I am fearful, you will not get the reaction you are hoping for. Think this through a little more, do you have that much faith in the American Public?
UFC is Ultimate Fighting Championship http://www.ufc.com/
Televised bare-fisted freestyle fighting matches. In the early days, a few guys died in the ring or as a direct result of injuries received in the ring. It’s only slightly more brutal than boxing, and I think has less deaths overall than boxing. And yes, the food network bit was a joke - I’m not big on the “Hi, Opal” bit, but respect the three-things-in-a-list policy she’s credited with.
UFC is Ultimate Fighting Championship.
Yes I have, but what does this have to do with public executions.
BTW: I watch Alton Brown and Rachel Ray occasionally with my wife. He brings geekdom to the kitchen and she, well she is cute and makes reasonable recipes.
I never heard of UFC however, what demented channel shows this?
Jim {Strange Simul-post, your reply was not there when I hit submit}
Winston: On preview, thanks for clarifying the Food Network part.
Actually, I do. In the abstract, they can be vindictive and angry, but when it comes to specifics, and to individual stories, they can be quite sentimental and forgiving. I think a lot of people would probably not find the spectacle as entertaining as they might have expected and more would be turned off by it than those who would enjoy it.
If you believe in capital punishment,you should have to watch what you have wrought. It is barbaric and diminishes us all. But at least you couldn’t pretend it was a harmless ,clean process. Enjoy hypocrites
Sure, but when was the last time Emeril stabbed someone? (BAM!)
I’m with the others- football, UFC and boxing are pretty well the linear descendants of gladiatorial combat, but the Food Network is pretty much about the making of food, and ogling of Giada & Rachel.
I’ve seen some serious cuts and burns on Iron Chef. and what about that time that Flay jumped up and stood on the cutting board? Morimoto looked ready to go to the katanas over that.
Ok, I got nothing.
Yes.
After all the argument is that the death sentence is a deterrent. What better deterrent than to have people see it happen live on TV?
Maybe we can even go back to the guillotine and electric chair. Much better spectacle. Since public excutions worked so well in reducing the crime rates in the past, we should return to them. No half measures!
That’s funny.
I’m very much against the death penalty, but I would still vote “yes” for televising executions.
If you’re going to kill someone, let the people see it.
The question is: who would sponsor it?
The electric company? FTD?
If there was any real hard data that showed unequivocally that the DP deterred crime in the least, I would be all for this and then some. Death isn’t pretty and I think it might do some good for the average suburban teen to see that. Most images of death in TV and games is unrealistic to say the least, so a good hard dose of reality may do some good.
However, there is no proof that DP is a deterrent and if the death of some low life scum wont help anyone, why show it?
I agree. If actual to-the-death battles were being staged in Mexico, the stands would be mostly full of daytripping gringos.
I also agree with what Diogenes said. If you’re going to execute people, be open about it. Hiding your actions in the shadows because you’re afraid they’re barbaric exposes your claims to civilization as merely an affected pretense. Either come to terms with it or don’t do it.
And if public execution leads one’s culture toward barbarism… well, that sure is interesting, isn’t it?
I think public executions would remove a lot of the deterrent factor from capital punishment. I think there’s a brand of violent criminal who would like the idea of being executed on TV, and might actively seek it out. Terrorists almost certainly would, since their whole idea is drawing attention to themselves and their causes. Without the “deterrent” argument, capital punishment is really left with nothing but “vengeance” and “blood lust.”
After reading all these posts I am reconsidering. I am against the DP in every way, but if it is to be, perhaps mandatory witnessing by all (Children exempted of course) is proper. If “We the people sentence you to death” means “We the people should have to look at what we are doing” then it might be a good thing. Otherwise just the somewhat unbalanced and totally unbalanced would watch and enjoy. I cut slack to the family of victims, while they might take some solence in the execution, they have personal issues that do not apply to the general public. DP is just bad policy all the way around. I was horrified that an advisory referendum to reinstate the DP in Wisconsin passed. WI became a state in 1848. The DP was abolished in 1853. We just took a 150 year step backward. Heck what next? Bring back slavery because we can’t get wages low enough? Damn, Wisconsin has always been a very progressive state, and we are hurling ourselves back into the dark ages.
I know that went off topic, sorry about the hijack.
I think most of them would either cheer it on, or complain that it wasn’t savage enough.
So what ? “No dead bodies” is a MAJOR difference. Much larger than difference between violence-for-entertainment and no-violence-for-entertainment, IMHO.
Not sure if you are serious, but it’s not and never has been. Public executions don’t discourage crime; they just make it easier for the criminals to pickpocket you while you gawk at the blood.
I don’t think it should be televised, many good reasons have already been mentioned above.
I do believe in capital punishment in certain situations and would have no problem in seeing it happen, although it would not be my first choice of things to view. Out of curiousity, do you also believe that the pro-choice should have to sit in doctors offices and watch abortions take place? Or that non-vegetarians should have to go to slaughter houses? Where do you draw the line?
These are bad comparisons. Neither of those examples have anything to do with killing human beings and the abortion example, in particular, would involve an invasion of the patients’ right to privacy.
Why are they bad comparisons? It is thought by many that those procedures are barbaric. Even if you disagree with that they are certainly not harmless or clean.
Well nobody is preventing the public from seeing slaughterhouses, so that’s a non-starter.
Like I said, nobody what you think of abortion, it still would violate a right to privacy to show the procedure to the public against the patient’s will.
If the patient is willing, then there’s no problem with it. In fact, there already ARE videos of abortion procedures available to the public.
So both examples fail simply because, unlike executions, it’s already perfectly legal to show them to the public.
Um, dude, no one would be forced to watch televised executions, whether they support the death penalty or not. And… Hypocrite? Whom? Who’s pretending an execution is a harmless, clean process?