feotakahari | Deterrence Is Bullshit

The problem with doing horrible shit as a deterrent is that if you don’t deter anyone, you’re just doing horrible shit.

Assuming a liberal audience, the easiest way to argue this is to gesture in the direction of the anti-immigration crowd. Jeff Sessions will never run out of horrible shit to do to illegal immigrants to “deter” them, and it will never fucking work, because what else are they gonna do, stay in their home countries and wait for the gangs to murder them? Even when the border patrol destroys water supplies so people will die in the desert, sufficiently desperate people will see it as a lower risk than staying.

But a surprisingly large fraction of liberals think doing horrible shit is a deterrent when you do it in wartime. They say that if you murder enough people, no one will want to fight a war with you. This only proves that liberals need to read more fantasy novels, because recruiters and terrorists have clearly been reading them. “Join us to become a hero and avenge all the people our enemies horribly murdered!” The more horrible shit you do, the stupider the things people will do in response, so long as they can fit it into a revenge narrative.

Honestly, I think there’s a cachet factor. People like the idea of being a strong-minded person who makes tough choices, and that means they need to come up with a tough choice that they can take. But before you talk about what must be done for the greater good, you should consider what actually works.