Words Poorly Used #17 — Victim

The place where I feel unease with the use of victim is in the idea of victimlessness.  Strategically, I think it is a poor tactical argument to use against arbitrary legislation.  If one’s complaint is against the proliferation and enforcement of victimless crime, then all the authoritarians need to do is to trump up a trivial victim.  Actually they don’t even go that far; they just ignore the argument on whether crime has a victim or not.  Propagandists know that in the roach hotel that many keep instead of a mind, the memes check-in but they don’t check out.  The common man has an indivisible definition of the semantic twins of victim and crime.  Furthermore, the cries about victimless crimes have the utility of a null hypothesis.  All the authoritarian need do is show a degree of victimhood, for instance in gambling, as a response in a classic liberal argument on victimless crime and thus is the argument blunted.  On top of that, it is a matter of supreme indifference to the statist whether a law relates to a victim or not — it is the profusion of law that is the hammer, not the concern for victims.

Kilgore