The Banana Trick and Other Acts of Self-Checkout Thievery (2018)

You don't know what to say because saying shoplifting is moral (under some conditions) goes against the central belief you were raised with all your life: private property.

But following an ethics based on social equality, you realize that in many situations self-discouting (autoréduction) is the just thing to do.

We live in a world of money and private property. These ever-invasive tools of injustice are actually based on institutionalized theft. The land you work you don't "own". The house you live in you don't "own". The programs/websites you build you don't "own". So usage-based property (the oldest and only "natural" form of property) is out of the equation because society's belief in a piece of paper (a property title) dispossessed you from what you need/use.

So in this equation, we realize what we need (that has no price) was taken away from us by private property. When we take a look at the production/supply chain, we can follow the money to see who benefits from this worldwide scam. Take food: food costs little-to-nothing to grow (unless you do it with chemicals, which you should never), so it's a good sample of how a capitalist system behaves.

Food you find in supermarkets is grown by farmers. Their production is bought by logistics giants who will take it to supermarkets, or to logistics hubs run by supermarket chains. For supermarket chains (not small shops), it is rare to have more intermediates than this.

Yet, even with so few middlepersons, retail prices can be 5 times or even 10 times what the farmer was paid for the product. Here in France, we typically pay 2-6€/kg of vegetables in supermarkets (farmers markets are cheaper), while the farm gets paid typically less than a euro (with some exceptions for luxury produce).

So where does the money go? The middlepersons are an obvious answer. But supermarket owners are also responsible for the high prices of food.

So in the end, supermarkets are just the place where common people come to spend all their money to survive, while the person making the food can't pay their bills and is pushed slowly towards suicide (very common among farmers working for the industry). Can we call this "moral"? To me it sounds a lot like any other definition of slavery: working a lot to just earn your right to live and help other people be exploited.

Coming from this economic analysis, i believe anything you need you should steal from the rich and the powerful. We need to dismantle these people and their systems of oppression before they complete the destruction of our planet (they will never stop until then).

That's not to say that stealing is a moral way of life under every circumstance. But before i steal something, i ask myself these two questions:

- Is it a necessity or a nicety? (niceties-stealing is just another form of consumptionism) - Am i stealing from a rich person or from a poor/working person? (in a supermarket, you're stealing from rich shareholders; in a smallshop, you're stealing from your neighbor's work, who themselves get ripped off by surrounding capitalist structures)

I know many people among you will not understand or approve my way of thinking. I'm not here to try and convince you. But you should understand that commerce and private property are not inherent aspects of humanity and that stealing is most times a necessity. Therefore stealing from the rich does not come from a delusion, but from the realization that the rules of the game are rigged and we need direct action to bring justice to the table.

P.S. I spent so much time on this crap instead of dismissing it shallowly because dang gets sad when people don't show intellectual cuiriosity ;)

I relayed my experiences with the people I basically grew up with- most of my friends when I was a teenager did drugs and by that I mean that they hardly did anything else. A few were honest-to-god junkies, who ended up in rehab and never really left, most of them (except the fortunately only one friend who died).

Is "disdain" derived from my statement that you don't take drugs to get smarter? My observation is that drugs make you you do stupid things and that most people who take them know this very well. Sometimes they seem to take the drugs to justify stupid behaviour that they wouldn't dare adopt otherwise.

The two examples are provided are general examples. I consider them examples of unreasonable thinking, and of how drugs make you do stupid things. I don't attribute the stupid behaviour of people on drugs to a moral deficiency (if that was the cause of the disdain interpretation)- I attribute it to the effect that drugs and the resulting intoxication have on their mental faculties.

As another exaple, I had a friend who started stealing our stuff when he took barbiturates. Once we were at my place and I showed everyone a silly trinket I had bought. After a while I noticed it had gone missing and I started looking for it. Seeing my frustration that I couldn't find it, my friend told me he had taken it and gave it back to me, _very_ embarassed at his own actions. I laughed, of course. Later another friend accused him of stealing some other trivial thing from his own house. My friend who stole those things (he was one of my inner circe, so to speak) was a pretty straight-up guy with very conservative values and he would have never deigned to stoop so low as to steal stuff from anywhere, in his sober moments. When he was under the influence, he basically turned kleptomanic.

I think this is a more relevant example to our discussion? If so, apologies for not bringing it up earlier.

it means that the only reason that these people don't steal, is that they think they won't cet away with it.