Scumbag Laws

You may have already seen this research done by Jon Haidt, which formed the basis of the book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. 

Watch this video if you want the gist in under 20 minutes.

This survey measured participants' moral intuitions and classified them into six broad categories.

• Care/Harm

• Fairness/Cheating

• Liberty/Oppression

• Loyalty/Betrayal

• Authority/Subversion

• Sanctity/Degradation

Haidt’s big thesis is that political affiliation isn’t about ideology. It’s about moral intuitions. A person’s political affiliation can be predicted by which of these things causes them the most anxiety.

Left-wingers highly value Care and Fairness, but have little interest in the other four.

Libertarians care about liberty and ONLY liberty.

Right-wingers are pretty evenly spread out across all 6 categories.

These morals aren't arbitrary cultural artifacts. An evolutionary psychologist would notice that all of them have survival value. These were all useful to our ancestors for identifying dangerous people and dangerous environments.

I want to focus on that last moral intuition, sanctity/degradation, defined as, the holy, elevated, moral, pure, and noble vs. the disgusting, sick, and degraded.

One of the questions on the test was something like this:

A woman dies. Her husband finds the body. He has sex with the body. Is this morally wrong?

The autistic answer is, “No, because there was no harm. She’s dead, so what does she care?” That’s an excellent answer for a robot.

The question misses the real point. The issue isn’t the behavior in itself. It’s not a matter of what harm is caused by necrophilia. The issue is what kind of a person would fuck their dead wife?

Logicians will go straight to a consequentialist answer.* But if we frame the question another way, you’ll probably get different answers.

Your daughter asks for your advice. She has two suitors. They are identical twins with identical upbringings and careers. They have only one notable difference. One of them has fucked several dead people. The other has not and would not. Which of these two men would you recommend your daughter marry? Or would that information have no impact on your preference?

Someone who says “no difference” is a liar pretending to be a horrible parent for the sake of winning an argument. Or they’re a person who fucks dead people. Just to be on the safe side, I assume they are a liar and a horrible parent and a necrophiliac.

***

In the 90s, there were local moves to ban malt liquor, the high gravity beers in 40oz bottles that cost $2.50 back then. No one was talking about banning Dom Pérignon or Grey Goose vodka. No, those are fine. Fancy, successful, good people drink martinis. Or at least the people are successful enough to buy their way out of any trouble that a bottle of Grey Goose put them in. 

Who buys 40s? Scumbags. Scumbags don’t have money for Grey Goose. Scumbags have three bucks in their pocket. Scumbags drink 40s.

What does scum look like? It’s a guy who looks like they have a chip on their shoulder, who keeps his hands deep in his hoodie pockets, who’s walking a little too fast, who keeps looking at you but looks away when you notice him looking at you. That guy looks like scum. None of the things you’ve seen him do are illegal, but his non-criminal behavior tells you that this guy might be dangerous.

In 2015, Tennessee tried to ban sagging. Sure, sagging is a crime against fashion and self-respect, but they wanted to make it a crime crime. What harm is caused by sagging? None that I can think of. But that’s not the point. Sagging isn’t bad. The point is that—in the estimation of the lawmakers—people who sag are bad.

Any laws operating this way are what I lovingly refer to as Scumbag Laws. They exist to punish you, but not for anything you did. They punish you for what you probably did, or probably will do, but cops haven't caught you doing yet.

***

A note on scumbags: I use this word with love. Me and my favorite people are all scum, former scum, or potential scum.

It's okay for us to say scum.

That's our word.

***

Potential scum entered my vocabulary as a term of endearment through Greg Costikyan’s extremely underappreciated satire game, Violence: The Role-Playing Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed, which I found in a game store bargain bin in 1999.

Costikyan summarized cop psychology with outstanding precision. Cops sort people into four categories:

• Scum

• Potential Scum

• Civilians

• Other cops

For cops, everyone is one—and only one—of those four things.

Civilians are taxpayers. Civilians are people with a job and a mortgage. Civilians are people whose criminal history doesn’t graduate past speeding tickets.

Scum are criminals who got caught. Scum are the bad people. As far as a cop is concerned, their job is to find the scum and lock them up to protect civilians.

Potential scum are the people who the cops believe are probably guilty of something.** The cops might not know what they did exactly, and even if they did, they couldn’t prove it yet. Potential scum can be anyone from a toothless lady living under a bridge with meth-head scratch-sores all over her face, or just a teenager carrying a skateboard, and everything in-between. Potential scum are presumed to be scum until they change their legal but suspicious behavior.

This isn't just about law enforcement. Women are extremely sensitive to qualities that give her the creeps. She often can’t even articulate the reasons because they are instinctual. It’s pre-thought. It can be triggered by a guy’s posture. A faint smell. A weird smile. A glance that lasts a fraction of a second too long. No one has to teach a woman to do this. They just know.

Women describe creepy men in the language of sanctity and cleanliness: he’s gross, he’s ick, he’s rapey. She regards him like a person with something contagious. She wants to put distance between herself and the man who’s giving her the willies. A creepy guy is potential scum and presumed guilty until proven innocent.

A woman’s pre-crime revulsion is natural, if unfair. I’m sure many innocent men have given women the creeps. But sometimes survival depends on unfairness. You may have a fear of spiders. Most spiders are harmless, but you squash them anyway. When your ancestors saw a bug, they didn’t fund a peer-reviewed study and have it published in a well-regarded journal of arachnology and patiently await their conclusions before deciding on how to treat the spider. Your ancestor just squashed it. Those ancestors didn’t get bit by spiders, venomous or otherwise. Spiders are guilty until proven innocent. And the ancestors who reflexively squashed spiders with extreme prejudice are the ones who lived to pass on their arachno-bigoted instincts to their kids.

It’s a heuristic. It is useful, but it’s often unfair (especially to non-venomous spiders.) That’s why cops can’t just arrest potential scum. Regimes that liberally arrest potential scum are the villains of history.

That’s where scumbag laws come in.

The scumbag law’s purpose is to take the quality we associate with scum, and make that not-in-itself-harmful thing illegal. Potential scum have to modify their potentially-scummy signals or commit to becoming full-on actual scum.

Murder, rape, burglary, etc. are all crimes. I don't see much argument that they shouldn't be. The characteristics we associate with them do change. Scum are the people who commit the crimes everyone agrees should be crimes. Scum is scum. Potential scum is more nebulous.

Are scumbag laws good or bad? That’s a great question that I pretended you asked me. But it’s the wrong question. The question should be, do scumbag laws work?

The short answer is: yes.

The long answer is: yes, but at the expense of sweeping up innocent potential scum who aren't actual scum.

Stop and Frisk is a great example. Cops had license to search people they deemed potential scum. Did it reduce crime? Yes. Did it require stopping and frisking perfectly innocent people? Yes. Did Stop and Frisk increase hostility between the potential scum and the cops? Probably. Was it unconstitutional? Yes. Were the courts wrong for thinking it was constitutional? Yes. Oh, so you think you know better than a supreme court justice with a law degree from Harvard? Yes.

Scumbag laws will always persecute innocent potential scum to get at the scum.

Here's a severe case. Polpot butchered Cambodians for wearing glasses. He assumed that wearing glasses meant you were smart. Being smart is a threat. Being smart is not an equitable distribution of IQ. Intellectual elites are intellectual bourgeois. Bourgeois are scum. Wearing glasses meant you were potential scum. Polpot couldn’t redistribute intelligence, but he could redistribute a person’s head with a Soviet-manufactured bullet.

The big difference between a cop’s and woman's ideas of potential scum is that cops bring guns, courts, and prison. Women usually just post a mean video of you to their Insta.

***

Imagine the following: one day, a highschool teacher shows up to work in ordinary work attire—khakis, button-down shirt, tie, etc.—but he has cut a pair of holes in his shirt, exposing only his nipples.

Men can show their nipples. Men do it when they go swimming—and in front of children, no less. Why is it okay at a beach, but not at work? Most importantly, why is it extra repulsive to expose ONLY the nipples?

Remember the woman and the spider.

Logic asks you to determine the impact of male nipple exposure. Sanctity asks you to evaluate the character of Mr. Nipple, and therefore the likelihood of Mr. Nipple having other (yet unknown) behaviors and proclivities, and their impact. When a man wears a nipple shirt to work, his coworkers and students will sense on a deep level that there is something fucked up going on with Mr. Nipple. Maybe parents would prefer that their kids not be anywhere near Mr. Nipple.

Allow me to introduce Mrs. Nipple.

Kayla Lemieux, the Canadian shop teacher / Japanese cartoon

Peter Boghossian is right. It is hard to construct an argument for why this person shouldn’t be near kids⁠… if you are Googling PubMed for a longitudinal psychological impact study on the effects of teenagers who are exposed to teachers with inhumanly large strap-on tits with 12-gauge buckshot nipples. That research does not exist yet if you can believe it. Without the infallible Experts™ toss knuckle bones and sacrifice a chicken to The Science™, we have only our peasant intuitions to rely on.

If anyone is confused why the moral foundation of Sanctity is being triggered in this case, let me clarify: It’s because most people think this person looks like a psycho.

Being psycho isn’t in itself illegal. But we don't trust psychos. Psychos are more likely to do something psycho. Often to other people. It’s not complicated. This person is what many cops would classify as potential scum. This is what many women would classify as creepy.

That’s the most pure, diluted form of the issue. People are divided into two camps: the people who think this teacher looks like a psycho vs. the people who don’t (and the people who pretend they don’t.)

Like almost every controversy, the thing we’re talking about isn’t really the thing we’re talking about. What would happen if a not-trans woman showed up to work one day wearing those same fake macromastia monster Z-cups over her actual boobs, declaring “This is me now,” followed immediately by her pointing at her face and saying, “Hey, buddy. I’m up here.”

*There is no such thing as a consequentialist, because everyone is a consequentialist. ALL ethics are consequence-based. All ethics are psychologically-based survival instincts, behavior that improved odds of survival. God and sanctity aren’t exceptions. Pissing off a vengeful God and mass-scale social depravity both have identifiable negative consequences.

**Potential scum is contextual. A clean-cut white man in a nice suit who drives a BMW is presumed to be a civilian most of the time. If you put that same guy in a black neighborhood with a high-volume drug market, cops will assume the only reason he’d be there is to buy dope or hookers. That clean-cut white man instantly becomes potential scum.