I’ll just walk away at this point then. Thanks for clarifying.
3 Likes
So, they deliberated for 3 hours. I wonder what games they played on their phones for the other 2 hours and 59 minutes.
5 Likes
Nor about me! I’m pretty inconsistent in my ability to apply Buddhist principles so this isn’t me dictating decrees from a lofty pedestal either!
I’m just sad at this whole thing. Sad for the murdered folks. Sad for racial violence. Sad for our bloody history in America. Sad, even, that we’re going to just kill this guy, deservedly or not, because violence is violence and it is all shit.
11 Likes
Same here. I just would be outraged if it wasn’t applied here. Then again if it wasn’t and that was the basis for successfully challenging the constitutionality of the law, I might be happier? I dunno. It’s shit… a world where some ass kills 9 innocent people is shit. It’s all shit. (not really but… shit)
I know, but if you can convince people that the death penalty is inappropriate for even the worst offenders, then it becomes obvious that it needs to be abolished entirely.
If you point to wrongful convictions, then, at best, you’ll only convince them that we need to fix wrongful convictions. If you point to racial imbalance, or harm to people who have diminished mental capacity, or a systemic bias against the poor, or anything what that shows them that the implementation of the system is broken, then you can only convince them that the death penalty as implemented now is wrong.
On the other hand, if you can convince them to feel compassion for the worst of the worst, then you’ve destroyed the very foundation of their argument, and the rest will collapse with the merest breath.
It worked in Poland; perhaps it could work in the US.
11 Likes
I didn’t take it that way. I took it as genuine concern, and I do appreciate the sentiment. I just want to avoid tangents as I have the thread discipline of a cat in a shiny object factory.
2 Likes
During the trial phase, victims and family members wanted to hit the Roof.
I wonder at the true power of a properly researched and technologically advanced psychedelic pharmacology. Could such technology be used to effectively ‘treat’ the bad personality out of existence without killing the underlying human? Is that still death?
4 Likes
It’s been nearly twenty years since I was introduced to the concept on Babylon 5, and I’m still uncertain as to the answers to those questions.
6 Likes
Either that or he didn’t necessarily want to be a martyr but it was so important to him that he be seen as a “noble race warrior” that it cut off any other alternative. Probably he wanted to be both a “noble race warrior” and a martyr, for the reasons you give, though.
Nor I. But if we’re going to have a death penalty and we’re going to use it, this is an appropriate case in which to do so. So…
1 Like
That, and also anyone who supports capital execution is effectively saying they’re OK with entrusting to the state the power to kill one of its own citizens according to certain legal provisions whose fulcrum is the moral judgement of an extremely small sample of the population with no background in legal reasoning whatsoever.
Replace ‘moral judgement’ with ‘sense of impunity’ and you get a pretty accurate description of police killings of citizens such as Eric Garner.
6 Likes
or Abdulrahman al-Awlaki
His father was a US citizen as well and murdered by drone without even a fig leaf trial. The case of the son is just more obviously egregious even to GOP types.
9 Likes
Had the same thought. I’ll google it later on maybe.
1 Like
I don’t think giving the government the power to erase people until their personality is gone would be a good thing. “Oh, we’re not killing them so it is ok for all of these lesser crimes.” I think I’ve ready dystopian fiction with this.
2 Likes
I will cheer when he’s dead, but I will not celebrate his execution.
2 Likes
I’ll take the opposite approach that many people council for when a good person leaves this world: I won’t celebrate his death but rather I will mourn his life.
8 Likes
I had written something like “this touches on an idea I consider the last stop on the train through moral-killing country” or something to that effect but removed it for brevity.
I agree that providing a government with some power is an invitation to see that power abused.
But. I only entertain the idea in lieu of killing someone. I’ve mentioned before that I think pharmacological re-tasking of the brain should be a last-ditch tool at our disposal. Emphasis on ‘last-ditch’.
Tasers were supposed to be a last ditch weapon instead of killing people.
4 Likes
Let me try this one again.
That damn Prometheus, who the hell does he think he is?
2 Likes
Because your question is a philosophical rabbit hole, I’ll limit my participation in this side discussion to just this post.
- Loss of all memories = death of person’s life story (biographical death) and relationships (interpersonal death)
- Loss of personality = death of person (intrapersonal death)
- Loss of vital functions = death of organism (biological death)
There is no medication that can transform an extreme personality such as that of Roof into one that’s socially productive (or failing that, benign). There’s a reason why the DSM has personality disorders placed on a separate axis from all of the other psychiatric disorders. They’re incredibly complex and highly resistant to change.
You can, however, medicate a person like Roof heavily enough that they’ll barely be capable of planning a grocery shopping trip, let alone mass murder.
1 Like
