If you’d like a spyware free alternative, you can try vs codium: https://vscodium.com

You mean to say we didn’t have these already? I just assumed we did honestly. Were we just buying time from commercial vendors?

Yes, In the UK, I agree with the decision to not arm most police officers. Bringing a gun to a situation automatically escalates it as you cannot allow it to be taken from you if the suspect is unexpectedly strong or good at hand to hand combat, or if the officer is unexpectedly overpowered.

It’s harder to advocate for that in countries such as the USA, with considerable amounts of weaponry on the streets. Of course, for people to give up their weaponry, they would need to believe that the police can keep them safe, so it does feel like a bit of a vicious cycle. However, I certainly would advocate for a society where the police is mostly disarmed. Given this is a USA-centric community, perhaps you have some ideas about how that starts?

Perhaps this hasn’t made the news in your area, but we recently had a series of riots and civil unrest caused by far-right ideology, and the criminal justice system is right now busy locking up those involved - the majority were on the far-right side. The point of it appears to be to make examples of them. You can scroll this breaking news feed for a taste of what’s been going on.

Of course, environmental campaigners have been just as harshly treated and the sentences are very long relative to the disruption.

Being from the UK I didn’t automatically consider them to be armed, but sometimes that is unfortunately necessary if the situation is dangerous enough. Surely you will need armed men in your ideal society also - forces from the outside may attempt to subvert it, and if a crisis emerges, order may break down.

I didn’t say prisons necessarily help people, and I agree with you that if anyone is reformed by prison, it’s in spite of the system. I think of a prison as a way to protect the innocent from dangerous people, but in most cases I disagree with sending non-violent offenders there.

Thanks for the book recommendation. I’d be keen to imagine another way forward, so maybe that’ll help me with some ideas, or at least understand the abolitionist viewpoint. I can see from skim-reading the preface that it attempts to answer many of my questions.

I wasn’t sure if I should introduce such an extreme example as serial killers to my argument and now I see why.

So perhaps let’s talk abstractly:

1. Some people are disruptive whether temporarily or permanently
2. In some cases, we might need to keep those people away from others.
3. If so, you need a place to keep them and,
4. Someone to take them there and,
5. Someone to make sure they don’t leave.

And it’s true that you don’t need police to investigate missing people. You didn’t answer my question though- in your ideal society, if not a police force, who does that job?

I agree that many crimes are only committed out of economic despair. Ideally, everybody has all the resources they need.

Are there not other reasons behind crimes?

For example, what do you do if a serial killer finds themselves in your society? Who would catch them and who would prosecute?

The police also handle other non-crime tasks such as finding missing people. Who would do that?

I guess I’m late to reading about this. As a 19 year old, he met a British 12 year old online, plied them with alcohol, raped them, pled guilty, and was punished for this.

What’s interesting is he was convicted in Britain, and then was sent to serve his sentence in the Netherlands. When he arrived, his sentence was reduced and the crime was changed because Dutch law didn’t recognise his crime as rape if force or violence wasn’t involved (they changed that this year).

Despite that I’m still astonished he was even considered to represent his country in this way. Even though the law and rules allowed it, surely common sense wouldn’t.

It’s still an emerging technology so it makes sense that many of the early adopters are IT nerds. Early Reddit was the same- the most active communities were IT, programming or video game related. More diversity will appear in time.

My son is teething so it was a loud and not at all relaxing weekend. When we were able to convince him to sleep though it was great, caught up with the Olympics and caught up with some sleep. Such is the glamorous life of a new parent.