**Pjen **even acknowledgesthat the “desire for revenge is a basic undesirable urge” but goes on to attack victims of crime and their families as being driven by blood lust.
Victims of crime and their families are entitled to feel however they feel, you asshole. That’s why they don’t get to pass sentence. They can even overcome their baser urges.
Pjen, making gross insinuations about the motivations of the families of crime victims in inexcusable, insensitive, and harmful to your own argument. Instead of taking heed from one who is on the same side you turned around to mock him.
Chalking up motivationsof death penalty supporters to blood lust attacks the person and not the argument. You could have a point but choose to go off track. Repeatedly.
You can argue against the death penalty without taking pot shots at people who mourn their lost loved ones. But you choose to twist the knife of your words to inflame the injury that never heals. Asshole.
It’s just a combination of moral preening and reflexive anti-Americanism. I wouldn’t worry about it too much. (Though comparing Clayton Lockett to Rosa Parks…Yeesh.)
Pjen’s thoughts were not poetic, but the thought seemed to be that vengence is not justice. On second thought, Pjens thoughts were quite poetic, imprtant, and true.
His knee-jerk America = Bad shtick got old ages ago.
Plus he’s just a fucking asshole.
Smug prick doesn’t even have the decent manners to at least be correct when he’s being smug.
zoid: How’d you like the “studied in the US” followed by “some people argue that” = “My assertion about US constitutional law isn’t really wrong” stunt? Mind you, those aren’t direct quotes, but they do pretty much give the gist of a few of his posts in the DP thread.
If I was convinced that the death penalty saved lives via deterrence, then I would be in favor the some version of the death penalty in the US. I am not. I don’t have the sense that my disagreement with death penalty advocates is grounded on a differing view of the statistical literature.
Take away deterrence, take away warehousing, take away rehabilitation and the only theory of punishment that remains is retribution. Advocates muddy the waters by labeling that justice: they lack self awareness. Unlike most legal writers, I consider retribution to be a legitimate consideration, as apparently does Pjen. But I don’t have a problem with calling it bloodlust, though I would be more likely to append that label to death penalty advocates: crime victims presumably have a more complicated set of emotions.
I’ve clicked the links in the OP. Pjen appears to acknowledge that crime victims have a certain influence on our judicial practices. I don’t find this position remarkable and I thought his tone was refreshingly bland. Is the OP butthurt? This may be the case.
ETA:
Monty, you’re a level headed guy. I haven’t read the whole DP thread. Do you object to Pjen’s tone? Because I’m not seeing a lot of direct quoting in this thread.
Why “take away” any of them? (rational folks are not likely to dismiss the goal of keeping dangerous felons from harming innocent people as “warehousing”, a term redolent of sociologist butthurt).
Pjen probably does oppose capital punishment, though his overriding obsession is railing against America as the embodiment of all that is Evil in the world, evidence and perspective be damned. Comparing a vicious killer to Rosa Parks is just the latest in a long series of tiresome Pjencapades.
I’m not following: maybe we are at cross-purposes. Life imprisonment without parole provides warehousing et al at a cheaper price than the death penalty. The two justifications for the death penalty would be deterrence and retribution and the former has weak empirical evidence. (The evidence could get stronger though: I’m not ruling that out.) So that leaves retribution, something that legal scholars take a dim view of. I don’t. Pjen doesn’t. But both of us are opposed to the DP for the US. And we don’t have a problem with characterizing aspects of retribution as bloodlust. What better way to characterize those who literally cheer at the execution of someone?
Um, yeah he’s opposed the DP in that thread. I haven’t seen instances of his railing. As I tried to indicate earlier, I might have simply missed those posts.
Except they crime victims don’t have any say in whether or not people are executed or for that matter in what the punishment can or will be.
In fact, there’ve been plenty of instances of the victims or their families asking for the murderers not to be executed and them being executed anyway.
Pjen was making bad assumptions because they validated his own bad assumption.
Similarly, he insisted that “the status of the children of illegals is undetermined”(paraphrase) when in fact it’s been settled for well over a hundred years.
The children of illegal immigrants are automatically US citizens just as the policy should be in any civilized country.
Admittedly, I had similar thoughts in the back of my mind. Crime victims are important as a rhetorical bludgeon, but they don’t have substantial direct political influence, probably because they are disproportionately of lower income. That’s my guess anyway. It’s something that I could see a distant viewer of US news confusing though.
Bolding added.
Ok. It sounds like his problem is that he sticks to his less-than-perfectly informed views. Did he do this when presented solid citations? Because in both cases his position wasn’t implausible, just not well grounded factually.
I think you’re kind of missing the point here, MfM. This isn’t a thread to debate the death penalty. There are two of those already: Pjen’s abortion and Bricker’s much better thread. The point of this thread is to denounce Pjen as a smarmy idiot. If you want to argue about the DP, try Bricker’s thread. It’s not bad.
I’m suspecting the same.
Taken separately, Pjen’s posts didn’t strike me as all that bad, at least the ones linked in the OP. But I just dived into page 1 of his thread and I see that they have a cumulative effect. Interesting.
My take: “Eh: middle grade ore or maybe middling grade.” I’ve seen better and worse.
My understanding is that most of the democratic world considers the death penalty to be, “Something from my great grandparents generation that we’ve grown out of.” So Pjen’s sentiments may not be that unusual. I recall an Italian film on the subject that had this feel. The lack of clamor to bring back the death penalty in most of the world is also notable.
Not as kick ass as China, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia - each of whom have more people executed by the state than the US does. North Korea and Yemen were ahead in 2010, but they have since slipped behind. USA! USA!