Investigating Blackout Crime in the Second World War (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Investigating Blackout Crime in the Second World War (2022)

blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

22 pointsrobtherobber12 comments

Hmm, on one hand you have an environment of collective hardship and efforts to strengthen civil unity and resolve, and on the other hand you have newspapers and courts making examples out of criminals with strict punishments and harsh public rebukes. Is it really any wonder that the rate of crime motivated by selfish greed was suppressed? Those kind of criminals are usually sane, despite their compromised morality. Modify the risk/reward equation and they respond rationally to that.

Senseless crimes, women being attacked with knives or worse, continued. Such criminals are depraved and don't respond to normal incentives and punishments.

> Such criminals are depraved and don't respond to normal incentives and punishments.

I think this has less to do with them being irrational and "depraved" and more to do with them being so poorly informed that their perception of risk/reward is unaffected by anything other than experience.

Psychos slashing women with knives are poorly informed of what, exactly? Nobody ever told them that it's wrong to attack people?

At this point in the conversation, I am struck with the realization that there are distinct conceptions of 'violent criminal' in the minds of the authors of each post in the preceding exchange.

Unless that notion is synchronized, perhaps by talking about a specific individual known/knowable to all parties, the conversation can not serve as a vehicle for communication any longer.

Now I'm even more confused.

He said it right there. Poorly informed about risk and reward.

So his theory is that the psychos weren't informed of the risk of getting caught? This is just absurd, just bending-over backwards to cast psychos knifing women as victims.

Please get a grip and find a more deserving subject for your overzealous pity.

He’s saying that they aren’t able to properly weigh out the benefits and consequences of their actions. They have a reason behind wanting to kill and that reason outweighs any other desire, despite knowing the risks of killing people (death, prison, etc) which we can assume far outweigh their motivation.

It's interesting how they discuss the 'harsh' punishments of those men as a few months in prison

I wonder how prison conditions then compared to today, particularly in the UK. I imagine it was a lot worse.

The Casefile podcast had a great two-part series on Blackout crimes last summer, one in London and the other in Berlin.

- https://casefilepodcast.com/case-218-the-blackout-killers-pa...

Oddly enough, I'm in the middle of Bill Bryson's At Home and he talks about the early years of the war, too. Except he wrote about accidents. For a few months, the Luftwaffe was killing 6,000 people a month, and they weren't even bombing.

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