The World Is Not As It Should Be

I’ve followed Megan McArdle since her days as a self-publishing penurious blogger through her gigs at the Atlantic, the Daily Beast, and now Bloomberg News. I don’t always agree with her, but she’s a thoughtful writer. And her comments are refreshingly multi-partisan (to the point of ideologues from all points of the political compass calling her a hack for their enemies.)

One article that recently caught my eye started from a discussion of the recent revelations that, yes, Virginia, some people will hack other people’s cloud storage accounts and distribute them far and wide. She then segues into why we can’t social engineer away crime:

[Y] ou cannot possibly subscribe to the idea that only social sanctions, well-designed law-enforcement penalties and a more equitable welfare policy stand between us and a nearly-crime-free utopia.

The point is that crime still happens even when everyone agrees that it is wrong, and crime still goes unpunished even when we would very much like to punish it. That’s because many people are … well, something that’s not printable on a family blog. Let’s just say that a troublesome minority of people will ignore basic decency and morality and do terrible, wrong things to get what they want.

The conclusion of the piece is one that I think readers here will agree with. “It is not “victim blaming” to urge their targets to protect themselves from that threat.” All together, a nice justification of the right to self defense.