Fine, give me a couple of hours. How these writers have wasted Anson Mount is a crime. I even like the other bridge crew and their actors, but the writers keep working hard to make me hate them. I know the "talent" all approve, but to quote Hitchcock: "I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."
I'll jump back in really quick to say I enjoyed our exchange and I disagree with others who are arguing with you that capital punishment needs to exist for the sake of retribution. I think that's a really bad justification.
I didn't continue our thread because I felt we reached an impasse, in a good way. We would have had to move on to harder questions like the value of a life and human dignity. Good topics to discuss, but honestly, I wasn't really up to it.
If you're into or interested in moral theory and/or the question of human dignity, this is a controversial lecture by Alasdair MacIntyre who is considered one of the preeminent moral theorists of the 20th century (https://youtu.be/q57wxXziKeQ). Getting into moral theory is pretty challenging because, once you move past "what seems fair", shit gets really hard really fast. Still learning myself.
Well, first off, u/Kienan 's ideas are far more workable as things stand right now. Just change the law to increase sentence length and eliminate parole. Legally speaking it's pretty straight forward. As far as costs, I don't know if it's true, but organizations that oppose capital punishment claim its more expensive (legal costs associated with numerous appeals?).
My "hang the bastards" approach would require significant overhaul of the legal system.
This has reminded me to read up on the history of incarceration. Interestingly, I think you and I are having a very old conversation. The very idea of holding people for any amount of time for their crimes is fairly modern. Usually, punishment was meted out based on some sort of capital-corporal dichotomy. Steal someone's purse? You go to the scaffold. Beat your wife? You go to the stocks for a day or two. I know that Kings and Lords may have held a few in literal dungeons, but this was not a society wide system.
Then in the 18th century, progressives (or social reformers as we used to call them) decided that incarceration could cover some of the lesser capital crimes and some of the greater non-capital crimes. It should be noted that from the very beginning the idea behind incarceration was rehabilitation, not separating dangerous people from society. Long and life sentences came about as a sort of stopgap measure.
I should stop here because, like I said, I need to do more reading on this subject to say anything intelligent.
First, yes I think armed robbery, by way of example, merits capital punishment. I guess that the sticking point is the practicality of widespread use of life (or very long) sentences as an alternative to capital punishment. I simply don't believe that handing out a life sentence to every violent criminal is practical. We were paroling violent criminals long before dindu justice became the norm because the system would crack under the weight. We would need prisons the size of small cities.
If they offend again, lock them up for life.
Remember that in the case of the proverbial stick-up man, the new offence probably cost an innocent person their life.
I used to agree with your position but have since reconsidered. My current view is that the use of the death penalty is far too limited. Let me explain why. For my entire life the death penalty has been only used for various forms of murder, and aa such it's easy to view executing someone as closing the barn after the horses have run. This is not how societies have used capital punishment for most of history. There is a well know principle among beat cops that a stick-up man WILL eventually shoot, and probably, kill someone. We don't do life sentences for a criminal who points a gun at a store clerk and if we did it would be decried as unjust. But people who do behave this way are going to eventually kill someone after they do a stint for armed robbery and go back to their usual ways. This is why societies have usually hung brigands and horse thieves.
As to the power of the state, if it is going to prohibit polite society from taking out the trash on its own, it has to shoulder the responsibility. An unfortunate tradeoff for those who wish limit the power of the state, but one that has to be made or you wind up like San Franisco will legalized brigandry (by people who WILL eventually take a life over $20).
EDIT: As for the risk of executing the innocent, there is a reason Blackstone's ratio is a ratio, and why he put it at about 10 to 1 and not 10,000,000 to 1.
Remember these are the people that called Chaya Raichik (libsoftiktok) a domestic terrorist for simply reposting their own positions and content.
Dude, I don't mind the JQ shitting up the board, but maybe wait for your handshake icon to go away before you make three posts in an hour.
You quote mining for something?
I'll cop to watching some nuTV here, but only because it had a cool idea that it completely failed to deliver on. In the first episode, of AppleTV's "Hijack" Idris Elba's character is implied to be some sort of amoral super negotiator that works for all sorts of business/government deals. When hijackers take the plane, he goes to them and essentially offers to work for them. This could have made great TV if the MC was actually working for the hijackers to ensure his own survival, but they don't even stick with it through the second episode and the show becomes a boring plane hijacking movie stretched over 7 hours. The show is shit.
The incompetent white male, powerful smart women, wise minority themes are so consistent that the show could make a decent drinking game, and I've watched the rest in amusement just (correctly) guessing what every character will do based on their race/sex.
vibrant
Princess syndrome
well-dressed
Consooomer
put together
Overconfident
dynamic
Unfocused
mostly seem to have easy conversation
And unable to say anything interesting or deeper than a puddle.
Imagine creating a bioweapon and it turns out to less severe than the common cold.
No reason a bioweapon needs to be particularly virulent. If its just bad enough to do economic or cultural/phycological damage its a good weapon. In fact, the idea of a non-virulent bioweapon is a pretty good one.
Petards are not hoisted; they do the hoisting. The expression "hoisted by his own petard" describes being killed by the explosive device that you are handling, a petard being a proto-explosive device developed in the 16th century.
Jefferson, more than any other founders, was a poster child for Enlightenment thinking. I suspect he would have been happy to see religion and church go the way of the dodo. However, I do think that what set Jefferson and his American colleagues apart from French revolutionaries was their recognition of the danger of the State, particularly one run by the mob. While the French gleefully torn down Chruch and Monarchy and went on a victory lap, the Americans understood that a democracy could suck too. So, while Jefferson probably would have preferred an enlightenment humanist society, he was too smart to think using the state to achieve this goal was a good idea.
codification of "Separation of church and state"
I'd like to add here, for those who don't know, that this is not a Constitutional concept, although courts and legislatures have sort of incorporated it in an ad hoc manner. Any sensible reading of the First Amendment would conclude that the Government is barred from intruding on religious matters; it does not automatically follow that the religious (or even religious institutions) are barred from civic matters. It is very unlikely that the Bill of Rights was somehow intended to be binding on "church" given that the whole point of the bill of rights was to place restrictions on government actors to the benefit of non-government actors.
"Separation of church and state" has served as a means to exclude people and ideas that are opposed by progressives from the public sphere. No one can explain to me why the moral theories of a Third wave feminists have a place in government but the moral traditions of the Christain West do not.
more interested in controlling discourse on the right
Remember kids, the Neoconservatives first major victory was not against progressives, but Goldwater conservatives. They operate this way to this very day.
They always deny their agenda and frame it as "its just being a decent person".
This here is the primary and most important tactic to understand. It preys on the sympathy of some and the pathological altruism of others. With the advent of kiddie drag queens, it would seem that the "slippery slope" does not exist with progressives and they can use "being a decent person" to justify anything.
It's a particularly gross bit of moral sleight of hand. Only their ideas of morality are true, and only for the moment: they will change. Anyone, past or present, who does not fall in line is morally bankrupt. This includes me, you, and 99.999[repeating]% of everyone who has ever lived.
(fyi malls still exist too!)
Malls could have been a pretty good solution to a growing problem. I say this because I live a few minutes from a defunct mall that predates the behemoths of the 80s and 90s, and I've thought about how it could be made useful. Imagine a mall that had a grocer, a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker. Add in an ACE Hardware, post office and Doctors office and it would be pretty useful. I think malls could have been a useful response to American's car driven city design, but for some reason they just wound up being consoooom product centers.
Edit: used the word "useful" four times like a grade schooler, leaving it as a monument to poor writing.
“believe whatever you want about yourself, but [...]"
Going to have to disagree here. I don't see how a village, much less a civilization, can tolerate the acceptance of people going about with a delusional sense of the world. You will always end up having to confront the belief; either because you got out ahead of it, or the nutters eventually demand to be taken seriously. I'll add to this the idea that BOTH progressives and conservatives seem to spit out when convenient:
"You should be free to do what you want as long as its not hurting anyone."
Nope. But that's an idea that some "conservatives" hide behind. Neoconservatives, that is to say Trotskyites.
“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.” ― Theodore Dalrymple
Yeah, they often seem to fixate on "boy/girl" rather than "man/woman." I've seen it claimed that it's because they were "robbed" of the "correct" type of childhood. I, of course, don't buy that; suspect there's something a bit more sinister there.
Utah's largest health care provider looked like it was on the path to expanding gender-affirming surgery options for adults. But in January, the state passed a law banning gender-affirming care for minors. And now the hospital system says it will not offer those additional adult services.
I occasionally subject myself to NPR on the commute, and heard this piece yesterday. Journalists claim to be puzzled as to why this hospital would cancel this program after setting it up and hiring a "surgeon" to lead it. They refused to make the connection between the lack of chemically castrated minors and the need for customers for these assholes.
Add to this that crime and poor behavior causes poverty rather than poverty causing crime and poor behavior.
The ERA won't pass this time for the same reason it didn't pass last time: the language on equality is so plain and straightforward that it would negatively affect women. Byebye "women owned" set asides, hello selective service.
Calling someone antisemitic at this point is going to make me actually investigate their views
I've been using ADL extremist lists as reading guides for years. I recommend it.
The other issue with charity is that all progressives are statists. They view private charities as a threat to their notion of "the state is mother, the state is father." They want control, and if religious or non-religious organizations are tackling social problems on their own then they are encroaching on the power of the state (which progressives believe is rightfully theirs). When those stories of prosecutors going after people for feeding the homeless its always in a blue city.