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Comment by itsyaboi | Hacker News Reader

As a thought experiment: who do you suppose will do the subduing? Or the enforcement of weapon access laws?

The non-violent men? Women? Are we predicting every man becoming a rabid, sex-crazed automaton?

I recently had the opportunity to tour a Marine base. I was blown away: it's all fucking kids. Drivers, checkpoint guards, helicopter pilots. All 18, 20, 22 years old. Kids! In charge of multi-million dollar hardware. The ones in their late 20s were few and far between. Middle aged men in uniform numbered in the single digits.

My point is: due to the natural curve of population growth there will always be more younger, potentially frustrated men who lack opportunity. Your only realistic hope will be to convince enough of them to help you police the subset who refuse to be convinced.

How do you influence them? What do you bribe them with?

I mean if you're at the point where you can't enforce laws in your society, you have even bigger problems; especially if you've allowed a small minority of men to hold your system hostage. So clearly, if that is the concern, better to nip it even sooner rather than let it fester.

Is there a society that has 100% enforcement rate? In the US, almost a third of murders go unsolved. There's also massive discrepancies in enforcement for lessor crimes when it comes to police and prosecutor "discretion".

Even the high clearance rate in places like Japan is suspect. So it seems like a problem, but it seems universal.

The "CSI effect" [1] tends to lead people to believe law enforcement is far more capable and effective than it is. Murder is the most likely to be solved crime, and its clearance/solving rate in the US is currently trending to drop below 50% for the first time ever. In some high crime areas like St. Louis, murder clearance rates are already in the thirties. [3]

The point of this is that the civility of society is, for better and for worse, not upheld by enforcement - but by an unspoken agreement to a social contract. If any remotely sizable group of people chose to break that agreement, it would be unpleasant times ahead. Even this issue aside, it seems self evident that trying to run a society through coercion would be unstable at best.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSI_effect

[2] - https://www.murderdata.org/p/blog-page.html

[3] - https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/05/08/americas-...

So what is the social contract in this instance? That men are entitled to women? That strikes me as... trying to run a society through coercion, just with the target being a group that people here seem fine with coercing.

Sometimes unpleasant times are necessary in the fight for human rights. Otherwise we would still have things like slavery. Additionally, women wouldn't have the right to vote, and they also wouldn't be able to make independent financial decisions like have their own bank accounts or mortgages. These things aren't that historic, and taking the side of trying to restrict women's relationship choices strikes me as being on the wrong side of history again.

That's quite the strawman, even by 'arguing on the internet' standards. I'd be happy to continue the discussion because I find this quite an interesting topic, but only if you're going to participant in good faith.

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