But there are varying degrees. Breaking a window isn’t tantamount to a murder, but burning a car or house isn’t tantamount to a smack in the face, either. It’s silly to say that All of X is Always More Grave than Any of Y. It’s just ot so.
At its core, vandalism is a crime of selfishness. It states, unequivocally, “I don’t give a damn about anyone else or their belongings, so there, nyah nyah.” Whether it’s a name carved on a table or a school rampaged and ransacked, the entirety of the motive behind it is “I can do whatever I want so long as there’s no one to stop me.” It’s mucking. It’s wilding.
It’s the same violent mindset as personal crime – think about the difference between the gang of kids who drives around chucking rocks through the windows of parked cars and the guy(s) driving around outside DC shooting people. “I don’t care about you, I’ll do what I please, just try and stop me.” Same idea, different execution and outcome.
This is not indicative of material poverty, it’s indicative of moral and ethical poverty. Neither rich nor poor are exempt or more prone toward being morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s a condition of the heart and mind, not the pocketbook.
…and? Any conclusion reached via inductive reasoning is necessarily wrong? While not as concrete as deduction, induction isn’t inherently bad. Though I suppose demonization of inductive reasoning is as good a strategy as any when you’re unwilling to present an actual argument. Here, I’ll save you the trouble of responding:
“ElJeffe, you’re a bigot.”
Read: You can stop urging me to actually address and refute the specific points of your argument, or provide evidence that your conclusions are faulty, because I refuse to.
Regarding what TLW said, I agree that vandalism is indicative of moral poverty rather than material poverty. However, I still believe there may be a correlation between them, for reasons other than “being poor makes you a bad person”, in much the same way that there is a correlation between being black and being a criminal that has nothing to do with “being black makes you a bad person”.
Sure…whatever. What experience is that? How many people do you know personally who make over $100,000? TV people don’t count. In MY experience (and I work with a lot of people who make a lot of money) wealthy people are just like poor people with better jobs. Some are jerks and some are good people.
I’d like to point out that my earlier “bring back public whippings” comment was BEFORE some parasitic miscreant broke into my car Tuesday morning and stole my bowling bag, containing ball and shoes.
WHAT KIND OF STRUNG-OUT BRAIN-DEAD PUS-FILLED PIMPLE ON THE ASS OF HUMANITY STEALS A BOWLING BALL?
It’s my most fervent hope that this person dies an unpleasant junkie death.
It is more likely that communities infested with vandals tend to be poor, for the obvious reason that it is difficult to generate wealth in the presence of destructive punks.
Quite many, actually. Closest to home, my father was dirt poor, and was a man of exemplary character. My (surviving) brother is a multi-millionaire and has stepped on many lives to get that way.
So based on your sample size of two, you have come to the conclusion that poor people are of higher moral character than rich people.
Well my dad is also a multimilionare (which is not actually that big a deal in the part of the country where he lives). He got that way by getting a good education, working his way up one of the largest corporations in the world and managing his finances wisely. He also happens to be a pretty good guy - married thirty something years, hardly drinks, and so on. Conversely, my girlfriends family on her moms side is dirt poor. When one of here relatives died, they speant years squablling and backstabbing to get an inheritence that would barely pay my rent for 6 months.
Getting back to vandelism, when I was in college there was a very pronounced class distinction between the college and the working class town that the school resided in. The college kids wouldn’t go into town to damage and steal propery, slash tires and steal radios, unlike the locals who apparently felt that their lower economic status is justification.
No. There are so many things wrong with that assertion that I hardly know where to begin.
First, I haven’t come to any conclusion of the sort. Second, I don’t think that poor people are of higher moral character than rich people. And third, you asked if I knew anybody who made more than $100,000, and I answered “plenty”. Finally, I mentioned two members of my own family as illustrations that poor people CAN have high moral character and rich people CAN have low moral character.
Your apparently deliberate and dishonest characterization of my position notwithstanding, that is my conclusion, as evidenced by my unequivocal support of TLW’s statement which I think bears repeating:
“This is not indicative of material poverty, it’s indicative of moral and ethical poverty. Neither rich nor poor are exempt or more prone toward being morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s a condition of the heart and mind, not the pocketbook.”
I see it exactly the same way.
Your false attribution is all the more galling given that you then proceeded yourself to give two counterexamples as though you bear some sort of immunity from your own ridiculous rhetorical cage. Assigning poverty as a pro causa link to vandalism is not just bigotry, but ignorance.
Not so random. If someone said “Your money or your life,” would you really have to think about which was more important? Would you flip a coin to decide?
For him, the money is more important. For me, my life is. But that isn’t the dichotomy that Buckner drew. He implied that you cannot value life more than money so long as you consider destruction of either to be murder. As I explained, that’s not the case.
Seriously, there are plenty of words to describe vandalism or theft which indicate disapproval–crime, immoral, unethical, victimization, injustice, wrongdoing, etc. Murder has a specific meaning; I don’t see how using words imprecisely fosters any moral clarity.