Item — HN Reader

All it takes is a world which has convinced itself that it is “time to be tolerant of all and punish none — all misbehavior is not a fault of the actor but instead the world at large is responsible”

Start dealing with pirates like they did in the 18th century, and watch how fast it ends. It would only take a few dozen publicly hung pirates to make the point.

5 comments

Did that work in the 18th century? Hanging a few pirates eliminated piracy?

It's my understanding it was more about the loss of favorable basing and the reduction in Spanish shipments of treasure that caused the decline.

We've killed plenty of would-be pirates recently. Doesn't seem to have ended the problem.

> Did that work in the 18th century?

It did in the early 19th century. Check out the first and second Barbary Wars. They were not permanent solutions but they had lasting effects. The real blow was the French conquest of Algeria after that.

1. Doesn't seem like this quite fits under "hanging a few pirates"

2. One of the big problems here is there's no real counterparty to negotiate with/cow like the Algerian Dey.

That's not to say that I'm against increased anti-pirate action. I just don't think it's as straightforward as you all say.

Many ships carry very heavily armed private security. You're describing a world that does not exist.

And still there are drug traffickers in countries with the death penalty on drug trafficking.

Those crimes correlate with poverty.

You want less crimes? Provide social security to get rid of the criminals out of desperation

I'm pretty sure that the typical HN reader doesn't understand what desperation is.

You can put a high wall at a border but desperate people will try to scale it. No matter how high you make it. People are willing to cross things like the Darien gap [0], they'll do a lot of things.

If you have nothing to lose, and I mean nothing, you might be willing to take the gamble.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

Desperation isn't even required. There are plenty of people who would see something like this as the adventure of a lifetime and would volunteer to participate knowing that they would have a hell of a tale to tell their grandchildren. Those who engage in things that are extremely risky can find themselves and their actions glossed over and glorified as their exploits become more public knowledge so that even the criminal parts of their past do not taint their resume.

What gets me is that we could have a desperation-free world if we wanted to, but no, instead, we set up the world so that billionaires can buy more super-yachts.

Who is "we" exactly? There's practically nothing that those of us in foreign countries can do to eliminate desperation in Yemen and Somalia. Previous attempts at interventions have probably made the problems there worse.

You know that various navies have conducted operations that have killed many more Somali pirates than that, right? No idea what you’re quoting there, but it’s a bizarre caricature of the world we live in.

Yes, it takes time. It took the British navy decades to rid the seas of most pirates. When a random somalian considers piracy and realizes that the RoI is very negative, hr job will have been accomplished.