| Dodece said: I have every right to be sick and tired about shop lifting. The reality is it isn't harmless fun or what some would call a victimless prank. The reality is it costs me a lot of money. I have to pay more at the checkout, I have to pay more in taxes for law enforcement, I have to pay to prosecute and jail the offenders. The truth is every time someone brags about how easy it is to shoplift it encourages someone else to go do it themselves. Right now someone in this thread has read what you wrote, and said to themselves well if that person can do it seven times before they got a slap on the wrist ban. Then I can probably get away with it once. Which is probably exactly how you started shop lifting. I am sick of people abusing the system, and me being the one to pay the price. It isn't what you stole you know. It is simply the fact that you stole. It isn't that one person stole, but that there are a lot of people stealing. All that adds up, and everyone is left with the bill. Have you ever listened to Chris Rock. He has a very funny line that goes like this. "I hate the electric chair. You know why it uses electricity, and that costs money. My fifty dollars going to kill a guy that ain't worth shit." The degree of separation doesn't mean we aren't getting robbed. We are getting robbed just as surely as if you hit us over the head and lifted our wallets. We ought to be more upset not less. We are the ones getting punished while your getting away with out paying anything. You want to make it right this is what you should have done. You should have just said I got caught shop lifting. No tales of your success, or what you got away with, or how light your penalty was. The least you could is be ashamed or embarrassed by what transpired. How hard is that exactly. |
That certainly is one perspective.
Ownership is not an objective concept but one enforced by the pervasive ideology of the nation. Theft as dicussed certainly fits within that ideology because it is about individual ownership and the promotion of consumption.
I see your response as coming from that same ideology of individualised consumerism. You are at the end of a process that involves unbalanced and underpaid production, overblown and deceptive marketing or propaganda, excessive profit-making and self-interested theft. Each of them come from a morally dubious position. I see theft as no different from the other immoral parts of the process.
Anyway, that was my pretentious response to a thread about something else completely. Goes back to consuming.
Yes.
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