I think the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment both bear you out on this.
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These men were in an environment where the worst in them was not only tolerated, but cultivated. So another question I have is whether the bad environment should be a mitigating factor. I honestly donât know.
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We refuse to let our soldiers be tried elsewhere. Weâre not a member of the ICC because our soldiers would be subject to someone else, and we canât do that, apparently. itâs enraging, actually.
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Maybe you should take them out for drinks. I recommend the Socrates special.
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I think I see where ActionAbe is going with this, though. What do you do, hypothetically, with someone whoâs a nice guy, loves his Mom, treats his girlfriend right, volunteers at the soup kitchen, and then goes to Iraq and hoses down a bunch of civilians with machine-gun fire? Well, obviously, you still send him to prison, but where do you put him in your mental schema? Itâs always satisfying and just-so when these incidents happen and the person behind them turns out to have been a bully who enjoyed kicking puppies and stealing lollipops, and then we can click our tongues and say âOoh, he was a bad 'un, he was.â But sometimes itâs not like that, and then we have to try to reconcile someone who was a good person all the years of his life right up until heâŚmurdered 14 people.
We donât really have a mental pigeonhole that fits a guy like that. So, being humans, we tend to resolve the cognitive dissonance by throwing away all the conflicting evidence and saying âeh, he must have secretly been a monster all along.â But itâs not always that simple.
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According to this article, though, âLamberth said he was fashioning the sentence this way with the understanding that he could re-sentence the former guards for manslaughter if an appeals court rules that 30 years on the gun charge is excessive.â
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From a nondual perspective, people are neither good nor bad. Weâve all been both and will be both in different situations. Erring on the side of assuming good rather than bad is a rational practice given the negativity cognitive bias.
The only part that rubs me the wrong way is that a judge would be making any pronouncements at all. If he knows enough to put them away for 30 years, then whether they are good or bad should be none of his business. But judges are people with egos, sometimes bad like the rest of us.
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Who is pretending that? Are you pretending they had cartoon victims? No? Then please knock off the straw man bullshit.
They are real-fucking-life murderers that murdered innocent people, have refused to accept responsibility for their crimes, repeatedly lied about their crimes and tried to blame others for their devastating crimes.
I apologize for shattering your fragile sensibilities by referring to them as bad people, but Iâm going to go out on a limb here and call them just that.
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Given the opportunity, would you behave cruelly toward these bad people? Theyâre barely even people, right?
Iâd say yes. Keep the total years of the sentence, but spread them more fairly; some to the guards, the rest to those who maintained the conditions these men worked in.
Its been a long time since I had a class in logic and ethics, but I do remember learning that we have to separate the action from the intent, and judge each separately. Bad actions can occur for good reasons, and vice versa. When war is thrown into the equation it guarantees that there will be disastrous outcomes, since it unties the normal restraints on behavior that are typical in society, and in fact it encourages a legal savagery, and provides a moral justification for it.
As Americans, we encourage the myth that our wars are always just, and our causes are true, therefore the consequences of those wars also have to be just. We cannot face the truth that wars, even wars of self defense, will ALWAYS generate atrocities by those who fight them. To always expect our recruits, let alone our mercenaries, to make accurate moral judgements in the midst of war is ridiculous. That is not to excuse the behavior of these men, only to explain that we are fools to enter conflict and expect otherwise.
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[quote=âhungryjoe, post:29, topic:55485â]
Given the opportunity, would you behave cruelly toward these bad people? Theyâre barely even people, right?
[/quote]No and no.
Unlike people like these callous murderers, I donât support cruelty and torture for anyone and I treat everyone as human beings no matter what theyâve done.
Any other loaded questions?
I think these murderers are bad people and I want these murderers in prison where they belong.
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Who is we?
Many protested entering these corporatist wars in the first place and have been against the privatization of armed forces and for-profit, corporatist mercenary machines like Blackwater as well.
Please donât lump them in with the fools who support these conflicts and entities such as Blackwater (or whatever bullshit name they call themselves nowadays).
To always expect our recruits, let alone our mercenaries, to make accurate moral judgements in the midst of war is ridiculous.
So we should always expect war crimes to be committed by Americans? Is this the kind of country we should âexpectâ to be nowadays?
Fuck that.
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Okay. Cool.
Right, shrug it off. Seems to be your general attitude towards these murders in general, frankly.
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Yeah, itâs simply âarbitraryâ that anyone would refer to these murderers as bad people.
Your message is terribly confused. But, hey⌠you wanted attention for yourself by acting as a stunted apologist for the judgeâs words and you got it.
Congrats.
Iâm sure the victimâs families would thoroughly enjoy your little pseudo-intellectual musings along with the judge referring to their murderers as âgood menâ. Since, ya know⌠itâs all just âarbitraryâ anywayâŚ
Hope it was worth all those little âlikesâ you got on your inane post.
Dude. I am with you on this. I have gotten shit for saying someone was âgood or badâ.
Wantonly killing civilians puts you in the âbadâ category in my book. I understand and harp on taking context into consideration and the world is rarely âblack and whiteâ. But there is a real concept of good and evil - good and bad. Labeling someone for their actions is sometimes completely justified.
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Got no problem with this. People do good things and bad things. Where the real test of character lies, what makes you actually a good or a bad person is how you deal with something unequivocally wrong.
Killing a whole bunch of civilians is a bad action, even if the theoretical reasoning behind it might have been good.
What changes this from a good person making a terrible and tragic mistake to a bad person committing an atrocity is their response afterwards. A good person would have either not shot in the first place or would have owned their mistakes.
Fuck that guy. Even though I dislike prisons, preferring restorative, rather than retributive justice, I have no problem with this sentence. May he live a long and productive life in the full knowledge of his crime and spend the next 30 years attempting to atone for it.
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I donât like it either. And I opposed the rah-rah histrionics from the beginning. Anyone who lived through the VietNam era as I did can recognize the rush to war and the propaganda that leads us into it. Doesnât change the reality just because we donât like it however. You donât have to look very hard to see that we are a warlike and reactionary society, willing to kill thousands of innocents in response to our fears and self justification and jingoism.
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