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How To Execute People In the 21st Century
HughPickens.com writes Matt Ford writes in The Atlantic that thanks to a European Union embargo on the export of key drugs, and the refusal of major pharmaceutical companies to sell them the nation's predominant method of execution is increasingly hard to perform. With lethal injection's future uncertain, some states are turning to previously discarded methods. The Utah legislature just approved a bill to reintroduce firing squads for executions, Alabama's House of Representatives voted to authorize the electric chair if new drugs couldn't be found, and after last years botched injection, Oklahoma legislators are mulling the gas chamber.
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is also prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is also prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."
Don't.
Nothing like a little "Pay Per View" to cover the costs of justice.
I mean, you could just not execute people. You know, seeing as how so many innocent people have been sent to death by racist juries or prosecutors extracting confessions from them with unethical measures. And how it costs a lot more to execute someone than it does to keep them in prison for the rest of their life. But that's just crazy talk! We can't have a vengeance-based legal system with thinking like that!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Please stop killing people in the name of justice. Just stop.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
I wonder what kind of occupation of how and why someone would pursue a career in designing execution methods.
mfwright@batnet.com
It's a bit odd that there isn't more consideration given to the idea of death by nitrogen asphyxiation. It seems to be a fairly foolproof and painless method of execution, if we must have the death penalty.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Considering that assisted suicide techniques are well-researched and well-documented, it seems very strange that they wouldn't simply use any of the preferred, pain-free methods such as the exit bag. What gives?
Give them the choice of suicide or ______________. (fill in the blank)
I'll start: Using /. beta on an old smartphone while waiting in line at the DMV.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So here's how you do it. You build a chair, adjustable to the height of the condemned. The condemned is seated, strapped in and sedated. A headrest is positioned very precisely at the back of the skull. The headrest contains a captured bolt projectile system, and is precisely aligned with the Medulla Oblongata. This captured bolt system is wired to a bank of seven switches, where one is randomly connected. The "firing squad" stands prepared, and at the allotted time, each member of the squad flips their switch. The bolt destroys the Medulla Oblongata, causing instant death.
No messy chemicals, no "everyone in the firing squad missed on purpose" no accidental decapitations, no trashing around under electrical shock, just a thin rod removing the part of the brain that makes humans function.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
With hypoxia (lack of oxygen), you just fall asleep and, if continued long enough, die painlessly.
Hypoxia is easy to implement, just replace the air in the room with 100% nitrogen. There will be no suffocation reflex, since that requires carbon dioxide. It is a completely painless way to die.
* Our atmosphere is around 80% nitrogen so usage can't be restricted, very inexpensive to purify, doesn't consume resources needed elsewhere (ie medically)
* Painless and humane: the victim just goes to sleep. They may become giddy beforehand
* No risk of leaks or poisoning as long as the areas around the chamber are open to the outside air... the chamber needs only be moderately airtight
Ideally this would be the time to reflect that perhaps, after numerous proven instances where innocent people were put to death or narrowly avoided it with a death-row exoneration, that a 21st century civilized society should abandon this barbaric practice, but if saner heads don't prevail at least there is this ideal method of it.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
The guillotine was originally adopted by the French as an evolved and humane method for taking a human life and, considering what we've seen with alternative methods this past century, I have to agree: It's fast, relatively painless (quite possibly completely painless when one considers the shock reaction of the body,) somewhat messy, but has great symbolic and even theatrical value. Granted, the upper classes world-wide hate this device with a fearful passion, but that is actually part of its value.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
If you guys attach one with duct tape to every missile you shoot at foreign country, your death rows would be empty in a few days ....
Win/Win ?
Head ripping off is considered a most humane, swift and painless method:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfsMMVgIToA
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
It has been proven (as if it needed to be) that we've executed an innocent person.
http://www.theatlantic.com/nat...
Any idea that you can "humanely" murder someone is a damned lie.
Moreover, remember the Central Park jogger case? Where they rounded up five minority scapegoats and said they brutally raped a pretty white girl? Everyone, including Donald Trump himself, was rallying to execute these kids. Now, it turns out they were all innocent. They spent 15 years of their lives in jail and they were LUCKY because they weren't executed. They had all of their primes taken away from them but they still get to live what's left.
The death penalty is for revenge, not justice. And the ones who pay the price when we're wrong isn't the prosecutors. Life in jail means innocent people have a chance. Death penalty removes that chance and replaces it with a false sense of faith in the system.
CO2 is *not* a pleasant way to go. The body reacts to the excess. Better to drown in N2 or even helium. The advantage of N2 is that the bystanders can be protected by moderate venting of the chamber and fans blowing in the viewing area, so that N2 doesn't pool around the observers.
and then ban. that how it works. mostly.
How is it that we can put people to sleep every day by the thousands, cut them apart, sew them back together, and wake them back up -- and this is considered normal medical care -- but for some reason the same procedures aren't good enough for performing an execution?
I don't particularly like our implementation of the death penalty, but this aspect of the argument has just never added up for me.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Or how about we stop this barbaric practice? It's 2015. We're not living in the fucking middle ages anymore.
What the fuck is wrong with Americans, I swear.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Heroin overdose (like 700 mg). No shortage of that drug (just check your evidence locker), certainly not painful - you nod off and don't wake up, easy to administrate, only downside is it's not all that quick.
I don't understand why filling a chamber with CO2 or some other gas is not the current method.
The human body uses CO2 levels to 'detect' asphyxiation. While 'quick', filling a chamber with CO2 would be quite stressful to the condemned as they'd experience all the effects of asphyxiation - gasping, hyperventilation, etc...
That's why you use pretty much anything BUT CO2. Helium, Nitrogen, Argon, etc... It's just that Nitrogen tends to be the cheapest and most readily available of the industrial gasses. Put an 'air freshener' in the vent and they can't smell a thing, and even talking won't clue them in on that the gas has been switched.
I don't read AC A human right
Not a big fan of execution (takes to long, cost to much, arbitrary application) ... however: ... the perpetrator won't feel a thing ... and if they did, they wouldn't care about it.
Why not use such drugs as cocaine, heroin and the like? There should be a good stock pile of it, they need to test the purity for trials, and when the when necessary dispose of it (the drugs). During the execution
You misspelled "retaliation" there. Nobody is being indemnified and no dead come back to life when the killer is killed.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
It takes work to make a room that can withstand the pressure(see how pressure chambers are built.
Now, we can do the same thing while keeping the pressure up via injecting a neutral gas, such as Nitrogen. Heck, with Nitrogen you can have the room be fairly leaky(think airplane leaky), and because N2 is harmless as long as it's not displacing too much oxygen, having the area outside the execution chamber being well ventilated is enough.
I don't read AC A human right
One problem with CO is if the concentration isn't high enough you will get symptoms of headache and nausea before the person dies.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
But, the murderer is no longer a burden on society.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
But that, probably, won't happen for another ten years.
the reason why electrocution exists is because tesla's competition - when he invented AC electricity - wanted to demonstrate that it was "unsafe". so they electrocuted cows and other animals in front of various influential people. when demonstrated in front of a texas governor, the individual concerned considered the method of killing to be sufficiently effective as to warrant its deployment for the murder of people who had committed crimes
although i do not specifically know, one way or the other, i would be very surprised if, at the time, an evaluation as to whether this murderous method was considered to be too barbaric or not. unfortunately however humans have a habit of using past decisions as a means to justify current and future ones, regardless of overwhelming evidence or opinions. honestly: much of humanity still has a lot to learn.
No strings attached.
I think that might only be for gays.
only because of the insane appeals process. there is no reason someone should be able to appeal 30 times
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
blood all over the place. yuuch.
Then kill every criminal whose cost as an inmate is substantially less than the expected contribution to the economy after release.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
The zero-one-infinity rule says otherwise.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Sure, when people stop killing other innocent people, we'll stop killing them right back.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well, it's more expensive to execute people than to keep them in prison for life, so... Quite easily I'd imagine.
I'm so sick of this Idiocracy I'm about ready for a nice benign dictatorship.
A bullet in the back of the head is a humane and reliable method of execution. The reason we don't do it is because the witnesses don't want to see the prisoner's brains splatter about the room.
... the death penalty is an effective form of revenge and piss poor at deterring crime.
Citation: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and stuff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
...that DNA has proven quite a few convicted criminals innocent, are you not?
unless they make over 1 million a year, then bring out the guillotines
But justice in the USA is mainly about revenge. Legal types even have a fancy name for it: "retribution." Protecting society is a secondary purpose, but that doesn't require the death penalty. It only requires keeping people locked up until they are no longer a danger, but we can't even get that right.
If the main purpose of justice were rehabilitation, there would be no killing in the name of justice, and people wouldn't come out of prisons more dangerous to society than when they went in. And prisons would be much nicer places, more like hospitals or universities than like dungeons.
Unfortunately, we are not a very smart nation.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
systemd is faster .. but not exactly painless
Is nobody else alarmed about what this need for importation says about what happened to the US chemical industry?
Yes, DiSKiLLeR, why don't we take death more seriously?
But, the murderer is no longer a burden on society.
And there's that 0.00% recidivism rate.....
CO poisoning has the unique effect that the CO molecules attach to hemoglobin in the same way as oxygen so the blood chemistry doesn't change.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The zero-one-infinity rule says otherwise.
No, it says that they should get one appeal.
Your belief that only guily people are being killed is amusing.
Your apparent belief that guilty people only kill once is naive and foolish. More innocent people are killed by repeat killers than innocents are by the State.
If the nine jurors that rendered the verdict had to compose the firing squad, I would feel somewhat better about the death penalty.
give them their appeal, and on appeal, if the appeal falls through, go directly to your fate, not back to your cell. problem solved.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Face it: Yes, it is wrong to kill any human being. Some people, however, have committed crimes so heinous that they no longer qualify as human beings, just because they happen to have a particular DNA sequence.
.. and some people decide that's because they don't believe in the same god, don't accept the same society rules, are homosexuals, ..
your attempt to change the topic is amusing. we are talking about people who deserve it, not the few innocents who fall through the cracks. And while I do want more safeguards for that, and DP should only be used in the most serious crimes where there is real proof vs circumstantial proof.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
constant search for a humane means of taking a human life
There is no such thing. Either you accept the fact that by killing someone you leaving the humane domain, or you renounce killing people.
I'd prefer americans to stop that archaic and illogical practice.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
How many is many?
Near as I can tell, they say about 4% of death row inmates end up getting their sentences either overturned or commuted in some way to avoid the death penalty. That 4% number cannot be transferred to those actually put to death because it stems from the overly abundant checks within the system on death penalty cases. I'm willing to suggest that more innocent people die from accidents revolving around police in high speed chases than on death row who were innocent.
With a hammer, of course!
If you're interested in facts I'll tell you what they are and I'll give you sources - Chomsky on The Big Idea
http://www.innocenceproject.or...
By definition there is no humane way to take a human life. Stop trying to solve paradoxical word problems and actually deal with the issues that cause aberrant behavior.
Every example I've seen of someone executed "who was innocent" has been scum otherwise. Certainly, they may have been innocent of that specific crime, but they've generally been worthless wastes of human flesh causing misery to the people around them for their entire lives.
And even IF they were perfectly innocent people, so what, really? This world is infested with 7 billion people. They're not precious snowflakes, they're utterly, completely, expendable. We cheerfully will cut out healthy tissue to excise a tumor; if we occasionally sweep up a non-scum person, really, so what as long as the bulk of bad guys are correctly executed.
Oh, and to the original point? Gravity's free. Put them in a cement 100' silo with a stair to the top. Either they starve to death, or jump off the top. Either way, it's toxin-free, zero-cost, energy-efficient, and afterwards crows get to eat, so it's green too.
-Styopa
Justice has several purposes. Deterrance, protection, rehabilitation and 'retribution' - providing comfort to the victims. The problem is that there is another very negative element too: Collective vengence. The social desire to see those who offend society made to suffer. Worse, this can be counterproductive to the rehabilitation role: Programs aimed at educating prisoners are widely seen as 'soft on crime,' while there is widespread support for any policy that increases the difficulty released prisoners face in finding housing and employment. In large part due to this attitude, the prison system in many countries has turned into an industrial-scale system for taking minor offenders as input and turning them into hardened criminals with gang connections who, upon release, find themselves effectively unemployable and thus with a strong incentive to turn to serious crime.
The deterrance aspect only works for crimes in which the offender knows beforehand that they have a significent chance of getting caught.
Forget the arguments about ethics - it's simply cheaper to put someone in jail for life than to pay out all the legal fees and appeals involved carrying out capital punishment.
That's what this is all about - chasing the "revenge" vote where it's more important for justice to be seen to be done instead of actually done. Such folk would be much happier with the Chinese system of a more than a 99% conviction rate.
But do we really want to go that way? Letting the state have that much power sets things up for the execution of people who annoy the state instead of commit what we normally see as capital crimes.
False dichotomy. You are asserting that the option is to execute or parole after some maximum term. You are intentionally neglecting the option of life in prison without the chance of parole. Your argument is rendered almost entirely moot by such a sentencing option.
Rhapsody in Numbers
I believe you need to read Rosseau. There is something called "The Social Contract", which is something of a "shrink wrap license" you agree to by being born
We have gone over this time and time again that EULAs are unenforceable. therefore Rosseaus "social contract" is bunk.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I don't think this is found at Disney World:
The Euthanasia Coaster
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Ignore the debatability of any society forcibly putting an individual to death for whatever reason (justice, order, deterrent, sadism, zealotry, etc) and consider the following: Is it less "cruel and unusual" to let the condemned individual choose the method of capital punishment from an approved list?
There is something called "The Social Contract", which is something of a "shrink wrap license" you agree to by being born into a society, that by doing so, you agree to abide by that societies rules.
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
The USA is the only G7 country that still executes people and they don't care if it's a woman, a juvenile, or someone with autism. The only other countries that execute people with the gusto of the USA are China, Iran, and North Korea. Instead of trying to come up with new methods the US should be phasing out this barbaric practice.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I believe that those suffering from a terminal illness should be allowed to apply for assisted suicide or euthanasia, and clearly whatever patients ordinarily choose for this purpose would be equally appropriate for condemned killers.
1971 is incorrect as it wasn't just Europeans that put them on trial. It was also the U.S. and the Russians. On occasion, Rudolf Hess was Ok'd to release by one power or another but the Russians said nyet. It would have taken the consent of all the participants to release them early. Hess served a life sentence without parole and he certainly wasn't any near as bad as Hans Frank or Goring.
Co2 *AND* O2 Displacement
Is without much doubt at all, the most peaceful/painless/cheap(vs drugs) way to end life... That they don't use it today, is only because they wish it not to be a painless experience.
I am pro-death penalty, and imo if it's beyond a reasonable doubt, without a doubt... It shouldn't be quick and painless but drawn out and broadcast as a true deterrent to those who might think of following in 'those footsteps'.
If a someone released from prison murders again then it's the State that failed to rehabilitate. Civilized countries like Norway have a very low recidivism rate because their justice system isn't about revenge it's about helping people who are mentally disturbed. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
1. It gets the deranged out of our society.
2. Their life to that point is effectively over.
3. We avoid all the problems with execution.
4. Considering that the only countries that would take them would probably enslave them, they'll die anyway.
False dichotomy. You are asserting that the option is to execute or parole after some maximum term. You are intentionally neglecting the option of life in prison without the chance of parole. Your argument is rendered almost entirely moot by such a sentencing option.
The following countries have abolished "Life without parole":
Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brasil, Cape Verde, Columbia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Kosovo, Macau China, Mexico, Montenegro, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Portugal, Republic of Congo, Serbia, Spain, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vatican City, Venezuela
The following countries have life sentences, but have mandatory consideration for parole after some set period:
Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Caech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Georgia, Greece, India, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Republic of Macedonia, Republic of Moldova, Monaco, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Switzerland, Republic of China, Turkey
So no, the argument is not "moot".
ObMontyPython: Being chased over a cliff by naked women...
> you agree to by being born into a society, that by doing so, you agree to abide by that societies rules.
I have no doubt you actually believe that horseshit. That statement makes some of the more hilarious proclaimations Christians are so fond of saying seem rational and reasonable in comparison.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
Try using that argument to opt out of the "income tax" portion of the social contract.
Good old-fashioned inhaled Ether. The anesthetic properties preclude the possibility of pain, and increasing concentrations will cause sedation, unconsciousness and then respiratory paralysis (death). Literally painless. Just have to be sure the gas chamber doesn't accidentally explode.
So is your argument why homosexuals are still thrown in jail for being homosexuals in Europe and North America?
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Justice is only about revenge. What else is there?
Real justice?
You get what you deserve for your wrongdoing nothing more nothing less. Justice has nothing to do with revenge.
It puts you to sleep and you die. With a modified gasoline engine the fuel costs would be at most $4 to kill someone.
In each case of an innocent being killed by the state the courts, several judges, at least one jury and the prosecutor swore that the victim was proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt, even when the evidence was circumstantial. How do we make them quit lying?
Execution is not a deterrent because they take place behind walls and virtually no one sees them. Out of sight, out of mind. If they are going to execute people, then do it in the public square in a way that shocks people (hanging, guillotine, etc). Couple that with executing prosecutors and cops who through malice or complete incompetence cause an innocent person to be executed. Like as not, the latter will reduce to an absolute minimum the former. And when an execution does happen, people will be shown the consequences if they murder in no uncertain terms.
If you don't do it in public, then don't execute people. Without being a real deterrent it serves no purpose and is more merciful than keeping them in a cage (but for fuck's sake, stop giving them TVs and other shit that makes the time go fast).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Executions are by no means done the most humane way, nor is anyone attempting to do them the most humane way. They're done the most telegenic way, so as not to bother the audience: Having your butt stuffed with cotton *before* being executed is not humane, but hey, that way no shit comes out when they kill you, and you die clean and smelling great !
To me, humane (if there is a "humane" way to kill people) would be quick and painless. Drugs or electrocution aren't. I'm fairly sure guillotine is the most reliably quick and painless way, but the blood ! You almost feel like you just killed someone !
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Deliberately killing someone is well recognized to be a much greater offense than accidental killing.
A massive heroin overdose seems equally humane. And as we've demonstrated for the past thirty years at least, despite our best efforts we cannot stop heroin from entering this country.
umm, the income tax is actually found in the constitution, not any "social contract"
Better yet. where is this social contract so i can have my lawyer take a look at it and see if it stands up
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You do not get the death penalty for accidentally killing someone.
Or are you trying to excuse the accidents leading to death in order to cry against the intentional deaths of people who intentionally killed others? Strange how one justifies things if that was the case.
But here is a thought exercise for you. If someone knows they would be getting the death penalty for murdering people in a certain way (usually more than one person and intentionally with heinous acts of violence), wouldn't that be the same as them committing suicide? We already have suicide by cop, and there are strong arguments for doctor assisted suicide, why is this considered different?
even when the evidence was circumstantial.
you answered your own question. if the evidence is circumstantial, DP is off limits
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
They claim the bolt-guns used to kill cattle and pigs are humane. Use those.
After all, it's not like there is anything "humane" about an execution. Stop candy coating the situation. Blow their damned heads off with a 12-guage at close range -- the brains will be all over the wall before the neurons have a chance to register pain. Sure it's ugly, but so is all death.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I am calling your excuse for the mistakes in the death penalty specious. You claim that since there are more accidental deaths in police chases than there are intentional but wrong executions, we needn't be overly concerned about wrongful executions is simply wrong.
If it's too clean, too clinical, people lose sight of the barbaric atrocity that execution is.
They also start to think that because it's clean, there's no reason to stop it. It should frighten (and gross out) any sane person.
...laura
you agree to by being born into a society, that by doing so, you agree to abide by that societies rules.
That is categorically not what the "social contract" means. The "social contract" is an expression that one must suspend some "natural rights" (i.e. the freedom to "do whatever you want") in order to obtain the benefits of living in a society (i.e. to protect rights that need social defense). Like any contract, it's one that must be entered into consciously, not by birth or decree; the perversion of such a "contract" to mean one inherits it by birth is a road to domination and stagnation. Being born conveys only liberties, not responsibilities. Being a member of a community conveys both. It is up to a person to choose the latter, and it is up to a child's guardians to convey the benefits and consequences of such a contract. And it is up to every person to negotiate the social fluidity of all of these.
Society's rules are also not static, and they typically only change through rebellion. This process can be peaceful or bloody, just or unjust, depending on the rules and the rebellion. The most just and peaceful evolution comes from a confluence of evolving "social contract" that challenges outdated or unwarranted rules; the least comes from the collision of an unflinching status quo with an unflinching reality. Wars are often fought, in either case, and often the "social contract" is discarded wholly in the process.
The people you listed above, had they been freed, elderly and in a different world? They would have little purchase to do any further harm. That isn't to say there is no reason to guard against a resurgence of past monstrosity, and it isn't even to say that the world isn't better absent some of the worst monsters. But the world changes—nay, people change the world—and tossing monsters into a world that was once their own but isn't any longer... doesn't give them a lot of leeway.
The "social contract" is a fiction created by the elite to keep the rest of us in line. It's something to which we are all supposed to accede, yet it's only enforceable one way. Rich men don't go to jail unless they harm other rich men or have in some other way broken the elite's kleptocratic rules in some way.
The (very few) times in our history when there has been something like a working social contract were periods when there were grass roots movements to enforce those rules. Labor unions, the civil rights and women's movements of the 20th century were a few such institutions.
And make no mistake: the rapidly metastasizing surveillance state is nothing more than an effort to make sure such institutions can never again exist.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Most courts accept it as a given, without blinking an eye. Inertia is the strongest force in systems of power.
I'm not sure I understand what your point is. My point was that the person to whom I responded created a false dichotomy, with life without parole being an option not addressed. I did not claim that "death", "life without parole", and "parole after X years" were the only options (my intention was not to create a false trichotomy, but merely to point out that there were options not considered by the OP).
Rhapsody in Numbers
The only real term in a "social contract" is "Society (i.e. the government) may change the terms of this contract in any way, at any time, prospectively or retrospectively, and the individuals all remain bound by it."
In other words, it's bunk.
Honest question, since there's a list of nazis up above: if an elderly Adolf Hitler were forced to live in prison for 50 years and released into modern life, what more harm could he do?
I dare say he could produce an astonishingly smelly old man diaper.
Seriously. If you want to execute someone and be SURE about it without untoward cruelty?
Two bullets to the head, of the largest possible caliber to fit in a handgun, in rapid succession.
If you want to feel more "humane" about it, drug person to sleep first.
*POW!*POW!*
End of story.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You send them to Carousel to be re-born.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But not humans? Unfortunately the contrived intravenous and electric chair methods which result in horrendous suffering are result of idiots thinking that shooting someone in the head is "gross". Well, overcome your childish sensibilities. All death is gross. But this method is humane.
And your assumptions seem wrong too. We accept all sorts of risks in life and this is just no different. There are plenty of opportunities to find innocents and stop them from being executed. In fact, you get more chances and more legal support if you are sentenced to death than if you received life in prison. The far vast majority of innocents are weeded out before it happens.
Handgun? are you a cruel bastard? All hand gun rounds are slow and barely lethal. yes even the big silly rounds.
20mm hypersonic round out of a 42" long rifle to maximize velocity, the head will completely explode into hamburger bits, Zero pain, The brain will not even finish processing the sound from the shot being fired before they are so scrambled that you can't have pain.
Or simply about 30 kilos of high explosives as a hat will also be the most humane. Plus you will have a 100% chance of success and 0% chance of suffering.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I never understood the sophistry involved in the quest for a "humane" execution. You are depriving someone of their LIFE. How humane can that be?
OK, I can hear you guys before the chorus starts. "But, but, suffering!" I'm not sure why that bothers certain people so much in this particular context, but rather than going down a long path of logic against deaf ears, I'm perfectly willing to concede it. There are methods that are guaranteed to involve no physical suffering or discomfort whatsoever. Inhalation of 99.995% helium or nitrogen is one. A fully encirling explosive helmet would be another. Just a hand grenade under the chin is pretty goddam instant and sure.
I'll give you another one. You know all those amps in a electric chair? Skull sizzling; eyes popping out; convulsions? It's utterly pointless horseshit. You don't need that. Two tiny needles with a local anesthetic, insertied to touch the heart, with an AC current of literally microamps will cause instant fibrillation and consciousness will be lost in a few seconds with no drama whatsoever. Lights out, baby.
There are a lot of posts here and elsewhere saying that we should "just stop," that capital punishment is immoral and should be abolished forever.
Is ANY kind of punishment moral and justified?
Is it logical that the severity of the punishment should be proportional to the offense?
How do you decide what is the most severe form of punishment that is moral and justified, if punishment of any kind is moral and justified?
Don't.
Do. An aversion to the death penalty is a twisted concept because it leads to so-called 'life' sentences.
A 'life without parole' sentence is the most horrible torture ever devised. A 'comfortable' life in prison (without institutionalized slavery, malnourishment or brutality) is a modern invention of energy-wealthy society in which a moment's mortal agony is stretched out over many pointless years. Confinement, a dreary existence far from one's desired path, a great and ultimately worthless expense to society. Any sane person placed in this condition will harbor a degree of growing resentment that cannot be channeled away. You would think the only hope they could muster is that society may change its mind someday. And for some, this needs to happen .
Abandoning execution for the worst crimes also leads us inexorably in the direction of a 'revolutionary' new medical procedure that will render a bad person into brand new good person. They can return home to their families in varying states of sentience and independence, they know their name, they are as cuddly as ever, no vulgar scars on the forehead. There is a warranty. The procedure is so successful (and financially lucrative!) that it is naturally 'improved' and 'refined' so it can be applied to smaller gentler degree and under various brand names, to many judicial and civil markets. As told in our latest prospectus, a particularly fertile R&D effort may make 'problem teens' and 'repeat offenders' a thing of the past. To ease barriers of parental consent, a multi-faceted campaign has been launched in news and social media. Our secured trademark has been injected as a clever and cute internet meme, so even Grumpy Cat is promoting our product though he does not know it yet. Contacts in the AMA and DOJ have assured us that there is even a useable legal framework in which judges may order the procedure done, in the same way that a vaccine may be involuntarily given. We have a saying, the customer *is* the cure.
If you are curious about this medical procedure and wish to research it further, see this essay I wrote in 2006 in which you will learn its medical name. I will not disclose the trademark-meme at this time, you will have to wait for product launch. If you think this is a good idea then get the fuck away from me and my family.
But back to the prisons. For those guilty of heinous crimes and disposed to violence, what they're actually hoping is that the society around them collapses, the grid goes down, or some violent insurrection or hostile invasion occurs in which prisons are opened as a war tactic. Some would seek only escape and obscurity, some directed revenge at any cost. Who is to say what most would do? We cannot know. To us, a lifer prison is an undiscovered country. What would the guards do if some apocalyptic disaster ensues, that no help or food will arrive? They begin to leave, one by one to be with their families. Will the last one open the gates?
Few would consider storing gasoline-soaked rags near an open flame in the boiler room a good idea. But when you oppose the death penalty for the most horrid monsters of our age... you bring into existence the possibility you or someone you know might meet them in person some day under conditions in which you'd rather not. This may be more likely than being hit by a tornado. I see you have a storm shelter.
Some may see life imprisonment as a sort of societal insurance policy against injustice. File 'em all away for good, and if some new miracle of technology proves their innocence we can get 'em back and fix it, make it right. The most celebrated cases
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Imprisonment to death seems to work for civil courts. It used to be that armies on the march or in battle did not have the facilities to deal with mutiny less drastically so they would have to use summary execution, but these days that is probably not the case. The US executed one soldier for desertion in WWII, and that after a court martial. Still, it is the reason officers have sidearms.
It is worth considering that corporal punishment was also a lack of facilities issue. It is cruel and unusual now because prisons are available. But use of stocks or flogging or maiming are a sign of a society too poor to afford prisons. Justice must be seen to be done, and the punishment must be deserved. When a society is poor, it has to have punishments that still seem proportionate.
Indonesia is about to execute a bunch of people, including two Australians, which is big news in Australia. They use the firing squad approach, and in the executions they carried out in January, using some 20 people firing at once - some with blanks and some with real, so the people never know if they really killed someone or not. Even still - the death is by no means quick., the fastest death by firing squad was six minutes. Others took far longer to bleed out or have internal organ failure.
It's especially big news in Australia at the moment because the two Australians (charge: drug trafficking in 2005) to be executed any day now are generally regarded by all as fully remorseful and fully reformed - even by the people executing them. Which begs the question - what's the point of a prison system based on reform if you just kill people even if they actually do reform? The two in question are said to be so well regarded in the prison they're in that other inmates have volunteered to stand in for them an be executed in their place.
The real pity here is that they're going to be executed not because of their crimes but because Indonesia's government wants to show its people how they can stand up to international pressure (something the majority of Indonesians want to see them do). So basically, they're going to be killed for political purposes, not because of their crime. That's no reason to execute someone.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not in favour of drug traffickers - but their "victims" all chose to take drugs, too.Compare that to someone who actively was involved in the Bali terrorist bombings a few years ago - I'm talking physically carried the actual bombs to the actual night club where 202 people were killed and many more mained - not just someone peripherally involved - and that guy has been released from prison in Indonesia already. But foreign drug traffickers? No - they get killed.
That's specifically why I mentioned 6/7 at the head. There's no delay to two pills to the head, let alone 6.
People don't have to actually witness executions to in order to be deterred from committing murder because they know they could face the consequence of execution.
Also, incompetence is not a reason to kill our prosecutors and police officers, just like negligent homicide is not generally punishable by death in general. There are numerous trial rules which make mistakes made by investigators to end up in favor of the defendant, and there is an extensive appeals process to validate that the defendant's every right was protected. Malicious prosecution and/or fabricated evidence resulting in the execution of an innocent person should be treated like any other homicide.
The funny thing is that stuff like the constitutions of democracies are the closest real thing to actual social contracts. But the people who speak of social contracts tend to ignore that stuff.
Showing zero remorse for doing it is despicable.
I completely agree...but isn't this what you are also doing too? Wanting to kill someone while showing zero remorse about doing so? If you are going to argue for the death penalty a far better argument is to say that it removes any possibility that the person can ever re-offend and thus protects society. The problem is that, as practiced in the US, this is very hard to argue. Those convicted are held in prison for a decade or longer and even then there are a shockingly high percentage whose convictions are quashed when carefully examined.
If you want to argue for the death penalty then you need to restrict it to cases where the evidence is overwhelming and you need to make it rapid. Even then mistakes will be made which is why I have so much trouble with the concept. About the only time I would think that it is justified is when you have someone whom you cannot safely imprison e.g. the IRA terrorists in the 1980/90s who used their contacts with the terror organization to threaten guards' families unless they got special treatment while in prison: something which almost lead to their escape. In these cases I would argue that the need to protect society from extremely dangerous criminals might make it justifiable but I'd still have concerns.
Exactly this.
If you really want to punish somebody horribly, make them live in 1 cage their whole life. Let them work on stuff; maybe they'll do something worthwhile in their cage.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Not really. The prosecutor would then make sure to turn away any candidate who would have qualms about pulling the trigger.
And yet we still manage to execute wrong people, or execute people who didn't get their due process. 250 in the past three decades. It's not exactly a small number.
Well, even with the "insane" appeal process, innocents still get executed. So apparently it's still not thorough enough to provide true justice.
The correct response to a disagreement with societies rules is to (A) Get them changed, or (B) emigrate elsewhere.
There are many other solutions such as progressively destroying one or more of the parties to the disagreement until the conflict goes away. And given the relativistic amorality of the social contract in the first place, this means this third solution is just as correct as the two responses you mention.
That is the failure of a criminal justice system based upon punishment and not rehabilitation. With a system based purely on rehabilitation, with specific crimes where risk of server consequence is high, no rehabilitation, no release. That becomes much more feasible where detention conditions are much more humane and the concern is protecting the public, whilst still endeavouring to achieve rehabilitation.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The "social contract" is a fiction created by the elite to keep the rest of us in line. It's something to which we are all supposed to accede, yet it's only enforceable one way. Rich men don't go to jail unless they harm other rich men or have in some other way broken the elite's kleptocratic rules in some way.
Very much this. A more elaborate form is "It is God's will", thereby neatly cutting of any avenue of discussion or escape, especially if the religion in question is executing people rejecting it.
And make no mistake: the rapidly metastasizing surveillance state is nothing more than an effort to make sure such institutions can never again exist.
I fully agree. The surveillance-states currently being busily established and justified with lies, lies and more lies are motivated by one thing: Those in power are terribly afraid of those they are supposed to serve.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As soon as you do it, every European manufacturer of your drug of choice will be forced to stop all exports to US.
I need a creditable cite for that number. Best guess estimates I can find from anywhere that is not pushing an agenda is a measly 50 innocents and they specifically admit that is incorrect because it is just a transference of the 4% of people who on death row end up getting their sentence overturned or converted to life in prison.
Hell, Wikipedia only lays claim that 10 specific people are thought to have been wrongly put to death with another 39 carried out in the face of evidence of innocence or serious doubt about guilt. Of course I'm not sure what they think is evidence but I do not really care. There are 52 separate jurisdictions (with two being the same but listed separately due to separate branches of authority) capable of sentencing someone to death in the US and over the last 4 decades all they can come up with is 49 people who might have been innocent and 10 that actually were. That is an extremely low rate if you ask me.
Handgun? are you a cruel bastard? All hand gun rounds are slow and barely lethal. yes even the big silly rounds.
To the brain? Most certainly not.
USSR/Russia has been using 9x18 to the back of the skull for many decades, and I'm not aware of a single case of a botched execution.
Because public square executions in the middle ages worked so well as a deterrent.
How does the post-beheading "suffering" time of a murderer compare to the time the average murder vicitm spends suffering (burning to death, bleeding-out from multiple gunshot or knife wounds, or whatever)???? All this focus on the sensitivities and sufferings of MURDERERS with no concern at all (beyond the obligatory lip-service in front of a news camera) for their victims is completely SICK.
And yet, people who absolutely positively did not commit the crime in question have been executed. That is a clear sign that the checks and balances are inadequate.
That's a very enlightening description and it covers the obvious point of calling this thing a "social contract" rather than say a "social mandate" or a "social duty". But what I think is particular interesting about the grandparent post is the perversion of "agreement" to mean merely being born or not trying hard enough to escape execution. At that point, every evil no matter how vile is condoned as long as it has the fig leaf of law allowing it.
So an innocent citizen's life is so precious that...it's okay to kill some of them in order to punish others who take innocent life? Gotcha.
It was not the number of innocents - it's the number of wrongful executions, which is not the same thing. It can mean that e.g. evidence against them was not "beyond a reasonable doubt", or some evidence that could sway the jury the other way was withheld, or there was another suspect that had similarly strong evidence that jury didn't know of, or numerous procedural reasons - basically anything that deprived them of due process.
It seems that I did get the numbers wrong, though - 250 is the number of people who have been exonerated through DNA evidence (not necessarily for capital crimes).
I wouldn't call 60 people "extremely low rate", though. Even 1% of those convicted, in a matter like this, is extremely high in my opinion.
Nah, nothing is 100% in life. It's a variable worth living with. Especially since DNA can exclude people far too easily today.
By leaving him in prison, we avoid creating provocation that might induce the impulsive with legitimate grievances to kill Hitler. I'd hate for a sixteen year old whose grandmother died in the camps to spend some time in jail for shooting Hitler or worse. And given that there's no compelling reason of justice to cut short Hitler's sentence, I think this concern reasonable.
Honest question, since there's a list of nazis up above: if an elderly Adolf Hitler were forced to live in prison for 50 years and released into modern life, what more harm could he do?
I dare say he could produce an astonishingly smelly old man diaper.
In a Machiavellian sense, he could be used, for example, as a figurehead to drum up support from the people who he was able to drum up support from before, in order to follow a political agenda. He could also be used in a campaign of renewed anti-semitism, and he could function as the Nazi equivalent of Nelson Mandela when he was jailed for his statements (which he would be, in Germany). At which point he could be a martyr. He could also be assassinated via a false flag operation in order to create a martyr. If he weren't senile, he could run for Chancellor - there's precedent for ancient men as Chancellor: Konrad Adenauer, born in 1876, was elected in 1949 at the age of 73, and served until 1969, when he was aged 87.
I could think of many dozens of ways he could himself cause trouble, and I can think of many more dozens of ways he could be symbolically used by someone else to cause trouble. Who would have thought a presumptive nobody like Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria could have been used to touch off WW I? And Hitler would have not really been a presumptive nobody, had be been released under the conditions you imply.
I would think spending 50 years contemplating their murderous deeds would be much harsher punishment than execution. By your reasoning George W.H. Bush and George W. Bush, as recently examples, should have been executed as well for their murderous deeds.
A sociopath would spend that 50 years plotting revenge upon release, and how best to play "the reformed person who had spent that 50 years contemplating their murderous deeds" to the parole board in order to get out so they could enact that revenge.
As far as the Bush's go: you only go to prison for your deeds if you lose, and you can't lose if you can't be held accountable, and you can't be held accountable, as the leader of a country, unless you acknowledge being subject to the World Court (which the U.S. does not, for its citizens). And if you are held accountable in the U.S., you either resign and get immediately pardoned by your hand-picked successor, or you wait until the next president immediately after you pardons you, so that they, too, will not be held accountable for their actions in office. So if it had been an issue, Obama would have pardoned the last one, so that whoever is elected after him would pardon him. It's a well understood "gentleman's agreement" to "pay it forward".
I would say it is a low rate considering. It's less than one person per year per jurisdiction. And that likely would still be true if you discounted the jurisdictions that have a moratorium on the death penalty. And I guess there are 18 states which do not even have the death penalty as an option.
With the exception of California, Texas and Oklahoma, I would also say the use of the death penalty in sentencing is relatively low.
That is the failure of a criminal justice system based upon punishment and not rehabilitation. With a system based purely on rehabilitation, with specific crimes where risk of server consequence is high, no rehabilitation, no release. That becomes much more feasible where detention conditions are much more humane and the concern is protecting the public, whilst still endeavouring to achieve rehabilitation.
Recidivism rates, as of 2014, http://www.nij.gov/topics/corr...
One year: 56.7%
Three year: 67.8%
Five year: 76.6%
Percentage of adult resident population in prison: 0.97%
Perhaps we could rehabilitate them with some reasonable expectation of being able to be reintegrated into society, by giving them blue collar factory jobs, if we hadn't shipped all those jobs offshore.
It's a myth that drugs used for surgery work reliably. In fact, there is a wide range of responses. A significant fraction of people reach some level of consciousness during surgery.
The first time Hitler tried to seize power in Germany via a coup, he was arrested and used his trial to gain publicity, and rallied a lot of people towards his cause while he was in prison.
Which by the way, 20 people died in his coup attempt, something that would probably have made him eligible for the death penalty in the US (felony-murder doctrine) which had he been executed, it would have averted his eventual reign which itself lead to WWII.
Funny choice of words there.
So-called "civilized countries" like Norway instill a large set of common values, behaviors, and goals into their citizens from birth. That's in addition to being wealthy, ethnically and culturally homogeneous, and having low inequality as a result of government policy. Now, that may appeal to Norwegians, but Americans actually generally prefer not to live like that. I certainly wouldn't.
Don't forget the two Aussie lads due to be shot any day now in Indonesia because Indonesia thinks possession of certain substances is worthy of death.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point.
Try using that argument to opt out of the "income tax" portion of the social contract.
Well, it didn't work out well for some of my ancestors when they tried to opt out of the "you're a slave" part of the one-sided "contract" they were born into.
On the other hand, some people realize that answering moral questions with appeals to who can inflict the most harm is stupid.
one innocent put to death is too many
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"More innocent people are killed by repeat killers than innocents are by the State." that does not justify the State killing any innocent people due to flaws in the justice system and the people who carry out that justice
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If you don't do it in public, then don't execute people. Without being a real deterrent it serves no purpose and is more merciful than keeping them in a cage (but for fuck's sake, stop giving them TVs and other shit that makes the time go fast).
Executions have never really worked as a deterrent, and they don't in the US today. The most thorough research where pairs of counties all over the US were compared, a slight (non significant) brutalising effect were all that could be shown. (I.e. the death penalty tends if anything to lead to worse crime, not less.)
But sure, those were where executions weren't public. In the bad old days in England when pick-pockets were hanged for their crimes, who were busy working the audience of the hangings? Pick-pockets...
For those of us for which deterrence works, prison and social condemnation has already maxed out our unwillingness to commit crime. For the rest, the chair is as abstract, and useless a deterrent, a punishment as a long prison sentence.
Stefan Axelsson
Uhm. No. A pair of decently large handgun bullets to the brain snuff you like a candle. There's no need to blow the head off completely.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah, what we really need in America is more inequality.
you forgot to mention something about india:
India retains capital punishment for a number of serious offences.[1] The Indian Supreme Court has allowed the death penalty to be carried out in only 4 instances since 1995.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
this i think is the best attitude of any country. out of over a billion people, they've only given capital punishment to 4 in the last 20 years. that's the way it should be. india has the best attitude
capital punishment should be abolished for 99.99% of crimes. but it should never be taken completely off the table
there does indeed in this world exist crimes of such heinous atrocity, that it is impossible to call yourself a human being with a morality and a conscience and not insist on the death penalty
again, do not get me wrong: we are only talking about the worst of the worst of the worst. so for example this man:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
absolutely deserved death
and i cannot understand any human being who does not agree with that decision. to weigh and consider his crime and suggest he does not deserve death is simply beyond my comprehension. this man too absolutely deserves only death and no less:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
why is this creature still alive, it is not a human being. it has lost the ability to call itself that by defiling basic morality to such a repugnant extreme. why is this thing still alive? so it can whine about video game privileges? this thing must die
i cannot comprehend any argument compatible with any logically coherent morality that suggests the bag of shit called breivik deserves to continue to draw breath. norway: you are defiling simple morality and basic reasoning in allowing this filth a heartbeat
again, please note: we are here on the very edge of atrocity. the crimes that shock the conscience at the furthest extreme. the worst of the worst of the worst. they alone deserve death from the state
to me, this means under 5 people out of the entire world every decade
so india has the closest approach to perfect on capital punishment in this world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's easy - just move to the Cayman Islands. There's no income tax there at all.
Are you, or the person you are replying to, an American.
'Cos if you are be aware that that is not true.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
We have tried the public execution thing.
We even put the bodies of the executed on the walls of cities, or next to the roads leading into the city.
Did not seem to have that much of an effect. There was never a shortage of delinquents to execute. It's like they did not expect to be caught or something.
Yeah, because Rudolf Hess was totally set free in 1971.
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I live in Canada, and the problem with parole being on the table for all crimes no matter what is you occasionally get a sick sideshow when someone like Clifford Robert Olsen would go up for parole (thankfully he died in prison). For those unfamiliar with that waste of flesh, he raped and killed 11 kids. Anyway, when his hearings would come up, some of the family members of his victims would inevitably show up for various reasons, and Olsen would use his time taunt them.
I think there are some lines that if crossed, you don't get parole. Like raping and killing more than 0 kids.
The social contract is not enforceable by the legal courts, it is a law of the jungle and is therefore enforced as such. No-one comes into this world with guarantees, if you don't like it then do your own thing and see how far that gets you.
Jungle law doesn't have lawyers, only survivors and corpses.
Worth pointing out at this time that a "life sentence" does not mean for the rest of your life in some jurisdictions. For example, the longest "life sentence" ever issued in New Zealand is 30 years.
That some utilize execution in improper circumstances does not negate the fact that execution is proper in others. Executing someone because they're homosexual is wrong. Executing someone who sets children on fire is appropriate; not for any reason of vengeance, but rather to ensure they cannot bring harm to anyone else ever again.
I would extend that to all murderers. Anyone who intentionally extinguishes human life without hesitation or remorse is so fundamentally broken that they should be permanently removed from society. Prison guards are people too and shouldn't have to be exposed to those kinds of threats. It's simply solved, humanely put an end to those who murder. (and before you try and go there, please do look up the definition of the word "murder". The words "execution" and "murder" are not synonymous)
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Perhaps a better example would be Napoleon, since he actually made a comeback after exile, and marched on Paris once again?
People in the 21st century don't execute other people, only in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA.
Why not ask Iran, after all it's a pen-pal of congress.
Yet both sorts of deaths are wrongful deaths caused by agents acting on behalf of the State. At least one sort is very easy to prevent. Whether the other sort causes more deaths, is less easily preventable, or both, has no bearing on this fact.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
How many? Could you please list confirmed innocent people who have been executed?
It's generally understood that no justice system is perfect. My guess is that for every person you can find who's been executed, then later found to have been innocent, I can find someone who died after decades in prison and was later found to have been innocent. Seems neither is particularly appealing and we should do all we can to avoid them. That doesn't mean letting everyone out of prison to ensure we don't ever punish innocent persons.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Could you please explain the difference between someone dying in an state execution chamber and someone dying in their prison cell of organ failure ("old age")?
Seems like neither is desirable and each has the same effect. While we should certainly do all we can to ensure no innocent people are sentenced to anything, that doesn't extend to letting everyone out of prison because there might be somebody innocent locked up with all the guilty people.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
We should be applying the lessons learned from the Innocence Project to better our justice system, not giving up on the idea that guilty people are being found, tried, convicted, and properly sentenced.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
To say nothing of the logistical headaches of range qualifications during jury selection.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
No confidence in the rehabilitative powers of the prison system :D ?
To be fair these people would never get out, even in Europe.
There are clauses that keep people a ward of the state after their prison time.
These are designed for these sort of people, although they sometimes get used for political prisoners.
Nobody wants to be a foreigner.
If you cannot successfully use some argument in a state court, it doesn't mean that the argument is invalid. If accepting some argument, however valid, can have disastrous consequences for the government, the latter just creates a framework where it can pretend that that argument is invalid.
(I'm not saying that there cannot be other, better arguments for income tax. It's just that the "social contract" is utter bullshit.)
You/we could say exactly the same about many other people in history. Maybe even one or more of your ancestors, which means that you would not be there, telling whoâ(TM)s in right to live.
Just blow up your point to extremum: kill everybody on earth, and I guess there will be no more wars. Would you pay that price? Why should others do?
The following countries have life sentences, but have mandatory consideration for parole after some set period:
So? So does the UK now after we were told we actually agreed to when we joing the EU. And my god the papers made a fuss over that one. But, do you know what it actually means? In practice bugger all.
So convicted mass murder comes up for consideration of parole after 50 years. And after due consideration of the fact that he murdered 25 people and ate their corpses they'll find after a good 3 or four seconds of considering that in fact no, parole would be a terrible idea.
The consideration thing means the case must be looked at. It does not in any way control the conclusion.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Please stop allowing serious and violent criminals to live and reoffend in the name of justice. Just stop.
I am against death penalty, but there is quite a few death where you do not feel yourself dying. Asphyxia thru helium, or nitrogen for example. Gee.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The same Norway that allowed Anders Brevik to murder 69 people? Um you can keep that system of justice thanks...
You're putting too much value on single people. Hitler as a person didn't cause WW2, and certainly wouldn't be able to repeat it in 1980. Franz Ferdinand didn't really cause WW1 either. Both of them were only a single symptom of their times and if they hadn't existed a similar course of history would have taken place.
Hitler could only start WW2 in the 1930s because he had a willing base of angry Germans with a mix of justified and unjustified grievances. He was the "first past the post" politician to harness those frustrations but if he hadn't existed some other populist would have, if not a Nazi then a Communist. 50 years later the situation was entirely different, the people content, and nobody could've gotten a majority support for political upheaval. We know this because the RAF certainly tried to.
> Or how about we stop this barbaric practice? It's 2015. We're not living in the fucking middle ages anymore.
So, you have someone who unrepentantly rapes, dismembers and possibly even eats little children. Don't make me look up serial killers, it's not hard to find someone this horrible. What do you suggest we do with them?
A) Let them free after X years.
B) Lock them in a tiny box for life.
C) Kill them.
Please feel free to explain your reasoning as to which option is most humane. Also, please assume that their next victim, should they be released will be you or someone you love. They will strike at a time you are unable to fight back.
a) should not happen
b) is what is done by civilised countries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Behring_Breivik for an example)
c) is done by barbarians (Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, USA..... -- pretty cool list to be on, right guys? Human Rights FTW)
And don't get me started on when you find the wrong person guilty......
If US society is so squeamish over the exact method of execution, it sounds to me that they're not really committed to the idea and probably shouldn't be doing it.
Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930.
Really? I thought the object of hanging was to break the victim's neck instead of strangling them, in which case this sounds like a resounding success - or did the baying crowds want to think that the victim had "just gone to sleep"?
I'm not a doctor, but I believe that pointing something called a "gun" at the subject and pulling the trigger a few times does the trick, is typically less unpleasant than many natural/accidental deaths and is already widely accepted as a method of dealing with foreign teenage conscripts who's governments threaten the stability of the oil market. Alternatively, every properly-run abattoir in the rest has a variety of efficient methods for killing large mammals with the minimum of suffering. If that's not acceptable then it suggests to me that you're not really 100% at ease with this whole "death penalty" thing and probably shouldn't be doing it.
Any society that wants the death penalty needs to be satisfied that "the end justifies the means" and understand that (a) there is no nice, guaranteed painless, dignified way to execute someone that won't go wrong from time to time and (b) you'll end up executing innocents occasionally. If you're not OK with that, don't do it.
Personally, if I were (rightly or wrongly) condemned to life imprisonment I'd like the coward's option - but not the USA version where, it seems, you rot in prison for a decade or two anyway and only then get dispatched by the sort of bizarre, theatrical method that a movie super-villain might dream up.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
What is almost never mentioned is that true justice would require restoring the victim as fully as possible. Common law came up with some equivalent costs of various crimes but that would be left to a jury to decide. If the focus was on the victim things would improve drastically especially because all victimless crimes would no longer include a prison.
In addition prisons should be privatized but not in the way they are today.
The prisoners should choose which prison they go to and use the money they earn working in that prison to pay for their incarceration as well as restoring the victim.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Just nuke them. It has a lot of advantages:
- You can get rid of old nuclear warheads that don't operate to spec anymore. As long as they still have enough power to vaporize a group of people sitting right next to them they're fine.
- It should be fairly painless, given that the prisoners' brains quickly transition to a gaseous state.
- It's inherently flashy so everyone looking for bloody retribution can see it being served from one state over.
- It's inherently suitable for group executions, which makes it very efficient in dealing with America's large number of criminals.
- It makes you consider whether you really want that prisoner dead. If you're not willing to nuke some part of your state you probably don't want the person's death that much.
Plus, it doesn't make you look much sillier than complaining about how nobody wants to sell you equipment for killing your own citizens.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
civilized nations don't kill people. life long imprisonment if you must.
You comment is ironic, right? People could have been easily executed for treason in the Weimar Republic in Germany. Hitler would have been gone, would it not have been for a lot of intervention on his behalf by people in the justice system and politicians. Justice is flawed. It was even worse back then.
During the time Hitler was not executed, lynchings were still frequent in the US.
George W Bush gave the order to kill people and torture people. Obama did the same. Even though the US has the death penalty. Some people can't be touched. Politics. That's how it works.
Face it: [...] Some people, however, have committed crimes so heinous that they no longer qualify as human beings
You say "face it:" as if the opinion you've outlined above is an objective fact, but it's not. At all.
Face it: many people would disagree with you entirely.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Quite frankly, the ONLY death penalty I support, is for politicians who make laws which violate human rights. Only large scale crime deserves an example be made for history....the poor people its normally used to execute don't deserve such treatment, even the worst monsters have hurt what....a handful or two. They are petty and mean nothing to history.... no reason to take away their right to appeal.
In short, the only people deserving of such executions are the people who would have others perform them.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
there, but what if he isn't black?
Animals by the thousands are being killed every hour to keep the meat machine going (I eat meat), so this shouldn't be a problem. What you need to do to guarantee a simple, virtually foolproof method of execution is a variation on a single bullet to the head. Russians have been doing that for years - no suffering or lingering, just ending the life by a shredding of the centre of everything that allows what we consider a person to be aware. The end. Hanging is a leftover from older methods of torture, the electric chair was a political decision, same as the gas chamber. Those two are positively absurd as machines to end human life - one is some sort of horror show to see how much torturing you can do via overloading the nervous system and frying the body, the other a variation on suffocation - generally considered to be one of the worst ways to go. The firing squad is a formalized lottery to protect the "blame" for the death by multiplying the possibility of failure and hoping the numbers crunch out right. The guillotine is a technology update on a reasonably sound principle which worked for years as a quick termination but sadly still has some notable failures. All of these are about methods of trying to make the notion of the state killing an individual somehow more "humane" or acceptable. Hypocrisy.
Do I personally think the state should be killing people as policy? Nope. Just pointing out the obvious. One bullet to the brain will kill a person instantly.
You just ramp up the nitrogen in the air while reducing the oxygen.
Air force does it with pilots to teach them how to deal with blacking out.
You don't even know it is happening. There's no choking reflex because that works by detecting CO2. Stick someone's head in a bag full of CO2 and they'll gag. stick their head in a bag full of nitrogen and they'll not even realize it.
The navy pilots that they do this to giggle, lose mental functions, then pass out.
It is a very humane way to kill someone. No pain.
It doesn't mutilate the corpse.
It is 100 percent effective.
It requires no special training.
It requires no special parts or chemicals.
It is very inexpensive.
If I were running the capital punishments in a country, this is how I'd do them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Why not administer anesthesia before electrocuting/gassing the prisoner?
After all, they do this with lethal injection (at least they did in my state).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You don't seem "precious." I am sure you are not totally innocent.
"What if I walk into McDonalds with a gun and rob it?"
"What if I have unprotected sex with this $10 prostitute?"
"What if we pass this bill to see what is in the bill?"
We have the death penalty in Florida, it's called "Stand Your Ground", and it works quite well because it doesn't require an abstract thought on the part of the criminal. The deterrent is not in some far away place 5-10 years after the crime was committed. The gun is right there, right now pointed in their face, a block from their dad's house.
The ones with even the smallest spark of intelligence (aka self preservation) back off. The rabid ones get put down on the spot.
In a Machiavellian sense, he (some policital criminal) could be used, for example, as a figurehead to drum up support from the people who he was able to drum up support from before, in order to follow a political agenda ....... I could think of many dozens of ways he could himself cause trouble, and I can think of many more dozens of ways he could be symbolically used by someone else to cause trouble.
We saw that with IRA prisoners in the UK. Even in prison they continued to make waves, make news (such as hunger strikes), and even continue to administrate campaigns via the communications of visitors which the civil rights people insist on being allowed. OTOH, once someone is executed, the news media (and they are what matters) soon lose interest as long as there is no mystery about it - which is why assasination keeps someone "alive" in the public mind more than execution does.
Whichever side you are on (and this applies to "both" sides") these are just facts, in a Machiavellian sense.
> The USA is the only G7 country that still executes people and they don't care if it's a woman, a juvenile, or someone with autism.
Why should a woman not be receive the same justice as man?
When was a juvenile sentenced to execution?
When was someone with autism sentenced to execution?
one innocent put to death is too many
"If it could save just one child", "Spare one innocent", or "Every life is meaningful"...
At some point, on a World with seven billion souls, it really just becomes a point of where exactly you prioritize the human lives. For whatever reason, lives taken unfairly in Western nations in the pursuit of justice are the epitome of travesty... yet it is important that we recognize crime and punishment must be dealt with the only way we humans can do anything: imperfectly.
Meanwhile, back in Western Africa, the ebola plague just took its 10,000th victim.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Death by Incarceration. Zapping, shooting, poisoning, hanging, or stoning cuts short their suffering. If you want to punish them, permanent "time out" alone in a cage should do the job. If by chance the person was wrongly convicted. there is still a chance to prove their case. The death penalty makes any mistake or official wrongdoing worse.
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Here's an alternative interpretation of what the "social contract" is -- civilized society is an example of Emergent Behavior.
It's not a legal rule, where paradoxes of consent or capacity are questions that must be answered. It is simply the rule-set from which the emergent behavior of human society arises, like some cellular automata system. What behavior comes out of the system -- be it a civil society or Lord of the Flies -- is a judgement-free result that depends on the proportion of adherents, versus dysfunctional units and cheaters.
Drones?
The problem with your argument is that there's no actual true definition for what's proper and improper. Religious people may think there is but they are wrong.
Just because you set children on fire once doesn't have to mean you'll do it again.
Say it were your own children or parent. How is that a danger to someone else?
Maybe the "hesitation" is a good rule. It's what keep it from happening in many cases I guess. And as such we have many who have thought the idea but is hesitating because it's tabu / not really accepted. And on the other hand some may have stepped over the border for what you consider good reasons.
Like say for me here in Sweden. We don't have capital punishment. You consider it proper to kill murders. So say someone had murdered. That set things out for someone to "properly" murder that person. Except it's not allowed by the law. Should that too require the hesitation part BTW? I mean. It was "proper murder"? ..
Read your last part, in the above I mean to kill by will in general. But yeah, I know there's a difference in "mord" and "dråp" here.
There was something more I wanted to say before I read that part. I think it was about differences.
QED! well played bro.
Strawman? This isn't a discussion on religion, it's a discussion on heinous criminals.
As if the conviction of what is right and wrong doesn't come from philosophy / ideology / local culture and the idea of murder being such a heavy crime even in the US may be because of the Bible (not saying it would be the only reason and people couldn't figure it out themselves. But there are various animals who battle it out to death if necessary and humans do it too as long as their commanders have said it's alright ..)
War = Killing is fine. Even just random person who haven't done anything yet.
Non-war = Oh how horrible!
income tax is bunk anyway. according to Rousseau I'm a natural citizen and no nation has sovreignity over me so I decline to accept the imposition of a foreign nation's tax scheme.
In war we all defile morality to repugnant extremes.
Stop dehumanizing this man by calling him *it*. It's practices like that that help enable enormous atrocities (see Hutu - Tutsi genocides).
The atrocity scale edges' move according to the 'zeitgeist'. There is no real hard end.
Yeah India. With their multilayered racist caste system. They know all about justice.
The quaint old custom of drawing and quartering provided entertainment for the whole family. And heads on pikes provided such vivid decorating options.
I am against capital punishment - sort of. Once in a while some horrific crime happens and my opinion waivers. How can a normal human being kill another human being in a such a cruel way without feeling compassion with his victim? I would use potentially deadly force if somebody would threaten my family and I wouldn't lose sleep about it, should the aggressor perish. The use of potentially lethal force to prevent a potentially brutal crime is one thing - administering death to somebody years after the fact is a completely different thing. I killed a lot of animals (on a ranch) , pigs, cows, deer, rabbits, chicken .. I always tried to make it as stress- and painless as possible but I always felt a bit sad. I know people who rip the legs of bull frogs without killing them first and those folks had no remorse or compassion for the animal. This makes me wonder: Maybe compassion is a genetic trait? Is it possible, that some peoples brains are "wired" in a way that they just don't care about other peoples (or animals) pain, fear and suffering? Is it moral to kill offenders because their brain is filtering what most of us would consider to be 'normal feelings' ? Or is capital punishment justified exactly because of that? I read a lot of opinions in this thread about other countries not being as violent as the US. That's just not true. Psychopaths and brutal criminals do their thing everywhere - it doesn't mater, whether or not they have capital punishment. I guess it all boils down to a simple question: Do we want to legally kill people because of their inability to experience remorse or compassion? This is truly a tough issue....
It's not a legal contract, it's the idea that you are beholden to the society you are in.
Now I'm going on a limb here, but I think Rosseau wasn't being a complete dumbshit by choosing the term, "social contract". He could have chosen, for example, "The Social Duty" or "The Social Obligation" as the title of his book. But he didn't.
And that means all the trappings of a legal contract including mutual, uncoerced consent to the contract, to the content of the contract, and to any adjustments made; fair dispute resolution; and all parties understanding the contract, its content and implications.
This attitude that society can pile shit on you without your explicit consent and your only choices are to comply, flee, or face the consequences is complete bullshit. Consider the tragic example of Polish Jews during the Second World War. They didn't have a say in their country being conquered by the Nazis or getting sent to the death camps. But according to you, you're beholden to the society you're in - even if you fought hard to keep that society from being that way and can't flee because they stuck you in a death camp. It is obscene.
Rosseau also had a thing for liberty which seems to be completely absent from modern advocacy of the "social contract". For example, the point of restraining natural rights, such as freedom to do anything you want (including harming or killing other people), was to enable civil rights, such as ownership of property or travel without fear of being robbed. It wasn't to create a society that can do to you arbitrary whims of the moment.
Lower the them down there with a bed, access to water and a drain hole. Put a glass cover on it. Every 24 hours toss down food. They only come up when they are dead.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
feel that human life is irrelevant if it is from a child that has already been born. Especially if they are guilty of the sin of being born of a different skin color.
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
You can look at the social contract as citizenship in the country to which you were born. Of course, that makes it a negative option contract, and you can therefore opt-out by formally renouncing your citizenship. However, by keeping your citizenship (and the rights and responsibilities inherent in that citizenship), you are implicitly choosing to be bound by the social contract. In most countries, you are not bound to the rules of the contract at birth, but rather have a graduated system where at certain ages you become more bound by the rules and more entitled to the privileges of adulthood.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Does it matter how many? One is already too many, for you killed an innocent man. Essentially that should qualify the governor in question for his own frying chair for he killed someone (by proxy) who had done nothing to deserve this.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
look at you: concerned because i dehumanize a mass murderer?
you do not possess coherent morality
you respect and tolerate all. until someone disrespects and lacks tolerance. then you give back exactly the same
to tolerate intolerance is only to invite the destruction of your belief system
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930.
Not really; what your example here shows is that it is about the perceptions. It's not about being humane, but about appearing to be humane. A ripped of head is shocking, gross and possibly upsetting, but I doubt the victim could have told the difference.
And execution is not about punishment, but revenge. Death as punishment is not going to make the victim a better person, obviously, and if the only purpose of executing people was to eliminate a dangerous individual, then society would have chosen a method that was cheap and effectivean associated with minimal fuss. Instead we have opted for methods that clearly involve cruelty, but superficially look 'civilized'; the ultimate in that respect has to be injection, which looks a bit like the kind of genuine, final kindness we show to our suffering pets. The likely reality, however, is that the victim is trapped, unable to move, fully conscious and goes through several minutes of excruciating pain. Whatever one will call it, humane it isn't - human, perhaps, since we humans have an amazing capacity for inventing new cruelties to inflict on each other. The driving force has never been anything other than a lust for revenge and ritual sacrifice; one has to wonder to which god.
Lol.. Do you think saying "fuck" adds depth of meaning to your words?
I have better odds of making rich by hitting the lottery than I do of being incorrectly put to death by capitol punishment. There were 699,000 or so murders since 1976 when the death penalty numbers can be tracked. There has been 1379 executions in that time span which means less than two tenths of one percent where executed. Furthermore, there are 3035 death row inmates, if we add the already executed of 1379, it comes to a little over six tenths of one percent of all murders over a 4 decade period of time results in a death penalty. Assuming a 318 million population level and an average murder rate per year, I had a little over five thousands of one percent chance of even being charged with one of those murders. Of course that number is flawed because the population is not static but I'm much more likely to be murdered by someone than to be executed for a murder I did not commit.
It's too insignificant to be overly concerned about it as far as I can tell.
Yes because he is still a human.
I never claimed I did. And I very much doubt you possess it as well.
O tell me oh wise one, where did I stop tolerating you ?
Cute very cute. Now give me one in Latin.
I'm with you -- certain heinous crimes deserve the death penalty. However:
In many cases, we cannot be certain that the individual who has been judged guilty, actually is. We know from the various exoneration projects, where convicted death row inmates have been proven innocent with more advanced forensic techniques (DNA, etc.) that the system regularly makes horrific errors, sentencing the innocent to death. Even just a cursory understanding of how our justice system works will make any reasonable person aware that it is error-prone. And we must not put people who are not actually guilty to death. Ever.
Consequently, this is my position: Until or unless technology allows us to unequivocally, zero-possible-doubt, 100% certain determine actual guilt of the actual crime they are being tried for, we cannot afford to engage in killing as punishment without becoming the very worst kind of criminals ourselves.
So as things stand right now, I am solidly against any use of the death penalty.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Being born conveys only liberties, not responsibilities. Being a member of a community conveys both. It is up to a person to choose the latter, and it is up to a child's guardians to convey the benefits and consequences of such a contract. And it is up to every person to negotiate the social fluidity of all of these.
One point worth making, however, which I think you overlook: while it is true that being born into a society does not in itself convey responsibilities, you can't expect to be allowed to remain part of any group or society, unless you are willing to obey it rules. It's like tax: you don't have to, but if you don't, then get the hell out of our society, stop using roads, schools etc you don't contribute to. Why should we accept somebody as part of us, if they are only freeloading?
Stalin himself (or rather, the Communist Party) probably wouldn't have gained power if the Germans hadn't invaded.
Something Hitler learned was that you need an enemy in order to rally your population to war, giving you power in the process. The enemy Hitler created was the Jews. Russia however had a real enemy, the Germans. Before Germany invaded Russia, Russia's army was rather pathetic.
Even after WWII, Russia had most of its population convinced that Fascism was still the biggest threat, and they also had them convinced that the west was trying to continue Fascism (keep in mind that Fascism IS a western concept, born in Italy and was very popular throughout most of Europe in several governments for quite a while even after WWII.) In fact the "official" reason Russia used for creating the Berlin wall was to keep Fascist influence out (though the real reason was because they needed to keep people from leaving the soviet bloc because it was a serious drain on their population of skilled workers who wanted to go to capitalist countries where they knew they could live better.)
we could join the rest of the civilized world and stop killing people.
Well if European justice worked like US justice even had at this time, they not only would have arrested Hitler, but they would have put the whole Nazi party under check for being a terrorist organization and probably arrested most of their ringleaders for conspiracy and had it forcibly disbanded.
Which if you want a precedent for this, look at the first KKK which was hunted down by the federal government and was completely obliterated by 1882. (The current KKK is a different organization.) The first KKK would routinely try to influence elections and had popular support in many areas, just like the Nazi party. It took martial law in many areas to get rid of them.
Does it matter how many? One is already too many, for you killed an innocent man.
One is too many to have die in a prison cell after years or decades of rotting there. The effect is still the same; an innocent man dies at the hands of the state. Based on this, we should release all prisoners because we can't ever be 100% certain any one of them is guilty, yes?
(if this ever happens, I'll be on an airplane beforehand going somewhere far away while the rest of you sort out the consequences)
Essentially that should qualify the governor in question for his own frying chair for he killed someone (by proxy) who had done nothing to deserve this.
That's absurd. The very, very worst case you could make against a governor would be conspiracy to commit involuntary manslaughter, which isn't even defined as a crime anywhere that I'm aware. You could possibly make a case for involuntary manslaughter against the police, prosecutor, and jury, but that's also asinine at best. Further, I don't know of anyone who would support the death penalty for involuntary manslaughter. Finally, the premise itself is absurd. Outside of fraud or negligence, there's no reasonable case to be made at all. Now if the prosecutor withheld critical evidence, I would fully support going after them with the full force of the law. Same for the police and anyone else involved.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The problem with your argument is that there's no actual true definition for what's proper and improper. Religious people may think there is but they are wrong.
I think the proper use of capital punishment should be defined as certain massive crimes (like murder, defined by the society as a whole) where we simply have drawn the line as the crime being too terrible (in essence, where we - as a society - have decided that those who do it are inherently beyond redemption) and those cases where rehabilitation (within a system - and we don't have this today in the US - where rehabilitation is available and generally effective) is impossible.
Just because you set children on fire once doesn't have to mean you'll do it again.
Oh that's alright, anyone who's that broken should be first in line for execution. They don't need to set children on fire twice to convince me of that.
Say it were your own children or parent. How is that a danger to someone else?
Perhaps there is some circumstance in which lighting children on fire wouldn't automatically qualify someone for execution, but I don't care to explore all the different circumstances we'd have to in order to find such a case. Suffice it to say that - as a general rule - things like murder and setting children on fire ought to be automatic.
Like say for me here in Sweden. We don't have capital punishment. You consider it proper to kill murders. So say someone had murdered. That set things out for someone to "properly" murder that person. Except it's not allowed by the law. Should that too require the hesitation part BTW? I mean. It was "proper murder"? ..
Read your last part, in the above I mean to kill by will in general. But yeah, I know there's a difference in "mord" and "dråp" here.
There was something more I wanted to say before I read that part. I think it was about differences.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. I consider it a proper use of the state's authority to execute convicted criminals when they execute a convicted murderer. When I'm talking about this, I don't mean an angry father who walks in on his child's molester and beats him to death, nor do I mean someone who falls asleep at the wheel and strikes and kills a pedestrian. I mean someone who knowingly, consciously, willfully makes an effort to maliciously kill another human being without some major mitigating circumstances present. What else are we to do with such a person? A person who robs a liquor store is making a poor choice and hopefully can be rehabilitated such that they won't make similarly poor choices in the future. Someone who has no difficulty taking human life is fundamentally broken in a way we can't comprehend and should simply be removed from society. Prisons are still a part of society inasmuch as members of our society live and worth there.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Last year after a horrible accident I put good friend. It was painless, peaceful and almost instant. It was in a vet’s office. My dog was hit and dying and in great pain. The vet described the process as ‘the same chemicals used for anesthesia before surgery, just more of it”. I was with him and held him as he simply layed his head on my arm and went to sleep within 3 seconds of receiving a single injection. If we can quickly and humanely put pets to sleep, we can darn well use the same process on people except for the lawyers.
If it isn't bloodlust, then a quick painless death would suffice in an execution, but it plainly does not.
Such respect for life would surely also have guided the Rs away from war in the middle east.
One might also expect that a deep respect for life would make even the possibility of executing an innocent unacceptable.
If a state is going to execute people then a firing squad is quite able to perform the task reliably and quickly. Hell, it doesn't even need a firing squad - guns can be preaimed and fired remotely with sufficient redundancy to ensure the outcome.
Also, don't give me shit about "you can leave if you don't like it". No you can't.
Really??? tell that to all the illegal immigrants who make it to america that they couldnt leave....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
simple.
Switzerland's Dignitas puts a human down with pentobarbital for about $ 6K. Pentobarbital isn't terribly difficult to make and it's been around since the late 1920's. The federally mandated, human rated stuff is from Denmark and is sold under the trade name Nembutal. The democratic left has been successful at disrupting the supply line. Apparently Dignitas has had their supply disrupted a couple of times and they switched to helium. A small gas chamber with an inert gas like helium, argon, or nitrogen would probably be the best way to put a really sick human down. It's easy to talk about cage and feed for life, but if a human is so sick that they are spending 24/7 trying to kill other people or inmates, it's probably best to put them down. That's how vets treat other vicious animals.
umm, the income tax is actually found in the constitution, not any "social contract" Better yet. where is this social contract so i can have my lawyer take a look at it and see if it stands up
A big chunk of it is written down in the constitutions.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
No. You would just lock people in cages with other animals instead. It achieves much the same end. YOU would likely think that it achieves the same end if it were done to you.
So ultimately you're no more "enlightened" for opting for a long period of torment over a swift exectuion.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The difference between someone being killed wrongly and someone spending a long time in jail wrongly is probably that if you find out within his lifetime that it's been wrong, you can at least compensate him. It's not really going to repay him for a life behind bars, but at least you can give him the satisfaction that, in the end, he was acquitted. Once someone's dead, he remains in that state without any recourse.
Also it's way less likely that a dead person would stand up and try to fight the injustice done to him.
And yes, I do believe that 10 guilty man running free is better than one innocent man being strung up. But I guess I'm becoming a minority.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is that there is another very negative element too: Collective vengence. The social desire to see those who offend society made to suffer. Worse, this can be counterproductive to the rehabilitation role: Programs aimed at educating prisoners are widely seen as 'soft on crime,' while there is widespread support for any policy that increases the difficulty released prisoners face in finding housing and employment.
As a Norwegian, that seems insane to me. We have some of the nicest prisons in the world, and inmates are given the opportunity to get an education. We also have one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at around 20%. The authorities have a stated goal to reduce recidivism by providing opportunities for reform in prison. This includes hard criminals like perpetrators of gang-related killings, robbers who have shown willingness to kill police officers in shoot-outs, and drug related crimes, which are among the worst when it comes to recidivism. Although some employers and neighbourhoods frowns on ex-convicts, they generally have lots of opportunities to reinstate themselves in society. You're less likely to be considered for a trusted position, but it even happens that former convicts get one of those with the employers full knowledge of their past (depending on the nature of their crimes and the position).
The punishment constitutes loss of freedom and communication rights - nothing more. The conditions in prisons are good (Halden Prison and Bastøy Prison are some of the "best", but the penal philosophy is the same for all of them), because they're not supposed to make you suffer physically or psychiologically. The political right wing (which even many US Democrats would probably still call liberal bleeding-heart commies) occasionally bleats about reforms to make punishment harsher, but nobody is really serious about it, since the existing system just works too well at turning criminals into productive members of society.
Of course there are a few wackos, like Anders Behring Breivik, for which the regular system doesn't work well. For the likes of him we have 'indefinite detention', our strongest punishment, which is something like life _with_ the possibility of parole. It is still very probable that he'll spend his entire life in prison since an absolute requirement for release is that he's deemed safe by psychologists and other professionals, which doesn't seem likely to happen based on his currently reported statements and behaviour.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Well, yeah, the US is busily privatising the US prison system and of course recidivism is their number one major profit centre. In point of fact wasting money on rehabilitation is not only a wasted cost but actively disrupts a core profit centre, so it is against the interests of investors. Kind of tough luck that those investors will become the target of the crimes that they expect prison management to 'PROMOTE'. America, STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So pointing out a logical flaw is considered "trolling"? +1 for Interesting!
I'm not prepared for anything, that's why I'm asking an honest question. Thanks for answering in the form of hostility.
If I'm faced with the death penalty, I would choose decapitation. It's the quickest and most painless method possible.
Don't fornicate. Seriously, just don't do it.
you do not possess coherent morality
I never claimed I did.
discussion over then. thank you for volunteering your irrelevancy to the topic. but maybe next time you shouldn't speak up at all if you don't have a leg to stand on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
because their justice system isn't about revenge
Well, exactly! Where's the money in that?
Seriously though, you have the issue dead-to-rights here. If we want rehabilitation, there are known methods we could employ to make a considerable improvement to the recidivism statistics. Other countries have achieved results worth looking into.
That suggests revenge is of much more importance to society than an actual resolution to the problem.
We're taught that people who do 'bad things' are 'bad people'. There are precious few of us who develop into adults capable of questioning this. In time a little introspection can resolve this blurry question into a clear focus on the real issue: 'why do people do bad things?' Another angle suggests that 'people are not their behaviours'.
People behave the way they do through learned behaviour. Violent people are enacting learned behaviours that they perceive grant them a little short-term power for a medium-to-long-term loss that doesn't matter because it's not happening right now. Persistent short-term thinking is a hallmark of a being in 'survival mode'. They'll never prosper in this state, nor will they interact well with others.
We must see this for the inherently-correctable behavioural issue that it is, because the consequences otherwise are a steadily-inflating prison population and an ever-widening gap between the attitudes of the average citizen, the police enforcing the law and the judiciary meting out an acceptable form of justice.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
That would make sense if the judicial process was without flaw. As we know that trials and hearings are often misconducted, you are essentially saying "fuck it - we're too lazy - just kill them after we've pretended to respect the notion of due process".
Nice unfounded, stab-in-the-dark racism. You were right with wealth, but ethnicity and culture have nothing to do with this problem. Your ignorance, on the other hand, certainly isn't helping.
The failings catching him had nothing to do with the justice system. The only way you could possibly be right is if you think Norway has some sort of pre-crime division. So, to sum up: Either you are correct, or Norway doesn't have a pre-crime division. Hmm... I wonder which is accurate. On the other hand, your post did serve a purpose - it shows how people's gut reactions often lead them to believe abject nonsense. When the gut reactions are dealing with whether people live or die, you can hopefully see how short-sighted your logical laziness is, and how it ultimately would lead to many deaths.
You should take a look at Norway's crime statistics compared to those in the US.
The latter costs less, and lets the accused fight to clear their name while they have breath in their body. The former assumes people never make mistakes, which is clearly not true, and will ensure innocent people are killed on purpose.
The lessons are "humans simply can't do this well; every country with an active death penalty is attempting to stop innocent people from being killed by killing innocent people". Also I like how you just slipped "properly" in there at the end, as if everyone agrees. The innocence project has already shown us that the "proper" punishment is incarceration, as that keeps everyone just as safe, costs less, and can be corrected at a later date, should new evidence come to light.
But the legal system is not perfect, and so the right-wingers are calling for innocent people to die, as one can not separate the innocents from the guilty every single time. So no, they don't view every life as extremely valuable - they view having the appearance of considering lives as extremely valuable as being extremely valuable. There is a disgusting difference.
You should take a look at Norway's crime statistics compared to those in the US.
Oh I'm quite familiar, as are most people who laugh at how ridiculously third world the US is when compared to every other OECD nation. But that is less about euthanasia and more about everything else that is wrong the the US (the list is long)
The first time Hitler tried to seize power in Germany via a coup, he was arrested and used his trial to gain publicity, and rallied a lot of people towards his cause while he was in prison.
Which by the way, 20 people died in his coup attempt, something that would probably have made him eligible for the death penalty in the US (felony-murder doctrine) which had he been executed, it would have averted his eventual reign which itself lead to WWII.
And how many people dangerous to Those In Power would have been framed and killed by now as well?
It's too convenient a tool to get rid of political enemies.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Surround the condemned with a few hundred pounds of semtex and detonate it. Instant death. Anesthetize them if you're worried about them feeling anything. Or use an M1A1 firing squad. 5 tanks simultaneously firing their main canon at the condemned. Again, instant death and no need for a burial as there will be no remains. The spectacle of a drugged-up limp criminal being dragged out, strapped to pole, and the vaporized with cannon fire or plastic explosive would make for great TV viewing.
It's very easy to cause unconsciousness and, eventually, death, by compressing the carotid arteries. This is essentially painless.
It can be applied manually with a rear naked choke (don't mind the name - it's a strangle not a choke, as it prevents blood-flow but doesn't block the wind-pipe).
I doubt it would take a huge feat of engineering to achieve that.
My preferred solution would be to stop executing people, mind. That would solve the problem neatly.
The only guaranteed way to execute someone in a purely binary "either you're alive and in no pain or you're instantly dead" is to have them wear a C4-lined helmet. Even if only 1 of the many detonators goes off, all of the explosives will go. The shockwave is faster than nerve speed, so they couldn't feel pain.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Ethnic and cultural homogeneity have everything to do with this problem, since crime and recidivism rates are highly linked to culture, and culture itself is highly linked to having a minority status.
(Since you appear to be too stupid to understand this, let me spell it out: it's not membership in any specific "race" or ethnicity that is related to crime and recidivism, it is the status of being a minority inside a majority culture.)
Of course I'm not sure what they think is evidence but I do not really care.
No, that's abundantly clear.
That is an extremely low rate if you ask me.
Your cherry picked figures aside, I wonder about how many innocent people executed would constitute an unacceptable rate to you.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Biblical revenge and other bullshit aside, I would like to suggest that if killing people is so awesome and wonderful and just, that in capital cases, if the wrong person is executed, the District attorney and jury who presided over the case, be executed. After all, he or she was responsible for killing an innocent person.
And if that attorney is not around, then whoever is doing that job after them.
Now suddenly, you are going to see people be a lot more careful about handing out death.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I believe you need to read Rosseau. There is something called "The Social Contract", which is something of a "shrink wrap license" you agree to by being born
We have gone over this time and time again that EULAs are unenforceable. therefore Rosseaus "social contract" is bunk.
Not really. You or I can't just opt out of whatever laws (or even customs) we feel like. We all have varying rights and responsibilities depending on where we live. Short of finding a self supporting desert island and only talking to the seagulls, you don't really have a choice.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Indonesia is about to execute a bunch of people, including two Australians, which is big news in Australia. They use the firing squad approach, and in the executions they carried out in January, using some 20 people firing at once - some with blanks and some with real, so the people never know if they really killed someone or not.
What a bunch of spineless sissy cunts. If you are going to have firing squads, Everyone should be doing head shots, should have scopes and personalized to show that each shooter shot the perp in the head. No deniability allowed. Because if people have to have plausible deniablility that they were the one to kill the person, it's admission that there just might be something wrong with cold blooded executions.
You want to do this shit, you've gotta really want to, and take enjoyment in snuffing out another's life. Some people do. ISIS does.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
umm, the income tax is actually found in the constitution, not any "social contract" Better yet. where is this social contract so i can have my lawyer take a look at it and see if it stands up
It's a metaphor, it would be like going to a stock exchange and trying to touch the Invisible Hand.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The funny thing is that stuff like the constitutions of democracies are the closest real thing to actual social contracts. But the people who speak of social contracts tend to ignore that stuff.
And people who ignore ideas like the social contact tend to believe that things like the Constitution are eternal verities, rather than partial codifications of already existing behaviour, designed primarily to formalise the power structure of that society..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The "social contract" is a fiction created by the elite to keep the rest of us in line.
I always understood it to be a fiction or metaphor used by those who opposed the elite. Rousseau might have been wrong about many things, but he certainly believed in liberty, equality and fraternity.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The "social contract" is an expression that one must suspend some "natural rights" (i.e. the freedom to "do whatever you want") in order to obtain the benefits of living in a society (i.e. to protect rights that need social defense).
And this is precisely what so many of the rugged individualists on slashdot can't stand, and why they have been poo-pooing the Social Contract so vigorously. In the libertarian/Randian/Thatcherite view of many people here there is literally no such thing as society.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Where are these income tax paying babies and children?
It seems to happen to celebrities on a regular basis, especially if they've lost count of doses. And it should be painless too, knocking you out before killing you.
The faulty "three step method" uses a sedative in the first does and then two more toxic chemicals after that.
Two men enter, one man leaves! Added entertainment bonus.
Seriously, look to what other countries have done. I bullet, and a bill to the family. Of course that puts you in the China and Iraq (Hussian) category.
Realistically morality aside, the only real reason a society might have capitol punishment, is a cost saving measure and to prevent victims from paying for incarceration. However in reality, in modern society with any sort of legal process, the cost to do so is many fold for that of just locking someone up forever.
So just stop the practice really.
There are still issues however. Recently in Canada a guy was released from mandated mental care which caused a stir. Some people argue that being found not criminally responsible due to mental condition deserves a second chance. Perhaps in some cases. Part of me however would argue that if you kill someone and decapitate them, in full view of everyone, that no you shouldn't have a second chance. You don't come back from that. You exit society forever.
It is hate speech to point out that many/most receiving government handouts are also working under the table for cash.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
All societies have 'free rider' problems.
At some point the cost of free riders is less then the costs of eliminating them.
I for one feel no moral obligation to report all my income. I'm compelled to report my income by laws. No paper trail, no income. This is just good and natural.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Some would consider him a Martyr; some do.
But that is no reason not to kill someone who needs killing. It is reason to kill those who consider him a Martyr also.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What have you been smoking? Social contract theory is a philosophy; it's an idea. It was not perpetrated by some Illuminati conspiracy theory to keep people in check. Even within your own argument, you bash social contract theory in one paragraph, then praise its merits in the next based on the implementing class.
If you want to argue over the merits of an ethical philosophy, have some idea of what you are talking about: http://www.philosophybasics.co...
If you want to complain about the overbearing police state the US has become, that's ok to. But don't string big words together if you don't know what they mean.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
You don't need to give the government power to execute to solve that.
Just eliminate 'protective custody' in prison. Tell the prisoners, 'Just don't kill the fucker, Do anything, but don't kill him'. When they do kill him by accident, slap their wrists.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hess had dirt on the English royal family.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
There doesn't need to be a conscious acceptance of the "social contract" to be subject to it. By living in this country, you're subject to our laws. It's not what I'd consider a contract, but it does appear to be a necessary part of living as a society.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I wonder about how many innocent people executed would constitute an unacceptable rate to you.
Well, right now, it seems we sentence to death a little over six tenths of one percent of the convicts compared to the number of people murdered. In other words, of the number of people murdered, we only prosecute and sentence to death roughly 0.6% in comparison. Come talk to me when that number reaches 1 percent or better.
You sad, sad little troll. Do you even know what a vigilante is? A citizen defending themselves from a criminal is not a vigilante.
1) Is it right to do this? Of course, I can show you Baltimore City - doesn't have DP and Baltimore County - does have DP. That political line is like magic with crime. No doubt about it, it is a deterrent. The rest of the world that did away with the DP need to admit they are wrong. No shame in admitting you're wrong as long as you truly believed you were right all along.
2) How to do it - They have got to be kidding. There are so many ways that I know of I can hardly count them all. Some very very cruel, some they wouldn't even know. So let's visit some:
A) Hang 'em, hang 'em high! This is the way it SHOULD be done. On a national holiday. Sell tickets. Let people see morality and how horrible it is. Not in some back room where nobody sees it. We'll get a lot more respect for one another. Maybe we as a society won't be so eager to kill each other via wars. A lot to ask I know, we seem to really like to kill each other.
B) Shoot 'em via firing squad. I'm against this one because that's a soldiers death. They shouldn't have that honor.
C) Shoot 'em in the back of the head in their cell - acceptable. They'll never see it coming.
D) Gas - take your pick. Chloroform, Ether, heck even a computer duster can be used. More toxic ones can be nasty. Chloro used to be used for patients.
E) Drowning - Easy to implement. Steel tube, grate on top, flood it. Drowns like a rat. So many ways for this one.
F) poison - any farm has this stuff.
And so on. I'm sure there are prisons with people that have all kinds of good ideas on how to kill someone.
There is something called "The Social Contract", which is something of a "shrink wrap license" you agree to by being born into a society, that by doing so, you agree to abide by that societies rules.
Ridiculous. You can't agree to anything just by being born; you aren't even sentient at that point. There is no meeting of the minds, no clear agreement. If this so-called "social contract" existed, it would be a contract of adhesion which no human being in history ever explicitly agreed to, and any competent court would throw it out with prejudice after a cursory hearing.
What about the laws of physics? Can I opt out of those as well?
If you're posting on slashdot you're probably from a wealthy nation, which means you have the ability to emigrate. You have the ability to either work to change the social contract of the nation you live in or move to another nation where the contract is more agreeable. But unless you have some political/cultural arrangement I'm not aware of I'm not sure there is such thing as a society where you don't have to agree to anything you don't want to.
I stole this Sig
it's just too dangerous a power for them to have.
but since the death penalty does exist in some places, IMO the only reasonable way to do it is:
1. the victim or a close member of the victim's family MUST be the ones to do the killing. no exceptions, except for one and only one circumstance (if the victim has no living family, then the prosecutor MUST be the state's killer) - if they can't stomach doing it, then it shouldn't be done.
The method should be as gruesome yet painless as possible - knockout drugs followed by manual beheading, perhaps...but there should be no euphemistic way of disguising the fact that a state-sanctioned *murder* is being committed.
2. if it is later discovered that they executed an innocent person, then they and everyone else directly involved in the execution (prosecutor, prison guards, etc) MUST be charged with murder and also subject to the death penalty.
3. prosecutors MUST be charged with attempted murder if (while the death row prisoner is still living) it is found that they ignored or suppressed evidence that proves innocence or provides enough reasonable doubt for a jury to acquit.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes...
PS: I'm against capital punishment of any kind.
Casteism
Psychopaths do not fear prosecution/punishment;
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
How to fix it?
Casteism
I'm not talking about the theory of a social contract. I'm talking about the way it's being used in Western societies.
Whatever the philosophy behind it, there has been such a perversion of the social contract (and misuse of classical ethical philosophy) that it has lost its meaning in regard to the relationship of the people who produce to the people who own.
You are welcome on my lawn.
There are many classical ethical philosophies, which you clearly don't understand. Social contract isn't then end all be all of theories. If you warp one philosophy you tend to end up actually using another or a blend of several. Our current state is a mix of egoism, social contract and utilitarianism, all poorly implemented.
Blame the theory all you want, but it's only a fool who blames his tools.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Fair enough. I'm talking specifically about the dialectic between deontology and consequentialism, which are the underpinnings of what most of us understand as "classical ethical philosophy". Both are predicated on a view of ethics based on somebody else deciding what's wrong and what's right. And both are artifacts of a system that has put all the power (including the power to decide ethics) in the hands of a few and sought to keep it there.
It's all academic window-dressing meant to make the elite feel better about their amoralism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is a huge oversimplification of many concepts stemming from your predisposed views of the world.
Foremost, amoralism is systemic to the human condition. Rich people, poor people average people, all have the capacity for moral and immoral acts.
Secondly, ethics is always based on what someone else deems as right and wrong. Ethics is the code of conduct between one person and everyone else. Even if you decided what was right and wrong, the rest of the world would be subject to the right and wrong decided by someone else. It is a group effort.
Lastly, classical ethics for the most part was created by the rich and powerful. But that is because they were the educated, not because they were trying to take over the world. The uneducated, even today, don't sit around thinking about the fundamentals of ethical theory.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
I want you to think about that statement, long and hard, until you've achieved enlightenment.
I'll wait here.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You are assigning causation where there is only correlation. That is a common logical fallacy. I am saying there is a correlation between being educated, being wealthy and discussing ethical theory. You are saying because someone is wealthy and well educated, they created ethical theory to maintain wealth.
You are inferring causation where there is none, and it seems to be based on your predisposition to dislike people with money.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
That applies to both criminals as well as states and federal. The death penalty is not a deterrent, it is not reversible, plenty of wrongly accused people were killed, and if electrocuting, poisoning, or gassing someone is not a "cruel and unusual punishment" as is prohibited by the Constitution then what is? It is long overdue for the US to join the modern cultures and do away with barbaric punishments.
"If a someone released from prison murders again then it's the State that failed to rehabilitate."
And the victim is every bit as dead.