…and is it babrbaric to wish death on doldiers deployed to the middle east, then?
But to stay on topic, I don’t think he’ll get the death penalty. Being in prison for the rest of his life may be too good for him, but stoning him? Definitely too babrbaric. Though if it were a relative of mine, I’ll admit I’d probably want to baseball bat to oblivion.
Oh, I think that they do. You certainly seem to.
HA! HA! HA!
Your whole OP is nothing but an illustration of the fallacy of two wrongs, and you want her to take a course in logic?
It is to laugh. :rolleyes:
If this is a way ofr raising your hand and announcing to the world that you, too, could benefit from such a course, it was effective. The fallacy of two wrongs, or the tu quogue fallacy, does not apply here. If my reasoning was we should be brutal with him while killing him solely because he was brutal to others, you’d be right. But that’s not been my reasoning.
In order to make this argument, you need to demonstrate that a significant number of people actually do believe that “their justice system does not deliver Justice.”
Further, you need to demonstrate that, among those people, a significant number think that the way to fix the justice system is to undertake the sort of barbarities that you are advocating.
Finally, you need to show that an absence of the type of “reforms” you are advocating actually results in a higher incidence of vigilantism.
Until you do that, your whole argument is mere pissing into the wind in order to satisfy your own warped sense of justice. You can pretend to some sort of socially-redeeming motivation, but it’s really not evident in your posts. You come across as nothing more than a prurient ghoul.
It’s not that they have trouble; it’s that the canon of medical ethics and every medical licensing authority I know of expressly forbids medical professionals from being involved in an execution.
There are good reasons for that. When I approach someone as a physician, it needs to be clear that I am there to help, and not to do him harm. Also, the condemned would presumably be a competent agent, and therefore he has to be able to refuse any interventions I might provide.
As for the OP, if a friend or family member of mine was killed, so amount of gore or pain would be enough to satisfy me. Even the OP’s snuff-porn rat fantasy wouldn’t be harsh enough. This is why I hate it when punishment is described in terms of making the victim (or his/her family) “whole” or giving them “closure”. You might be able to do that in terms of theft, but rape and murder? All the butt-rats in the world aren’t going to “close” that.
And as for deterrence, I think you’re overestimating the thought processes of the sort that would rape and murder a 99-year-old.
No, that’s the wrong metric. I think most people would be of the mind that it usually does. I’m looking at a tiny, tiny number of incidents where the punishments available cannot fit the crime. Someone who shoots someone (a homeowner) while robbing his house may be justly served by being put to death. Someone who rapes and kills a 99 year-old woman, or a 6 year-old child deserves more punishment than the first guy. Problem is, the death penalty is the maximum. On a scale of 1-10 it’s the 10. There are times it seems we could do with an 11.
In order to have something actually instituted, you are correct. To post and rant in The Pit, not so much.
If I were actually trying to pass this into law and that was one of the main reason, maybe. It certainly would be asked for. I don’t think it is 100% provable either way. It makes perfect sense to me, though, that the more unjust people would find their justice system the more they would feel the need to get it on their own. Or, at least, be tempted to. Do you disagree with that?
Pissing in the wind? Absolutley.
There are two things. One, was simply me posting out of anger and wanting to cause this guy all sorts of pain, with hopes that it would dissuade similar events from ever, EVER happening again. Call it what you will, but I find it cathartic.
The other thing, which occurred to me while writing the OP was the purpose of the death penalty and what responsibilities fell to us when we take the extreme measure of taking someone’s life. Do it as painlessly/somberly/respectfully as possible? Or should we try to extract maximum use from it at the same time? This was really more fitting for GD, sans my more cathartic elements, but that would have robbed me of my catharsis.
I think it would have been better to break the two items up. Have a more purely theoretical discussion in GD, while allowiing the one here in The Pit to be more vitriolic. Still, some posters were actually able to discuss the loftier debate and take the stoning idea as more of an anger-filled rant.
This discussion has brough to the fore, for me, some interesting issues. Namely, if the taking of the life by the state is such an extreme measure—and I absolutely believe it is—is it more respectful to life itself to do so quitely and minimize the act? Or is the state—us—morally obligated to make it a noteworthy event, and to get as much “good” out of it as possible?
As interesting as I find that discussion, I do believe that extremely violent attemps to make it a spectacle would probably do society more harm than good by lowering the bar as to what we believe can be done by moral/righteous/sane people.
What the hey else do phrases like “fitting punishment”, and “A life sentence. Not adequate” imply? It reads to me like the kid is deserving of the unusual RatAss death because of the unusual nature of his crime. If that wasn’t what you meant to imply, then why is this crime in particular deserving of the unusual punishment?
And you severely misunderstand the fallacy if you are under the impression that the second wrong has to be of the same type as the first. This is in no way true of the general case, which is why I said “fallacy of two wrongs” and not “tu quoque”, which I consider the special “You do the same thing!” case.
And all arguments for Capital Punishment either boil down to “two wrongs” or the unproven “deterrent” argument.
Why do you hate America, magellan? And if you hate the Constitution of our land so much, why don’t you get the hell out and go somewhere more to your liking? I hear Saudi Arabia might be up your alley.
Daniel
Both of your comments here are due to you misreading. You seem to assume that what might be “a” reason is “the” reason" or the totality of my reasoning. Yes, the visciousness of his crime would qualify him for a more brutal punishment than if he didn’t commit it or committed a lesser one. This is not news. We do this all the time in our criminal justice system. For instance, not everyone qualifies for the death penalty. One has to have committed a certain type of crime, usually (always?) involving the intentional taking of another’s life. So, a person who rapes and murders the elderly or a young child would qualify for the maximum penalty we have to offer. Whatever it is. I was simply exploring offer something more severe. There will always be a range, and one punishment will always be the most severe. The only question is what will it be.
So, that’s one of my stated reasons for exploring this, another—and this is what you seem to have missed—is the question of whether we can/should change the maximum punishment we offer to act as a deterrent. And if we do decide we are going to take someone’s life, is it more moral to see that some good comes from that drastic act? Or is it more moral to allow that life to be taken almost unnoticed, like throwing out the trash? I think there is a serioous question here.
Now that does not automatically mean that we should make the extreme more severe and/or turn it into a spectacle. If doing so would have a greater negative effect on society, we should not. And that is where I basically come out. But I do not think that means we just throw up our hands. For instance, moral arguments to the death penalty aside, if there were a way to make putting someone to death act as a more meaningful deterrent—without adding to whatever cruelty you might associate with it—wouldn’t that be a good thing?
There is an old movie with Jimmy Cagney, I don’t recall the name. But he is this tough hood, one which all the neighborhood thugs-in-training idolize, for his toughness. At the end of the movie his deeds have caught up with him and he is about to be put to death. The priest asks him if he is not afraid, and he isn’t. But then he appeals to a whatever sense of responsibility for society that might be there, and basically, gets Cagney to see that there might be some real good that can come from his death. That is, to strip himself of his mythic stature. In the final scene, as he’s being taken to the electric chair, he starts to fight and whine and bawl like scared baby. The kids get wind of this and no longer hold him up—or toughness itself—as the be all and end all. And they are on the road to salvation. The end.
In the real world, I think, as I’ve stated, in some cases we should try to close the gap between a conviction worthy of the death penalty and the sentence being carried out. Please note “in some cases”. I am strongly in favor of putting many fewer people to death. But for those clear-cut cases (and you can raise the bar as high as you wish here for the sake of argument) we should fast-track it. Ideally, inside a year. I believe that if this is done, the death penalty will, in fact, start to act as a deterrent. Why? Basic psychology. The more immediate a punishment is tied to a specific act, the better able people (animals) are to understand the relationship. If everyone who stepped on a particular sidewalk died immediately, we’d very quickly understand that doing X = Y and would avoid the sidewalk. If, on the other hand, people who stepped on this deadly sidewalk didn’t die for ten years, it would be difficult to see that we should avoid stepping on the sidewalk.
The more examples we can have of the committing of a heinous crime being immediatlely associated with death, the more those death sentences would act as a deterrent. And remember, I’m not advocating speeding things up in all cases. Only in those cases where there is no reasonable doubt that the jury got it right. Maybe we need a videotape of the act, whatever, but if we do have an extremely high degree of certainty, a quick trip to the inevitable woiuld be best. And much made of that fact in the media.
Leaving my cathartic stoning idea aside, agree? Disagree? Where? Why?
I’ve been ordered to stick around to counteract the presence of the less enlightened. So, as long as your here, I’m stuck here, too.
Not surprisingly, you seem to think that citing the constitution ends the argument. Not surprisingly, you are incorrect. If the meaning of those words were etched in stone and didn’t change over time or from person to person, you might a point. Proof that this is not the case can be seen in the fact that right now there are millions of American who believe that putting someone to death is cruel and unusual punishment. And millions who believe that it isn’t. Surely you are aware of this. Whatever the ratio is, I’d bet that it has been differetn in the past and will be different in the future. So, your infatuation with cites won’t help you here. Perhaps you have a counter argument…
Well, Magellan, I sincerely hope that you never get treated in the manner that various of your threads here, including this one, have seen you endorse.
And that, my friend, is mercy. Which is, you’ll recall, defined as treating someone better than they deserve under strict justice. It’s a quality you’d do well to cultivate.
You may safely disregard any orders given you by neighborhood dogs, you know, even if they do claim to be Satan.
This is idiotic. Yes, there’s room for disagreement on what precisely constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” just like there’s room for disagreement on what precisely constitutes chocolate. If you try to tell me that a rampaging elephant is chocolate, I’ll call you an idiot, and if you try to tell me that forcing someone to be eaten alive from the inside by rats is neither cruel nor unusual, I’ll do likewise. Strangely enough, in this case citing the constitution does end the argument, except when the argument is with someone who shits on the constitution.
Daniel
Oh, magellan. While I’m sure your adolescent revenge fantasies salve the strains of maintaining such an unrivalled level of stupidity, surely even you must experience mild pangs of embarrassment when you find yourself trying, in all apparent seriousness, to argue that rats up the bum might not be cruel and unusual. Perhaps this might be one of those times when you want to take a step back, and take a look at quite what a ridiculous cul-de-sac you appear to have ridden your high horse into.
What a real alice in wonderland like world you live in, where torturing to death is considered a sign of enlightment.
What percentage of people, if you polled them, do you think would be ok with the methods you advocate?
Although that’s a good question, it’s not exactly the right question for this scenario. THe question is, what percentage of people would believe that the methods he suggests are not cruel and unusual? We are not a country of mobs, a country in which people give in to their basest instincts. The Constitution is a point of great pride for most Americans, and rightly so. magellan’s contempt for it is so strong that it makes me wonder why he remains in the country.
Daniel
Magellan has hinted that things may one day change (in his direction), but has the “cruel and unusual” standard ever evolved in the direction of being more cruel instead of less?
Interesting question! I’ve never heard of it, but I’m certainly no expert. In any case, the chance that it would evolve to allow terrifying and agonizing fatal torture is absurd. Absent an Orwellian revolution that effectively invalidates our system of government, that ain’t gonna happen.
Daniel
IMO, more harm would come of this than good. Much more. Making a spectacle out of the death penalty does nothing but raise the blood lust of the general population. We’ll return to the days of lynchings. Hell, maybe we can build new colosseums and make condemned criminals fight to the death for our amusement. There will be plenty of them, because the populace will clamour for more and more crimes to be punished by death if they get to be cheering spectators. Not enough murderers? We’ll do rapists too. And pedophiles, and the ‘three-strike’ felons. It won’t lower the murder rate, because you’ll be conditioning your whole audience to think that torture and killing is exciting and fun.
That wasn’t in The Haj, but there was a scene where a guy was tied up in a sack with a bunch of wild desert cats, and then the guards beat the sack and he was clawed to death.