Turning executions into entertainment encourages more executions. It encourages making them more of a spectacle, which requires turning up the cruelty.
You can already see it happening: the execution method is by firing squad. That makes for a more entertaining product.
I’d also invite you to consider the least cruel execution. It would be the person peacefully taking their last breath, feeling no pain, just drifting off, right? We already talk about pain destroying the peace, but what about people watching you, cheering on the death, enjoying it?
The point of this execution is to make it more cruel. There’s a reason the public execution is a trope of dystopian fiction.
The point of doing it this way is to make it more cruel, which is at odds with our ethic against cruel and unusual punishment.
Are we really going to do this? I’m going to say that, regardless of my personal preferences, I of course can’t forbid you from seeing me when both of us happen to be out and about in public, to the extent that we’re free to go where we like and do as we please, but that it’s my call to make — in the Who Am I To Tell You No department — when it comes to my property, since I can bar you from this room in my house or from that room in my house or from my house altogether, which means I can ask a doctor to make a house call and examine me behind closed doors while you’re barred from said room or said house. And then I’m going to add that the doctor can reply, “well, I could of course do that, with your permission on your property; but it’d be easier for me if I stayed at my place and you visited me there, right over by where I keep unwieldy equipment.” And then I’m going to say that I’d reply, “yeah, but I’m not keen on Babale watching,” and I’d say that the doctor would of course reply, “uh, buddy, if you don’t want Babale to watch, I’ll just bar him there the way you’d bar him at your place,” and I’d reply, “oh, cool; let’s do some offer-and-acceptance stuff via the moral magic of consent.”
But. I didn’t actually have to write all of that, did I? I’m guessing that you could’ve written it, because it’s an obvious-to-the-point-of-being-implied response that doesn’t need to be spelled out by dint of already being understood.
“There are two thoughts: don’t show it and show it. Cause you know, by showing it, maybe other people won’t be doing what he did. So I’ll make a decision ultimately. I know what the military would like to do, but I’ll make a decision,” the president told reporters at the White House.
Funny, that’s what I said when I heard about the public execution.
Great, but the execution isn’t taking place in a public place; it’s going to take place at a military fort. The question is whether or not it will be broadcast over television.
No, you didn’t have to write all of that because it doesn’t have anything to do with the topic at hand.
The man was sentenced to death. The government can carry out that sentence in accordance with the law. That doesn’t mean that Hasan has no rights whatsoever. If someone kills him on the way to the execution, then that is murder. The government can carry out his punishment but it cannot do so in a cruel or unusual way. The government can’t tell everyone in America “well, we’re killing him anyways, so if you want to stop by and work out some aggression on him before we do, step right up”. Just because we have sentenced him to death does not mean that we can ignore every other right he has. He lost his right to life in one particular circumstance; that doesn’t mean you can violate every other right willy billy.
Not because I feel bad for him or think it would be wrong to violate his rights, but because that’s how a society of laws operates.
You wrote: “If people want to witness your next prostate exam, who am I to tell them no?”
I didn’t pick that sentence out of some paragraph; you merely asked it, and I merely answered it.
If you’re going to dismiss my answer by saying that I didn’t have to write it, then you don’t need to ask the question in the first place. I now don’t know what else is worth replying to, because an answer from me to a question from you could well draw yet another “it doesn’t have anything to do with the topic” from the guy who asked the question.
Speaking of defaults, the default is to not put it on television. There’s no positive reason offered for breaking that default to televise it. If defaults are to rule, then no televising. That’s all.
And I stand by that. If people want to witness your next prostate exam, I can’t tell them no.
YOU on the other hand can. So can your doctor. Just like how the people doing the execution can say that it won’t be televized, and the person being executed by his right to avoid cruel and unusual punishment should be able to avoid being executed on live television.
You answered a question but it was not the question I asked.
I’m saying my default is to err on the side of allowing this sort of thing. I don’t give a crap what the default is for how things happen to be done — I’m not trying to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ — I’m telling you what I default to thinking ‘ought’ to be the case.
You don’t want to care? Fine, don’t care. May as well argue with a visitor from space asking “What is this thing humans call emotion?” For everybody else, the default is not to do such degrading and abhorrent acts.
You seem to be saying that the default should be allowing people to watch the broadcast.
I agree. If there’s a broadcast, I don’t think the government should arbitrarily ban people from watching it.
But the question that you haven’t engaged with at all is whether or not, and if so why, the government SHOULD CREATE SUCH A BROADCAST in the first place.
You’re saying “Banning people from watching the broadcast is an action that the government should not take without good reason” and I would agree. But creating the broadcast is also an action that the government does not do by default and if you want to argue that it SHOULD START then you need to make an actual case, not just repeatedly ask “why would we ban the broadcast?”.
I expressly said that, in the Who Am I To Tell You No department, I’m the one who gets to make the call. I keep thinking I don’t actually need to spell out something so obvious that you presumably already know it, but I’ll reluctantly go through the motions: you can tell them ‘no’ because it’s a situation where the person who gets to make that call has, as it happens, made that call. That is who you are: the person who can relay the call that I made.
For everybody else? I didn’t come up with this proposal; I wasn’t the first to mention having no problem with it. The whole reason this came up out there to get discussed in here is because I’m not the only one who doesn’t seem to mind.
I’ll remind you that this proposal comes from the fascist death cult that has taken over America, and I consider it the duty of every patriotic American to resist that cult as much as possible.
I don’t see that I do. Like I said, I don’t care what the status quo happens to be; if you want to ban people from doing something — regardless of whether you want to start banning it, or want to keep banning it — that prompts me to ask why; that’s what cries out for a case to be made.
The issue is banning government from what it can do to citizens. To ensure human rights and civil rights, the Bill of Rights is entirely a list of what the government cannot do. You’re confusing the rights of individual citizens with the power of government over them. That’s how your argument has gotten so twisted up. To ensure the civil rights and civil liberties of the individual, the government has explicit restrictions placed upon it.
Does this involve one of those explicit restrictions placed upon the government? Is this on the list of things the government cannot do? Or are you simply asserting that individual citizens shouldn’t be allowed to watch?