Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/24/cruel-punishment-from-the-17th.html
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They were savages back then.
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I like to imagine Jesus looking down on and shaking his head at Christianity and saying, “you f***ers just don’t get it.”
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Fucking religions.
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Not nearly as cruel as lifetime in prison for drug possession. We’ve advance so far since then
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wiping your a$$ with that on must be difficult.
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Torquemada: How we doin’, any converts today?
Guards: Not a one, nay nay nay.
Torquemada: We’ve flattened their fingers, we’ve branded their buns, nothing is working…send in the nuns!
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Will short fingers fit in these? Asking for a country.
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INB4 : not so bad as the dick pillory.
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Leave him out of this. I went to school with Dick Pillory.
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I doubt it was intended to be extremely painful. People would have been far more afraid of the humiliation and damage to their reputation than having a sore finger. Community is less central to our daily lives in the 21st century than it was in previous centuries.
I think an equivalent punishment for modern times would be if we were required to post video apologies on our LinkedIn network. For all of our coworkers and future employers to see.
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man, humans are such dicks…
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My sense of empathy way too overactive for me to think very long on things like this. Every time the human imagination is bent toward the creation of an innovative means of causing misery, we earn that big meteor strike a little more.
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Reminds me of a torture device I saw at the Tower of London- essentially just a simple metal loop you’d lock around a person kneeling on the floor with their head down, to keep them from getting back up. There were more elaborate devices, but that one really stuck with me as a horrific idea, imagining being stuck like that, weight on your legs, back bent… restricting a person’s movement in simple ways would be extremely painful and traumatic, within a surprisingly short amount of time.
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the mortise and tenon right angle rights of passage
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And of course this meant that the punishment could backfire if used on someone sufficiently popular.
The 19th-century British naval hero Thomas Cochrane, the model for Patrick O’Brian’s Captain Jack Aubrey, was sentenced to the pillory in 1814 after being (probably wrongfully) convicted of stock exchange fraud. The sentence was commuted after the government realised that there would probably be a riot as people tried to free him- Cochrane had also been expelled from Parliament on his conviction, but reelected unopposed shortly after.
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also, this reminds me of Edward-40-hands. One on each hand would be a real hinder.
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barbaric treatment for a sister too.
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