AMA (YYW)

>Thoughts on DART?

Without question better than what DDO is now, but that's a bar so low it might even be impossible to trip over. 

I think that the userbase here is too young to justify my sticking around long, though. 

>Can you concede that we conservatives have won America over in the long run? (We will win more elections within 40 years.)

Conservatives have not won America.  Trump has less than 6 months before he is impeached, and once that happens the neocons will be back in power. 

>What crimes do you feel should result in stricter ramifications?

Very few.  America has the opposite problem.  Our criminal justice system is harsh, and more arbitrary than a lot of people realize.  Lessening the degree to which there are "strict" ramifications for most crimes (especially drug crimes) would be the way to go. 

As well, I think we as a society have to have a serious conversation about the realities of the role police play in the lives of youths, from the suburbs to the cities.  

>Do you not see the irony in the definition of "illiberal"?

No.

>Thoughts on the deity of a man in my avatar? 

If Ben Shapiro was gay, I'd hook up with him. 

>And how will that stop them wanting to rape or rehabilitate them to contribute to society and others? How will that encourage them to confess and/or seek therapy and tell the therapist the one of a select few things that a therapist must always snitch on people for? What escape to they have, what salvation or way to stop being what they are? People who seek retribution are not inherently evil, people who ignore rehabilitation are either scum or are stupid, depending on the reasoning

First of all, the fact that someone does one crime once doesn't mean that they're inclined to do it again. 

This is the idiotic assumption that Bentham's supposed utilitarian theory of justice based on "rehabilitation" presumes.  The idea of rehabilitation is that someone who engages in some sort of criminal activity has obviously dangerous propensities that society ought to redress.  How do you know of their dangerous propensity? Their prior criminal act, of course.  So, in order to deal with that we've to to do something.  (Note: the rehabilitation people also assume the necessity of prison, which is equally stupid, but that's another point for another day.)  The only thing that the rehabilitation types seem to have figured out is prison plus something else (usually education or what have you, all garbage) is the way to go.  Therefore, we only lock people up to the point that they're no longer a threat.

There is "some" logic to this, in the sense that MOST of the people who commit crimes are younger males (16 to 35 or so), and by locking them up until they're 40 or so, maybe longer, hopefully by then they've sorted themselves out enough that they're no longer inclined to go out and rob a bodega again.  We know, for example, that people tend to become more stable and less impulsive as they get older.  We've known that since Freud (scientifically at least, really we've known it since we were in caves).  

But, that's just about where the logic ends. 

It turns out that there are loads of factors that affect criminal behavior, many of them dependent on the individual, but many NOT dependent on the individual as well.  There's virtually zero credible scientific literature establishing anything even approximating a "criminal predisposition" beyond the incredibly weak and undeveloped research on things like the warrior gene.  There's even less research on personality; though some of the stuff out there is good, most of it is complete garbage (and the more political psychology gets, the more garbage its research tends to become).  

So like when Bentham was talking about structuring the criminal justice system in such a way as to address criminals' "nature" he didn't have a damn bit of evidence behind what he was saying beyond his own highly speculative pontification (if you would even consider that "evidence").  Normative nonsense like that isn't really a good way to structure societies or ascertain how society ought to respond to criminal behavior, when you can't even establish the truth of that school of thought's most basic assumption (i.e., that there is such a thing as a criminal predisposition) in the first place. 

Given all of that, suggesting "therapy" to someone seems like a really stupid idea too. 

That's not to denigrate therapy.  Even criminals may benefit from therapy...  Many people have lots of problems, criminals probably do too, and it very well may be that a lot of those environmental or at least non-inherent factors (society, poverty, context, etc.) cause or contribute to a person's decision to do something illegal, therapy might help them contend with those factors in a more socially productive way.  

The bigger thing is that there is exactly zero evidence that therapy has any impact a person's "criminal predisposition" (which, again, there's also no evidence that there is a such thing as a criminal predisposition, but if we buy into the normative idea that there is, then we can meaningfully assess the fledgling research between "therapy" and "committing further crimes").  All the evidence out there shows no relationship between the two things; though most of the research out there can't even agree what those two things are (damn hard to scientifically define normative concepts, after all). 

So, yeah... I'm skeptical of basically everything you said there, though less because YOU said it than because those assumptions are the wholly ill founded a priori assumptions that people in the West have about criminology (which is pretty much a pseudoscience in its entirety) in general.