation. You are away from your family and depending on the situation you might not even know anyone going to the university you're attending. Embracing causes like this is a way of joining a "solidarity family" with the people who focus on that cause. Solidarity families are suspicious that adherents may be freeloading, so getting arrested in the name of solidarity helps signal credibility and commitment.
Are protestors mostly interested in helping a cause or competing over showing their commitment to the group? Replace “protestors” with “nonprofit organizations” and I think the logic still holds. Paying a high price like getting arrested signals you are more dedicated to the cause, without having to actually figure out how to help the cause; people just assume that part.
A while ago, (long enough for the details to get fuzzy) I read something about the famous American feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. As I recall, although it apparently affected people's imaginations for a long while, the actual number of violent incidents and the length of time it continued were much smaller than I would have imagined from its reputation.
In the medieval period feud was sort of an informal system of policing. The reduced prevalence of honor culture and herding, which both contributed to its necessity/popularity, might also explain its disappearance.
But I am just a guy on the internet, I don’t even pretend my facts are authoritative.
I see the distinction being made, but it seems a bit thin. Even people without laws do not assume they are constantly at war with everyone not immediately in their kin group or local village.
Maybe the important (but nebulous?) distinction lies in legitimacy. If one person or group does s, it is an outrage, they have no right. If some other person or group does it, of course that is what is supposed to happen. A further distinction with8n that one might be whether the legitimacy derives from a threat or the exchange of benefits. I might prefer going along with a bad arrangement to being shunned or punished for resisting it. That leads to a difficult question about the difference between coercion and genuine consent.
I don’t think I am estimating or underestimating. I think that there were approximately three categories, none of,which was empty: always at war with, never at war with, sometimes at war with.
Regarding your claim about the firmness of the distinction, I could be convinced but need some evidence. Or does “widely acknowledged sovereign “ turn it into a tautology? I am thinking of the history of the Comanche before, during, and after the establishment of governments claiming the territories they inhabited. In that case, yes, after killing off most of those who disavowed the sovereign, things might calm down. I am not really well informed of the history, so maybe I am wrong; but I don’t think every encounter between a Comanche and a non-Comanche even during the most violent period was an encounter between people intent on killing each other.
I assumed you'd meant post-medieval norms. My initial response was to hope for a moment that we hadn't really changed that much on a root level in a few centuries, but with a sense of weary sadness I realized that you're right.
Getting rid of feuds (like getting rid of polygamy or the warrior caste) was part of making modern civilization possible, but look how flaccid and pathetic we are now, centuries on.
But you CAN show up in court and plead special circumstances for a speeding ticket or a parking violation, including showing that you’re contrite or that you only violated the law because of a “passion”. And it might work, particularly for first offenders.
I don’t believe that it’s so much that we punish “crimes of passion” less as it is that we punish cold-blooded intentional crimes more. It’s one thing to get drunk and accidentally kill someone in a bar fight. You’re in serious trouble but we can all see ourselves in you. It’s another thing to come up with and execute a plan to murder your spouse for the insurance money.
Also it is probably the case that a premeditated murderer is likliest to kill again, so from a forward-looking harm reduction standpoint it is rational to impose longer jail time on them.
I like the idea of feuds & preventing feuds as important to explaining human behavior, but I don't think it's useful to explain your 2 conundrums.
Your 2 conundrums can be better explained by the simpler observation that "punishment" doesn't work as popularly believed to control behavior. BF Skinner (father of behaviorial psychology) has long recognized this. It's only tangentially, indirectly related, and its immediate effect in our society to impress bystanders of the power of the punisher (which longer term, keeps bystanders on side and reduces total number of potential violators).
The protesters are challenging the power of the state, and the state is punishing to impress society that they're still in control. The laws they choose to break are minor and often not enforced, which shows the hypocrisy of the situation they are challenging. In the second example, the contrition is offered by the accused, as a face saving out for the state not to have to punish as hard, because the contrition itself is (more) impressive to bystanders, especially under a Christian mindset of forgiveness. It's like an implicit plea bargain.
I suppose you can still relate this impressing bystanders effect to preventing feuds, but to my mind, the more accurate description is preventing private enforcement by vigilantes. If bystanders are convinced that the state is on top of it, it lessens the motive for self-appointed viligantes to "do something" on their own. Which eventually may trigger counter-viligantes and feuds. Feuds triggered by vigilantes and counter-viligantes is the least productive kind of feud. Most states view that as "tearing society apart" and should be prevented.
But not always. Elites sometimes foment that kind of feud to get the societal change they approve of. Or they hype up one potential aspect of it or another to push social consensus in the direction they want.
"The first puzzle is why protestors go out of their way to do illegal things, and especially things that force police to remove and detain them using direct physical contact. "
Some protests are intentionally illegal, but only a very small proportion of protestors break any laws. Most protests are organised by groups that apply to governments for permission and the resulting protests are authorised by governments, or other authorities, and take place without breaking laws. Generally, they are some of the most law abiding collections of people that we have. More laws are broken at the average sporting event. More laws are broken by people travelling to and from the protests than at the protests.
Do you have any evidence that protestors who intentionally break the law get off, or get reduced sentences?
Many people get off both parking and speeding tickets.
A good reason to punish crimes of passion less severely is that the main purpose of punishment is to get people to change their behavior. But during a crime of passion, the person isn't thinking about any potential punishment, so knowledge of punishment couldn't have prevented that crime. Thus, severe punishment is ineffective at preventing this type of crime, while still causing direct harm to the punished party, so it should be reduced.
You are right that protestors try to gain public sympathy - and often succeed - as a result of police action taken against them. This doesn't have much to do with revolution most of the time, because protestors are usually concerned with a particular issue rather than overthrowing the government.
Also, revolution is not a type of feuding. The only similarity is that they both involve violent conflict. But feuding is a particular type of violent conflict with a particular structure of motives not present between revolutionaries and a government. The revolutionaries are not seeking to "even the scales" by returning perceived offenses in kind, like happens in feuding; the revolutionaries are seeking to eliminate the current government entirely. That's more like war than feuding.
Well, why do we admit temporary insanity defenses? I would say for the same reason: if the person is temporarily insane, then any potential punishment for their actions is powerless to influence their behavior. No point "whipping the sea."
Intentionality of thought is the same deal. We don't punish crimes that weren't intentional because if they weren't intentional, potential punishment couldn't have deterred them.
IMO this is the reason "free will" is so tightly tied to "guilt." You are said to have "free will" about precisely those behaviors that could be changed by the knowledge that you would be socially punished or rewarded. These are the behaviors where it is socially productive to assign guilt and blame.
An insanity defense may lead to a worse "sentence," but this would be psychiatric treatment rather than socially viewed as a deterrent punishment.
A warning is more likely to come if the offender doesn't have previous similar offenses. That lack off previous offenses implies a lack of disregard for the law. Such a disregard could be analogous to a plan, or at least a first step towards a plan. A lower chance of re-offending is also implied when there are no previous offenses..
There is a genocide being committed by Israel against people in Gaza, and funded by the USA and other western countries. Shouldn't everyone be doing absolutely everything in their power to stop it?
This isn't the post to discuss it, but I disagree about what's happening being genocide. I should note that I don't think the US committed genocide against Germany & Japan in WW2 either though.
Israeli army motivational speaker: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don't wait, go to his home and shoot him . . . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see, we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”
You can't seriously argue that that isn't genocidal. The fact that it is promoted and not punished means Israel is breaking the genocide convention, and breaking the genocide convention is what defines being engaged in a genocide. It is defined that way because it is considered too late to wait for the genocide to be completed before you should start gathering evidence and prosecuting, and so carrying out various genocidal things is what a genocide consists of. And Israel is doing it. Hamas is trotted out as an excuse, but there is no excuse for the type of behaviour described by the army motivational speaker. above
You mention Arab neighbors, but Israeli has had lots of Arab citizens since its founding. They continue to exist (unlike Jews in most majority Muslim countries other than Iran), and even had a political party in the Knesset part of the governing coalition before Natanyahu came back to power. So, yes, I do seriously argue that it isn't genocidal.
I didn't mention Arab neighbours. Those are the words of the Israeli army motivational speaker. Those words are genocidal, and promoted by the Israeli army. There are many examples like this from various segments of Israeli society. These types of statements are common in Israel. Many of them are limited to Gazan's, and many to Palestinians, relatively few to all Arabs. That doesn't mean they are not genocidal.
You don't know what genocide means. It does not mean killing every last member of a group. The word was invented near the end of WW2 as part of an effort to create laws preventing the types of things that Germany was engaged in, and which lead to the creation of the genocide convention. You might read that to understand the scope of things that genocide encompasses.
Israel did not grant citizenship to it's Arab population until 1966 by the way, and their citizenship is still not equal to a Jewish person's citizenship. Until 1966, they were occupied persons under jurisdiction of the military often within areas fenced off from the rest of Israel. needing permits to leave or enter their village or town Many Arabs continued to be expelled by Israel for many years after it's founding until they were a small enough minority to no longer be seen as a serious threat. Many of the places attacked on October 7th were previously majority Arab towns the entire Arab population of which were expelled from Israel well after Israel's founding.
None of the rights granted to Arab Israelis proves anything in relation to genocide.
It's labelled "Israeli army motivational speaker", so it is clearly not me. It's one example from South Africa's ICJ case. Personally, I've seen Israelis say before Oct 7th that Gaza should be annihilated. It has been a common view for a long time, and in and of itself it is genocidal.
One example of unequal equal rights is that Arab Israeli's are not allowed to own property in about 80% of Israel because it is reserved for Jews. Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality. Jewish is one of the nationalities in Israeli. Arab is the 2nd most common. The Jewish nation has a special status within Israel enshrined by law. Jews have rights the enter and live in Israel that Arabs do not have. Druze is another nationality. Druze can in theory exclude Jews from living in their areas too if they have the guts to do it, so Jews will claim that Druze have equal rights to Jews in that regard, but there aren't many Druze areas, so it's as equal a right as black people had to vote in some southern states in the 1950s - anyone who could pass the tests was allowed to vote - equal. so what was the problem there?
If you are Gazan, or Palestinian from the west bank, you have way less rights and Israelis have even more rights, and it's not even Israel.
There are over 400 million Arabs in the world and no one is claiming that Israel is trying to kill all Arabs. You are arguing against a position that no one has.
The basis of your rhetorical question regarding a genocide in which the government gives equal rights is just wrong. But even assuming you meant that they have substantial rights in Israel (and they do), it is still irrelevant because genocide is not the removal of rights from all of the group being subject to genocide It is defined in the genocide convention - making genocidal statements, starvation of a substantial portion of the group, killing large numbers of people of the group, making ordinary life impossible for a substantial proportion of the group, etc. Those things are what genocide is. It is not okay to do those things as long as you give some people of a closely related ethnicity the right to vote.
German Jews died at lower rates than Jews of many other countries (in part because they started fleeing earlier). Germany tried to wipe Jews out everywhere they conquered, which admittedly didn't include anywhere in the New World. Admittedly, killing all the Jews was not the original plan, the term is "Final Solution" because that's what they went with after rejecting the options of deporting them to Madagascar (which they couldn't reach), Poland (they decided they wanted that reserved for ethnic Germans ruling over some Slavs) or the USSR (since they failed to conquer that).
The word genocide was not invented to mean killing every last person of a particular group. It is doing some of a number of genocidal things that include ethnically cleansing places, killing large numbers of people of a particular group, inciting people to kill members of the group, etc.
The word was invented in the light of German behaviour in WW2, and largely based on that behaviour. It is a misunderstanding of what the word means to say Germany was not engaged in genocide in WW2.
We're also human, and understand that passion for example is a powerful emotion, and can overtake someone.
Whereas speeding and parking violations, whether planned or not, are usually not associated with any such great emotion.
In the rare cases where they are associated with some emergency, we often do cut slack for them too. Like "violated the parking because my child was in danger and had to get to them quickly".
Seems to me we don't need this to explain those phenomenon and surely fueds is the more complicated and less likely explanation.
First, it seems likely false that passionate acts were less likely to perpetuate fueds. Sure, there might be the occasional delibrate reprisal done in cold blood, but surely the more usual case was running into that guy whose brother killed your dad on the street or bar and words get exchanged and escalate to violence.
And the explanation seems unnecessary, the lighter sentences for those who apologize or act passionately is the same rule we follow with our friends and loved ones about how mad or upset to be with them after something they did. Likely it's the same explanation, it suggests they are less likely to do it again or, at least, aren't trying to claim dominance with the action (I believe you've given this explanation before). Same with having done so out of understandable passion. Also, those willing to break rules coldly are more dangerous to general social trust because you can't predict when or in what cases it's likely.
As far as protestors liking to break rules, Im curious if this was as common before TV? But either way the sympathy angle plus rule breaking drawing interest seem sufficient to explain it.
Also, getting arrested or breaking rules forces people to at least consider whether your cause justifies breaking those rules so they can't completely ignore it.
I don't think this one is your theory. I've taken history courses and read books on the logic and history of feuds and the legal systems that result from them, and this fits into that mold quite well as a next logical consequence. It's a good lemma or corollary, though.
Anti-feuding norms don't explain why we would draw a bright line of outside intervention at physical harm. They do provide one reason that a bright line should be drawn somewhere, but reprisal-spirals could be prevented by intervening sooner or later, as long as everyone is clear on where the line is and what it means to cross it. Physical assault is less ambiguous than insult and, if injured, easier to prove after the fact, and these are reasons it's good place to draw a line before it, but they are also independently good reasons it makes sense to have interventions around it. We consider physical harm more grievous than insult, but that's another independent reason to proscribe it, whether the matter involves sides that can plausibly retaliate or not. (Consider: anonymous graffiti maligning the reader vs anonymous insertion of razor blades into boxes of cornflakes.)
If something is bad enough that we want to prevent parties locked in conflict from engaging in it over and over, at great cost, it might also bad enough that we want to discourage someone from doing it even once, at less but still significant cost. For a norm to be in place to prevent feuding, either the harms should be particular to feuding or the method of prevention particularly effective against feuding as opposed to other kinds of conflict. If we had a norm that encouraged us to punish retaliation at least as or even more severely than the initial act of an aggression, you could make a really good case that was an anti-feuding norm. And while parents (who are very motivated to prevent rampant inter-sibling conflict, even if it only involves verbal acts) will say things like "I don't care who started it!" and make a show of punishing everyone equally, adults usually do care who started a conflict and consider retaliation more justifiable than initial acts of aggression.
Edited to add, the example you give is intentional vs unintentional harms, but that's just as easily explained by the facts that a) unintentional harms are less likely to be repeated, and b) people who commit unintentional harms are less likely to commit unrelated acts of harm. These considerations apply to many more instances of unintentional harm than retaliation. If the aim is to prevent retaliation, as mentioned, we could simply punish retaliation more severely, we wouldn't need a work-around where it's caught under a much broader category.
Brilliant. You hit the ball outta the park with this one. The punishment is less (or waived) if the action wasn't planned (crimes of passion or poor judgment). The punishment is less (or waived) if the perpetrator is contrite. I've wondered about the explanation but didn't have one while recognizing the intuition that it makes sense. Your idea that "humans have long developed a set of social norms designed to limit feuds" is the explanation.
Feuds emerge in the absence of state-monopolies on violence (to use Steven Pinker-style terms). Feuds emerge in lawless environments where families or clans have to demonstrate to others, don't mess with us or we will hit you back harder than you hit us. The other side often feels it necessary to refuse to be whipped (to maintain their status), and so retaliates in kind.
as we know, feuds are destructive and leads to a poor environment for human thriving. So feuds are the opposite of 'tit-for-tat with forgiveness.' There is no way to stop them unless families and clans can be subjected to governmental policing, or social norms where various strong men meet to declare how to end the feud with agreed-upon reparations and exchanges between the waring factions.
It is false that there is no way to stop feuds. Mediation (and the status accorded to mediators) is one way. Breaking the cycle in a way that allows both sides to claim satisfaction is another — exchanging brides, for example. One side packing up and leaving is another way.
I used to think that. My newer conclusions are that most commenters are just hallucinating while looking at what I write, and there's nothing that can be done. It's fun to insult them, though; your insult here was very mild.
Honestly, I rarely see violence done to the protestors. And most reporting that I read, even in widely read newspapers, only reports on the law breaking protestors, not on the physical force used on them. I think it's more likely that law breaking protestors are seeking attention and status from other people like them
Agree, peer signaling is the more important component. I was arrested by riot police in college and I remember feeling very proud that I "stood my ground" … I didn't expect my arrest to be reported in the media (it wasn't) but on reflection, my desire to be uncompromising mostly had to do with wanting to affiliate as strongly as possible with the cause.
One thing to consider is that when people go to college there's really a sense that you have no kin, which is a socially unstable and instinctively scary situation. You are away from your family and depending on the situation you might not even know anyone going to the university you're attending. Embracing causes like this is a way of joining a "solidarity family" with the people who focus on that cause. Solidarity families are suspicious that adherents may be freeloading, so getting arrested in the name of solidarity helps signal credibility and commitment.
But there are many things you could do to help your cause; why get arrested in particular?
Are protestors mostly interested in helping a cause or competing over showing their commitment to the group? Replace “protestors” with “nonprofit organizations” and I think the logic still holds. Paying a high price like getting arrested signals you are more dedicated to the cause, without having to actually figure out how to help the cause; people just assume that part.
I wasn't optimizing on helping my cause, as my comment explained.
I just added to this post.
Maybe we have an overblown idea of feuds.
A while ago, (long enough for the details to get fuzzy) I read something about the famous American feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. As I recall, although it apparently affected people's imaginations for a long while, the actual number of violent incidents and the length of time it continued were much smaller than I would have imagined from its reputation.
In the medieval period feud was sort of an informal system of policing. The reduced prevalence of honor culture and herding, which both contributed to its necessity/popularity, might also explain its disappearance.
But I am just a guy on the internet, I don’t even pretend my facts are authoritative.
That medieval period when feuds were a big source of policing is what plausibly made such strong norms that we still see their traces today.
Is there a distinction between feuds and gang warfare?
I see the distinction being made, but it seems a bit thin. Even people without laws do not assume they are constantly at war with everyone not immediately in their kin group or local village.
Maybe the important (but nebulous?) distinction lies in legitimacy. If one person or group does s, it is an outrage, they have no right. If some other person or group does it, of course that is what is supposed to happen. A further distinction with8n that one might be whether the legitimacy derives from a threat or the exchange of benefits. I might prefer going along with a bad arrangement to being shunned or punished for resisting it. That leads to a difficult question about the difference between coercion and genuine consent.
I don’t think I am estimating or underestimating. I think that there were approximately three categories, none of,which was empty: always at war with, never at war with, sometimes at war with.
Regarding your claim about the firmness of the distinction, I could be convinced but need some evidence. Or does “widely acknowledged sovereign “ turn it into a tautology? I am thinking of the history of the Comanche before, during, and after the establishment of governments claiming the territories they inhabited. In that case, yes, after killing off most of those who disavowed the sovereign, things might calm down. I am not really well informed of the history, so maybe I am wrong; but I don’t think every encounter between a Comanche and a non-Comanche even during the most violent period was an encounter between people intent on killing each other.
I assumed you'd meant post-medieval norms. My initial response was to hope for a moment that we hadn't really changed that much on a root level in a few centuries, but with a sense of weary sadness I realized that you're right.
Getting rid of feuds (like getting rid of polygamy or the warrior caste) was part of making modern civilization possible, but look how flaccid and pathetic we are now, centuries on.
But you CAN show up in court and plead special circumstances for a speeding ticket or a parking violation, including showing that you’re contrite or that you only violated the law because of a “passion”. And it might work, particularly for first offenders.
I don’t believe that it’s so much that we punish “crimes of passion” less as it is that we punish cold-blooded intentional crimes more. It’s one thing to get drunk and accidentally kill someone in a bar fight. You’re in serious trouble but we can all see ourselves in you. It’s another thing to come up with and execute a plan to murder your spouse for the insurance money.
Also it is probably the case that a premeditated murderer is likliest to kill again, so from a forward-looking harm reduction standpoint it is rational to impose longer jail time on them.
I like the idea of feuds & preventing feuds as important to explaining human behavior, but I don't think it's useful to explain your 2 conundrums.
Your 2 conundrums can be better explained by the simpler observation that "punishment" doesn't work as popularly believed to control behavior. BF Skinner (father of behaviorial psychology) has long recognized this. It's only tangentially, indirectly related, and its immediate effect in our society to impress bystanders of the power of the punisher (which longer term, keeps bystanders on side and reduces total number of potential violators).
The protesters are challenging the power of the state, and the state is punishing to impress society that they're still in control. The laws they choose to break are minor and often not enforced, which shows the hypocrisy of the situation they are challenging. In the second example, the contrition is offered by the accused, as a face saving out for the state not to have to punish as hard, because the contrition itself is (more) impressive to bystanders, especially under a Christian mindset of forgiveness. It's like an implicit plea bargain.
I suppose you can still relate this impressing bystanders effect to preventing feuds, but to my mind, the more accurate description is preventing private enforcement by vigilantes. If bystanders are convinced that the state is on top of it, it lessens the motive for self-appointed viligantes to "do something" on their own. Which eventually may trigger counter-viligantes and feuds. Feuds triggered by vigilantes and counter-viligantes is the least productive kind of feud. Most states view that as "tearing society apart" and should be prevented.
But not always. Elites sometimes foment that kind of feud to get the societal change they approve of. Or they hype up one potential aspect of it or another to push social consensus in the direction they want.
"The first puzzle is why protestors go out of their way to do illegal things, and especially things that force police to remove and detain them using direct physical contact. "
Some protests are intentionally illegal, but only a very small proportion of protestors break any laws. Most protests are organised by groups that apply to governments for permission and the resulting protests are authorised by governments, or other authorities, and take place without breaking laws. Generally, they are some of the most law abiding collections of people that we have. More laws are broken at the average sporting event. More laws are broken by people travelling to and from the protests than at the protests.
Do you have any evidence that protestors who intentionally break the law get off, or get reduced sentences?
Many people get off both parking and speeding tickets.
A good reason to punish crimes of passion less severely is that the main purpose of punishment is to get people to change their behavior. But during a crime of passion, the person isn't thinking about any potential punishment, so knowledge of punishment couldn't have prevented that crime. Thus, severe punishment is ineffective at preventing this type of crime, while still causing direct harm to the punished party, so it should be reduced.
You are right that protestors try to gain public sympathy - and often succeed - as a result of police action taken against them. This doesn't have much to do with revolution most of the time, because protestors are usually concerned with a particular issue rather than overthrowing the government.
Also, revolution is not a type of feuding. The only similarity is that they both involve violent conflict. But feuding is a particular type of violent conflict with a particular structure of motives not present between revolutionaries and a government. The revolutionaries are not seeking to "even the scales" by returning perceived offenses in kind, like happens in feuding; the revolutionaries are seeking to eliminate the current government entirely. That's more like war than feuding.
Well, why do we admit temporary insanity defenses? I would say for the same reason: if the person is temporarily insane, then any potential punishment for their actions is powerless to influence their behavior. No point "whipping the sea."
Intentionality of thought is the same deal. We don't punish crimes that weren't intentional because if they weren't intentional, potential punishment couldn't have deterred them.
IMO this is the reason "free will" is so tightly tied to "guilt." You are said to have "free will" about precisely those behaviors that could be changed by the knowledge that you would be socially punished or rewarded. These are the behaviors where it is socially productive to assign guilt and blame.
An insanity defense may lead to a worse "sentence," but this would be psychiatric treatment rather than socially viewed as a deterrent punishment.
The Persian king Xerxes was known for whipping the sea when a storm destroyed his pontoon bridge. https://www.ancient-origins.net/weird-facts/xerxes-bridge-0016747
Speeders get off with just a warning quite often.
Yes, but not because they said that they didn't plan it, or that they have suddenly reformed their views on speeding and now will never speed again.
A warning is more likely to come if the offender doesn't have previous similar offenses. That lack off previous offenses implies a lack of disregard for the law. Such a disregard could be analogous to a plan, or at least a first step towards a plan. A lower chance of re-offending is also implied when there are no previous offenses..
But “I didn’t realize” or “I had a good and innocent reason” may get you out of it. (Ahem, from experience.) Both go to not repeating it.
There is a genocide being committed by Israel against people in Gaza, and funded by the USA and other western countries. Shouldn't everyone be doing absolutely everything in their power to stop it?
Did I imply otherwise?
Did I misinterpret your last paragraph? I'm sorry, Robin, what you were getting at wasn't clear to me.
This isn't the post to discuss it, but I disagree about what's happening being genocide. I should note that I don't think the US committed genocide against Germany & Japan in WW2 either though.
Israeli army motivational speaker: “Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them. Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live . . . Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them. If you have an Arab neighbour, don't wait, go to his home and shoot him . . . We want to invade, not like before, we want to enter and destroy what’s in front of us, and destroy houses, then destroy the one after it. With all of our forces, complete destruction, enter and destroy. As you can see, we will witness things we’ve never dreamed of. Let them drop bombs on them and erase them.”
You can't seriously argue that that isn't genocidal. The fact that it is promoted and not punished means Israel is breaking the genocide convention, and breaking the genocide convention is what defines being engaged in a genocide. It is defined that way because it is considered too late to wait for the genocide to be completed before you should start gathering evidence and prosecuting, and so carrying out various genocidal things is what a genocide consists of. And Israel is doing it. Hamas is trotted out as an excuse, but there is no excuse for the type of behaviour described by the army motivational speaker. above
You mention Arab neighbors, but Israeli has had lots of Arab citizens since its founding. They continue to exist (unlike Jews in most majority Muslim countries other than Iran), and even had a political party in the Knesset part of the governing coalition before Natanyahu came back to power. So, yes, I do seriously argue that it isn't genocidal.
I didn't mention Arab neighbours. Those are the words of the Israeli army motivational speaker. Those words are genocidal, and promoted by the Israeli army. There are many examples like this from various segments of Israeli society. These types of statements are common in Israel. Many of them are limited to Gazan's, and many to Palestinians, relatively few to all Arabs. That doesn't mean they are not genocidal.
You don't know what genocide means. It does not mean killing every last member of a group. The word was invented near the end of WW2 as part of an effort to create laws preventing the types of things that Germany was engaged in, and which lead to the creation of the genocide convention. You might read that to understand the scope of things that genocide encompasses.
Israel did not grant citizenship to it's Arab population until 1966 by the way, and their citizenship is still not equal to a Jewish person's citizenship. Until 1966, they were occupied persons under jurisdiction of the military often within areas fenced off from the rest of Israel. needing permits to leave or enter their village or town Many Arabs continued to be expelled by Israel for many years after it's founding until they were a small enough minority to no longer be seen as a serious threat. Many of the places attacked on October 7th were previously majority Arab towns the entire Arab population of which were expelled from Israel well after Israel's founding.
None of the rights granted to Arab Israelis proves anything in relation to genocide.
You posted a big block of text with no citations. So as far as I'm concerned, it's just you mentioning it.
How is the citizenship of Arab Israelis still (so not from the 1960s) not equal?
If you go back far enough in time, none of Palestine was "Arab". So what?
In what instance of genocide has the government committing it continued to grant equal rights to a population of that ethnicity?
It's labelled "Israeli army motivational speaker", so it is clearly not me. It's one example from South Africa's ICJ case. Personally, I've seen Israelis say before Oct 7th that Gaza should be annihilated. It has been a common view for a long time, and in and of itself it is genocidal.
One example of unequal equal rights is that Arab Israeli's are not allowed to own property in about 80% of Israel because it is reserved for Jews. Israel distinguishes between citizenship and nationality. Jewish is one of the nationalities in Israeli. Arab is the 2nd most common. The Jewish nation has a special status within Israel enshrined by law. Jews have rights the enter and live in Israel that Arabs do not have. Druze is another nationality. Druze can in theory exclude Jews from living in their areas too if they have the guts to do it, so Jews will claim that Druze have equal rights to Jews in that regard, but there aren't many Druze areas, so it's as equal a right as black people had to vote in some southern states in the 1950s - anyone who could pass the tests was allowed to vote - equal. so what was the problem there?
If you are Gazan, or Palestinian from the west bank, you have way less rights and Israelis have even more rights, and it's not even Israel.
There are over 400 million Arabs in the world and no one is claiming that Israel is trying to kill all Arabs. You are arguing against a position that no one has.
The basis of your rhetorical question regarding a genocide in which the government gives equal rights is just wrong. But even assuming you meant that they have substantial rights in Israel (and they do), it is still irrelevant because genocide is not the removal of rights from all of the group being subject to genocide It is defined in the genocide convention - making genocidal statements, starvation of a substantial portion of the group, killing large numbers of people of the group, making ordinary life impossible for a substantial proportion of the group, etc. Those things are what genocide is. It is not okay to do those things as long as you give some people of a closely related ethnicity the right to vote.
German Jews died at lower rates than Jews of many other countries (in part because they started fleeing earlier). Germany tried to wipe Jews out everywhere they conquered, which admittedly didn't include anywhere in the New World. Admittedly, killing all the Jews was not the original plan, the term is "Final Solution" because that's what they went with after rejecting the options of deporting them to Madagascar (which they couldn't reach), Poland (they decided they wanted that reserved for ethnic Germans ruling over some Slavs) or the USSR (since they failed to conquer that).
The word genocide was not invented to mean killing every last person of a particular group. It is doing some of a number of genocidal things that include ethnically cleansing places, killing large numbers of people of a particular group, inciting people to kill members of the group, etc.
The word was invented in the light of German behaviour in WW2, and largely based on that behaviour. It is a misunderstanding of what the word means to say Germany was not engaged in genocide in WW2.
I thought the term was coined after the Armenian genocide.
No. But even if it was, there are still Armenians left alive, so that wasn't a genocide by your definition either.
I didn't provide "my definition".
Doing absolutely everything, or doing absolutely everything that is plausibly effective? Which category is the sort of violence mentioned by Robin in?
We're also human, and understand that passion for example is a powerful emotion, and can overtake someone.
Whereas speeding and parking violations, whether planned or not, are usually not associated with any such great emotion.
In the rare cases where they are associated with some emergency, we often do cut slack for them too. Like "violated the parking because my child was in danger and had to get to them quickly".
Seems to me we don't need this to explain those phenomenon and surely fueds is the more complicated and less likely explanation.
First, it seems likely false that passionate acts were less likely to perpetuate fueds. Sure, there might be the occasional delibrate reprisal done in cold blood, but surely the more usual case was running into that guy whose brother killed your dad on the street or bar and words get exchanged and escalate to violence.
And the explanation seems unnecessary, the lighter sentences for those who apologize or act passionately is the same rule we follow with our friends and loved ones about how mad or upset to be with them after something they did. Likely it's the same explanation, it suggests they are less likely to do it again or, at least, aren't trying to claim dominance with the action (I believe you've given this explanation before). Same with having done so out of understandable passion. Also, those willing to break rules coldly are more dangerous to general social trust because you can't predict when or in what cases it's likely.
As far as protestors liking to break rules, Im curious if this was as common before TV? But either way the sympathy angle plus rule breaking drawing interest seem sufficient to explain it.
Also, getting arrested or breaking rules forces people to at least consider whether your cause justifies breaking those rules so they can't completely ignore it.
I don't think this one is your theory. I've taken history courses and read books on the logic and history of feuds and the legal systems that result from them, and this fits into that mold quite well as a next logical consequence. It's a good lemma or corollary, though.
Anti-feuding norms don't explain why we would draw a bright line of outside intervention at physical harm. They do provide one reason that a bright line should be drawn somewhere, but reprisal-spirals could be prevented by intervening sooner or later, as long as everyone is clear on where the line is and what it means to cross it. Physical assault is less ambiguous than insult and, if injured, easier to prove after the fact, and these are reasons it's good place to draw a line before it, but they are also independently good reasons it makes sense to have interventions around it. We consider physical harm more grievous than insult, but that's another independent reason to proscribe it, whether the matter involves sides that can plausibly retaliate or not. (Consider: anonymous graffiti maligning the reader vs anonymous insertion of razor blades into boxes of cornflakes.)
If something is bad enough that we want to prevent parties locked in conflict from engaging in it over and over, at great cost, it might also bad enough that we want to discourage someone from doing it even once, at less but still significant cost. For a norm to be in place to prevent feuding, either the harms should be particular to feuding or the method of prevention particularly effective against feuding as opposed to other kinds of conflict. If we had a norm that encouraged us to punish retaliation at least as or even more severely than the initial act of an aggression, you could make a really good case that was an anti-feuding norm. And while parents (who are very motivated to prevent rampant inter-sibling conflict, even if it only involves verbal acts) will say things like "I don't care who started it!" and make a show of punishing everyone equally, adults usually do care who started a conflict and consider retaliation more justifiable than initial acts of aggression.
Edited to add, the example you give is intentional vs unintentional harms, but that's just as easily explained by the facts that a) unintentional harms are less likely to be repeated, and b) people who commit unintentional harms are less likely to commit unrelated acts of harm. These considerations apply to many more instances of unintentional harm than retaliation. If the aim is to prevent retaliation, as mentioned, we could simply punish retaliation more severely, we wouldn't need a work-around where it's caught under a much broader category.
Brilliant. You hit the ball outta the park with this one. The punishment is less (or waived) if the action wasn't planned (crimes of passion or poor judgment). The punishment is less (or waived) if the perpetrator is contrite. I've wondered about the explanation but didn't have one while recognizing the intuition that it makes sense. Your idea that "humans have long developed a set of social norms designed to limit feuds" is the explanation.
Feuds emerge in the absence of state-monopolies on violence (to use Steven Pinker-style terms). Feuds emerge in lawless environments where families or clans have to demonstrate to others, don't mess with us or we will hit you back harder than you hit us. The other side often feels it necessary to refuse to be whipped (to maintain their status), and so retaliates in kind.
as we know, feuds are destructive and leads to a poor environment for human thriving. So feuds are the opposite of 'tit-for-tat with forgiveness.' There is no way to stop them unless families and clans can be subjected to governmental policing, or social norms where various strong men meet to declare how to end the feud with agreed-upon reparations and exchanges between the waring factions.
It is false that there is no way to stop feuds. Mediation (and the status accorded to mediators) is one way. Breaking the cycle in a way that allows both sides to claim satisfaction is another — exchanging brides, for example. One side packing up and leaving is another way.
One must write so very clearly, leading with one's strongest points, otherwise commentators misrepresent.
I used to think that. My newer conclusions are that most commenters are just hallucinating while looking at what I write, and there's nothing that can be done. It's fun to insult them, though; your insult here was very mild.