A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them. They tend to want the most extreme and sick punishments too, at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.
They are outraged anytime they think "the wrong kind of person" might be getting away with something, while they are mostly fine when people they view as being "higher status" somehow gets away without punishment. They feel like the poor person shoplifting should be shot on sight, but the rich CEO who commits wage theft and illegally hides money in overseas tax havens is a smart business person who deserves to get away with it. I don't know if it's a mental sickness or a moral one, but it's gross and way too common in the US.
This is a ridiculous generalization, and not a common way of thinking in the US. It's an extreme way of thinking that the majority of people would be ashamed of.
Do you have any non-fictional examples (by which I mean factual accounts rather than fictional portrayals) of these beliefs being generally accepted that we can actually have a conversation about? Even some personal anecdotes they could be a useful lens into your perspective?
Or is this an opinion born from listening to the media gone into overdrive during the current political season in the US? If that's what you're referring to, I think you may want to reexamine how much credulity you're giving those sources.
> Do you have any non-fictional examples (by which I mean factual accounts rather than fictional portrayals) of these beliefs being generally accepted
The entire US prison system for one example. Many people will see that prisoners are allowed to rape or beat each other, that they are tortured by solitary confinement, that they are often forced to eat rotten and maggot infested food, that they are used as slave labor by for profit corporations, and those people will insist that these are desirable features and they will even argue that prisoners have it too good/easy and that prison conditions should be worse.
There are countless comments all over the internet demonstrating this, I've even seen them on this website, but if you need evidence that a large number of the population feels that way you can look at the fact that those things continue to be allowed to exist and that reform efforts have been unsuccessful for decades.
Probably not a good approach to take here because there are plenty of examples of everything he said. However there are simultaneously plenty of counterexamples. For example certain west coast cities where shop lifting has been de facto legalized due to non-enforcement rooted in the name of the social cause of the day.
Actually what he wrote appears to match a certain political stereotype in the US while being the opposite of the other one. So I guess it says more about his view of the US than anything else.
> > at least when they want any at all. It's not consistent.
This is because you are treating Americans as a monolithic group, failing to differentiate between various major clusters.
However I will say that at least
> > A lot of Americans are way too into punishment. It's seriously like a fetish for them.
As an American who hungers for punishment, it's in fact a hunger driven by not punishing people (see SF, Chicago), allowing crime to persist, slaps on the wrist.
I've had my vehicle stolen, come time with the PROSECUTOR called me they tried to convince me to let them off the hook - like, is this the prosecutor speaking or the defense? That was DC. Never heard anything from that case, no justice provided.
And so that generates a certain hunger.
As far as our punishments, we are very lax. Look at illegal immigration in Singapore. The punishment is a literal beating with a stick. Not a soft beating, a leaves-lifelong-scars beating. Then, deportation. Imagine if the US did that. Singapore also has beatings for many other crimes. They are a "scrappy" country that probably couldn't afford room & board for prisoners, so beat and release it is, more economical. Not to mention anything to do with drugs is a death sentence. If the US believed in punishment like that there'd be a lot less problems. And that punishment system is very humane compared to Sharia law i.e. if you steal, you get your hands cut off. So I personally would support some extreme punishments by way of our punishments being too weak presently.
When George Floyd was killed news stations, independent journalists, and everyday people were trying to find any and all crimes he MAY have committed in the past that would justify his public execution.
As if any past crime could justify a public execution. This is the US, not revolutionary France.
Europe always seemed to be tougher on crime than America. Like, you get caught doing or even dealing hard drugs in the states, 9 times out of 10 nothing will happen, especially in west coast cities. But do that in France (or more intense, Switzerland)? The police are plentiful and they come down fast so that small things (like shoplifting) don’t turn into big things. America is just weird, we actually are really permissive to a lot of smaller crime and aren’t putting someone in jail until they actually kill someone. It’s law and order but not really, definitely when compared to Europe.
It really is weird. Some little things are let go, but ultimately the "Land of the Free" locks more of it's own population behind bars than any other nation on Earth. A lot more. It's not even close. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...)
There are certain pockets where some drug offenses and low value shoplifting don't go as harshly punished, but others where they will destroy a person's entire life over it. Only a few states have legalized or decriminalized certain drugs. There are even states that legalized marijuana but left people behind bars who were locked up for doing what anyone outside of prison could now do freely.
Massive crimes tend to go unpunished or punished very lightly compared to minor crimes. Companies like Philips Respironics and Johnson & Johnson are literal serial killers who continued to sell products that they knew would give their customers cancer. They even tried to hide what they knew from the public so that more people would buy the dangerous products and die. Many people were involved in that, and there's no doubt about the guilt, but no one ever saw a single day behind bars for that.
Same with Purdue after they knowingly and intentionally hooked millions on deadly and addictive drugs, or the countless data breaches that go unpunished, or DuPont which managed to pollute the bodies of every last human and animal on the planet. Even the CrowdStrike incident (which resulted in multiple deaths) didn't end with a single person being punished to the extent that a person committing a minor crime would, for example, the purse snatcher who got 45 years in prison (https://www.aclu.org/news/smart-justice/extreme-sentencing)
You know, I think we (the USA) are just messed up: we don't really have as much law and order that we think we do, and while countries like France focus on reforming people earlier by coming down hard on small crimes, we don't, and so we have a lot more people in prison for heavier crimes because we don't believe in fixing problems before they start.
I can't say about France. But in Switzerland, there is a "three strikes" system where if you are caught with drug, the first time you have a $100 fine; Then a higher fine, called "Day-fine" which is proportional to your income; Then maybe, just maybe, a jail sentence.
Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence. That seems disproportionate to me. Maybe police in the US is more compassionate than some militants make it seem, and that's why they don't like catching people for that kind of crime?
Looking at Wikipedia[1] it appears the number of policemen per people is two times higher in the US than Switzerland, and about the same as France. If it is true that "the police are plentiful and they come down fast" in Switzerland (which I would not agree with), it is twice as true in the US.
> Comparing that to the US, where if you get caught dealing marijuana, you get a 5 years minimum sentence.
That is literally no state in the USA, discounting the states (like the one I live in) where marijuana is legal.
I had Switzerland swat come down hard on me just because I wasn't registered correctly in the apartment I was living in when I was staying in Lausanne. You don't screw around with swiss cops.
They are outraged anytime they think "the wrong kind of person" might be getting away with something, while they are mostly fine when people they view as being "higher status" somehow gets away without punishment. They feel like the poor person shoplifting should be shot on sight, but the rich CEO who commits wage theft and illegally hides money in overseas tax havens is a smart business person who deserves to get away with it. I don't know if it's a mental sickness or a moral one, but it's gross and way too common in the US.