What was that about putting words into others’ mouths, again?
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Unfortunately, these assholes have managed to make it all about them.
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There’s this great scene in Babylon 5 where the court has ordered a mass murderer to have his personality replaced with a benign one by telepathic manipulation, and Garibaldi remarks that it’s more barbaric than executing him.
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Let’s not let them 
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Even if we accept that he meant that his son shouldn’t be punished for an action that took 20 minutes - which is how I read it* - that’s just as fucking perverse! If I shot his son, that would only take a second. Would he argue that I shouldn’t be subject to punishment at all because my crime had a much shorter duration?
*Although there is at least some hint of meaning “to get some action” in his statement - it’s clear he sees the rape as consensual sex, not a “real” rape, so to use that phrasing (instead of the more obvious “20 minute action”) was inflammatory even if it wasn’t his primary intent. But it’s irrelevant.
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Intention does not matter in the field of semantics. What matters is what it means to other people. That’s what semantics is. Sure, he may have meant something else other than ‘sex’—unlikely, but let’s go with it—but clearly he failed to convey that obscure, skull-sized meaning, as evidenced by the outpour of criticism from the vast majority of native English-speakers who understand such use of the term ‘action’, in this context, to mean ‘sex’.
Consensus is everything in semantics. Natural languages would rapidly decay into a fragmented, unintelligible mess if this weren’t the case.
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He’s a young white male rapist who clearly comes from a family environment that is willing to bend way over backwards to defend any wrongdoing he might commit.
He is ALMOST GUARANTEED to reoffend.
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I don’t think punishment for the sake of punishment is necessary or desirable.
If you punish someone, it only reinforces their own narrative that you are their enemy, and that they are right, you are wrong, and they’re being unjustly treated. Locking someone up to keep everyone else safe? That I can understand. Trying to fix them while they’re locked up? Sure. Showing them and others that you take that crime seriously? Perfect.
But there’s no objective measurement of “suffering.” There’s no way of measuring out exactly the same amount of suffering that you caused to another person and delivering it back to you. If there was, it would seem disproportionate to the prisoner, because we suck at putting ourselves in other people’s shoes.
True retributive justice simply isn’t possible, so we should discard it as a goal of our correctional system.
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Affluenza is a bitch, isn’t it?
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yeppers, the very one.
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Great idea! That’s what I want to leave future generations, too bad I’m poor as fuck.
Stanford rapist’s dad says jail time is “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action”
How about no, how about f&*k you, you’re son is going to jail for being human scum and stop trying to justify his actions.
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I remember. What a cool show; so full of ideas.
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Good points. I was thinking of somehow keeping the punishment humane, but of course that’s in the eye of the beholder (or be-sufferer). One thing is for sure, the system we have now really sucks.
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As a first approximation, though, it’s pretty good.
You could expand it to something like “white privilege meets male privilege” (or “white men” for short). Is that the kind of specificity you were after?
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I can’t believe it hasn’t been said yet, but somebody has to:
Christ, what an asshole!
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Holy crap yes. This is a gene pool that needs a serious chlorine shock treatment to sanitize the fecal contamination.
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To be fair, this guy was writing a letter trying to try and prevent a long jail sentence for his son. Finding a way to describe “my son violently raped a woman for 20 minutes” in as mild a way as possible in this context is no easy task. I don´t actually think he meant it to sound like “getting some action” but trying to say it in as neutral a way as possible, which he obviously failed in.
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So by that same logic, 1min of being shot should be considered a pretty light punishment.
That is first class victim blaming douche baggery without a doubt. fuck him, the problem is assault and rape, the stuff he did that is never okay no matter what and never any except the perpetrators fault.
unfortunately true. especially since he has dehumanized his victim.
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I realize that Dear ol’ dad just doesn’t care and is looking for some sort of word salad to justify that; but since when did the time required to commit the crime matter?
You can shoot someone to death in a matter of seconds. If you are handy with explosives, you can do an entire crowd in the same time. Any guesses as to whether he’d be all mercy and forgiveness if ‘just 15 seconds of action’ had left his golden boy an outline on the pavement?
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