If this is indeed true, it is yet another piece of evidence in the case for prison reform. Prisoners are universally bored, yet in many cases insufficiently protected from one another. Read accounts of any long-time convict's time in prison and you'll hear about excruciating boredom punctuated by acts of outrageous sadism.
I believe we should focus on separating criminals from non-criminals instead of punishing and torturing them. Give them an environment where they can thrive without being harmful to themselves and others. Let them re-join the society ONLY when they pose acceptable risk. This means violent criminals may never get to re-join the society, but that's okay given that they are still given a humane environment where they can stay healthy and thrive.
I'm classified as a "violent criminal" by the state by way of having a violent felony. Not trying to be inflammatory, but this sounds like awful idea, mostly psychological and societal at large. In my experience, many, many people have this "us vs. them" attitude towards criminals, as in "I would never commit a crime so therefore they are not like us." The reality is, countless people are either innocent or one-time offenders (or others who likely do not "deserve" exile). Further division along further boundaries is probably not what we need, especially one which is nearly certain to be universally looked down upon.
So, IMO, resources would be much better spent improving what we have (a lot), making sure justice & sentencing is fair and consistent, and certainly doing a much better job of post-incarceration support, community, and monitoring. I would wager that many, many more people can be helped out of their circumstances than are currently, but prisoners are almost dropped entirely once they're released.
Thanks for sharing. Especially the “us vs. them”-view.
I recently realised this while watching Gordon Ramsay’s Bad Boy Bakery. The sentiment (I assume often portrayed intentionally by the show) about prisoners really both shocked and confused me. It’s as if people want prisoners to do absolutely nothing, somehow still act according to their rules and then somehow flourish in society after release.
imo, prison systems should be more focused on learning crafts and education in general. I feel like the vast majority are in for minor crimes and somehow their life should be ruined for it. Doesn’t seem just.
There’s definitely some people who pose a permanent danger to society, and some prison sentences will seem just. But there’s no reason they should be bored out of their minds
That's an interesting reference, thanks. I kinda skimmed through a couple episodes on YouTube actually. I don't think I watched enough to pick up on nuanced portrayal of prisoners but I do understand what you're saying nonetheless. I was lucky enough to go in and come out with a job but it appears any reason or amount of time is heavily stigmatized in so many other ways (total ban on immigration to many countries, automatic bans or denials for things that utilize background checks, negative judgment from friends and family, general assumption of guilt in many scenarios, etc).
I very much agree re: focus on education. I spent some time in a new facility and they had good classrooms and programs for it and I saw a lot of interest in them. That said, I think boredom is often seen by many as a desirable part of the punishment.
Thank you for sharing. I personally view "violent criminals" as regular human beings and believe we should stop classifying people as violent criminals the moment they no longer pose significant danger to others. But maybe you're right in seeing that most don't share these views. Regardless, what I'm trying to say is ALL people deserve to organize themselves in ways that lead to safe, healthy, and happy lives. We should not torture people for decades for murdering others. Rather, let them live in a way that allows them to thrive while protecting the rest from getting harmed.
I get where you're coming from but realize that you're advocating for indefinite sentences, which are inhumane, combined with a board of fallible, perversely incentivized people who will determine who is rehabilitated and who isn't. The board will presumably be subject to the will of a sadistic, vengeful public who have cartoonish beliefs about a system they have no direct knowledge of, and who completely fail to understand even the most basic rights afforded under the constitution. (Go look at just about any tweet about the fifth amendment.)
It sounds great on paper but the second real people get involved, it becomes a humans rights disaster.
I agree that it would be difficult to implement these practices at once. But the core idea, that all people have the right to organize in a way that leads to sustainable happiness, can be implemented in small chunks in many different, less controversial aspects of our lives. I imagine if the idea gets enough traction, we can then take a good look at how we treat those who refuse to harmonize with the general population.
Penal colonies and other forms of exile are cruel and unusual. It's hard to conceive because this form of punishment has been disused in the west for nearly as long as drawing and quartering, but historical use of exile gives a sense for how extreme permanent exile is as a punishment.
Even in the age of drawing and quartering, penal colonies were used primarily as an alternative to capital punishment. In the age of gruesome physical torture, exile was used primarily an alternative to execution.
I think the key difference is I'm focusing on allowing people to live with others they can synergize well with. I oppose the focus on punishing (torturing) criminals. I do not believe we should permanently exile all violent criminals into wilderness. I believe they should live in a safe and healthy environment where they can thrive. We shouldn't let someone who's likely to murder people out on the streets with no help to get them reintegrated just because they did their time. At the same time, there's no reason we should keep someone locked up when they have truly changed. Give criminals a healthy environment where they can thrive and even be happy. Give criminals a chance to join back when they really want to.
Maintaining a sufficient level of physical security to reliably confine violent criminals while also giving them a safe and healthy environment where they can thrive would be extremely expensive. It sounds great in theory, but most citizens wouldn't be willing to pay more taxes for it. (And yes I'm aware we could find the necessary funds by slashing military spending but realistically that's not going to happen.)
Well that would depend on the specific facts of your case, which is why we give judges some flexibility in sentencing. There's a huge difference between punching someone in a bar brawl versus pistol whipping a store clerk during an armed robbery.
You make various odd connections there that are just not true. Violent criminals do not thrive together with other violent criminals. By definition those are people who have trouble fitting in a society. There's a high chance of various bad things happening and so you need rules and guards and so on. It would never be a free society when talking about bad criminals and not small offenders.
There are tons of serious pragmatic issues with your suggestions, as well as serious political questions about how to convince people to implement them.
I don't see a meaningful difference between exile and inprisonment then. In either way, you remove the people from their communities for an extended period of time. I don't think it's consequential to make a difference between them being stuck outside or inside the geographical area.
Exile might sometimes give people an opportunity to create a new life for themselves, even if it wouldn't have been their own choice. Especially if exile is to a semi-free society, as opposed to exile to a prison colony or an internal gulag. Some people may even thrive as a result. There is no comparison with an lengthy period of imprisonment, with no freedoms at all
Australia was populated long before that. 100k or so convicts shipped over a century probably means fewer than 50k shipped-convict population at once, compared to an 800k aboriginal population (plus or minus a lot).
Non-violent offenders will be housed in a different prison than violent offenders, and the worst of the worst (usually lifers) will be put into one or two very secure prisons.
This castle is the max security prison in Czechia. Used as a prison since 1760 (back then for offending clergy). You won't get there for child support debt.
(Though as a former kid whose father was deliberately neglecting child support payments - it can work pretty long if he lives in another country that has a corrupt judicial system - I believe withholding child support should be punished by more than just a slap on the wrist. Lack of support makes life really hard for the kids.)
I'd be happy if we'd just get over this vindictive need to deprive prisoners of basic pleasures.
I've seen outrage over the idea that prisoners have access to TVs, or gaming consoles, or similar, stories of wardens confiscating books and pen and paper and such. I understand there are some other concerns that may warrant keeping usage of some of those under surveillance or similar (keep a pencil from being used as a shiv say), but other countries don't try and make prisons as miserable an experience as possible, and they have far, far lower rates of recidivism and violence and such.
Deb Alderson's Global Tel*Link is replacing libraries with locked down tablets that have e-reader apps. Inmates are charged a couple bucks an hour for access to the tablet and are limited to 90 minutes of reading time.
> I'd be happy if we'd just get over this vindictive need to deprive prisoners of basic pleasures.
I won't argue that there aren't some people who have such a vindictive need, but in most cases where I've had conversations with folks about things like this, it's more that they oppose someone having a similar (or maybe "better") quality of life to what they have, without working to pay for it, and rather being paid for by them. The opposition to these things in prisons seem similar to the arguments I hear from people against social safety net things generally. Not to say these arguments are reasonable, but I don't think vindictiveness is the primary driving factor.
Okay, maybe. Rather than people wanting the worst possible thing for prisoners because of the perceived harm those prisoners have caused them (vindictiveness), they want the worst possible thing for prisoners because HOW DARE someone else have something nicer than them that they didn't "earn". That's the same attitude that would begrudge a homeless person a donated name brand hoodie, because (you) had to pay $X for it.
That's even worse. But maybe the term should be different; maybe it isn't vindictiveness.
The US is the most incarcerated country in the world. We have the most prisoners, the most prisoners per capita, the highest spending on prisoners, and one of the worst recidivism rates (76% after 5 years).
What we're doing is -clearly- not working. The idea that we'd rather spend -more- than other countries, on a system that works worse, begs the question of 'why'. Why would we want to keep doing the same thing, that isn't working, -and- costs us more? Because we think prisoners don't deserve better.
Maybe that isn't "vindictiveness", but it's damned close.
It certainly isn't "I want to make sure my tax dollars being used effectively", or "I want the best outcomes from prisons", or even "I want to make sure they're only getting what they need to serve their time and then be able to come out and rejoin society".
It very much is "Damn the consequences, and how much it costs, I want them to have the worst possible experience".
IMHO the appropriate focus there is that whatever argument you can make in the form that "criminals should get a standard of life of at least X" would also imply that non-criminals also should get at least the same standard of life. Prisoners do deserve all kinds of things, but to be fair, everyone else does as well. And if you assert that a certain thing should be provided for criminals but you already have a non-trivial underclass who can't afford these things and have no plans to provide those things to the non-criminals, then it is a reasonable source of frustration for a honest poor individual who is being denied that opportunity - why is society abandoning them and is literally treating them worse than criminals, if they have done nothing wrong?
And it acts as an anti-deterrent if someone sees that they would improve their material conditions by doing harmful things and going to prison. There's nothing wrong with ensuring good prison conditions, but it has to go hand in hand with ensuring equally good non-prison conditions for poor people.
> It very much is "Damn the consequences, and how much it costs, I want them to have the worst possible experience".
To be clear, I am not agreeing with the position I am describing. Rather, I am trying to very specifically say that it is NOT "very much... I want them to have the worst possible experience."
If anything, I think the attitude I described may be more reflective of the overall poor quality of life (relative to the possibilities) that the majority of Americans enjoy in their day-to-day lives due to the widening wealthy inequality. For many people, who can't even afford access to entertainment like "gaming consoles", providing such to prisoners out of the taxpayer's till makes them question why their life is so hard and what they're working for if they could just become anti-social and get enjoyment beyond "three hots and a cot". Granted, perhaps it would be useful if more people questioned their lot in life and how we got here, but the result of that questioning for many is not high-minded ideals and calls for more equality.
You seem to be reiterating the idea of vindictiveness in your conclusion, while acknowledging that something akin to spite might be more causative earlier on in your response. I am not sure I'd classify exactly what I'm describing as either spite or vindictiveness, but it's certainly a dark feeling. What I'm observing is that many people are uncomfortable with the idea of prisoners having an enjoyable enough quality of life such that their own non-prison life seems worse by comparison, it creates feelings of futility towards life and engenders a certain type of nihilism. I think considering that people are merely vindictive or spiteful is an oversimplification that does not fully encompass the complexity of the human experience. You should also consider that many people who are in the bottom half of American society /know/ someone who's been in prison, or may have been in prison themselves, so it is not as if the realities of the prison experience have escaped these people. As you rightly point out, the US has the highest incarceration and recidivism rates in the world, and it's predominantly people who are "lower class" ending up there, mostly from a demographic standpoint the same folks who hold the viewpoint I'm trying to point out.
I understand their frustration, but I think it's a win-win situation to provide a nice life in prison. They get out of society so we don't have to deal with them and they also aren't subject to torturous conditions.
If the last two years have taught us anything, it's that being stuck in one place, even if it's your own house, feels pretty bad when you cannot go do something else.
My brain seems to reflexively get "bored" when they've announced any new restrictions or measures. I'm not sure bored is even the right word, but it's the best way I can describe it.
It makes me laugh at myself because I wasn't going to do any of it either way.
In this case, "spite". As in, "I don't want you to have anything nice, even if it cost me less and led to better outcomes for you and society at large (and thus indirectly me)". As in, "bite off your nose to spite your face".
>'s more that they oppose someone having a similar (or maybe "better") quality of life to what they have, without working to pay for it, and rather being paid for by them
This is very akin to vindictiveness, though. It's one of the most corrosive forces in American political life. *Someone* might get something they don't *deserve*. Bonus points if that someone is the "other" (Jewish, brown skin, Mexican, whatever). The right wing used this as a wedge issue in the 80's ("welfare queens") to make life miserable for the poor and it's the driving force behind a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric here and abroad.
Forced labor in a fixed geographic region with strict security requirements is fundamentally incongruent with pricing power.
I think prisoners should have the option to work and that they should be subject to all of the normal worker protection laws. Wages can go toward some combination of restitution and improving quality of life in prisons: food, lodging, entertainment in off hours, etc.
Restitution should be limited to a fixed percentage of monthly income (as it is in the civilian world). Why? Because removing positive reinforcement from the act of labor has perverse psychological effects. These effects persist after incarceration and contribute to recidivism.
This sort of system is insufficiently punitive for some, so the politics of these reforms are tricky.
Look up CCI in Colorado. They pay almost nothing for prisoners to work in industries like manufacturing. They then sell these products to businesses so they can claim it was made in the USA (so awesome!). It’s all slave labor essentially. Then, with the skills these people learn, when they’re released they can’t get hired because they have a record. Whole thing is a disgusting joke. Taking advantage of people that ended up in their situation because they never had direction or opportunities to begin with.
(Should mention they just got a new director and she is really awesome. Came from the women’s bean project. Hope she can make some positive change but she’ll have to fight a lot of bureaucracy.)
Forced labor is an incentive to incarcerate more people. Incarceration should not be profitable.
It would be better to give them daily education, therapy, recreation, etc. They have piloted such programs in the US with a lot of success at preventing recidivism.
All of this can save costs in the long run. Paying for prison security, medical costs, maintenance, turnover, and recidivism is extremely expensive.
“The going rate” will be low, because of market dynamics. Either you need a prisoners' minimum wage, or you need to not do that; people do still have rights even if they've committed crimes.
Put them in education, give them food and shelter, and they'll be better able to contribute to society when they get out.
They should have the option of school or work, with a minimum GPA required to stay in school. The biggest issue will be supervision of the grading to ensure it's not being abused either to punish people who are doing well or to let people off who aren't actually doing their work.
I’d pass on the forced labor part, but make work at a going rate optional. Bring separated from everyone and everything you love is punishment enough in many cases.
I know a little about car-dependency in the US, but sheesh... I am always astounded how such things like driving being a basic skill or having a car being a necessity are unquestionable parts of living and culture there.
I mean the "obvious" alternative that satisfies those predicates is house arrest: separated from society, not in danger from other prisoners.
So I'd ask: What prevents us from using house arrest as an alternative to imprisonment more often? How can those problems be addressed? Can we "build a better house arrest" -- maybe even from within the private sector?
Prison is fundamentally flawed from a conceptual basis. Is the idea to reform someone? To make them not repeat their crime? Is it to punish? It is to discourage? It does none of these job as well as it could.
Lets take for an example a semi successful drug dealer. Odds are the drug dealer choose that profession because the rewards were higher than the risks. So to discourage that you can 1) make prison so terrible he fears it more than the rewards from dealing 2) teach him something that is of comparable economic utility so he no longer wants to deal drugs.
The problem is that option 2 is arguably a reward. If you create incentives to break rules ("I break the law and sell drugs, my punishment is that i get locked away from X years and be forced to learn a trade or get a degree") then why wouldnt you break rules? We seem to pretend we dont want 1. But I've seen plenty of comments from conservatives about how the criminals deserve what they get, and oddly enough I also hear "dont drop the soap" jokes from liberals when its people they dont like....
Then you have for example murderers. Quite a few murderers will probably never murder again. The man who kills his wife and her lover after catching them in bed, is probably not going to be killing anyone again. It was that set of situations that drove them to that. What more can the person do than classes on impulse control? And your going to get them to learn that by putting them in the place where the impulse stimulus is completely different than the regular world? What does life or a lengthy prison accomplish if punishment/deterrence is not the goal?
Thats not even getting into the fact that prison is the main mental health provider for anyone with serious issues who cant get family to take care of them. (and even people who have family might not be able to afford their particular issues). A person with severe schizophrenia who attacks others can't really be reformed
The only real fix is to be honest about what the goal of "prison" is. And break the concept out into reform, containment, and punishment. At least then you can optimize towards those goals.
I think you're missing a huge part of the point of prison; prisons aren't designed for the prisoner's benefit, but for society's benefit. Somehow who shoots his wife and lover in bed, or someone who deals drugs, or someone who steals cars isn't someone I want to live near or around.
I'll give you an example to pair with your drug dealer example. A small community store is run by an old couple. Everyone who enters is greeted with pleasure. Shoplifting increases, and the old couple sells to a young person, who is concerned about shoplifting and doesn't greet everyone with pleasure. Then there's an armed robbery. Now there's cameras, bulletproof glass, and the store clerks are openly suspicious of people who come into the store. Now society is worse to live in, and the only people who caused that are the ones who did the crimes.
Crime causes poverty of spirit and weakens social bonds; prison is a place to keep prisoners so they don't disintegrate society.
Am i? Punishing someone for a societys benefit sounds like detterence to me. Sounds like what you think should be done against that person is removal from society. The classic way (death penalty) is not in fashion in the western world.
So it sounds like they should be put in a facility optimized towards containment and letting them live out their days in some semblance of peace. (Not wanting them in peace sounds alot like you want them punished) Not in a facility where they take a slot to learn a trade from someone else and get to influence people who reform is deemed appropriate.
Hmm, perhaps not. We may be agreeing with each other. I have no desire to punish people for their crimes, only to remove them from society.
I thought your point was that the concept of prison as "a place where you are removed from society" is fundamentally flawed, and your rationale was that removal does not serve the person removed. It seems that your point is actually that the modern concept of prison as "a place where you go to be punished" is flawed, which I agree with. Prisoners should simply be outside society, not in pain or fear. If they can manage to live peacefully that ought to be allowed; if they cannot, they ought to be restricted further.
I think there are only two real "punishments", which are death and exile. Corporal punishment is just partially-applied death, and prison is just partially-applied exile. All other punishments I'm aware of are just shades of either death or exile; even monetary fines are "a reduction of your ability to participate in society".
The point of punishment is not to reduce crime. Revenge is the point. Im not saying you should make prisons harsher. Im saying if you want a societal revenge site. Just admit and optimize for that. Putting that right next to "reform this person" just hurts both endeavors.
Some people could really use removal from their environment and a fresh start where they get discipline and learn a way to be successful.(prison doesnt do this, and a one size fits all discipline approach causes problems too) Other people are just dangers to themselves and others. Mixing the two just damns the people who could be saved.
I have a similar thought about flamewars on the internet, or rather about why generic discussions so often turn into flamewars: the mind resorts to indignation to amuse itself in the absence of anything more interesting.
I wonder if this doesn't have some survival value for Homo sapiens? If people are bored, it often means that they are secure and well off. At that point, to maximize the survival of the species, perhaps it would be of strategic value to send people off exploring to create new settlements?
From the standpoint of genes, in small settlements, there would tend to be some inter-relatedness, so this would be a way for genes to distribute copies of themselves geographically.
This could even have memetic (in the academic/generic Richard Dawkins sense) survival implications. In the same way that established villages could send out dissidents like "seeds" to start new settlements, perhaps internet forums do something analogous?
(I have another horrible sounding idea: Perhaps the penchant for little children to grab things to put into their mouths is a way for 1) the most expendable members of the community to act as inadvertent food tasters/poison detectors for the group and 2) a late filter to knock inattentive parents out of the gene pool. I know it's all evolutionary "just so stories," but it's fun to speculate.)
Little children putting stuff in their mouths has an immediate use. I discovered this with a child that lacked this stage of development. It's important to their eating. Babies learn to eat whatever they're fed. If they're fed spicy food, Thai hot, that's their normal. Being willing to taste/try anything makes this pretty easy. And, overall, babies are hard.
Being bored seems like one of the factors, but I also wonder if it is additionally caused by being unhappy or angry or [some other emotion] in other parts of our lives.
Perhaps this is why there is all the anecdotal evidence of people being asses to one another, and especially to “low status” retail workers and clerks over the last 2 years.
(economic/influence based status here, of course all people should be given the same amount of default respect regardless of occupation or income level, but real life seldom plays out that way)
I like the relevant quote from Pascal, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" mainly because it's allows me to feel smugly superior while procrastinating work.
If I'm being completely honest, once I discovered all of the manipulations and lies Christianity perpetrates on its people, everything else I hear about the religion I take with a heaping pile of salt, including wisdom I might, in a vacuum, accept.
My thought is usually something like, "Yes, and how did this 'wisdom' help earlier Christian leaders control their followers?"
Sorry you had such a bad time with religion. Our experiences really do affect how we perceive the world. I also had a bad experience with it growing up, rejected it, became an atheist, then really experienced God later on and it changed me. There really is beauty in the Bible and the life of Christ. Real hope, real redemption for broken humanity. You have to separate Christianity from the people that abuse it for control, manipulation, and power. Those things are not principles that the Bible teaches, in fact Jesus condemns those actions explicitly.
I did not have a bad experience with religion growing up (I had little/no experience with religion growing up), but the manipulation I'm referencing is available for anyone to read about, as the history of the Catholic church is not private information.
The beauty in Christianity is co-opted and stolen from the beauty of the universe in an effort to control others. Very little about Christianity is uniquely beautiful, in my opinion.
This is why the Roman generals in Britain built Hadrian's Wall. They knew it wasn't defensively useful for crap, but it kept a lot of trained soldiers far away from home stuck in a cold unpleasant land with people they did not view as civilized from becoming a dangerous idle mass of people.
> bored people will give themselves electric shocks
That's masochism, not sadism.
When I get incensed on the internet it is due to overt display of -isms, and not a desire to hurt someone (or get hurt), but more of: your attitude and behavior is hurtful to others and here is why. However, trying to change someone's attitude in non-troll way when they are entrenched in their belief system leads to a flame-wars 98% of the time. I'm always hoping for that 2%.
There is an interesting exploration of this in the Altered Carbon universe. If people can become functionally immortal, will they inevitably grow tired of societally acceptable pursuits and move on to sadism?
Also 'Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged' from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
"After a period of total boredom, especially on Sunday afternoons, he decided to insult everyone in the entire universe in alphabetical order." (A quote from the fandom wiki)
You don’t need fiction to explore it; look at the rich and comfortable in our society forcing austerity on the poor.
Bored people playing the only titillating game available to them.
It’s not lost on me these folks are generally of the age to have lacked the variety of multimedia we have now. Raised on tales grounded in literal global conquest and missionaries of their culture, chasing “forever life” through family tree taxonomy, enlisting their kids as “skins” in the battle to maintain order as they see it.
Of course ideas that challenge their poetic vision are illiberal nonsense.
There are a lot of factors that could contribute to sadistic behaviors aside from simply boredom. When people are bored, often they lack purpose and in the modern world a purpose can be difficult to find and follow, especially when depending on someones socioeconomic status it may seem near impossible to accomplish larger goals that they've already dismissed as near impossible (and rightfully so) that may prove to give them value.
Maybe they need a career change. Depending on someones age and commitments, the idea of changing careers can be very difficult. How do you keep paying bills and working in a job you hate, taking care of family, but learn something new that will become fruitful. I can relate to feeling like you want to lash out at people, unfortunately often these can be people that just seem like easier targets.
At least for me my lashing out is more about just being honest with people that normally I'd normally ignore, but have decided that I should just tell them the cold hard truths.
People also behave more masochistically when they're bored. When placed in a room with no other stimulation other than a button that (painfully) shocks you when pushed, people push the button out of boredom.
I believe it! I am surrounded by retirement-age non-workers, one who is an alcoholic, one with severe medical condition, a practically non-verbal who lives like a hobo—oh, and one does resent having to work part-time, and let’s you know it.
The first one will go nuts and scream his head off all night and has been arrested so many times they know him by name. The next just bought a rolling chair and likes to roll around his apartment, the next wakes up all hours during the night and is constantly moving his milk crates and lawn furniture and dropping things that roll (these two live above me) and the last stomps around the building and can be heard at 0400 in the morning whining about her life and talking $#!t about everything and everyone.
Fracking Miserable people who spread misery.
I mentioned to the people above me and the one denies he rides the chair and then uses his medical condition as an excuse. The other said flatly, “too bad”.
> one with severe medical condition... bought a rolling chair and likes to roll around his apartment [all hours during the night]... denies he rides the chair and then uses his medical condition as an excuse
I mean... is his medical condition related to his ability to walk and sleep well? E.g., does he:
1. have trouble walking
2. can't afford a wheelchair
3. has continence issues?
That would explain rolling around at all hours of the night. And sourcing him some cheap/free mats/carpets to cover the floor between his bed and bathroom could help you sleep better.
In any case... sorry you have to put up with that. Having noisy upstairs neighbors sucks.
In this case, the rolling guy does lay off after 2200h. It’s the hobo who is over my bedroom and makes noise at all hours.
But that said, you’re right. A friend commented I should have bought the hobo a pair of slippers as a house warming gift. I will totally do this next time someone moves in above.
I have a pet theory that smartphones and the mobile Internet are the primary reasons for the decline of violent street crime. People these days don't need to be violent to entertain themselves -- because they now have porn, dating, gossip, games, and gambling in their pockets. Plus it's a lot safer than violence.
At least in the US you have your timeline backwards. Violent street crime declined strongly starting in the early 1990s. Lots of reasons have been suggested for this, mainly around lead in the environment. But maybe it went the other way. The lack of street crime lead to people walking around, creating the demand to create the mobile internet.
I'm burned by social sciences so I'll wait for a replication study.
But as an aside, grinding maggots is not exactly my idea of sadism.
I prefer when they feel physical pain.
Or at least think they look like they do.
Although, mental atrocities are actually my specialty.
They must excite my empathy, I'm more the sensitive type.
The icing on the cake is, when they like it.
Confiscating one of their most important holds on reality, their smarthphones, stealing their time and making them watch boring 20-minute videos about waterfalls on the other hand...
There I sense a really sneaky kind of evil.
A bit like that Milgram stage drama.
Experience with maggots is an important control variable, especially given the tiny sample size (13 people ground maggots).
I suspect that people who have experience dealing with a maggot infestation -- or any infestation -- will have a very different relationship to grinding maggots.
I wouldn't think twice about grinding maggots, but to do so voluntarily I'd have to have nothing better to do because it's not pleasant work.
I don't think grinding maggots is particularly violent. This is probably because I had to deal with a very serious and persistent maggot infestation. There's really no way to deal with a maggot infestation except to kill them en masse using methods that appear sadistic (e.g., boiling water or chemical treatment).
An alternative title might be "Dealing with a maggot infestation is necessary but unpleasant work... you have to be pretty bored before you decide to do this work voluntarily."
> people who have experience dealing with a maggot infestation
I do, albeit just a small one.
My wife used to feed our American Staffordshire with raw offal, especially beef stomach, tripe, whatever.
Absolutely disgusting.
But he loved it.He seemed to inhale about two pounds of it in what I perceived as nanoseconds.
He was such a charming beast, absolutely adorable.
But disgusting nontheless.
May he rest in peace.
Anyway, one friday morning we forgot to take out the trash with a handfull of leftovers from that stuff before setting off for a little trip over the weekend.
I tell you, sunday evening was hell on earth.
The lord of the flies himself had infested our kitchen.
Thankfully its door was closed during the infestation and they weren't fully awake and they all sat sluggish and fat on the windows.
I annihilated most of them with the vacuum cleaner and started a search and destroy mission that lasted half of the night.
A few hundred sleepy flies and some leftover maggots had to die.
No remorse.
Thought about nuking the place from orbit.
I don't have to mention, we never ever feed our AmStaff with offal again.
That means any kind of stimulation is preferred over no stimulation. If sadism is the only kind of stimulation one can get, they'll take it for the sake of survival.
Some guy did something similar a few years ago, livestreamed himself sleeping, allowed watchers to wake him up.
Can't remember if he monetized it. Also, found out that people actually do livestream themselves sleeping while looking if I could find it to link to it - unrelated & weird.
Cool theory with outsized cultural influence, but one would be remiss to not mention that the results of that study are on shaky ground and were not replicated.
I don’t know how true this is in general but upon a bit of reflection I will say I am more honest when I am bored. That is pretty extreme coming from somebody who normally has no resignations about social awkwardness from blunt honesty.
The common response to my bored honesty is typically a positive mix of bewilderment and curiosity. People tend to find the unexpected hyper criticality a bit entertaining.
I wonder if this tendency is the reason for the stereotype of the sadistic prep school trust fund kid that is so dominant in popular culture. In some cases it's obvious that they are easy opposition to the main character, but even in other stories they tend to be characterized that way.
Is this experiment fair? People were bored and the only alternative given was to grind worms and conclude that boredom catalyze sadistic behavior? What about give something kind as alternative (like giving away stuff to homeless ppl), what would that give?
"If I'm alone too long I think too much, and I'm not interested in doing that. That won't lead anywhere good, I'm sure. If I'm busy I tend to stay out of trouble. An idle mind is the devil's playground." Lisa Marie Presley =)
It's interesting how little this forum respects social science results due to the reproducibility crisis. Except when it tickles our brains via confirmation bias.
Is there a link between proliferation of smartphones with games and lower violence? Most people are never bored these days because they escape to their smartphones.
I don't know if putting a maggot through a grinder counts as acting sadistically. Boredom is dangerous though, sometimes when people are bored they do things like sneak a gun into a situation they know could turn violent and then pretend they're a hero
> If one understands even a little bit of how unimaginably complex, fantastic and incredible is that I exist
That sounds incredibly narcissistic... The universe doesn't give a single shit that a lump of carbon is doing some weird chemistry on a rock along side other carbon lumps.
> Boredom is just a sign of undeveloped human
Boredom is a sign of an impedance mismatch, a lack of stimulus or novelty.
>The universe doesn't give a single shit that a lump of carbon
If it truly didn't then we wouldn't exist. Since we are here it means we need to be here, as all things have their place. We are the finest way the Universe can experience itself, at least on this planet and this is our significance.
>Boredom is a sign of an impedance mismatch, a lack of stimulus or novelty
What better stimulus you can have than the whole Universe in front of you? It's not a lack of stimulus it's inability to see deeper into what is going on. If you look out of the window and see people, trees, cars of course you will be bored. But if you see how none of this would be possible without Sun showering this planet with energy, without stars forging atoms and then evolution combining them in unimaginable ways which ended up in forms you see, then it's a different thing altogether.
Do you really remember your million lifes? Even if so, wouldn't you be astonished by how million times it happened and still there is something new every time? Still it's not the same and there are different experiences all the time? This is not about emotions, this is about realizing what is there in front of us every moment.
This means you are not fully there. If you find yourself bored just look at how boredom works, look at how what is there in front of you at that moment is not enough and why you want something different. Just diving into it with a keen attention will remove it right away :)
Pleasure is fleeting. It must be or else you'd still be glowing from your first orgasm.
Inevitably the search for pleasure will require variety and inevitably that variety brings you to inflicting pain on others.
We do it publicly. The romans fed people to the lions. We have lots of violent sports. Nascar isn't about driving left. It's about the crashes. Hockey is about the fights and checking. Lets not even evaluate violent videogames.
The real trick is understanding what's happening in your brain and controlling this before it gets to the need to inflict pain.
Out of the hockey fans I know, only the really casual watchers are interested in fights and checking at all. The big fans are way more interested in the strategy and statistics and many of them are annoyed when a big fight breaks out and wastes time in the game. If what you were saying was true, way more people would just be watching videos on the internet of people getting into street fights than professional sports.
It's way easier to find videos of car crashes than it is to watch hours of cars driving in circles. I don't understand the appeal of NASCAR, but it's clearly not about the crashes.
> Lets not even evaluate violent videogames.
Why not? You might find that long-term players of games are more interested in good gameplay than bloody effects or the violence itself. I've noticed that games in general are tending toward less violence and blood than a decade or so ago.
I think you are being unfairly judgemental about things that you don't understand.
>Out of the hockey fans I know, only the really casual watchers are interested in fights and checking at all. The big fans are way more interested in the strategy and statistics and many of them are annoyed when a big fight breaks out and wastes time in the game. If what you were saying was true, way more people would just be watching videos on the internet of people getting into street fights than professional sports.
To be fair I havent watched in quite some time but as the saying goes... I went to a fight, and a hockey game broke out!
This is very simple to evaluate. What would happen to the NHL is fighting and checking was banned. Any physical violence is an immediate contract break and players thrown out of the league? Dont get another $.
Obviously violence would go away but how'd the sport work out? I'm thinking hockey would suck pretty hardcore. NHL viewership would be at all-time lows without question.
Also yes, street fighting videos are ridiculously popular but also why they were banned on so many platforms.
>It's way easier to find videos of car crashes than it is to watch hours of cars driving in circles. I don't understand the appeal of NASCAR, but it's clearly not about the crashes.
I mean no offence against nascar. F1 has nothing but crashes as well. Every highlight reel is about the crashes. So it is about nascar. Nascar highlights are all about crashes.
>Why not? You might find that long-term players of games are more interested in good gameplay than bloody effects or the violence itself. I've noticed that games in general are tending toward less violence and blood than a decade or so ago.
The violence is the point being made. Pleasure is fleeting. Violent video games are fantastic because it lets you chop someone's head off when you cant do it in person. When you have gone so far as to needing that level of pleasure, the next step in solving boredom will be more extreme.
>I think you are being unfairly judgemental about things that you don't understand.
Not judgmental at all. I've got my TF2 and skyrim installed. I watch violent sports. Im not judging people who do these things. I can see that's how people took my post by the heavy downvotes.
The point being made isnt about NHL being bad or good or that fights are or arent part of it. Its that this pleasure seeking constantly increases.
Pleasure seeking increases, sure, I just don't agree that violence is the prime focus or end goal of any majority of the participants or viewers of any of the things you brought up. Violence might be a part of it, but it's clearly not the main part of any of it, otherwise violence would be increasing rather than decreasing in every single one of those, and more people would just turn to the simpler sources of violence. Why would anybody watch Hockey for the fights when many games don't have any fights at all? Nobody who really just wants to see car crashes is going to sit through hours of cars driving in circles for the chance to occasionally see a car hit a wall and spin out.
> Every highlight reel is about the crashes. So it is about nascar. Nascar highlights are all about crashes.
Looking up "Nascar highlights" on YouTube, I can see that it's not all about crashes, it seems to be all about turnarounds, where somebody suddenly overtakes somebody else, or somebody loses their position quickly, so crashes are a part of that, but it doesn't seem to be "about crashes", but rather about changes in the standings of a race in progress.
>Pleasure seeking increases, sure, I just don't agree that violence is the prime focus or end goal of any majority of the participants or viewers of any of the things you brought up.
no, not prime focus yet. If hockey is a fresh pleasure, the fighting or violence isn't important. The end goal however is that you must have this violence or the pleasure seeker moves to the next thing which will have it.
>Violence might be a part of it, but it's clearly not the main part of any of it, otherwise violence would be increasing rather than decreasing in every single one of those, and more people would just turn to the simpler sources of violence.
That's my point and why i picked my choices. Violence isn't the prime focus. Afterall go watch boxing or MMA. Which some people have gotten their pleasure seek onto this for sure.
>Why would anybody watch Hockey for the fights when many games don't have any fights at all? Nobody who really just wants to see car crashes is going to sit through hours of cars driving in circles for the chance to occasionally see a car hit a wall and spin out.
Fighting is but 1 violence. Checking is another. Elbowing and slashing are others.
>Looking up "Nascar highlights" on YouTube, I can see that it's not all about crashes, it seems to be all about turnarounds, where somebody suddenly overtakes somebody else, or somebody loses their position quickly, so crashes are a part of that, but it doesn't seem to be "about crashes", but rather about changes in the standings of a race in progress.
Lets not even go into derbies where the goal is to literally crash into each other until you're the last working car.
Or monster trucks which crush other cars.
This is all about pleasure seeking and constantly need to increase which leads into sadism.
I love violent video games and media as much as the next gal (Doom, ME3, Hellsing as an anime, etc) - but I can absolutely see the connection of trying to work out that pleasure/boredom with fiction.
IMHO multiplayer toxicity is orthogonal to game type, you get that both in "violent" shooting games and also in abstract strategy or card games; harming or griefing someone, or verbally abusing them is a thing no matter if the gameplay itself is violent or fluffy.
There’s a lot of different nuances to all sports. I used to find baseball boring. But after coaching little league and watching and help players grow, I’ve developed a an appreciation for the nuances of both the games and the plays by themselves.
