Death doesn’t break people, @enso, it is simply one terminus of their linear experience of timeless reality. It’s nothing to be feared or despised… and cannot be avoided. We’ll all die. Not all of us have to be painfully psychologically maimed first.
Your edit helped me understand the question.
Personally, I don’t think changing someone’s personality is the same as death. I don’t think sane humans can avoid environmental conditioning, and if someone wants to be de/reprogrammed that’s just taking control of one’s personal evolution. On the other claw, though, if someone else wants to forcibly manipulate my psyche to make it more congruent with their ideas of right and wrong - no thanks, please just let me jump out a window or something! That’s not morally, ethically or pragmatically the same as killing someone, but it’s potentially worse. The ultimate slavery is to have one’s mind controlled by one’s enemies.
So I guess intent and consent are big issues - for me - in this. Parents mold their children all the time (for what they hope is a child’s benefit, but generally without consent) while we restrict by law the techniques advertisers and educators may use to shape human minds for profit or politics.
Soon enough we will be able to detect and correct things like paedophilia before any crime is committed. Is any government entitled to do so? What if someone convicted of future crime prefers death? What if the process is hijacked by political ideologues? We should be thinking about all this before the choices are made for us…
Edit: But I’m out for the night, you’ll have to carry on without me!
You are literally and figuratively immersed in culture. Everyone is always forcing their way of thinking on you.
Your very concepts of right and wrong were developed through interactions with others.
This is not to say that mind control is not a Bad Thing .
I’ve read/played “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”.
Probably an intelligent and morally sound exploration of our options is preferable to removing the ability to ever have options again.
I don’t believe the universe ceases to exist when I die, I have object permanence, and my current working knowledge of reality includes special relativity, therefore my experience of time is subjective, completely an emergent property of the meat engine my consciousness inhabits. Time is not a constant, therefore the concept of the future as something that doesn’t exist is fundamentally wrong, the future is just whatever experiences my moving point of consciousness hasn’t visited as considered from any given temporal location.
I enjoy the cessation of consciousness that sleep grants me. If death is merely an end to consciousness, and I will experience no more, that sounds very restful! Hopefully, the proper coda to a life well lived, but if not, at least a final end to suffering.
But we’re kind of beating this into a pulp. I think everyone sees the sources of our conflicting viewpoints, regardless of whether they share them or not; and for my part I am quite willing to respect death penalty opponents and will happily ally with them to seek prison reform.
However repeatedly hearing someone say that anyone who’s spent more than a year in prison would be better off dead really rankles me.
You’re talking about people I know, my brother’s father, and possibly my dad. I don’t actually know how long my dad was in for when I was little. They don’t wish they were dead and neither do their families, including my family.
Having people you know hauled off to prison is pretty bad but I can’t even imagine if I’d had to grow up seeing person after person being taken away and killed by the state.
I’m sorry your family members had to live through that, and I don’t wish them dead.
I know what it’s like to have friends and relatives hauled off to jail, and I know what it’s like to have friends and acquaintances brutally murdered. Those experiences are part of why I feel the way I do.
I do not agree that this guy will be considered a martyr. I don’t think this will be considered noble in anyone’s eyes, even white supremacists. I think that (and I could be wrong) that most supremacists believe in segregation, not murder. To think that this is, in any way, going to further any cause, is delusional. This was a fantastic example of someone who needed the death penalty. That this happened in a church makes it even more horrific. My heart goes out to everyone involved.
There is definitely a popular movement (I believe one of their members was elected president or something?) that is committed to segregation rather than to genocide. I wouldn’t give them too much credit, though, genocide is lurking under the surface. A rational strategist for how to accomplish that is probably going to think that Roof set the cause back rather than moved it forward, but maybe we shouldn’t assume rationality? If you shake the white nationalist movement on a tray of rational-shaped holes, I’m not sure anything falls through.
You keep telling yourself this, if it helps you sleep at night. Given that many white supremacists already glorify a mass murder and then lie about what that mass murderer did, well… But sure, if you want to play that game, not all white supremacists…
What are they going to do when they keep running up against all of us who wish to thwart their plans. What did the nazis run up against, when they ran up against opposition to their plans for lebensraum?
Although I do believe that white supremacists like the Trump victory, I don’t believe he’s “their guy”. I think that is buying into the scare tactics of his opponents. If he were a segregationist, he would not appoint any minorities to any positions of authority. And he has throughout his career.
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