It has just occurred to me, as I’ve logged out and begun to go back to the day’s business, and in replaying my own words in my mind, that I’ve somehow gotten on quite a high-horse myself. My apologies. I think I’ll back out of here for now.
Regards to all.
Yeah, it is silly. That’s why I was amused that Gus thought the killer would just spend a little bit of time in the joint and then walk away.
Yup.
Depends. Is it necessary to keep him in there to keep him from reoffending, or is he rehabilitated? Will it serve any other purpose to keep him in prison besides making him suffer?
Well, I don’t think a killer is any less likely to think “uh oh, I might get caught and spend the rest of my life making license plates, I better stop” than “uh oh, I might get caught and eventually be executed, I better stop”.
I’d rather spend the money to directly improve prison security than just slaughter everyone who might harm another inmate in prison.
Speaking of silly, why are you offering an opinion on a statistic? If I said it was my opinion that more Rolls Royces are sold each year than Honda Civics, I’d expect to be laughed at and ignored.
A final comment from my side of the street,
With what I have had to experience as a parent, brother, member of several juries, as an observer at several trials where I had first hand knowledge of the why and wherefore, and 61 years of life , the last 13 without my daughter, I have come to this decision.
There is no line in the sand that I won’t cross given the right circumstance.
There is nothing that I can be called that I have not said to myself with much more feeling that any outsider can even dream of.
As a pilot, I know that bad things have to be thought of in advance and a course of action decided before hand because when it start happening, there is seldom time to stop and think.
I was not afforded the chance to stop my daughters murder nor my sisters rapes.
If I am ever in a position that lethal force is necessary, I will use it and I will use it until I can’t catch the person, regard less of age, race, or anything. Front, back, give up or not. As long as it is that time before the person escapes or is captured by authorities, I will not willingly give them up to society.
I no longer suffer from the delusion that society as a whole even begins to understand. I will continue with my form of SD, in other words, applying the DP to anyone who attacks.
The semantics of when SD becomes vengeance or it becomes the societies problem trouble me not, for I feel that the individuals choice in attacking me or mine give me personally all the notice I require to get there first.
To open the door to violence and then complain about how much walks in is the height of folly and the practice of the protected. It has negative survival implications. World enlightenment will just have to wait until I’m gone. I know how the system works. Not very well. I will never trust it again.
Interesting thread and thanks to all who have come.
Thank you for this insightful argument in favor of abolishing the death penalty.
And thanks to you, too, Gus. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for you to have to talk about this or read some of the things that were said. My heart goes out to you, that’s for sure. I wish you all the best for the rest of your life.
I omitted the following in my post to Gus out of a desire not to get things started again, but since Ludovic has decided to use his last post as a way to kick him while he’s down and pervert what he said, I’ll say it now.
It’s frustrating, Gus, when people criticize or even fail to recognize the very things that keep them safe, and then out of a misguided sense of wanting to do what’s right take steps that actually undermine that safety.
I remember a comment by by my eighth grade social studies teacher: “Watch out for impassioned do-gooders. They’re the ones who cause the most harm.”
[QUOTE=Starving Artist]
It’s frustrating, Gus, when people criticize or even fail to recognize the very things that keep them safe, and then out of a misguided sense of wanting to do what’s right take steps that actually undermine that safety.
[QUOTE]
Unbelievable! Have you just wiped your memory of the entire thread?
I’m trying!
So . . . you want to kill criminals because otherwise criminals will be killed. You never disappoint, Starv. (I cannot continue to call you “Artist,” because I am an artist, and you sir are no artist.)
Dude, you keep saying societal violence prevents individual violence, but you refuse to back up that claim. I understand it’s because you can’t, but rational as you seem largely to be, you keep ringing that bell no matter how many times it’s muted for you.
You, sir, could not possibly be an artist as you have no discernment.
My status as an artist therefore remains in good standing.
What is frustrating is when somebody dodges every practical argument against the “fact” that the DP keeps us safe, preferring instead to paint happy stories of times gone by, and then wildly misrepresents the reasons that the majority of DP opponents have for opposing it. That’s frustrating, alright. It’s particularly frustrating when some of us have been at pains not to misrepresent that someone’s arguments, and have been steadfastly ignored.
GusNSpot, know that those of us who oppose the DP oppose it when it is already too late. If you could have stopped either of the crimes you describe with lethal force against the perpetrator, I would not and could not hold you in any way responsible for doing so. You would be, in my view, entirely in the right. Self defence is not what I am seeking to prevent. I just don’t think the DP defends anyone.
I’ll get back to the rest of your post presently, but I want to address this bit of crap right off. To suggest that DP opponents are anti-DP merely to feel superior to others is pure unadulterated bullshit. You are suggesting that we haven’t really thought it through, that we have come to our conclusions merely to be fashionable. This is an insult to our intelligence, and I expect you to take it back.
If you care to reread this thread, you’ll see that most anti-DPers that responded have posted well though out, researched, citeable facts, and have clearly come to their conclusions with a great deal of insight. You seem not to care for facts, and so maybe you’ve reached your own conclusions based on your own biased feelings, but please don’t project that illogic on the rest of us.
I agree with Dead Badger. In fact, I would think that if I were to catch someone committing a felony against a family member or friend, there’s a good chance that I would submit them to extrajudicial proceedings. Not that that is the right thing to do, but I could see my passions getting away with me.
However, in my view of the DP, I am not an “impassioned do-gooder”. I am stone cold sober.
I have suggested no such thing. There are intelligent, highly educated and wise people, as well as dolts and morons, on either side of such emotionally charged issues. But as I’ve said before, people seem to operate on two levels: intellectually and emotionally…and the one doesn’t really seem to have that much impact on the other. It is not only possible but normal for people to hold certain positions because it conforms to their core philosophies of life and the sense of right and wrong that they developed due to the influence of countless things they experienced or observed as they were growing up or proceeding through life.
Would you agree that most people who oppose the death penalty simply oppose it, and that no amount of facts, statistics or logic will persuade them from that point of view? And wouldn’t you agree that those who favor the death penalty will continue to do so regardless of whatever facts are brought to show it’s wrong? The same can also be said about issues such as gun control, abortion, the war against terror, etc. People simply believe the way they believe and then pick and choose (or ignore) facts and examples to bolster their beliefs.
This does not mean anyone comes into the battle from a shallow stance and poorly armed with facts to support their point of view. I’m sure there are exceedingly scholarly people who are diametrically opposed on the question of the death penalty, as well as each of the other issues I mentioned.
There are reasons for everything, and in my opinion the things you’ve chosen to take offense at are the primary motivations that drive the the anti-vengance, anti-retribution, and anti-justice crowd.
(And as an aside, have you ever read Frank Abagnale’s book, Catch Me If You Can? In it, he details his European prison experiences after having finally been caught after passing over a million dollars in bad checks in numerous countries. In France he was thrown into a literal hole carved in stone and kept in a totally dark, moist rat and bug infested cell, completely in the dark and passing excrement on the very floor he had to sleep and sit on, and fed little but bread and water. He was told by the U.S. emissary that nothing could be done because France wasn’t treating him any differently than its own prisoners. [Hard to beleive it’s the same France, isn’t it? It seems their punitive “enlightenment” is but a recent thing, after all.] So much for the inherent civility of the French, eh?
Anyway, he was finally turned over IIRC to the authorities in Sweden. Oh, how wonderfully civilized and enlighted they were. Was he kept in a prison? No…he was kept in a delightfully furnished room in a building and on a campus that reminiscent of a college more than anything else. His door was locked though. :rolleyes: He was allowed to order his home-style meals from a menu similar to that of a fine restaurant and treated with smiling friendliness by his female inquisitor/guide. All in all, he thought he’d landed in paradise.
Eventually, a deal was worked out and he was returned (much to his dismay) to the U.S. to face trial. His sweet and enlightened captor in Sweden asked him to promise not to try to escape and they wouldn’t chain him down. Of course, he looked her in the eye and promised he would do no such thing and thanked her for his pleasant stay in her country. And of course, when the plane taxied up to the gate in New York, he was nowhere to be found, having escaped through the floor of the plane.
I remember thinking at the time that if I ever lived in Sweden and got hard up for money, I’d be tempted to commit some sort of crime so I could go luxuriate in jail. And I remember thinking I’d sure as hell stay out of France. So now you tell me in which country would you be less likely to commit a crime in (in 1964 anyway)? )
This is the kind of thing that happens when you take emotion and a desire for justice away and when do-gooders get their way. You become so “civilized” no one fears the consequences of their actions.
Countries all over the world punish their criminals. It’s the only thing that works! The only alternative is to do nothing, and I’m sure even you wouldn’t support that. And all this nonsense about me refusing to acknowledge that capital punishment has been shown not to be a deterrent is just that: nonsense. To me this is illustrated even more if you look at it from the other direction. What happened right after the death penalty was abolished in the early seventies? A rash of murders ensued over the next several years which committed during minor robberies so as to leave no witnesses…the thinking being that the robber had little to lose and much to gain by killing his witness.
So, no thanks. I’d prefer to gauge the civility of the country I live in by how happily and safely its citizens can go about their daily business rather than by the gentleness of its response to horrific crimes…a response that really only serves to create an environment more condusive to crime, and which ultimately results in even more crime than was the case before it was adopted.
I’ve got a few quotes for you, Starving Artist:
“Don’t judge reality by your own limited experiences.” -unknown [to me]
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” -Anais Nin
“We must learn to tailor our concepts to fit reality, instead of trying to stuff reality into our concepts.” -Victor Daniels
“Preconcieved notions are the locks on the door to wisdom.” -Merry Browne
“Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to admit it.” -Thomas Jefferson
“Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.” -James Robinson
“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.” -Adrienne Rich
Good luck with living in your perception of the past. How’s that working out for you?
Oh, well. Here’s one more for the road:
“As lousy as things are now, tomorrow they will be somebody’s good old days.” -Gerald Barzan
What??? Not the right thing to do? You have got to be kidding me!!!
Let’s see if I fully grasp the scenario here. You come home and find someone raping your wife or molesting your little girl. But you, thinking it’s wrong for you to do so, would probably attack them anyway even though you knew it was “wrong” for you to do so.
Well, there would be an alternative, you know. You could pick up a weapon of some sort and tell him you really don’t want to use it and won’t he please just come and join you in the kitchen for a cup of coffee while you wait for the police to arrive.
YOU PEOPLE ARE DRIVING ME %&^@# NUTS!!!
Thanks. Too bad I didn’t have these little bromides an hour ago. I could have used some of them myself aimed in your direction. Would have saved me a lot of words. 
Glad to see you like Anais though. Even though I still like her and her work and think she was brilliant and excelled at living life fully, I enjoyed her more during the time I assumed what she was writing was true. Once I found out what a monsterous liar was and that she (and Henry Miller, for that matter) believed in the philosophy that it was better to be an entertaining liar than a truthful bore, her work lost much of its magic for me. It simply became fiction to me.
…what a monsterous liar she was…, etc.
:smack: Damn! Screwed up the entire meaning of that sentence.
You refuse to acknowledge the facts, instead creating a false justification for your emotional take on the subject. And then you have the nerve to try to invalidate a long list of relevant quotes by accusing ONE of the authors of writing fiction! Since you seem to think “cocksucker” is an extremely insulting epithet, I’ll toss it back to you, cocksucker. As a gay man, it didn’t affect me much beyond making your character that much clearer to me.