:cool-zone: end this fucking blight of a country. love and power to the people who head out to protest tonight.
don't watch this if you value your sanity.
:cool-zone: end this fucking blight of a country. love and power to the people who head out to protest tonight.
don't watch this if you value your sanity.
I actually have an ongoing internal conflict with the idea of capital punishment.
But then shit like this makes me realize that a certain level of rehabilitation and redemption just does not exist at least in America's current society. The hypothetical video of scum police getting fired at until they turn into a cherry slurpee is understandably horrific, but that one act of controlled violent gore ensures no more police brutality for decades at least.
There were two Reigns of Terror etc etc
My opinion is the only crimes that should be capital crimes are gross abuse of power. Shit like this is the best example, but I think also prosecutorial misconduct (i.e. planting evidence) deserves lifelong gulag if not death. It's such a perversion of anything we might call justice that it needs the kind of sentencing we give to our poorest right now.
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The problem with, say, killing prosecutors is that all the prosecutors know each other. They went to the same college, they drink at the same clubs, they all read the same articles by the same authors. They have a strong social incentive to cover for each other. After all, it might be their head on the block one day, and if the prosecutor in charge owes them a favor then some evidence might go missing, or the case might get screwed up in a way that demands a re-trial.
In so far as I understand the research, harsh punishments rarely if ever result in desirable deterrence. From the standpoint of social harm removing a prosecutor from their position and baring them from professions where they would wield power serves the same purposes as executing them; In each case they are removed from the situation in which they had power to abuse. One of the benefits of abolishing the carceral punishment system is that in many cases reducing the stakes for bad behavior opens up more options for correcting that behavior. If a person knows they face death for misconduct they'll do everything in their power to subvert the system. If their penalty is being barred from their profession without being economically destroyed or losing their freedom then, from their perspective, cooperation with the state and the community becomes a much more reasonable choice.
While there are certainly moral and ethical arguments for prison abolition, community justice, and restorative justice there are also arguments that can be made from a position of pure, ice-cold pragmatism.
:gold-communist: I mean I want to believe your :bloomer: energy, I just have a deep cynicism about the rehabilitation of the powerful who are willing to abuse a system where they already have the power.
Still this is very hopeful and the kind of communist world I want to live in
SORRY to respond to a 4 day old post but ive had this tab tucked away for a while and only got to reading through it.
I think the strongest case for death sentences, in this case, for the gross abuse of power is that these people cannot be deterred. They have been structurally engineered, as you acknowledge, to believe certain things, in fact, small mercies may further inculcate these beliefs that the state of things where they are punished is abhorrent and evil. The death penalty provides a sure fire safety to society, not their conception of society like the one we live in, but to our ideal society that they, who know how power operates, how our cultural bureaucracy works, from ever using that knowledge to potentially hurt us ever again.
In fact, this is primarily how the current state of things sees us. We cannot be exiled, as they did in the 1910s and 1920s, or blackballed and harangued and imprisoned like they did from the 40s to the 60s. They have to kill us, because thats the only way the dialectic and tension gets smoothed over for at least the time being. They can infiltrate our groups and imprison our leaders, but they have to kill people to stop a revolution, and much is the same for the counter-revolution.
Political corruption should potentially lead to the wall too. A government official giving inflated contracts to his friends harms everyone.
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Humans are very bad at assessing risk and understanding probability. People tend to, say, be very afraid of sharks despite sharks being, for all practical intents and purposes, harmless. People stubbornly refuse to wear hard hats, ear plugs, or safety glasses despite the chance of suffering a serious injury being nearly certain if you spend long enough in the trades or a factory environment. If you've ever tried to manage or team lead people who work with ladders; Trying to make people practice basic ladder safety is a fucking nightmare.
Another example would be gambling, where the law requires the exact odds of winning to be published so the punters should know that they are mathematically incapable of winning, but people still throw their money in to the machine anyway.
Combined with other factors like Boomer solipsism, Calvinist invidualism, the pervasiveness of the Just World Fallacy in capitalist cultures, and the simple failure to reckon with the immediacy and inevitability of death we arrive at a situation where many people are effectively incapable of gauging risk or appreciating how quickly their quality of life can be completely destroyed.
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I might voice some pragmatic objections to the great bacon fry on restorative justice and decarceralization grounds, but I wouldn't try very hard.
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My take is pretty simple; Outside of wartime conditions there is rarely if ever a situation where resources are stretched so thin the state can't afford to incarcerate someone indefinitely. If you kill an innocent person that's it, they're dead. No going back. If you lock up an innocent person there's still a chance that the truth will come out and they'll be freed. For the most part the death penalty is about revenge and doesn't serve any legitimate social interest. We know from extensive research that deterrence doesn't work. Additionally, hope for mercy can be used very effectively to turn criminals against each other, induce spies to give up useful information, and so forth. Mercy is a very powerful weapon. People will resolutely face death, but it's a lot harder to keep your mouth shut when you've been treated humanely and with respect by your jailers.
Generally speaking, and excepting wartime exigencies that might demand more immediate and decisive action, I don't think it's ever in society's best interest to execute people.
And, of course, ultimately, the goal is the abolition of carceral punishment entirely, and with it the cultural and economic situation that makes the kind of violence we're dealing with endemic.
Have you forgotten that this is the nation of overreacters?
One act of controlled violent gore makes them infuriated and looking for even more people to punish.
Capital punishment has never deterred crime, ever. To buy into that narrative is to legitimize what has been done to minority community for centuries.
Capital punishment is one thing but sending :the-pigs: to the wall is something else. Its self defence. They worked to get that badge. They chose to become an oppressor. They wear it with pride knowing that is is worn by murderers who don't get punished. That badge is indicative of their desire to kill people.