Well, I think, but i'm not sure, there is a law against theft (I'll have to check on that)
Of course there is. Think of it this way.
How many people feel bad for Germany Because they were on the losing side of two world wars? And yet we are supposed to "sympathize" with people who essentially lost a battle of wits with people whom you yourself believe are the stupid ones.
Generally, there are fools, and their are knaves. A lot of consumer laws are in place essentially to protect fools from knaves. Personally, for example, I don't feel sorry, not in the least bit, for anybody who actually fell for a 419 scam. I'm sure you know of them; somebody sends an E-mail that essentially promises that they can give you millions of dollars but they need a couple hundred or a thousand to get the money out of some holding; they continue to pile on "oh no, there was another fee" type stuff until they bleed the victim dry or they finally get a clue. There have been cases where people have literally emptied their bank accounts, life savings, borrowed thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars from anybody, in order to send it through western Union. I don't know about anybody else, but that quite literally is the stupidest thing I had ever heard in regards to money management. And people still feel sorry for the idiot, despite the fact that it was his own personal greed for the several million dollars that drove him to do it in the first place. Scams take advantage of the stupid. Personally, I feel that laws that criminalize scams are sort of saying "you're not allowed to be smarter then your consumer". However, it's interesting because it's only illegal when it involves getting money or other material goods; I took advantage of a users ineptitude with regards to (what they called) the "cyber-world" with the whole "Possumboy" thing (posted elsewhere), and for payment I got lots of laughs; but it wasn't illegal. However if I somehow had cajoled them into sending me money through western Union, despite the fact that they are clearly dumb for doing so, that would be illegal. Laws are quite largely black-and white in a world of gray and gray, so it's difficult to make them make sense in all contexts; that being said, applying these black and white laws in gray and gray context's that had not been thought of when the law was created is simply naive. As you say, "theft is stealing".
In the Prince and The Pauper, there was a segment where the "Prince" (who had, as per the very plot crux of the story, essentially Swapped places with a poor pauper) was essentially framed for stealing a Pig from a woman by a villainous cohort. Now, ignoring the fact that they were framed, the fact was that the Pig cost enough to the lady to warrant his
execution. So she essentially
lied and said to let the record show it cost no more then X shillings (I forget the exact number, it's not like I read the book yesterday). And everybody
knew she was lying about the cost of the Pig, so in a sense she herself was breaking the laws of the time and lying to the court; but the context was equally important since she was also essentially saving the boy (who was actually at that point the King if I recall). Which is a excellent demonstration of two wrongs making a right (although technically there was no wrong to begin with and it was a case of being framed, but nobody bought that story).
Despite people's perserverence in doing so, What is and isn't illegal is not what is and isn't immoral, if that was the case then there is no such thing as an immoral law, such as, for example, segregating races or sending people to concentration camps or making them wear 6-pointed stars; "if it's legal, it's moral" is not a particularly good definition.
Additionally, while Laws are largely black and white, the Moral ground they attempt to cover isn't; this of course leaves holes. Additionally, what is and is not moral is more or less defined by culture, and is not something that necessarily can be applied on a global scale to everything; In particular, Lions aren't beset with guilt because they took the innocent lives of gazelle; the very concept of morals at all is an entirely human concept and we've extended it to the animal kingdom (mainly domesticated animals, where it makes perfect sense anyway). This of course is not a bad thing; it's essentially required for most societies to exist. But if you ever have a society that believes that Laws dictate Morals, you have gone either too far left or too far right on the government scale, and are merely at a crux-point which occurs immediately before a revolution.
I don't and never have, but i was just trying to make the point that we seemed to have accepted that we constantly have to protect ourselves from totally unscrupulous 'people' and that this is the norm. So, instead of educating said people we have to educate the innocent to protect themselves. I know these idiots are part of life and that this has little to do with the original post. I just don't like it. It's an opinion.
What would we educate them with? The fact is, again, Morality is a purely human concept; but that doesn't mean that people can't reject societies idea of morality and substitute their own. In the case of "thieves", they feel justified in taking things for many reasons; perhaps because the person who rightly owns it is making no attempt to protect it, which would be more then enough of a reason for it to have remained moral a few hundred years ago. Additionally, once again, the morals that dictate this differ; first, in order to have thieves, you need to have private property. Some systems of government don't have anything that can be called that; everything belongs to the state and the state belongs to the people; therefore in such a system you cannot
steal anything, instead you are using what belongs to you no more and no less then the person who previously had it under their protection. Some people like to say that the concept of private property is some sort of inalienable Human right; this is simply not the case. Sure, it may be a right preserved by many systems of governments, but it's hardly inalienable since it's rejected by any number of governmental forms, which are themselves of course vilified for any number of reasons (the most prevalent being nationalistic bigotry and ideological differences). Years ago, the stronger,faster, or smarter person would be the one who would get the spoils, regardless of where they came from. If a particularly dumb person had something in their possession that you wanted, you could either kill them or beat them up until they give it to you, outsmart them in some way, or something to that effect. In order for said person to keep that possession they would either need to fight off the person who wants it or outsmart them yourself. Nowadays, "laws" and "morals" essentially say that despite that person being smaller, dumber, and weaker then you, you cannot essentially brute force yourself into having what they have. intimidating them into giving it to you is illegal. scamming them is illegal. beating the crap out of them until they give it to you is illegal. Whats the one way of getting it "morally"? Exchanging goods or services rendered in exchange for said item. It makes society a lot less violent and far safer, as well as far more stable, but at the same time it skews any number of concepts and makes people all-around weaker; they no longer have to defend their "share" of things, since they are now "protected" by an invisible force called morals, and those who don't hold to this completely arbitrary definition are invalids and degenerates. At the same time, however, such invisible rules do not exist when those moral codes fight each other; the larger, stronger, faster mobilized, smarter army in a war will win. So despite the fact that people like to cling to a idea where the moral way is the right way, the world at large goes in the opposite direction. Nobody blames the Allies from WW1 for the outbreak of WW2, but any history buff can tell you that they set the stage for WW2 to breakout on their own.
I see the burglar as the stupid one and the person who left the windows open as a victim of a society that would prefer to live in fortified castles, with a gun each. I know that the dream of a perfect utopian society is impossible, but i'm a dreamer.
I, on the other hand, see the burglar (in most cases) as smarter then the person who left the window open, or the door unlocked, who is dumber then their neighbors who didn't; this of course isn't true if said burglar uses their computer for facebook and forgets to logout, of course. It doesn't make it
right of course, but people who do bad things aren't necessarily stupid, despite the fact that villains on TV are often painted this way.
I disagree. How can people who are ignorant KNOW that they are ignorant. Doesn't make sense.
I never said they knew they were. However, they are deliberately choosing a path that means they clearly will be ignorant. Additionally, people can know they are ignorant of things. In my example, the people who refuse to learn how to use a computer and the various ups and downs of it's use and how to prevent bad things from happening with them and so on and so forth are ignorant for the same reason that the person that wants to drive a car without learning how is ignorant. They deliberately choose not to learn about the computer, but insist on using it. That is ignorance. By the same token, people who deliberately choose not to learn about the WiFi but insist on using it are also ignorant. They may not directly choose to be ignorant (my statement was a metaphor, I didn't realize I had to include a full paragraph to explain what I meant with it) but they are quite deliberately setting the stage whereby they will be taken advantage of. The best part is that they often blame the messenger; that is, they will blame whoever sold them the device for not telling them about it. Which is equally ludicruous. When you go to buy a knife, they don't have to explicitly say "don't stab yourself".
Looking at the wireless networks I can pick up from my desktop, there are about 13. About half of them are protected with WPA or WPA2; another quarter are using WEP, and the rest are unsecured. The unsecured ones are all using the default name scheme, and testing around with a few I find that only one or two of them were actually passworded, so in effect, with the ones that had no password, anybody could drive in, park their car across the street, change their password or make the router use a poisoned DNS, and they would be none the wiser. This isn't exactly common, but the fact that the people are essentially relying on others to not take advantage of the situation is asking for trouble. Why do you think many gas stations have bulletproof glass between the staff and the customer? Because people with guns often took advantage of the lack of such glass. The thing is, except for many cases, a lot of seemingly "black" (bad) things are in fact more a shade of gray. For example, somebody might have robbed a bank, but it was only because "evil insurance co." refused to payout for their house burning down because the neighbour had strapped TNT to his dog had crawled in through an unlocked basement window and exploded, and his daughter has cancer and was at the time trying to sleep while the evil neighbors were screaming and banging on he door; she is in the hospital and he cannot afford to keep treating her without it. This is yet another case where the invisible third party is only noticable to those of us who don't have to worry about it; the fact that said health-care needs to be paid for at all, which is a interesting hypocritical point that can be made since despite being all "goodwill towards all men" they essentially revise the hippocratic oath to "do no evil, as long as they pay me". That aside, of course, it could seem like said extremist neighbor is evil, but when you look closer, it turns out that his dog is dying of lung cancer, and because he can't afford to pay the vet to put the dog down, he has to do it himself, and all he had was some dynamite. So tearfully, he straps the dynamite to his beloved family pet, as the rest of the family watch in tears. Just as he sets the timer, the dog dashes off and squeezes into his neighbors basement, so they ran as fast as they could to try to get to the dog to stop the timer before 30 seconds, but nobody answered the door. So the insurance company looks evil, but at the same time, it only didn't pay them because the entire story seemed ludicrous and made-up, and even a joke, and they were suffering at the time from a lot of insurance fraud (which I might point out a lot of people do without feeling bad at all, same with tax evasion)... etc etc. Basically, except in very rare cases, "Evil" acts almost always have reasons that are otherwise benign.
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