Just got done responding to Larry's "What are you reading?" threads on the books board and one of mine raised an interesting subject I thought might amuse the various clever and twisted minds that frequent the CMB. Here's the context:

A couple months back a friend of mine who is in law enforcement suggested we do a book lunch on Dale Carnegie's "How to win Friends and Influence People". If you're not familiar with it, the title is accurate, it is a classic on improving your interactions with others. He wanted to meet for lunch or breakfast about once a week to do a chapter or so. Now the usual application of the book is improving your sales, being a better leader, better spouse or parent. Unsurprisingly we went a bit different, inspired by his profession and the first example in the book being a criminal affair, and focused on crime.

One of the core points of the book is that whenever possible any given interaction/deal/etc should focus on you telling them how a given action will benefit them, as opposed to yourself. So we tried to come up with arguments for any given crime that would be compelling to discourage people from doing it, with the caveat that while it never hurts to remind people how expensive a speeding ticket is the argument could never rest principally on "Because it is illegal" or legal fines and consequences. Which is to say that an argument to someone for why they shouldn't run a stop sign or red light should not focus on "Because we told you not to" but rather why they shouldn't even if they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that no police were nearby.

This was actually rather fun and challenging, and I'll give a few examples and a few extra ones for others to use below, but the one that really fascinates me and stymied us both was anything involving drugs and addiction. You can't use health reasons, for instance, because the goal is to present something that might sway them and its fairly absurd to assume even the most brain dead crackhead doesn't know its bad for their health, and the argument seems ineffective on smokers or drinkers by and large too. Here's an example:

Q: Why shouldn't I mug people?
A: In Ohio better than 1 in 30 people have concealed carry permits, and there's no serious demographic bias like 'almost all male' etc, so even if you don't get caught, there's a very strong chance you'll be killed or critically injured. Let's say that chance is only 1 in 100 per attempt, if the average person can be mugged for $150, you're effectively placing a half-life of 50 attempts, meaning that you can mug for $7500 with a 50/50 of being killed or seriously injured and the latter likely to result in serious prison time for you. This makes mugging vastly worse in profit vs risk then even such jobs as coal miner, lumberjack, or military service during wartime, all of which pay several times that a year, whereas your prison term could well exceed a year and basically bar you from any future high pay low risk job.

Note that in this case it is fine to include some legal ramifications as icing because no one is going to use the 'Well it shouldn't even be illegal' argument for mugging, unlike most vice crimes (drugs, gambling, whoring, contraband) or traffic violations, but again the argument can't focus on it.

So you get some tough ones especially from the things falling into the categories a lot of people don't even think of as crimes, like speeding, smoking a joint, etc. And of course the goal isn't to be 100% accurate or truthful, it's to create a reasonable true and compelling case that focuses only on how taking or not taking an action will specifically benefit/harm the offender in a clear and tangible way.

1) Why shouldn't you run a stop sign or red light even if you are certain there is no oncoming traffic?

2) Why should you turn in a friend or family member who committed armed robbery?

And again the trick on these is to revolve the argument around tangible personal benefit. It doesn't have to be a 'case closed' example, just extra icing on the usual arguments. Feel free to make up any other example too. Now we came up with decent ones for most, some solid and some more of a minor plus to use as a supplement, but we were utterly shutdown on addictions so I'm curious if anyone can come up with better. And remember, "this is bad for your..." has to be weighed in the context that the person probably knows that and has placed, at least subconsciously, satisfying that addiction above those other concerns. It's tricky to argue that using heroine, meth, coke, etc will damage your ability to earn money when that's not exactly demonstrable and they don't want to believe it would apply to them, and moreover earning more money is to them largely a good thing so they can buy more smack.

So, test your persuasiveness, pick a fairly common crime and argue it, or try tackling the addiction one.