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Comment by array_key_first

4 days ago

I mean, yes, generally, for most things.

This mentality is kind of dumb, no offense. We have a bunch of laws. You could just as easily use your argument to say murder should be legal, or rape, and certainly people have.

Laws do, actually, work, for the most part. No they're not perfect, but they don't need to be.

Legalizing capital crimes would barely make them increase in prevalence. The state punishes people for those things mostly so that other people don't.

Laws are basically codified morals, but shitty because they need to be written to be some semblance of objectivity. You typically get stupid results when you try and surgically codify niche things or try and legislate controversial things.

I'd much rather live in a world with LLM image location stalking than one where people just punt everything to the state.

no, it's not, those things are illegal but cars and trains are not illegal even though you can use them to run over people. Knives, same thing. Alcohol is not illegal even though you can use them to get people too drunk to resist you.

Criminalizing everything that could be used to do bad things is an extreme position. Instead of jumping right to "ban it" you should probably first have a discussion where you consider whether (A) that ban will make any difference to its availability to most people who are criminally-minded anyway and (B) whether it has positive benefits to the law-abiding.

  • And what legitimate purpose are we balancing against the negative purposes in this circumstance?

    • I don't think there's a legitimate purpose for this. I do think no legislature is capable of outlawing this in a way that's both enforceable with some degree of impartiality (i.e. does not provide plausible deniability for a prosecutor to drag a legitimate service through a courtroom for political reasons) and incurs acceptable collateral damages (e.g. doesn't outlaw unrelated stuff that's fine).

  • On most sane societies guns are illegal, drugs are illegal and blackmailing is illegal