Do you believe in "once a criminal always a criminal"?

An Australian made the argument that there supposedly (dubious statistic) being x people who committed y crime at least once, that there must also be x people currently committing y crime. He even took it a step forward to suggest that this means that there are x people currently committing y crime on encrypted messengers, therefore encrypted messengers should be outlawed.

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Everyone’s a suspect. Everyone MUST be doing something illegal. It also throws out the idea of rehabilitation. Labeling people for life. So wonderful! Ban everything, subject everyone to a search of their personal property and person. Horrible ideas!!

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His logic is faulty. If X people commit a crime once, they can’t all be committing it currently. And since most people are not actively committing crime continuously, there is a number Z committing it at any one specific time. Therefore, Z people is a smaller, probably much smaller set of X. This kind of invalidates his theory from the start.

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Every dumb idea, every idiotic law, every stupid thing I hear about comes out of someone from Australia.

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This was Australia’s Prime Minister. His right wing Liberal National Party lost the federal election in 2022.

One of the officials his party appointed was caught appearing on NCOSE’s podcast (an infamous group of Christian fundamentalists from the U.S. who want to ban all porn). A report released in 2023 by Labor showed a group which wants to ban all porn and has links to those fundamentalists from the U.S. lobbying the government. They lobbied against more conventional porn and those “cartoons”.

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the number of (for lack of a better way of putting it) law-abiding people using encrypted messagers far outnumbers the number of people committing crimes using encrypted messages. Because, spoiler, the people committing crimes is a small minority of all the people in the world. The overwhelming majority of people…are not doing anything wrong. (and just so we are clear. For the small minority of people that are doing wrong, we should help them so that they stop doing wrong)

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on a related note. The number of people using TOR for legitimate purposes far outnumbers the number of people using TOR for illegal purposes.

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