Not necessarily, but probably true. Same with all the best criminals, the best live out their lives and none are the wiser as to their actions besides those in the know.
This all assumes that getting caught is a bad thing. For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.
> For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.
Errrr, should we tell you about Blackwater, Thalès, BAE Systems, Bolloré, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Alexandre Benalla, Serge Dassault, NSA? They are just some examples of very famous people/corporations engaging in high-level criminal activities ranging from basic corruption to actual slavery to wide-scale murder.
We live under capitalism, a system which glorifies criminal activity as the path to success and social recognition. Sometimes, this criminal activity is legal and you can't believe how that's even possible, but many times it's illegal but when people/organizations become too influential they are far above the law.
Don't even get me started on law enforcement engaging in criminal activity such as organizing drugs trade like in USA's crack epidemics or with France's chief anti-drug cop leading the biggest smuggling ring for cocaine/hashish for years. One could even say in some circles, being ready to defy the law is a sign you're part of this circle. For example, in France at least, murderous cops are more likely to get promotions than to get kicked out of police, because once they took part in murder and held their mouth shut through the shitstorm without compromising colleagues/higher-ups, they have successfully demonstrated their loyalty to the establishment.
Of course, you're free to not research scandals involving the people/organizations i mentioned, take the blue pill and go back to dreaming about elections and free market and how fair our society is.
To make my statement more correct I should have distinguished between crimes that are discovered and those that are prosecuted. For example, I wouldn't have considered the murderous police to have been "caught" if they didn't face prosecution, but that is simply semantics.
Legal criminal activity is an oxymoron. The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality.
And even though I'd tend to agree, I absolutely don't understand why you're making a connection to capitalism. Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues with police etc you're talking about.
> The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality.
That's not entirely wrong, but "criminal" is often used figuratively to refer to morally-abhorrent behavior. I took the liberty to employ the word this way to address the blind spots of our respective legal systems. I personally wouldn't call a weed smoker a criminal but would call a murderous cop a criminal: that France's legal system does not agree with me is unfortunate but irrelevant.
> Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues
That's a debatable point of view, but my opinion is that what you refer to as "socialism" or "social democracy" is in fact just another brand of capitalism. For example, in anarchist circles, the USSR was widely criticized as "State capitalism" [0]. In this mental framework, laissez-faire capitalism (Randt/Hayek ideals) is yet another brand of capitalism, although it has yet to be proven that capitalism can exist without nation states to enforce it, while stateless communism has a varied history throughout the ages.
The problem with criminality is that what we feel like is absolutely irrelevant, which is why this is a big mistake. The fact is that weed is criminal in France/elsewhere in Europe and that is a problem that must be recognized because it's immoral. Same re: murderous cops and other excesses of criminal systems.
Ad brands of capitalism - well OK, but any place that tried any brand of anarchism failed even harder than any brand of capitalism ever did, and the end result was much worse for the individual people who lived there. The US was always a heaven on Earth in comparison, even during its worst era of unregulated capitalism.
USSR is the largest example but it was a poor country. There were rich countries that voted for true communism democratically and even there it devolved into a catastrophe in less than a year (after WW2, or after a few years for the more recent examples). IMHO human nature makes it absolutely impossible to make communism work, because it will be immediately taken over by power hungry people for their own benefit. Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.
> Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.
That is indeed the history in USSR/Spain for example, however i don't think it has to be this way. Many smaller-scale societies could be considered anarchist. In our 21st century, the only large-scale example i can think of is the zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas. Very interesting to read about if you're curious: millions of people living in autonomous communes without central government (although there's a central army to protect communities from the Nation State, it does not hold *any* political power). Money has not been abolished but its significance has been reduced due to collective work/property (cooperatives). Their judicial system is also very interesting, as it's based on reparations not punishment which appears to work great if you take murder/rape as a metrics which has almost entirely disappeared since the revolution in 1994.
I'm not saying the exact same model is applicable everywhere, but examples like this demonstrate that anarchism is possible on a wide scale. Although to be fair most zapatistas would not label themselves "anarchist", despite claiming to be from the anti-authoritarian/bottom left (the historical definition of anarchism).
The US has some seriously dark history including a relativity extreme form of slavery. Some failed states and tribalism where extremely unpleasant and legitimately better places to live.
No, it was at best the same, US was never worse - and only much better after the abolition. The sad fact is that these anarchist places devolved into feudalism/slavery and then straight into warlordism. The only difference was that the people weren't called slaves directly.
Not all forms of slavery are equivalent. Cultural norms evolve to where European serfdom for example was a distinct institution. At the other extreme Caribbean sugar plantations had a ~50% mortality rate in the first year. US slaves where treated significantly worse than the average over history, though of course not the worst.
It wasn't anything like the distinct European institution in these places, which was hell anyways - there was a good reason why these people risked death and went to America.
While the most extreme abuses happen in basically every society at some level, widespread institutions run into real limits. Extremely brutal forms of widespread oppression take strong institutes to maintain stability. Haiti for example had truly horrific conditions, but it couldn’t maintain control first seeing significant numbers of escaped slaves living off the land then a successful uprising. Natzi’s where brutally efficient at working their slaves to death.
At the other end, Native American tribes for example would capture people effectively taking slaves but they integrated them into their tribes. Similar practices where fairly widespread in many cultures without firm centralized governments. The captured wife/sex slave divide is historically nuanced. Keeping people under lock and key takes effort and limits the forms of manual labor they can do. Mines where often extremely horrific because they where so easily managed. Hunting on the other hand requires significant freedom of movement.
I don't know what relevance this has to the fact that any brands of anarchism anywhere were as bad or worse than the US ever was, and (unfortunately - I'd really like them to succeed) never better.
> widespread institutions run into real limits.
The only limit of European feudal lords was how many people they could kill/cause death before there was nobody left to do slave work and fight in wars for them. America was a heaven for the serfs.
There are many historical accounts of freemen in England choosing to become serfs. It wasn’t freedom, but they had real protections. For example they couldn’t be sold individually only the land they where bound to could be sold, which was a major protection keeping families from being broken up.
They may have owed their lord specific quantities of uncompensated labor, but conversely that meant they had socially and legally protected free time.
Also, Serfdom largely disappeared in Western Europe well before America was a thing. “In England, the end of serfdom began with the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. It had largely died out in England by 1500 as a personal status and was fully ended when Elizabeth I freed the last remaining serfs in 1574” “ Serfdom was de facto ended in France by Philip IV, Louis X (1315), and Philip V (1318).[6][7] With the exception of a few isolated cases, serfdom had ceased to exist in France by the 15th century. In Early Modern France, French nobles nevertheless maintained a great number of seigneurial privileges over the free peasants that worked lands under their control. Serfdom was formally abolished in France in 1789.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom. Various exceptions did exist but it simply wasn’t that common in Western Europe.
This all assumes that getting caught is a bad thing. For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.