When I was 18 I ruined an Amnesty International meeting at school because I was a strong supporter of capital punishment and I intervened to defend it, but not long after that meeting I started to think about it to discuss my own positions, and I discovered that I had no good reason whatsoever to support them. It was a saddening moment, a huge achievement and part of a continous process.
It's expensive in emotional terms, but I'm convinced it's worth it.
You're missing the point. The law does not exist to appease a wronged individual, it exists to define a society by what it deems acceptable of its members.
So, if someone raped and murdered my daughter then I could reasonably expect them to receive the longest custodial sentence that the law provides for. If I wanted them dead then that would be an entirely selfishly motivated desire and it would not be the state's responsibility to kill them - it would be mine.
A prison isn't a luxury hotel, so let's stop pretending that it is. If you think incarceration is the easy life, then why aren't you objecting to all prison sentences? And why are criminals so keen to avoid getting locked up?
I also don't believe that seeing a convicted man executed would in any way accelerate the process of grieving, but maybe that's a social thing too - perhaps it does in places where capital punishment is generally accepted.
I believe, wholeheartedly, that when you take a life as punishment, you're no better than the person you're killing, whether you're a government doing it with a machine, a supporter of that government's policy or an individual doing it with your bare hands.
All I see when I see pro-death penalty arguments is a desire for vengeance, pure and simple. It can be dressed up with some intelligent arguing and moral justifications but when you strip those away you're really not left with much more than "he killed someone, he must die as well." I think we're a smarter species than that.
I like it. And it seems somewhat hypocritical to me when a country presumes to "spread democracy and freedom" while its prisoners can still be gassed, electrocuted or injected with lethal poisons as punishment. With an audience, no less! Is injecting homegrown terrorist Tim McVeigh with poison in front of 50 people really that far removed from the public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or the stonings in Pakistan (both close US allies, who have yet to feel the embrace of US democracy-spreading for some reason)? Those methods may seem more brutal and barbaric, but the only real difference is the technology in play. The US prefers anonymous killing machines where other countries use more hands-on, personal methods. The end result is the same, though: one dead prisoner & many people still left grieving over the results of his crime. I don't think killing a criminal could help the grieving process at all, despite the visceral desires of the affected to remove him from the earth. But if you're the kind of person that can be satisfied by someone's death then you're probably not that far removed from the personality that drove the criminal to kill in the first place. Maybe that's something that bears further thought: you're afraid you might be just like the guy in the gas chamber. We hate those things we fear because we don't want to become them. The more they scare us, the more we hate them. The more we hate them, the less rational we're likely to be when confronting them and that's when we start making decisions based on pure emotion. I think that's the heart of the matter: you want to kill the criminal because you fear and hate him and want him gone, not because you think it will stop other people from committing the same crimes. Deterrence is an illusion. People will always kill other people whether the death penalty exists or not. They'll always hurt kids and rape people and do horrible things to each other regardless of whether the threat of poison or electrocution or beheading hangs over them. What happens to them after they're caught truly is the measure of a modern society, and I do not believe a nation can truly call itself civilised until they remove from their penal codes all forms of retribution-based punishment. It's barbaric, bronze-age, Biblical and entirely inappropriate for life in the 21st century.
Exactly what kind of punishment is NOT retribution based? That is the point of punishment. Punishment means retribution, whether it's being locked in a cell or killed, it's still punishment and the motivations are fundamentally the same - otherwise we would just let criminals go free.
I think your theory about being afraid of becoming a murderer is quite astray as well, sounds too much like left wing psychobabble IMO.
The most obvious explanation is usually the correct one
Yeah, punishment is, in a sense, retribution. What I'm talking about is pure, tit-for-tat revenge. When someone robs a bank or rapes someone, the state doesn't rob their house or have a state-employed rapist rape them right back. The state deprives them of their freedom and say "you have relinquished your right to live as part of a free society" for a number of years, or for life. But if someone murders a person or commits another capital crime, a state-employed killer kills them. It's straight-up, mirror-image retribution. If there were indeed rapists employed by the state to violate sex offenders, can you imagine the outcry, even among conservatives? Sure, noone likes a rapist (and noone should) but what possible purpose could be served by having them violated? So what purpose (other than pure vengeance) is served by killing a captive? He's dead. Now what? Instead of one family grieving a death, you now have two. You've increased the total sum of human misery on the planet. Not something to be proud of in my opinion.
There's nothing paticularly left-wing about my psychobabble either. If we don't examine the motives and reasoning behind peoples' actions, both individually and on a societal scale, progress simply can't be made. Social progress has always been achieved when people have examined their society's actions & behaviours, the reasoning behind them and determined whether those actions & behaviours should be continued, limited our outright disallowed. Such examination is always at the root of any social upheaval, from the fall of the Roman Empire, the outlawing of slavery, the rise and fall of European communism, through to the current socialist revolution in places like Venezuela and Bolivia. Basically, people look at something and decide if it's good for them. If enough people think it's not, things change.
This societal introspection is how so many modern societies have arrived at the decision to scrap the death penalty: they analysed what benefits it gave, the motives behind it, what impacts it had and determined that it was in the better interest of society not to kill criminals anymore, regardless of their crime. I don't want people to resort to terms like "psychobabble". I think any discussion of capital punishment should include thorough, logical examinations of the motives behind killing people as a form of punishment. I may well have been astray with my "fear of becoming a murderer" theory - if it were that simple to begin with. It was meant to illustrate that, a lot of the time, people would rather dispose of a problem than face it. Also, there's also the distinct possibility that the condemned person wasn't simply an evil killer, but shared more with you than you would ever be prepared to give him credit for, like normal human motivations and feelings. I know it would be very difficult to look at the person who'd killed your child and think "this person is just a human who made a terrible choice. He shouldn't be killed, no matter how much I feel like doing it myself". I'm sure for some people it'd be a lot easier to just watch him die and get on with your life, rather than suck your vengeful pride in and ask for mercy. I analyse human motivation as a hobby and I can't help but apply it to almost everything
Lefty, hippy, whatever I am, I simply can't abide humans choosing to kill each other, either as punishment by the state, as collateral damage from a stray bomb, as grey-suited figures in a far-away bunker ordering thousands into the fray, or in a dark alley looking for a few bucks.
I don't see it as left or right. It's not a political question, it's a humanitarian question. Politics may profess answers, but it they cannot claim the question.
No, the most obvious explanation is invariably an uneducated guess.
There ya go. Humanitarianism. I work for a humanitarian organisation (the Red Cross, you may have heard of it) and believe me, there's more than enough death & misery in the world already through famine, wars, natural disasters and human foolishness. I simply don't see the sense of causing more at home, in our well-fed democratic countries.
All the best ditching the dhurries mate :up: Stilton is a good reward for not smoking - it should keep your mouth busy as well as satisfy your need to smell bloody awful
I signed the petition and included a rousing anti death penalty speech in the comment area. I feel suitably happy, maybe I even helped save this guy's life.
Whether he deserved it or not (seems not) I am ferociously anti capital punishment, because I'm not a hate filled nutter.
I'm seeing it this way, those who disagree with death penalty are thinking with their emotions and are feeling that human life is more valuable than let's say cow's life.
Those agreeing with death penalty are thinking coldly with logic without any emotion in it, however some part of them are thinking only with rage/revenge and are like first group but also fail to be any better than those criminals as they can't control their bloodthurst or something like that.
But I don't know how far off I'm with this, could be that there is more groups in it too.
However if you think some cases with cold logic without any emotions, there is much cheaper ways to solve problem than feeding prisoner 40 years or more as there is not going to be day that such individual is capable of return society, some persons just have fault in their minds that can't be fixed. That is something that we can proof to be true.
One thing I have wondered if it is just part of us being different that some are murdering people or steal cars etc or is it just how people are taught as a kid.
Humans don't taste too good, also energy in meat is not too great and some hippies are going berserk about such activity
But if we think logically, in some situations eating human is only reasonable thing to prevent dying for hunger (that is if we exclude emotions from equation).
I'm just thinking that perhaps some individuals would not be much different even with differnet childhood and values teached to them?
Reports say it tastes sorta like pork - which I find reasonable all things considered.
And hygiene - there's no telling what toxins they've consumed if they're not young enough or haven't been fed bio-produce. So we should probably eat hippy-kids that will be toxin free and tender enough, thus getting rid of the hippy-problem mentioned above.
Well, if we take that theory then perhaps that "thing" they have "in" them that gets triggered off would be channeled in a totally different path. Who knows, maybe it's the same thing artists or athletes get when they're "in the zone".
And I'm certainly not a "hate filled nutter.", and in fact I'm generally told that I am "too nice" of a guy, not the opposite.
And I find it dreadfully ironic that all the self-proclaimed logical, academic, humanitarian people are using the backwards argument that capital punishment supporters are the ones thinking with their emotions, in fact, it's quite the opposite. In fact, the supporters (depending on their argument) are the ones using cold hard facts, overlooking the "emotional upheaval" of ridding the Earth and our "advanced society" of a scumbag who's agenda is solely to put our safety and the lives of others in danger.
Any any other situation in life, I suspect your logic would lead you to avoid and or dispose of situations or circumstances that could lead to your harm, or the harm of loved ones. In every other situation, you would seek to ensure peace and safety. If someone in society breaches their trust in certain ways, to me they are no longer a part of society - but a hindrance to it both socially and economically, and you really can't argue with that. Those people are in no way contributing to your "advanced society", they are completely and utterly hindering it from every standpoint imaginable.
