Are Thieves "Hateful"?

[CofyCrakCocaine]

So I had some minor crap of mine randomly stolen the other night. Nothing to freak out over, but it does put me down some $180 bucks or so. I mentioned this to a lady, who is well, old, and she just says over and over "Oh, how HATEFUL! Society is falling down to pieces, you need alotta HATE to steal..." Sweet lady and all.

But I got to thinking. I've stolen shit before. As a little kid I walked off with lighters and candy bars right out the store doors. I didn't have any hate in me. Pals of mine stole bigger things and they might've been dickheads, but they weren't hateful about it. I doubt those dudes in France during the 1790's who got executed for stealing bread to feed their starving families were full of hate either. Burning down a synagogue is a hateful thing. Is stealing something deserving of the term "hateful"?

Does society make such a huge fucking deal out of stealing things because societies in general are always obsessed to some extent with material goods? I'm not talking about the breakdown of law and civilization where nothing is safe. I'm just talking the occasional household dumb ass lawn gnome that someone kicks into the street one day.

Why do people get so upset about that? I'd be more pissed off if it was something truly violating, like I dunno, a family grave gets fucked around with. Having some dumb object that I can easily replace get stolen doesn't strike me as deserving of the proverbial hand getting chopped off.

Make no mistake I'm pissed off with the fuck who stole my shit. I would love to kick his stupid ass all over the place. But I don't feel violated by some hateful act from some evil villain. It was probably just some regular person who is no better and no worse than myself. Who am I to judge 'em as evil and hateful?

Wonder if people feel differently.

[ChrisTheCop]

I suppose a small amount of thievery may result from hate.
But by and large, I find people steal for greed, need, or for just plain fun.

[King Hippos Bandaid]

dont forget drugs

people steal for drugs, addictive people arent mean , they just can't control their impulses

[PapaBear]

I think people tend to say "how hateful" instead of "I hate that".

[ChrisTheCop]

ohhhhh.... like "That's so hateful, I can really hate that" sorta like "hate-able"

I can see old folks saying that.

PBear is wise.

[jonyrotn]

Hateful people do hateful shit..You have to own a certain amount of hatred, to hold a loaded pistol to someone's forehead and demand everything on their person.. The hate may or may not be held against the person being robbed, but they are most definitly a victim of the bad guy's hate..
Hate is an emotion that I'm not very familiar with...Nor can I identify with a hateful person..So, which ever crimes are perpetuated by hate is a huge mystery to me...I can say one thing fo sure though..I HATE GETTING MY SHIT STOLEN...

[Yerdaddy]

Cambodia is now probably the most dangerous place I've ever been. I've heard some freaky shit that's gone down just since I've been here, some of it reported in the media and some of it told to me by long-term ex-pats who don't have it in for the locals or anything like that. Some of the stories:

Bag snatching is probably the most common crime against westerners here. "Freshie boys", (rich kids on fast motorbikes), ride up behind a western woman on a moto taxi and snatch her bag and zoom away. A couple months ago they did this to a French woman who worked at an investment bank here but they ended up pulling her off the bike and she was run over by a van and killed. Everybody just fucked off - the freshies, the moto-driver and the van driver. I figured there'd be a hunt for these guys and a crackdown on the bag-snatching. Nope. I've only heard of more bag snatches since then and I don't think the French woman's case was ever solved.

Down in Sihanoukiville, (the port city and resort town on the Gulf of Thailand), the ex-pats there are talking about a recent crime wave. One of the stories is of guys, (probably freshies), stringing a wire across a road to knock a tourist off a motorbike so they can rob him and take his bike. An ex-pat almost got his head taken off. A western woman got in trouble with a local mob and was murdered. I've met about a half-dozen tourist chicks who had bags and motorbikes stolen - some at knife-point.

Meth addiction is sweeping SE Asia. At least two western bar owners have had meth addicts break into their homes at night and kill them and slice up their wife/girlfriend badly.

Moto taxi drivers, ("moto-dops"), are notorious scumbags. Sometimes one will whip out a knife at the end of a ride or a screwdriver and rob their passenger. They'll do it near a group of other drivers because the others will always join in against a westerner. They've picked up drunk western chicks and instead of driving them home driven down dark alleys where their friends are there to gang rape her. Gang rape has it's own name here and is common, and nearly acceptable - and rarely punished - because usually they do it to a prostitute. But it's also happened to college girls and very occasionally western tourists.

There's a few principles at work here besides hatred, but I think hatred plays a part. Most of all is the fact that the children of the rich can literally get away with murder. Cops here make about a dollar a day. They're basically for-hire; if you get your shit stolen or whatever, you pay them to either investigate, return your shit if they already know who did it, (common), or even fill out a police report if you need it for your insurance. Criminal gangs often simply give a cut of their loot to the police so that the cops only confiscate the merchandise if the victims outbid the gang. The cops will always give you the price, although there's always room for haggling. In this climate - a lack of rule-of-law - crime is usually a calculated financial decision. The crime is almost always more lucrative than the chance of getting caught is costly. The choice of westerners as victims, (locals are still more often victims than westerners), has to be seen as a financial decision - the, usually correct, calculation is that we have more money than the locals. The rich kids' dad will often buy the kid expensive motorcycles and clothes but they won't give them money for drugs and hookers so they use the bikes to steal from "rich" foreigners. If they get caught they drop their dad's name and the cops have to fuck off. But there's also an element of resentment towards those with more money and foreigners. Hatred of Thais, of the Vietnamese and of the west who colonized, bombed and abandoned them in the past is as much a part of Cambodian identity as anything positive about themselves. One of the reasons nobody came to their rescue during the Khmer Ruge era is that only a few years earlier the world watched as they purged themselves of their ethnic Vietnamese minority a few years earlier and nobody, (even among their educated elite), said peep about it.

Now don't get me wrong; the vast majority of Cambodians are lovely people. But the rich kids learn to be hateful early on. Most of this country's wealth is ill-gotten. An honest buck is soon stolen. There are haves and have-nots, and the haves look at everyone - the have-nots, as well as the other haves - with contempt at the first sign of weakness. I think growing up with knowing only greed and priviledge leads to other vices like hatred, mallace, and sadism, (freshies are especially fond of gang-raping poor prostitutes and are more likely to throw in a beating and robbing just for shits and giggles).

As for the moto-dops, they're poor. Their hatred comes from the fact that they know they're fucked - their lives are shit compared to ours. They'll never have the money to travel so every westerner they see is doing something they'll never do. Their maliciousness comes from a sense of lack of priviledge - the flip-side of the coin from the freshie-boys' motivation. I think in some cases they steal and cheat from opportunism, then the hatred comes later - as a justification of their actions. (I should also say that some of my best Cambodian friends are moto-dops. The ones who only want to earn an honest buck are also the ones you call in an emergency, and they're very protective of my female friends that like to get piss-drunk and then have to get home. I think the decision to be virtuous is as self-reinforcing as the opposite and virtues multiply as much as vices.)

I can't help but compare this place to Yemen. The kind of petty and violent crimes committed against westerners here are virtually unheard of in Yemen. And I attribute much of the difference to the religions. Yemenis, as strict Muslims, will tell you that they wouldn't do what Cambodians would because it would be a disgrace to Islam. They would site the passages in the Qu'ran declaring that guests in Muslim lands are to be protected and never harmed. They take that shit seriously, and they know that, if they were to be caught stealing anything from a westerner on the street, they'd more than likely be beaten to death by their fellow Yemenis. The Buddhism of Cambodia, on the other hand, is more like a set of suggestions. I've never heard a local site Buddhism as a reason to do or not to do anything other than to have a day off work for holidays and flock to the capitol and major cities to celebrate and spray everyone with water. And even those occaisions are known to ex-pats and city-dwellers as rob-and-rape festivals. If you live in Phnom Penh and you have the holiday off you get the fuck out of town. With double the usual population in the city the cops are even LESS likely to help you even if they're watching you get robbed. Yet Buddhist shrines are everywhere - in every house, business... every building actually. They burn incense and there's always an offering of food, booze or trinkets at every shrine at all times. But the western mistique we hold that Buddhism is THE religion of peace is bullshit. Perhaps on paper it is. But in practice Buddah is an absentee landlord. It's caused me to reevaluate my ideas of religion, of tolerance, of authority, and of human nature. I'm coming to the conclusion that MOST humans need rules, and more importantly, need consequences for their actions - positive and negative. The promise of heaven and the threat of hell only go so far. The threat of a beat-down - or the lack of that threat - go a whole hell of a lot farther in the real world.

What were we talking about?

[A.J.]

Dude, you have to write more of this stuff in your Yerdaddy of Arabia thread.