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I would say that I don't care how much enjoyment the thief gets from my stolen property, but that's not true.
I do care.
I want them to be utterly miserable from their theft.
Far more unhappy than I am about the loss.
I want them to contract a slow moving, incurable, untreatable, painful disease that also, perversely, prolongs their life.
I want them to experience this in a poorly run prison, where their cellmate considers their affliction a kink.
For Fuck's Sake!
Where does the idea that someone who steals from you being happy about stealing being a good thing come from?
Perhaps the idiots who think this way should be treated more harshly than thieves.
The thief's depredations are far more limited in scope than the idiot depicted in the comic. That idiot will go out to vote, get laws changed and make it impossible to punish thieves.
Shitheads like this think, "property can be replaced, so it's wrong to kill thieves," and, "your property isn't worth more than their life!"
I shouldn't be surprised to find that's a close quote to something Che Gueverra said, "The life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on Earth."
That's wrong-think.
The proper attitude is, "nothing here is worth getting killed over."
It's not me deciding that my property is worth more than their life, it's them deciding that their life is worth less than my property.
It's illegal for me to act morally on this.
The thing is, theft isn't just stealing objects. It is, in effect, stealing the time put in to earn the money to buy the stolen property. Not to mention, the property stolen may have sentimental value above its nominal cash value. Also, a bicycle is not a candy bar. The ones I've priced start at about $200 and go up. WAY up. Getting zapped for that much money is no damn joke.
ReplyDeleteMy sister-in-law's oldest nephew is a policeman out in Riverside, CA, and he was telling me that he and his colleagues were instructed not to bother people who stole goods valued at less than a certain amount because the policy was not to "waste time" prosecuting such people. And then people out there wonder why they can't leave anything outside.
Harsh penalties, applied across-the-board, combined with thorough and effective policing, reduce this sort of nonsense. I have two examples that prove it: eye gougers and kidnap-for-ransom. Back around the turn of the 20th century, no self-respecting street hoodlum was fully equipped without an eye gouger, and gouging out eyes was a standard tactic in street fights. But when the citizens found this out, they were outraged and the politicians who used the hoodlums as muscle passed the word: "Get caught with a gun, a knife, a sap, a club, brass knucks---we can get the courts to go easy on you. Get caught with an eye gouger, though, and your ass is grass." And, as if by magic, eye gougers disappeared from the streets. A lot of modern people wouldn't even recognize one if they saw one.
Same for kidnap-for-ransom. Before the Lindbergh case, kidnapping was not a major crime if the captive was released unharmed. But after Lindbergh, the laws were tightened, Federal law was put in place, and the authorities came down real hard on kidnappers. Some crooks who hadn't got the word, notably "Machine Gun" Kelly and his vicious bride, got sent away for very, very long stretches in the pen. And lo and behold, the professionals abandoned kidnapping-for-ransom. These days, most "kidnappings" are matters of custody disputes or the like.
This is an excellent example of a luxury belief. Virtue signaling about theft being nugatory because the criminal needs it more is something people with lots of money who live in gated communities say. My attitude is theft is theft and should be punished and if you break into my house you have lost all benefit of doubt.
ReplyDeleteThat Guevara quote, if it's authentic, is hugely ironic. Che killed people left, right and center, for all sorts of reasons. A lot of the people who idolize him would have been up against the wall if he'd got his hands on them.
ReplyDeleteFull quote, “[W]e understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth millions of times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. . . . [The revolution] demands they understand that pride in serving our fellow man is much more important than a good income; that the people's gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate.”
DeleteCan you say, "lip service"?
None of those commie fucks actually believed what they were saying if they lived past the revolution days. The true believers are liquidated faster than their opponents!