The art of punishment, translated.

Translated from the original Arta pedepsirii by Mircea Popescu.i

Eu : so basically tonight is eu summit. teh germanz are threatening to invade greeceii
Ea : srsly? wow
Eu : sort of. im kinda in favour.
Ea : were you ever not in favor of an invasion?
Eu : i think the best thing for the present crisis is the wholesale arrest of all greeks and forced labour for a year. dispersed all over europe. that’ll solve problems for at least 50 years.
Ea : just greeks?iii
Eu : yea.
Ea : they fucked up, everyone else did right?
Eu : yea. effective punishment is impredictible, disproportionate and visible.iv
Ea : a principle i recognize in practice if not verbiage

The young lady knows what I mean, seeing as how she was the principal and teary-eyed beneficiary of it a number of times. To be effective, penalties must be unpredictable, so as always to catch the guilty unprepared, disproportionate, so as always to exceed her compensatory resources, so that they can’t be secured against, and visible, to serve as a warning to others as proof that a) their turn will come ; b) it will be most inconvenient ; and c) it will be more expensive than it’s worth.

Aberrant humanitarian-socialistoid states, with their “proportionate to the act” penalties and “civilised” treatment of criminals do nothing but create anti-social behaviour in society that encourages the emergence and supports the development of a class of individuals who perpetually negotiate when and how the sentence is to be most tolerable to them. The gypsy steals not because he’s a thief, but because he’s he, clever but uneducated. As such, he thinks about who benefits from the theft and about the risks involved. Will he be compelled to eat free bread and water for two years ? Or perhaps he will be cut off mid-effort ? Or he may be politely asked to move along down the street ? Alas ! Is it not worth it ?

It’s worth it. And then that becomes the problem : a society that’s unable to introduce and manage a distribution of unpredictable, disproportionate, and visible punishment cannot work.

Sure, for short periods, when there’s an economic boom and the world is too preoccupied, you can make sure that farmers who earn money can well tolerate the “suckers.” As long as suckers are few in number, they don’t merit beating over the head when they steal a bit of flour. But when the boom ends, the reality of the situation comes to the foreground. Either unpredictable, disproportionate, and visible punishment or dissolution of the society.

That’s it for the first version. It’s yet to be seen whether the “leaders” of various facilities and institutions will take the blood they need to save their buildings and organisations.

___ ___ ___

  1. Because the Icarian tragedy must go on !
  2. Funny how the original article was written almost exactly two years ago and Greece, that lazy whore of a failed state, is still, STILL, stringing the IMF, ECB, and EU idiots along, keeping the same tried and true tradition of the African scam alive and well just as they have these past 2,300 years. Lulzy shit.
  3. Well, seeing as how all the Northern Mediterranean peoples are in the same boat as the Greek, if you’re going to enslave one, you might as well throw in the Italians, Spaniards, French and Portuguese along with. Just my two bitcents.
  4. I seem to recall Taleb expounding the same methodology, though I’ll be damned if I can find a link atm.

3 thoughts on “The art of punishment, translated.

    • Pete D. says:

      Haha ! Y’know, I thought that it sounded a little too familiar in English… this’d be why !

      Well, at least I’ve now captured the hearts and minds of those readers, such as they are, who don’t frequent both blogs.

  1. […] course, there are two kinds of dignity in this world : the kind you beg for, as the Greeks are currently doing, and the kind you forge for yourself, as the Greeks last did 2`300 years ago. […]

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