Capital Punishment

And you're piss poor at it too.

I would have to dissagree with the death penalty. To me, the death penalty seems more like an act of revenge than an effective solution. The killer should be rehabilitated and act as a useful element of society, instead of being killed. Why not treat whatever mental/emotional problem the killer has, teach them to do a variety of jobs, and send them back into society as an ordinary citizen, preferably in a different area than were the crime was committed?

And you should stop dreaming. Tell, me, do you have a way to change human nature? As recently as 2007, statistics indicated that 55% of "rehabilitated" inmates that were released, committed another crime that landed them back in prison. I imagine that you will argue that the programs aren't good enough and that it has nothing to do with being a scumbag of a person?

http://www.realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2009/04/prison_populati_1.html

When are you libs ever going to realize that there are just bad people in this world?
Why should someone who arbitrarilly kills another, and TAKES THEIR LIFE, be allowed to continue theirs?

Recidivism is problemtic...while I appreciate your 'POLLYANNA' attitude it just doesn't work/apply to the Federal Penal System in America...never has never will. Not when the human gene pool has the unique/deviant/perverse thinking & non-thinking humans that won't/don't desire to be changed and given out lack luster psycho therapist personal and the budget restrictions...they {the incarcerated} are a rarity if they do get released and become a productive member of our society!

Why am I always called a liberal? A liberal is a moderate who is used to distract the working class.

There seems to be no purpose in vengeance. Vengeance must leave the justice system. If killing a killer is fine, than whats wrong with being a killer? Really, the only perpose of killing a killer is to save money. When money is put above human life, what will we do?

And a Marxist is a totalitarian used to enslave all the people but the ruling elite.

I invite you to prove it and perhaps return to the thread about the little kid getting shot that you so rudely fled from.

Why must you ask such simple questions? Every Marxist nation throughout history has done what I indicated. History proves me right and that is the end of the story.

Karl Marx was nothing more than a disgruntled jealous fool. He was unsuccessful in making money to support himself so he blamed society and was jealous of all who were successful. As such he hated capitalism and wanted to destroy it much like BO. This thinking is common among lefties. If not for Engels supporting the fat murderous fool, the world would have never known his name.

And I will get back to you on the other thread... Fleeing from threads is not something I do. I think you know that.

First, you have to manage to find a single Marxist nation in history. That is an impossible task, as there never were any. When you find one, provide evidence of it's Marxism. Until you do that, you should not make wild accusations.

I do not consider insulting Marx or his career any kind of political argument, as you seem to be from the generation that focuses on personalities, not issues. As for Obama, he is a Capitalist who makes tiny reforms to keep people placated, like a more polite version of George Bush.

Oh I know you are going to claim there never was a true Marxist nation. Whatever...

Cuba, USSR, North Korea, Cambodia, and several others are or were Marxist nations. And look what they did? They did what the fat murderous Karl told them to do. Which is to murder and imprison all who oppose you. And, implement a society where the elites control everything and the masses suffer greatly. And you persist in believing this garbage.

Once again, PROVE that the listed nations are Marxist. And find one Marx qoute that says anything about taking power from the masses and commiting genocide.

WTH man. Must you continually ask such easy questions? I appreciate your efforts to make me look so smart. If I were a baseball player, I would be hitting home runs at every at bat...Must I continually educate you on the evils of your idol???

You are making me look smart...

First, none of the people listed who actually commited the genocide were really Marxists. I will list the flaws in the belief that each of these people were Marxists:

Lenin: Firstly, all of his writings were about the manner of carrying out a revolution, not the function of the revolutionary state. Second, he never proclaimed the Soviet Union Marxist, and a Soviet is not a strictly communist institution, it is a council that would be feasable in any kind of state. Also, he made reforms that allowed capitalism to exist on a small scale in the USSR. When looked at closer, Lenin's state only took over Russia when Stalin was premier and Lenin was dead, and we can have little idea what a leninist state would actually look like.

Trotsky: More or less a copy of Lenin with a slightly less authoritarian view. We can not really make much of a distinction between leninism and trotskyism.

Stalin: This man could be summed up as just another dictator who called his state different titles depending on his current situation. When he first came to power, he called his country a socialist republic. During world war 2, he called it communist to try and cause mass revolutionary upheaval in Germany[communism was popular back then]. After the war, he called his state a federal republic. When you look at these, the first sounds like Vietnam, the second sounds like a revolutionary state, and the third sounds like the US title. Obviously, the soviet union was not ridiculously close to a US style government, the Paris Commune did not seem to have a dictator, and vietnam just isnt even comparably murderous.

Moa: Mainly a Stalin copy who called his nation a "People's Republic", which sounds like it could mean anything with the word republic in it. That made it to vague to question. He was part of the Chines communist party because it had the most members. He could have called himself a nationalist if he thought that the Nationalist Party had enough members. He was just an opportunist.

Pol Pot: Can you se a difference between this fellow and Moa? I shure can't. Name one, and I could explain it.

Castro: He was a nationalist at first, and his aim was to drive out american influence. But he became flushed with power and went dictatorial. Under russian pressure, he called himself a Marxist-Leninist. He is sort of a guy who fell into a pit and got stuck.

Marx's only part in all of this was coming up with a name that they stole.

There you go again. Its not really Marxism...if only we could have the real true Marxism all would be wonderful. Ain't going to happen and lots of people get murdered whenever its tried.

Karl Marx was an anti-Semite (though born a Jew), racist, and anti-Christian disgruntled jealous penniless fool.

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way… They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust"
- Karl Marx ( Marx People’s Paper, April 16, 1856, Journal of the History of Idea, 1981 ) Nice peaceful quote from the fat dummy.

Why have you chosen to believe in an intolerant murderous ideology? Were you mistreated as a child?

When was Marxism tried? All I can think of is the Paris Commune. We might assume he was an anti semite until we realise that "dirty jew" was the most common insult of the time and everyone used it. And to be an anti-christian is to love humanity and work for it's achievment. Only a fundelmentalist would oppose that.

About that qoute, I googled it, went on a few forums, looked through my marx books, tried ask.com, and found that it could not be verified. I did find some rascist [and actually provable] Engels qoutes, but I see marx as the father of communism, so it only bothered me a bit.

Why do you choose to idolize an autistic, greedy, warmongering, lying, fundelmentalist, traditionalistic, homophobic, anti-progressive, murderous, actor? Were you mistreated as a child?

You poor soul.

I shall pray for you...again.

I suppose this is over then...

Yep.

There is no sense in continuing this.

You are a lost soul and may God have mercy on you.

Whatever... bye

Some Thoughts on the Ethical Consistency of Death Penalty Supporters

So here’s a far-out and heady hypothetical proposition, a provocative and introspective thought experiment to test the depth of belief that death penalty supporters have in the moral math of “a life for a life”. A slightly grim gedankenexperiment to make them question whether or not they have the moral courage of their professed conviction that anyone who needlessly causes the death of an innocent person forfeits his/her own right to go on living.

Imagine that a lunatic-fringe faction of seriously strict-constructionist believers in Deuteronomy 19:21 ( נפש בנפש “life for life” ) has come to power. They are absolutists who rigidly adhere to a verbatim reading of Deuteronomy so we’ll call them VDs for short. The VDs devise a disconcertingly clever way of applying their literal understanding of the “life for life” principle so as to make the implementation of the death penalty more just.

Here, in a nutshell, is the ethical dilemma of the VDs and anyone who’s pro capital punishment. One of the inherent moral defects of the death penalty is of course that it’s an irreversible punishment imposed by fallible human beings, a permanent payback dealt out by systems of jurisprudence, judges, and juries who are very much subject to human error. In other words, it’s a foregone conclusion that wrongly convicted individuals will now and then be executed, the innocent will occasionally be unjustly deprived of their lives. And when this happens and we belatedly discover that we’ve visited society’s irrevocable retribution on a not-guilty victim of a miscarriage of justice there’s really nothing we can do to make it right. We can’t release someone who’s been given a lethal injection from his grave. There’s no way to compensate the dead. Even if we catch and kill the guilty party the blood stain of an innocent still remains indelible on our society’s moral fiber.

And furthermore we have no real excuse, because we all know full well going in that when we place capital punishment on the books we’re courting the risk that we might one day, as a society, put to death someone who’s done nothing to deserve it. So how do death penalty advocates atone for the sin of killing the innocent? Of course most don’t think they need to atone, they simply rationalize that the real perpetrator of the crime that a falsely convicted defendant was snuffed by the system for is the one who’s responsible for the system’s tragic transgression against the sanctity of innocent life. That is, death penalty advocates pull a somewhat slippery move and pin all the blame on the “bad guy” without flinching in their self-righteous good feeling about their staunch support of a punishment that sometimes ends the lives of decent human beings.

But it’s society, and more specifically all the members of society who favor the death penalty who really bear responsibility for the unfortunate consequences of the punishment they’ve chosen to espouse and embrace. Criminals and murderers don’t actually compel us to endorse the gallows, the chair, or nowadays the needle, if we do so it’s our own choice. And so the question once again puts itself, when our choice costs an innocent life how do we redeem ourselves? The rub here is that the resolution is patently obvious for true believers in the logic of a life for a life. If they have the cojones to be consistent, that is.

Well, in our imaginary scenario the VDs who’ve won the Whitehouse and a majority in every legislature in the country have the mettle to practice the retributive principle they preach, and so they propose the following. The implementation of the death penalty is to be suspended for the time being, and the only way that it can be reinstated is if there’s a national referendum and the majority of the electorate votes for it. But there’s a considerably disturbing catch, this will be the only election in US history in which the practice of the secret ballot is waived, the name of everyone who votes in favor of capital punishment will go into a computer database.

This is to facilitate the lottery that will be held whenever it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt that an innocent, law-abiding citizen has been executed. The lottery that will give capital punishment supporters the remission of their sin of casting a vote that ultimately caused the death of an unfairly condemned person.

Everyone who votes for capital punishment will be assuming the risk of killing an innocent, and so everyone who votes yea on capital punishment will also assume the risk of his name one day coming up in a lottery to choose a scapegoat, one individual who will shoulder the collective culpability of everyone whose vote made it possible for the system to legally rob an honest man or woman of his/her precious life on this earth. The unlucky winner of this atonement lottery will balance the equation by being put to death in the same manner as the innocent victim of his vote. The principle of a life for a life will be taken to its logical conclusion. The sacrifice of one capital punishment supporter for one wrongly executed prisoner will once again level the scales of justice and provide absolution to all death penalty proponents.

For capital punishment advocates the nub of the question here is of course how much, really, do you believe in your righteous rationale and rhetoric of “a life for a life”? Would you be willing to put your own life where your revengeful stance is? This is the crucial question since death penalty boosters really only have two planks in their platform, the deterrence argument and the argument that a life for a life is poetically just. And the deterrence argument is refuted by plenty of statistical evidence, which leaves them with only the “justice” plank to stand on. So, if you’re pro capital punishment this little thought experiment is designed to make you ask yourself just how deep and sincere is your conviction that a life for a life is justice, and how much is it perhaps just a convenient moralistic justification for your punitive and pitiless desire to see a cruel comeuppance inflicted on criminals?

If as soon as you realized where I was going with the above thought experiment your mind automatically began rationalizing and sophistically squirming its way out of the ethical bind I was attempting to put it in, well, perhaps you should examine how honestly committed you are to the core ethical logic of your advocacy of capital punishment. Perhaps all your Old-Testament ethical logic and lofty talk of justice is just a lot of sanctimonious smoke, perhaps hiding out behind it is just an ethically unenlightened hardness, harshness, vindictiveness, and viciousness?

Yep, maybe being a “civilized” citizen of an “advanced” society and a good, pro-life Christian, Jew, or Confucianist is not all that compatible with being a death penalty enthusiast?...

If you’d like to explore this and related topics with me in greater depth please feel welcome to visit my new website, The Total Revolution Project.com Just click on or copy & paste the address below. Thanks.


www.thetotalrevolutionproject.com