So they tracked him down.
Theft is a fictitious crime imagined by possessive people.
Trolling is a fictitious crime imagined by possessive sheeple?
I canât help but think that a sufficiently highly-priced lawyer would still manage to get the perp off on a technicality.
Fictitious crime? What would you consider an actual crime?
Do what now? Have you ever had your car stolen? It suuuccckkkkssssâŚ
Thankfully my dad had my dead Grandpas old Datsun still and loaned it to me until the cops found my car a month later, and I was able to put it back together a couple months after that (steering column had to be replaced and everything not bolted down was stolen).
Anyway - had I not had that support network, I would have been up shit creek, lost my job probably, and a whole host of bad things.
Thatâs a good question. I guess Iâd say that the real crime is facilitating peopleâs selfish attachments to things, relationships, and even ideas.
Iâve got a strong sense of social responsibility, and it often manifests in striving for collectives. What practical or economic sense does it make for all of the nuclear families on my block to work themselves into debt for the âprivilegeâ of having âtheir ownâ nearly identical houses, cars, etc.? I prefer the village/tribal outlook of extended families. communal houses, neighborhood property, village parenting, etc. That is, unless or until I encounter a better argument for living some other way. I think itâs also more politically powerful than pockets of isolated people who canât/wonât organize and live to be marginal and exploited for their wallets.
Much existing (US) law gets in the way of that, and transparently does so to the (perceived) advantage of only a small economic elite, who nobody else is invested in. If I want to buy a house or car for my community and not have it âmineâ is made a complete PITA. It is a legal system which expects and demands a perspective of selfishness which is IMO naive and will never be practical.
They violated the âallegedâ thiefâs privacy.
Nice ideals, but why such a binary, between everything privately owned versus everything communally shared? If we recognize instead a mix or blend (which we actually have already to some extent â while individuals are said to âownâ various things, no single person âownsâ most roads or public schools in the U.S., for instance), then we recognize that some things are rightfully possessed by individuals. And thus that the act of taking them needs to be classified as a crime to dissuade the act of taking them.
Yep, when I was 6 months pregnant, and ridiculously strapped for cash.
Fuck the noise that it was ânot a crime.â
Agreed, as having to live with all of my extended family forever would suck tremendously, so itâs good for people to have as many options as possible.
While Iâm not clamoring to obtain a neurotoxically perfect lawn, white-picket children, 2.5 golden retrievers and a blond wife; it seems worth noting that reports from the field on âvillage/tribalâ social relationships often include a lot of violence revolving around property, territory, and the like.
The notion that the natural unit of society and locus of ownership is the individual Homo Economicus and his wife and dependent children is a thoroughly modern construction; but the application of coercive and/or lethal violence to the question of resource distribution is not.
Iâm more surprised that a police department actually followed up on GPS tracker information. Our cops wonât move on stuff like that - IP addresses, intercepted text messages, lost iPhone GPS.
A few people Iâve known who had their cars stolen with GPS trackers ended up having to steal them back, often from in front of the thievesâ home.
Kudos to the SFPD.
Interesting discussion. Looking to other cultures provides some guidance on the boundaries between private vs. public ownership. There is a myth that Native Americans lacked the concept of private property. That is only partly true and mostly revolved around the collective use of shared resources like land and hunting.
Among Plains Indians, who depended on the buffalo, property rights and
rules about who had precedence provided the incentives for successful
hunts. The successful hunter was entitled to keep the skin and some
choice portion of the meat for his family, writes one historian.[10]
The hunters marked their arrows distinctively, so after the hunt, the
arrows in the dead buffalo indicated which hunters had been successful.[11]
Disputes over whose arrow killed the buffalo were settled by the hunt
leader. Poorer families followed the hunt and depended on the charity of
the hunters for meat.[12]
âŚ
Personal items were nearly always privately owned. Clothes, weapons,
utensils, and housing were often owned by women, for whom they provided a
way to accumulate personal wealth. For the Plains Indians, the tepee
offers an example of private ownership. Women collected enough hides
(usually between eight and 20), tanned and scraped them, and prepared a
great feast where the hides were sewn together by the participants.
True collectivist societies are probably not realistic nor feasible beyond a certain point.
Even in a society with shared resources, there can be a need for temporary ownership: âPlease donât take the car on a three day road trip now, I need it first thing tomorrow morning to go for chemo.â A case can also be made for the ownership of specialized tools: âPlease donât use the cord spooler as firewood; I put a lot of thought and effort into building it for a specialized purpose, and I have immediate and continuous need of it for that purpose.â Getting consent is a way to get around both of those cases.
When a person breaks into someone elseâs office in the middle of the night and steals her bicycle, that person eliminates the possibility of consent. More importantly, that person does him or herself a disservice by eliminating other possibilities in the process. A simple conversation might have produced more positive results.
Q: "Can I have your bicycle so that I can pawn it for money to buy groceries?"
A: âNo, but I will happily give you these groceries right now.â
Instead of that conversation, or any number of other possibilities, the thief chose a predatory route that put himself in jail.
The cited article gives zero detail about what the tracking+recovery process was like. It really reads like a puff promo piece.
If you steal things that might be trackable, wrap them in aluminum foil before taking them back to your secret crime lair.
