Reacting to a show that aired around Nov 18.
I like you Dave, but that’s lame, and doing so is stupendously dangerous. The closest I can come to giving them a pass is not knowing if they actually did shoplift. As for proportionality, yes, the punishment should fit the crime, but would you really expect that out of China?
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Your theory is facially absurd. They were in Americans in China. Chances are they were in China for funzies. If you find the system so morally heinous then maybe don’t vacation in it and give it money.
However, their motives don’t technically matter, NAP wise. If there is some reason why the store is “eligible” for defensive/retaliatory force then you can’t aggress against it. You won the NAP lottery and you’re a shitty person, but if this is the case you still did not commit aggression. Same as if you see a book lying under a tree and you intend to steal it, but as it turns out it was abandoned property. You can’t steal it because there is no victim. Motives matter for morality imo, but they do not matter for the NAP.
I find it interesting that you claim to know so much about the slave labor in a county across the world from where you live, but can not name a single US company that engages in slave labor (or any other form of aggression). Companies in countries that do not live up to US wealth standards get accused of “slave labor” all the time when in reality they pay people less than what (some) people in the US make. There is zero evidence here that the store in question is guilty of slave labor. That’s not to say that no foreign companies engage in slave labor, but the problem in China is over exaggerated, and the problem in the US is largely ignored.
Retaliatory force is valid, but it belongs to the victim. The odds that these Americans were victims of Chinese company slave labor is effectively non-existent. The victims can exercise retaliatory force. The victims can assign people to exercise retaliatory force on their behalf. But you can not, consistent with the NAP, randomly use force on anyone who has ever aggressed against an unrelated party at will. That’s not retaliatory; that’s just random force and therefore aggression. Furthermore, the store has in mind some amount that it will sell of each item. When someone steals one just as when someone buys one, they are causing MORE not less slave labor to be used because now one more item is “needed.” These people did the opposite of helping the (dubiously existing) victims, they exasperated the problem (if there was a problem in the first place).
Proportionality is bullshit. A couple of people from a place where the median income is 47k went on vacation and robbed some people in a place where the median income is 10k. So imo they can fuck off. Whatever level of force is necessary to make people stop doing this is the level of force that the victims should decide to use. Maybe a little more to account for error. There are some levels of defense/retaliation that I find morally heinous, but the NAP has no such requirements and no one is required to allow aggressions to continue. A bunch of rich people, and I think world standards are fair to use here because they decided to travel the world, went and robbed probably a bunch of poor people, whatever level of force it takes to make that stop is a level of force that I’m ok with. You don’t have to worry about proportionality if you don’t violate the NAP in the first place.
tl;dr, but I’d go with the strength of the last sentence.
Jail seems stupid. Maybe caning does make sense sometimes.