This is, by far, the coldest possible calculation to make upon Castro’s death. However, it is worth pondering that while it is human to desire retribution, punishment for wrongs and/or vindication, there is a monetary price for fulfilling those baser instincts. It’s worth pondering further how a portion of that nearly million dollars could assist Castro’s victims ease their suffering and help them achieve their desired outcomes in life. I’d say at this point, that helping his victims in their recovery attempts would be tax dollars well spent.
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Perhaps someone just needs to come out and say it: Fuck Ariel Castro. He is dead. The world is a much better place without him.
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Good riddance.
It’s pretty awful to say “well, he was definitely unfathomably cruel, but we didn’t give him the chance to shine!” as if there’s an balance sheet to ethics and morality. I see you took one look at Godwin’s law and floored the accelerator.
The issue here is not your anxiety about the state of the world. It’s about a monster who died, and what he took from three women. I find your argument incredibly offensive and disingenuous.
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The man was already in prison for life, isolated and unable to harm anybody. I don’t see how his death changes anything, or how it could make the world “a much better place”, or any good that could come from being happy about it.
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None of us should celebrate the death of any living creature we did not personally know, regardless of how necessary or deserved that death might have been.
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I don’t see how you can feel anything but pity for such a pathetic creature.
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Not that I’m personally celebrating of having a party over his death, but I don’t find it difficult to understand how his death can bring a measure of relief to many people.
Some psychopaths have harassed and taunted their victims even from behind bars. Considering the sustained, vicious treatment and control he subjected his victims to (including his former wife and the daughter he fathered with the one of the victims), there could have been a possibility for him to seek any means possible to remain a presence in these women’s minds. There is now no chance for him, for whatever unfathomable reason, ever reappearing into his victims’ (or any further victims’) lives in any way. That shadow, however large or small, is now gone.
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aa[quote=“Glitch, post:41, topic:8944, full:true”]
Ahh. The requisite droll, topical, “witty” comment.
[/quote]
Ahh, the requisite sanctimonius comment.
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I’ll just leave this here.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/ariel-castro-failed-by-system
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There could be a number of reasons for his death. He might have been taking the easy way out or trying to avoid justice (or the reactions of other inmates to having the most hated neighbor in their prison), or he might have been killed. His own testimony suggests that he felt he couldn’t control his own addictions and he wrote a note around 2004 saying that he wanted any of his money to go to the girls he had abducted. He may just have been too weak at that point either to take his own life or to release the girls and give himself up, but then he couldn’t face his own demons after a few months of solitary confinement. He does seem to have had some idea that what he was doing was wrong, but may just have rationalized it to some extent in the years after his note, at least to the point that he didn’t do anything about it.
Honestly, this whole story just makes me all the more sorry about the situation of many child brides around the world. For many of them, their life is very similar - no sense of agency or freedom of movement, threats of violence in the home etc., but there’s not even a sense that people are out there looking for them. The family can be complicit in the abuse and escape carries genuine risks. As there was a wedding involved, the ‘husband’ feels legitimate in considering the woman as his property, and may not even have the feelings of guilt that Castro had. Amanda Berry had the sense that her family and the press hadn’t given up on her, which would have given her a small sense of hope to hang on to. In some countries, culture and religion combine to support the abuser and condemn the victim in cases like these. I have literally no way of comprehending what women must go through in their early teens or younger knowing that they are being given up by everyone they know into a situation that could be as bad or worse than this, without any hope of getting out of it.
Your link isn’t working. Here’s a working one, though: http://www.theonion.com/articles/ariel-castro-failed-by-system,33733/
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OK, I’ve thought about it. Good riddance.
All my leftover sorrow, pity, empathy, salvage and/or belief that they will invent a cure for cancer will be going to his victims.
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I liked your post, but the fact is that we should care about the welfare of prisoners, and not just because some of them may be innocent. In this regard, condemnation of the crimes people commit should be kept separate from concerns about their well-being while they are in the care of the state. There are people who would be happy to hear that he would risk being attacked (physically or sexually) or killed by other inmates or by the guards. Honestly, that seems like using the other inmates as a sort of proxy for our own ideas of how we’d like to retaliate. You could argue that the world is a better place without him in it (or even that he deserved a daily butt-rape for the rest of his life). I certainly don’t feel sorry for him, but we should take his death seriously from the perspective of the criminal justice system, regardless of how serious his crimes were. If he was killed, we should know about it and his killers should face justice. If he killed himself, there should be an investigation into whether it was right to take him off suicide watch. Ultimately, the statements “Ariel Castro deserved to die” and “Ariel Castro was failed by the justice system” could both be true.
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No, that’s not the issue. He was in harmless in prison, and now he’s gone. The only people who have any right to feel personally or passionately about him were those who he impacted directly and those who knew him. Not you nor I.
I’m a more worried about everybody else, all the people think it’s morally acceptable to feel any sort of joy, vindication, or pleasure at the death of ANY other human being.
The mental hoops I see people jumping through to personally dislike the man are honestly disturbing, he should exist inside your monkeysphere, in which case you should treat him as a human. . . or for most of us outside of it, in which case he just shouldn’t be relevant.
Look at you, finding an argument that you didn’t fully understand 'incredibly offensive’ before wondering if maybe I had a slightly different perspective. So much emotion, no good reason.
Jiminy H Christmas. I skim through some of the replies and I’m just flabbergasted. Maybe I shouldn’t be. It seems like what ever bat shit insane view you can think of, someone will own it and defend it.
This man deserves no pity. He was a monster. He plead guilty to 937 counts. He was sentenced to life plus 1000 years. He imprisoned, beat, and raped 3 women over 10 years. He blames the victims, claiming none of them were virgins and that they wanted sex.
Taking himself out was the most honorable thing he did in his whole life. He saved the tax payers hundreds of thousands of dollars, and brought closure to the victims. If only more monsters were so thoughtful.
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I don’t think people are celebrating. I think they are bristling at being told (by @William_Holz) how the world lost the man who would cure cancer, create clean energy, etc., if only he had the chance, while the same poster doesn’t say how 30 cumulative years of the victims’ lives could have been applied to the same. And we are bristling at everybody who excuses him due to being broken while not attributing anything to malice, forethought, and calculated cruelty.
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In a slightly different world, everybody now feeling no pity over the death of Ariel Castro gathered instead to sing beautiful, mournful hymns of regret at his lost potential. Therefore, you really can’t chide them for doing otherwise in this world.
In other words, the moral framework you seem to be proposing does not function worth doodely-squat.
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That’s. .actually a clever observation.
Might I propose that we’re actually amazingly complicated, and are more influenced by our environments and defaults than pretty much anything else (according to actual evidence and such, you don’t need my help there, watch how entire societies change at the drop of a hat, usually because of war . . . the only change is their context). But yeah, I like the where you’re coming from.
I’m mostly trying to get the point (that I learned from a far better person than myself) out there, because I’m constantly fighting the trap.
We’re trained to want that simple, tight ending where the bad guy dies. That’s our context, you even see it in DISNEY movies! How often does one of those end up in actual redemption for the ‘bad guy’? But that’s just training, that’s not how things are supposed to be if we’re being good people rather than clinging to our monkey roots.
Like I said, he’s gone. . but we’re still around. . and we need people who think that ‘begrudging the happiness of another’ and ‘wishing ill on a stranger’ should be socially unacceptable.
Our culture, our media, all the decisions that are presented to us FRAME things. My beloved couldn’t watch the news because it HURT her, because she knew that actual Iraqi citizens didn’t order a box of explosions, that having several foreclosed homes for every homeless person was flawed and that ‘sorry, my hands are tied’ was a lazy, crazy statement. She never made up suffering, there was enough real stuff to go around. She just felt pity and worry.
So, I’m trying to be better than I was. She was right and I was wrong, I think that was a good lesson. It’s okay to be human, but we shouldn’t feed the worst parts of us.
I’m tired of seeing good people turned into angry, closed minded children because they don’t like it being pointed out that there’s something WRONG with enjoying the suffering or death of anybody else, ever.
I was pretty happy when Bin Laden died. She put me in my place. It was uncomfortable seeing myself through her eyes, but the only way to get better is to embrace your mistakes rather than hide from them.
I’m pretty sure people are on more of an analog scale than something polar.
I didn’t feel I had to talk about ‘his victims’,do you know them personally? Does anyone here? No . . . I didn’t think so. Instead, people are projecting in an effort to maintain dehumanization, which is a very, very bad trait.
Instead, I think the most important part of the statement was the lesson -I- learned. Enjoying the death or suffering of another (I’ve done it too) is a poison and ruins us. Turning a stranger into a cartoon and then saying their death is ‘okay’ and ‘they deserved it’ is lazy, and it poisons us. A few people here get it, even though it’s a pretty uncomfortable thought, and it leads to a lot of rabbit holes of rationalization unless they or you were far better people than I was or am.
It’s not about him at all, it’s about people’s reactions to him.
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You are wise, sir.
And in smaller context, what has been done to Castro’s family? How many people are related to him and because of that forced to dehumanize him themselves in public or face some degree of scorn? How many are hurt by the media frenzy, not realizing that a prison shouldn’t be a zoo of horror?
Just because a thought’s uncomfortable doesn’t make it wrong, I know I balked at the thought at first too. I was all happy when Bin Laden died, Rebecca was sad because she just discovered he had a family, and their lives had just taken a huge turn south in an already mad situation.
It’s conversations like this that help some people percolate to the surface. If we’re going to go there,let’s not be LAZY, right? We’ve learned life is more complicated than ‘Beauty and the Beast’
