Comments

3

as many that have been Executed for drug crimes never in the History of the World has just One galactically-wealthy fambly overseen the Hooking of America -- an epidemic of Drug Addiction was introduced by them and they're negotiating not for their Lives but for their Billions. and it looks like they're gonna get to Keep most of 'em...

will we Execute Them?
nah. plus they can
keep most of their
Billion$ and just
skate
away

never conflate our Death
Penalty with Justice

'specially when the aggrieved
fambly has Forgiven them
it just makes the Suffering
so much worse & to Hell
with Compassion and
that shit just Runs
Downhill. see it
on our Roads?

5

Hate to ruin the cops are all bad guys vibe Chuck has going but pretty much all the unions in Chicago are not ok with Lori’s edict.

“ Chicago Federation of Labor President Bob Reiter said his member unions “believe in vaccines” and believe those shots are “important to protect workers and residents.” But they don’t believe the end justifies the mayor’s means.

“We don’t think that the way to get people vaccinated is by issuing mandates and being punitive about it.”

And if you think any of the local unions will accept Inslee terminating their members in Oct without collective bargaining you are in fantasy land.

6

"“We’re in America, G-ddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi f—-ing Germany,"

Dear Stupid Pig: You're not being forced to do anything. You have freedom of choice here. You may not like the choices, but they are choices nonetheless. Nazis would hold you down and inject you with whatever chemicals they wanted, and then throw your ass in a labor camp if you're lucky.

7

@Charles "I'm still of the opinion that this behavior can be blamed on how cars are advertised: always on empty roads, always moving freely and quickly. Road rage is the explosion that occurs when the fantasy of the ads meets the excruciating reality of traffic."

There is definitely something to this and it's a pretty big psychological problem with marketing in general I think. When you are sold a vehicle, you are also being sold entitlement. You are being sold the idea that you are special, you are beautiful, you have important places to be and are entitled to arrive there with the utmost speed and power, unfettered by any constraints. The road is yours for the taking, and yours alone, and you can do no wrong on it.

The car is an extension of the individual. So don't you want the biggest and best? Because you deserve it.

8

Traffic is excruciating, unless you're in a luxury SUV with mood lighting and all sorts of cutting edge conveniences and delights.

9

The reason to be anti-death penalty is that doesn't work to prevent other people from committing the same crimes, far too many people executed are not guilty, it costs taxpayers far more to keep a defendant on death row than it does to imprison them for life, and the prison industrial complex in this country is a sadistic, horrifying white supremacist terrorist, capitalist enterprise. We have 5% of the world's population and 25% of the incarcerated population of the world. ??? How the fuck is that possible?

Am I pro death penalty? No fucking way.

Do I think the state upholding the already determined death penalty for Dylan Roof who committed a crime that was proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to have been committed by him is barbaric? Nope. He slaughtered Black people sitting in church in the name of white supremacist terrorism. White supremacists should all be put down like the sick animals they are. They cannot be anything other than what they are. Good riddance to human garbage.

11

@8,

Hard disagree.

While it's surely nicer to be stuck in traffic while in a nice, modern vehicle equipped with state of the art amenities, it's still frustrating and stressful. People en route to someplace just want to be at their destination. Sure, there's a difference between being en route to a show or to a close friend's house for dinner, as opposed to just heading home to sit on the couch, but people are still preternaturally anxious to arrive at their destination. Also, being stuck in traffic is inherently stressful, requiring as it does constant and vigilant attention to your situational surroundings, lest you should have someone lay on the horn based on your failing to notice a green light in the requisite amount of time, or even sideswiping your passenger side door due to their own negligent arrogance and/or incompetence.

I'm a car owner (and manual transmission die-hard, ha ha) mostly for the relative recreational freedom and opportunity that car ownership provides, but Charles makes an interesting point here.

12

“We’re in America, G-ddamn it. We don’t want to be forced to do anything. Period. This ain’t Nazi f—-ing Germany," said Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara. "

Next time I'm in Chicago and the police give me an entirely arbitrary but lawful order, I will have this on a card to read it allowed to the officer. I'm sure they will understand since we are all equal under the law in America.

13

The death penalty is arbitrary, expensive, leads to the execution of innocent people and does nothing to prevent crime, but none of these reasons are why we should end the death penalty. We should end the death penalty because it coarsens society and makes us all less.

"A murder by sentence is far more dreadful than a murder committed by a criminal. The man who is attacked by robbers at night, in a dark wood, or anywhere, undoubtedly hopes and hopes that he may yet escape until the very moment of his death. There are plenty of instances of a man running away, or imploring for mercy—at all events hoping on in some degree—even after his throat was cut. But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die,—is taken away from the wretch and certainty substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad? No, no! it is an abuse, a shame, it is unnecessary—why should such a thing exist? Doubtless there may be men who have been sentenced, who have suffered this mental anguish for a while and then have been reprieved; perhaps such men may have been able to relate their feelings afterwards."

"The Idiot"
Dostoyevsky

The best case I have read against the death penalty is Orwell's "Against the Logic of the Guillotine"
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-against-the-logic-of-the-guillotine

I also agree with the EU that the maximum penalty for any crime should be limited to 20 years. We have a system in America where we rarely catch criminals, but when we do we lock them up for an eternity, turning entire sections of our prisons into retirement homes. America has by far not just the most prisoners, but the most long prison sentences in the world along with a far higher crime rate and prison rate that most 1st world countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_prison_sentences

You prevent crime by catching more criminals and locking them up for shorter periods of time. It's the likelihood of getting caught that reduces crime, but how much you punish the few people you manage to catch.

16

@15: The former. At least they can still find salvation and redemption with God and find comfort in spiritual healing.

18

@17: God could be a myth, but that's a moot point for the faithful and if there is no afterlife or salvation the departed wouldn't have consciousness to know that it was missing.

19

There was a road rage incident that spilled over into my workplace the other day. We had to go into lockdown for a few minutes.

20

@7:

Yes, this is the fundamental precept of all advertising: instill in the potential consumer the idea they are somehow inadequate unless they purchase Product X, which will magically transform their inadequacy into unbridled entitlement. And it works just as well for toilet paper, tooth paste and beer as it does for automobiles. Except of course, you seldom see anyone start shooting up a bathroom over being forced to endure the indignity of using industrial grade single-ply.

21

@15: It hasn't been a popular view in the entire EU either. If you look at that url of prison sentence lengths I included there are two columns. If you look at column one for Spain you will see multi-hundred year sentenced handed down for some people. Then in the right column you will see that the EU reduced the punishment to 20 years post trial.

It's an interesting idea. Spain is able to deliver a sentence that matches the understandable outrage of the people in Spain, then the EU follows up and measures the lost opportunity cost of incarceration (the cost of locking someone up into retirement vs. using that money on more productive parts of society such as healthcare) and the overall goal of ensuring there is room for new offenders without going on a permanent prison building spree, which is also extremely expensive.

I don't see the US giving up executions, or the 1,000+ year sentences that leads to extremely expensive end of life care anytime soon, but if it were to ever happen I suspect there would need to be a system like that.

23

@16
"Relative of Mother Emanuel victim to Dylann Roof: 'I forgive you ... you'll be OK'"
https://www.al.com/news/2015/06/relative_of_mother_emanuel_vic.html

While I don't support the death penalty, I find it easier to understand people who want to kill him than someone capable of that kind of mercy.

Dyllan Roof will almost certainly become a martyr and hero to white supremacists everywhere once we kill him. It appears this mother was determined to deny him even that. Most of the Christians I meet love incarceration and the death penalty. She is certainly an outlier.

24

@23: That's not entirely correct. They believe in the love and mercy of the New Testament for themselves, but the Old Testament for everyone else.

26

I need to consult with Socrates and Plato and will get back to you.

29

Yes, yes - ads are the cause of road rage, not the twisted interpretation of “freedom” as “the right to what I want” and “freedom from other people getting in my way.” Totally nailed the cause and effect here, Charles.

30

To be frank, two industries are being hit by people bailing from them: health care and restaurants.

It's not just in BC, it's all over North America.

31

@26: I wouldn't be so sure about Socrates.

In Plato's "Phaedo" Socrates points out that he would rather suffer harm as an innocent man than live with harming someone else who is innocent and the ultimate crime was not that he was being put to death, but that the jury had done harm to an innocent man (him) based on the lies of his prosecutors. Not only is in an indictment of how the current US Criminal system works, but it also makes an argument he is more comfortable with is own unfair death than with using the State to put some other innocent person to death. Great philosopher, but he would have made a lousy prosecutor.

Anyone yahoo convict the guilty. Prosecutors show their real talent in the ability to secure convictions against the innocent. Of course, with plea deals not even that takes much talent. I don't think Socrates would have approved of that either, but his thing was justice, not simple legality.

35

@34: I don't think the argument was ever that the death penalty was uncivilized. The argument was that it is immoral.

36

@33: "I'm not sure how a long dead greek civilization entered the chat but like invoking the mythical "founding fathers" to support some immoral argument it's fucking irrelevant to today."

No one debating if Greek culture from 2,500 years ago meets the standards in 2021. We are talking about about deontology, which has not changed in 2,500 years and likely never will.

38

@37: There's some generalization we need to assume simply to have an honest conversation. In the context he used civilized it appears his argument was a moral one against the death penalty. To the extend me used civilized it was in the context of 2021

He is welcome to correct me if I misunderstood him.

40

39: his argument was that the death penalty is barbaric because it leads to the death of innocent people, which is true. In this context, I think it's fair to assume when he mentioned civilized countries in this context he was not talking about the Assyrians or the Greeks, but modern civilization. The fact that he asked why we were talking about the Greeks in this context seems to confirm that.

The prof. and I somtimes disagree, but I always try to respond to the argument he intends to make. It baffles me why people here try so hard to not understand. You're welcome to an honest disagreement. Why invest so much time and energy into misunderstanding the point another person is making?


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