He is being given the easy way out, he has killed so many people and has now been caught, the best way for him is to be killed.
IMHO I beleive they should lock him away in a old box'd jail cell under a the worst jail in the world, he shouldn't be given any sharp objects and live off bread and water for the rest of his life.
I don't see how death can be a sentence, he will only suffer for a very small amount of time if he is hanged, but another 20 years or whatever if he is put in a old tatty lonely jail cell.
I think he deserves the strictest penalty from his own people, the ones he murdered and oppressed and tortured (including one of his own sons),
but I am worried that death will martyr him and that will be the excuse sought for the extremists to justify more bloodshed. What a dreadful, bloody mess.
Somehow I don't think/feel this subject is suited for the LFS forum, even in the Off Topic section. However, I'll just drop my stinkbomb and move on...
Is death penalty "the solution?" I'm no great thinker but by logical deduction I say "no." I just can't bring myself to think of issues in such an absolute mode of thinking.
If the excuse is "cost": there already is a prison system that costs as much as it costs to keep a certain population behind bars. I doubt having another say 20 people who've been sentenced to death would burden the budget much more - if you got more than 20 people that have reached this ultimate of sentences then, buddy, look at your society and do something to fix it up, killing people won't do it.
If the excuse is "it sets an example": it has been attempted in the past and it didn't work. Britain, way back in the day, applied capital punishment for no less than 200 or so offences - the result? More violence. Ofcourse, they had gone overboard - criminals knew that anything they did would get them killed if they got caught, so they just went all out.
If the excuse is "but he killed": he did, yes. For his "reasons" - be it he is a serial killer, sociopath, person motivated by greed, etc What exactly is our excuse? Advanced civilization?
EDIT:
Disclaimer: Ofcourse all this applies to our western standards and is only mentioned in reference to some viewpoints laid forth in previous posts.
On the Saddam issue, I'm partly of the same viewpoint as Al on this. Partly, because I am not so certain he was actually judged by his own people or with the standards of his country - whatever those are in a ravaged country like Iraq.
The riches he amassed driving slaves? Whose funds are those?
No one else's but that of those "slaves", which (my guess) I doubt they'd want going to his upkeep.
Al H., do you really expect extremists to act reasonably, either way? The place is a mess, but it had (or still has, if somehow the present situation is cooled off and defered to later) to happen some day, there's only so much space on the planet.. Law abiding people can only displace themselves out of criminials' reach for so long, before they have to take a stand, sometime, somewhere.
It's been long enough that we ought to have figured out where to draw that line.
Xaotik, the prison system is flawed, and yes, it can like any other problem be traced back to its source.
If it is your choice to keep the village serial killer alive on your dime, it's your business, just as it's your business whether you donate to a fund supporting patients in a deep coma.
Just don't expect everyone, such as victims of said killer do pitch in.
I also don't think it is any more humane to lock someone up when they've proven they will abuse of society given half a chance, than to execute them. They're both violent means of correcting failures of society. But honestly, does one not put their own interests before the convicts when they decide he's to be locked up?
I don't think the second and third excuses justify a death penalty either.
Unfortunately, Reason (the antithesis and solution to barbarians like Saddam & co.) is not something a lot of people on this planet regard as worth replacing their habit of walking a path of least resistance, of entropy, with; not absolutely, anyway.
You can only have others' support if your actions are justified, and there is no substitute to reason. It is sovereign over everything else in the human mind, no matter how criminal or barbarian. Criminals merely champion bastard forms of reason, tailored for their own ends, with no regard for others. Petty thieves are of no appeal, but the bigger crooks are plenty appealing to armies of lesser thieves, with politicians and their goons somewhere near the top of the scale of criminal efficiency, as Saddam, and all sorts of politicians across the globe's governments prove everyday.
Good luck rehabilitating a criminal on your own, when he catches you vulnerable armed with only reason..
Hasn't there been enough killing? What good does it do to kill one more? As long as there's killing, there's killers. How on earth could anyone of worlds so called leaders throw the first stone?
Stupidity, madness and greed (actually part of stupidity) makes people kill another people. Politics makes lots of people die.
If we start saving society's money by sentencing criminals to death, into what would society use the saved money? You have to be very naive to let yourself believe that the money would go to something else than weapons, machines of totalitarian kapitalism and to pocket of those who already have everything.
There hasn't been any conflict that would have had straight forward causes. Everything has been and will be bs-politics.
And this will never happen because when you are the leader of a real big country and then you lie to the whole world and also your allies, just to start a war against another country on a basis of fictional and constructed reasons and then you send your own troops a lot of civilians and opponents into death.
Then and only then you'll only get a death penalty of the "opponent leader" right in time before the next elections starts. And a lot of votes for your own party too.
Since you insist on focusing on the money aspect, as I said before the same amount of money would be spent if the said serial killer was in the prison or if he didn't exist at all. Each country has a predefined budget for their penitentiary systems. Some choose to include execution facilities in that budget. I'd rather my country invest money into things that would keep people from ending up in prison.
Entropy? You mean empathy? Entropy is a totally different term.
I think you are confusing some extreme version of pacifism with people not wanting their country to have absolute power over life and death within the pretext of law. Not wanting the death sentence is not equal to being a pushover.
Actually you can have others' support if you fanatize them, if you keep them in ignorance, if you appear to them as "charismatic", if you prove to them that something bad will happen to them if you don't have their support, etc. History has shown that "justification" has little to do with the matter.
The death sentence will not necessarily save people from that criminal. If he legally deserves the death sentence, according to what you say, then it means he has already killed. Also, not all who are not in favour of the death sentence are turn-the-other-cheek types, don't generalize or adhere to stereotypes.
It's not just the money aspect that I'm focusing on, but for the sake of argument, can you back up that claim - that prison time is equal in cost to execution?
No, entropy, i.e. letting your mind go to waste. Wasting your good intent supporting happy funnybears and pink elephants and opening your arms saying "Less killing, more loving.".. What did Saddam's goons think of that when the villagers they butchered said that? How long do you think they, or Saddam considered that point of view's validity?
Not wanting the death penalty is a mistake, for many reasons, and one of the simplest ones to debate, and therefore one of the first to choose in the order of debate, is that it makes no sense to expect a population of sheep to finance, with anything that can be given a monetary value (be it the grass they eat or the air they breathe or the space they habitate or the time they spend in their pursuits), in other words, that can equate to currency, the containment and sustainment of a pack of wolves interested in nothing but sheep BBQ.
Not wanting the death penalty is a good idea if you've got a good reason to prefer it over every other alternative. What is that reason?
I agree, though, that a preemptive solution is preferable, but that just doesn't seem to be winning any minds. People simply prefer to stay stupid as long as they're comfortable, no matter how much liberties they give up and nanny government they acquit those liberties to, for that comfort.
And that fanatism is that bastard form of reason I mentionned.
Justification is the reason you're arguing right now, you feel your argument is justified. Reason has everything to do with anything that comes out of the human mind. Minds can be fooled, that's nothing new.
What's your point with that? You can't change the past, no, but you can prevent future killings by eliminating the killing factor - the killer criminal.
Removing the killing intent from the criminal would be a very practical solution, a win-win for both the criminal and society, but honestly.. Saddam is not the first nor the last of a long tradition of human society, so far, producing immutably criminal individuals.
Until it's possible to lock these criminals up for such an end, they're being contained to no end.
My point was, unless you've some kind of thought policing going on, you cannot preemptive a first-time criminal about to strike. Every strike after that is prevented by neutralization of the criminal.
All this arguing is definitely not a means to make a case for generalisations or stereotypes.
Well, let's take the hypothetical situation that a country has 1000 prisoners:
The government of this country assigns a budget for maintaining 1000+ prisoners in jails. If out of those prisoners you have 10 or 15 that "deserve" the death sentence then it won't really affect the budget if you don't execute them. If more than 1% are found by the legal system to "deserve" the death penalty then there's something very very wrong with that country or that country's law system and execution is not a "solution", it's just a "finger stuck in a hole" in a sinking boat.
If our hypothetical country comes to a situation where prisons are "overflowing" and costs are skyrocketing (I recently read that in California alone from 1975 to 1999 the costs for prisons have risen from $200 million to $4.3 billion) then again there's something very very wrong with that country or that country's law system and execution is not a "solution", it's just a "finger stuck in a hole" in a sinking boat.
At the time of the Iraq/Iran war Saddam had, and it's well-documented if you weren't alive or were too young to recall at that period, the backing of the "allies" and he didn't have to think about things like that. He was "justified"...
Breizh, I would really like to see the argument for Saddams execution move beyond the coldly rational concern over where material resources are being channelled. This issue's a little more complicated than that...
You're starting to sound like a bit of a goon yourself...
Is this the part where I knee-jerk and reply the same way, e.g. "you sound like an appeaser"?
I don't see for sure what you're getting at: What is more reasonable than cold rationality? Do you mean the warmth of irrationality (what's warmer about it?) is preferable, more impartial, more just? Saddam and his ilk do feel warm and fuzzy doing what they do, and that's my point.
Are you not able to discuss what an opponent's reasoning or motivation may be without assuming the writer supports that reasoning? Is it not possible for you to entertain an idea without accepting it?
Are you saying you could not point out the faults in my reasoning if it was, in fact, a goon's reasoning? Were it such a grossly mistaken point of view, it oughta be easy enough to cut short at its logicaly-frail root.
Anyway, you have to be more specific, otherwise suggesting I'm "sounding" like a goon comes across as another dig like CSU's at my atrocious Don Hertzfeldt avatar being irrefutable proof of my blood thirstiness - if my points are wrong, prove em so, ad hominem won't do the job.
It may be no big deal from an accounting point of view. The quality in question isn't financial proportion but whether it's an appropriate purpose or not, because principles aren't just bent for convenience.
You're either being fit to a T to justice, or corrupt.
I don't think it works out: execution is a one time cost, while a life sentence would average around 20 years of food, etc. No matter how small a percentage of the total prison budget, it's still a susbstantial enough amount to fund a lot of books for schools, etc.
It would be such a symptom, I agree, but preventing future criminals does not resolve present ones; preventing future delinquants is such a piece of cake, in my opinion, it's a non-issue. But it's off-topic:
It doesn't do much (anything?) for answering the question of present unconvertible criminals.
Criminals of that kind usually have years - that equates to thousand(s) of 24 hour portions - to carry out their deeds.. how is a conscious and willful criminality through all that time, and unrepentance after the fact(s) an encouragement to expect criminals didn't really mean to convince everyone else they were and always will be nothing but a burden for society?
They know what they're getting into.
Reagarding "justification": He was accurately justified in his own sense (i.e. Efficiently). He was not mistaken to expect what he got (Reign, up to his demotion, anyway) from what he did (Dictat).
Justification is the reason intended for any given action, AKA Final Cause. Whether that Final Cause, by virtue of its justification, is criminal or not is what matters.
So, no, he wasn't accurately justified outside of the boundaries of his influence. We already covered this:
How is any decision responsible if it is not made for a good reason?
Only by analyzing 'why' or 'what' an opponent wants or thinks, can you ever advance beyond animal reactions. In order to solve a problem, you must first understand it, and the irrelevance of a law abiding folk's (such as those villagers telling Saddam about their families) reasonability to a criminal's (such as one of Saddam's goons) interests is what I mean to make obvious as the reason why you cannot expect a criminal to play nice.
Why you can't reasonably expect that simply locking them up will rehabilitate them, and why without either a way of substracting them from interaction with society in their civil-intolerant state, or any other way that eventually reinserts them in peaceful population, you're asking people to contribute, indefinitely, their fair share of livelihood to others whose only livelihood is to live at the expense of the former's fair share.
That personal contribution is each one's arbitrary, but what's good about it besides being the effection of their free will? Why is choosing not to contribute to that which means you harm reprehensible?
This is basically the one thing I want to know.
As for the big picture of his execution being more complicated than whether capital punishment is right or not, yes that's true.
But we're probably just going to agree that the impartiality of the court he was tried by was suspicious, that it was a mistake from the start, for the US to get involved in Irak, that the Administration have spoilt the concurrence 9-11 made, that the rest of the US foreign policy ruffles too many feathers despite all its good intentions, that mullets and nascar are not cool etc..
There's little to learn in that, and I'd rather learn something new at the cost of something abstract like netiquette than waste time patting each others on the back repeating truisms as tokens of friendship.
It's not easy to treat this matter in isolation. Don't muddy the question with the other issues.
Put aside the 9/11 situation, I don't think this can be pinned on Saddam.
Put aside US policy on Iraq and the oil wealth and their mishandling of the difficult and complex situation.
Just judge Saddam on what he has done to his own people (and family).
He is not a good or a just man, is he? People from many countries and religions seem to agree that he was one of the most evil and oppressive dictators in the 20th Century.
I believe for what he did his people, by their own laws, have judged him fairly. This situation has llittle room for western liberal politically-correct armchair moralists who have never set foot in the middle east.
I think the death sentence is the only sensible option. A bit of his own medicine as it were. But does that make me sick, or lacking in morals? I don't think so. I don't wish death on just anyone (okay, maybe Alonso a couple of times, but mostly in jest), and it's not as though the case against him was purely 'Western', or that he was 'Western' either.
If the powers that be hold him to death, then I think that's great! Can we watch?
Ok, but can we at least come to the conclusion (here as westerners) that to intentionally take another humans life is wrong in every way, no matter how how bad the crime you must not kill.
Al,
911 and the other issues are only mentioned because it's what I expect will come up sooner or later, the same way blame usually comes against "Americans", for the rest of the world's decadence, or whatever.
As for the armchair moralism, I grew up with middle easterners, and in fact still have almost a majority of them among my friends. Including some Syrian Sunnis who motivated me to find a good counter to their apology and martyrdom of anything from Saddam to Muslim customs to innocents killed by the US, and "the West" now and then.
They're still my friends though, and I think it's a mistake to consider their culture as outside the boundaries of human Reason.
Reason is sovereign above all.
Does that conclusion just pop out of thin air or what? Give a reason.
Yes. And you don't like beer either, which makes things worse.
OT.
As al said, there is much muddyng of the waters here. Lets get down tho the crux of it. One person killing another person (or many people). That person's society killing him back. It can't be called anything other than stone cold revenge no matter who the perpertrator is or what circumstance he is in.
It's revenge, and I wish that human civilization was beyond that sort of thing.
But the money of that budget is NEVER going to make it to "buying books for schools" - than budget is ALWAYS assigned to prisons. That's the purpose of assigning a budget.
If I was in favour for the death penalty I'd rather mention the arguments I outlined previously that say "it's cheaper to just kill people". I guess the same idea could be applied to taxes: it's cheaper to kill tax-evaders than hunt them down - they've cost your country a mint by evading taxes (probably much more than it would cost to put them in prison) and if you put them in jail they'll keep on costing you money, if you let them out they'll probably cheat on their taxes some more so let's just kill them because it costs less...
My point on using "cost" as an issue: I don't think capital punishment was inserted to any modern law system with cost cuts in mind, so it's a moot point bring in it up as an argument in favour of it.
As I said I agree with that as long as he was trully judged by his people and so and so forth. I am not saying he wasn't - I have no proof of that and not so eager to get in any such discussion either.
Not to mention that I don't feel I'm entitled to voice a deterministic opinion about his sentence either. I only got caught up in this because I saw many young people insisting that the death penalty is a "good idea" in general for every country.
And it certainly doesn't have room for any right-wings idealists that have probably never left their country, or teenagers that will just echo their conservative parents' views on the drop of a dime, or for people who fling themselves head-over-heels into irrational hatred for the Enemy Of The Year(tm) because their "leader" said so.
EDIT:
For the issue at hand - Saddam's sentence - I can't say. I don't think so either... but then again, I don't think you are directly entitled to an opinion on it as well.
But, for what it's worth, this is my take on the idea of "death penalty":
The "not supporting the death penalty" is not a moral issue for me. I don't support it not because it's a "sin" or "it's bad". I don't support it because it's giving more power to a State to directly control the life and death of it's citizens - that is not what a State is for ("state" as in the institution, not as in "United States"). As it stands, modern States have already enough power over our lives. Even if 1 person is unjustly executed because of a flaw in the law system then it's 1 person too many, and this has happened more than once already.
Erm, no, I was hoping others would agree that it's wrong to take human life, we all already know what your thoughts are on human life, and how criminals should be dealt with Breizh, the post was directed at civilised westerners who think its wrong to take a life for the sake of money.
And for a reason, well thats just something that most people are born with, its to put it plainly: morals,conscience and the basic human atitude tword killing one and other , which you and millions of people in the middle east lack...for what reason they think its okay to slaughter one and other, God knows.
