No. I have no problem in principle. I have a very big problem in practice.
Penn Gillette said that he would have no problem with the DP if Google were in charge of it. Because Google doesn’t fuck up very much.
I am kind of in that camp. I think there are crimes and criminals that deserve the DP. But I do not trust our present system to dish out that punishment. It fucks up waaaay too much.
Bolding mine.
Huh?
You realize, i assume, that the belief that the death penalty is brutal and savage is, in and of itself, a moral argument. A moral argument is, by definition, a normative rather than a positive argument. It is not necessarily amenable to standards of logical progression or rational coherence, although there are times when it may be.
I support the right to abortion, but i don’t expect opponents of abortion to provide a logical reason for their position. They believe abortion is immoral, and while i disagree with their moral position, i don’t believe that it can be rebutted by a simple set of logical and rational arguments. And nor could my support for the right to choose be swayed by such arguments.
I’m not arguing that reason and positive arguments have no place at all in discussion of morality; simply that, while there are some beliefs that are amenable to change in the face of conclusive evidence, there are others that are rooted in fundamental beliefs about right and wrong. For example, i would be willing to countenance some restrictions on third trimester abortions, IF all women had adequate information about and access to abortions during the first two trimesters. This position is based on a belief that, given proper information and proper access, a pregnant woman should be able to decide before the end of the second trimester whether or not she wants an abortion. But none of this undermines my fundamental moral belief that a woman should have complete rights over her own body while she’s pregnant, and that this includes the rights over a fetus inside her.
Also, as spooje’s post indicates, there is more than one level of opposition to the death penalty, and that opposition has both normative, moral aspects and positive, evidentiary aspects.
Some oppose the death penalty under any and all circumstances. They would oppose it even if it worked perfectly, and even if they could be completely assured that an innocent person would never be executed. The reasons people have for this position are generally normative, moral positions that rely on their fundamental beliefs about what humanity and civilization are, and how they should be expressed in society.
Others oppose the death penalty on practical terms. This group generally includes most people from the first group (you can oppose on moral and logistical grounds), but it also includes folks like spooje, who would support the DP in an ideal world, but who recognize that the way it has been administered in the United States has been not only fraught with problems in individual cases, but plagued with systemic inequities related to issues of race, means, jurisdiction, etc., etc. There is still obviously a moral component to this argument, but it is also supported by positive and rational conclusions based on evidence from studies of the death penalty as it has worked in practice.
What makes you think a society should value the life of a person who chooses to murder another human more than the life of a child who is vacuumed from the womb and thrown in red plastic bio-hazard bags?
I’m in favor of capital punishment, and in favor of gun ownership and concealed carry, which are traditionally conservative/Republican stances. Apart from that, I’m actually pretty close to a yellow-dog Democrat. So, I’m right there with you. If we can come up with a name that’s humorous enough, maybe we can form our own party. I propose “Misanthrocrats”.
The “Blue Dogs” I know. And I remember laughing uproariously when a yellow dog got shot. But I don’t recall any political implication.
It’s a much older term than Blue Dog. Refers back to the old “Solid South” who would vote for a yellow dog if that’s what the Democrats nominated. Apparently the term’s height of popularity was to describe Southerners loyal enough to the party to vote for Al Smith in 1928, despite him being a progressive (sort of) New York Irish Catholic.
RED plastic? Okay, now I’m outraged.
The blue plastic bags are for the souls of the unborn children. The red ones fill up faster.
Ooh, ooh! Can I be on the show? I’d do a little stand up, then you’d motion me over to the big chair next to the big host desk…
The fact that she was correct has nothing to do with your rant, I suppose.
Do you ever get tired of being wrong about…oh, everything?
I somehow doubt that Ann herself believes half the crap that she says. She basically just likes to shock and disgust people, which makes her a total bitch 
But very well paid…:mad:
Even if it ties 2 crimes to each other, how do you conclusively tie the gun to Davis? Don’t we as a society have to tie that gun that killed those 2 people to Davis before killing Davis?
Shouldn’t society say that the ONLY reason that we are not sending you (DAVIS) to the gas chamber is that we cannot absolutely prove that you had this particular gun (a gun that was never found) in your hand and forensic evidence found on you pins that gun on you on that day and that time.
In essence, shouldn’t society err on the side of absolute and conclusive forensic evidence before condemning a living breathing human being to death?