The Testing Chat III: The Time of Great Chatting

[timmy]

I'm against capital punishment for the usual reasons; once done, it can't be undone, and in judicial systems subject to human error the risk of even one innocent person being put to death is unacceptable.

There are times when I wish unpersons convicted of crimes that there is overwhelming evidence that they did commit, with the full understanding of what they were doing, could be executed. Burden on the state and all that. Unpersons. But I'm not even sure Martin Bryant qualifies for that. So instead he'll be incarcerated for the rest of his natural life, not for the protection of society, but to protect him.

[magic princess]

I see it as basically crimes which can be considered a form of social violence resulting in death, yes. I do see serial killers in the same way and I would argue that the crimes in question really have a relatively common theme:

1. Guilt is RARELY in doubt. Oklahoma City, Boston, Jeffrey Dahlmer, Holmes, Lanza if he'd survived -- By the time they actually got to trial "innocent until proved guilty" was kinda of a I'M A JUGGALO WOOP WOOP farce.

2. They all basically function as psychological attacks on society or a particular part of society, or to incite social violence.

They can be roughly summarized as spree killings, terrorist attacks, serial murder killings, and serial rapists/kidnappers who escalate to the murder of their victims. Single instances of rape or kidnap leading to murder should be excluded because it's conceivable that they panicked and essentially committed more of manslaughter subsequent to the other felony, but if they've serially raped or repeatedly kidnapped people and then escalated to a single murder it shows a very deliberative spiral of depravity.

And then there's the more or less unrelated argument that since I am strongly against isolation as an extreme psychological torture, I think people who murder in prison should be put to death as a mercy. Since it's a confined environment, the chance of getting the wrong person is proportionally fairly small.

Spree killing is actually the most difficult category because how do you legally distinguish between the spree killer and a particularly (un)lucky gangbanger with a MAC-10 and 100 round mags who is shooting at a guy in a crowded nightclub? I suppose it must defined as a premeditated planned intent to kill multiple people unrelated by any factor except location which succeeds. Terrorism is the more extreme form--doing so for explicitly religious-political reasons and in sympathy to or under orders from an unlawful combatant group--where execution may be acceptable even if the attack failed.

[joviwan]

kinda of a

Sorry, that's all I have to say right now, I don't really have a horse in the show so-to-speak at-the-moment and I'm tired

but I saw that and smiled

[magic princess]

Questor, I like the use of тела людей a lot. It's a very good connotation for what this means. Otherwise I have to use about five different terms in ways that they haven't really been used in for the past fifty years to string together an English approximation I'm really happy with.

[magic princess]

kinda of a

Sorry, that's all I have to say right now, I don't really have a horse in the show so-to-speak at-the-moment and I'm tired

but I saw that and smiled

Heh, well, you try to be involved in your negotiating union for Graduate Assistants, work as a research assistant, and go to school more than full time for Graduate RAs, too...

[timmy]

The guy with a MAC-10 in a crowded nightclub is a study in itself. Was this a personal fued, or was he paid or instructed to do by a third party, be that an employer or the head of an organisation? If any of the latter, can this be taken as an increased likelyhood of repeat offense, and thus, is it in society's best interest to allow this person to have self determination?

If only life was like a movie where you know who the bad guys are.

[Jung]

The importance to human psychological health of the aesthetic is, as Jung's link touches at, something people of the TEO's intellectual mindset love to ignore. It is a force that hyper-rationalistic people with feelings of superiority, social awkwardness, and a conviction in their individual rights and in world progress can't ever understand, and it scares them, because they can't interact with it. So they just assume it is wrong and will be quickly removed from society by Progress and is therefore something they never have to take the time to understand, even if they disagree with the belief systems and ideologies of people who adhere to its importance and cherish its value in their lives.

I find this a little ironic - much of my attraction to the, call it standard liberal progressive notions, I suppose, is aesthetic and emotional, often in conflict with my intellectual positions.

Just thinking about stuff we've talked about - the real core of my dislike for the Taloran system is aesthetic. Intellectually, my beliefs tell me that a preference for modern Western cultural values and judgment of the Taloran kind of values as primitive is purely subjective, their model of modernity is clearly viable and as such their society is no less "advanced" in any real sense that ours. But part of me looks at them and thinks of this:

Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in
Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of
science, the steel, the concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all
in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age.

Not for any really rational reason, but out of the essentially aesthetic judgment that a modern society should not look like that!

Or, in more serious issues, the closest thing I have to a rationalist moral philosophy would probably endorse retributive justice, because human social instincts are such that we want to hurt bad people. But I just find the notion that it would ever be a positive good to hurt people so ugly that I really don't like that idea.

[Questor]

Number 2 is where I'd focus, and I suspect that you're more inclusive than I am. EDIT - Obviously, you did.

I'm 100% OK with the idea of the death penalty being used for cases that fall into that strange little catagory. In fact, I'd say that crimes falling into that category deserve special, social punishments instead of the usual set. So, for the three groups that I think really fall into that crimes against тела людей (literally "a body of people" but the context is kind of "the collective of the body politic as distinct from the body politic itself"):

Political Murder by a member of the society (I.E. The US cannot apply this to OBL because he does not consider himself a part of US society) - Death Penalty
High Treason resulting in loss of lives - Death Penalty
High Treason without loss of life - Exile, either internal or external. I'm really thinking something along the lines of shunning
Perjury - The voiding of contracts, making a person unable to enter into binding contracts as they have proven themselves too dishonest to trust their word

[Questor]

Questor, I like the use of тела людей a lot. It's a very good connotation for what this means. Otherwise I have to use about five different terms in ways that they haven't really been used in for the past fifty years to string together an English approximation I'm really happy with.

Yeah, I wanna say that was Lenin, but it's way too fresh in my mind. Maybe Plekhanov?

I'm not fluent in many spoken languages other than english, but for philosophy I try to have the original and a translation and try to follow along as best I can. There's just so much of the character of language bound up in philosophy that you really need the clues that you can get from the original language.

[Jung]

1. Guilt is RARELY in doubt. Oklahoma City, Boston, Jeffrey Dahlmer, Holmes, Lanza if he'd survived -- By the time they actually got to trial "innocent until proved guilty" was kinda of a I'M A JUGGALO WOOP WOOP farce.

2. They all basically function as psychological attacks on society or a particular part of society, or to incite social violence.

They can be roughly summarized as spree killings, terrorist attacks, serial murder killings, and serial rapists/kidnappers who escalate to the murder of their victims.

Wouldn't a lot of these be some of the people on which fear-deterrance would probably not be very effective?

IIRC spree-killers are usually basically murder-suicides who have the mindset that society has hurt them so they're going to hurt it back before going out, scaring them with punishment doesn't seem like it'd be very effective.

And terrorists, as I said before, are ideologically motivated and would likely actually feel they have a duty to plant the bomb or whatever even if it means they'll die. A lot of them even kill themselves in the process of carrying out their attacks.

Fear-deterrance seems like something that'd work best on intelligent rational sociopaths ... I dunno, maybe it'd work on serial killers.

I might be reading this wrong assuming it's supposed to reduce violence by scaring people with the consequences of it, but I'm kind of wondering exactly what benefits such a policy is supposed to have. Criteria # 2 seems to suggest this is about something more than "they did bad stuff so we want to hurt them" or "we shouldn't waste resources keeping them alive."

[Questor]

At least from my perspective, its not so much about fear-deterrence as it is about, cautery, I guess. People so calculating as to perform these types of acts are by their very nature too dangerous (not the best word, but I haven't run across a better one) to leave alive - because they cannot be reformed and punishment is meaningless. If they are still alive, they will continue plotting - and very likely at least attempting to manipulate those around them. The only way to protect society from them would be to isolate them completely, which - as MP has stated - is too cruel a punishment for a human to even consider.

As I said, this is vanishingly rare. My version (with the caveats) has only happened once in the last 20 years that I am aware of in the US - McVeigh. A politician murdering or hiring the murder of their political opponent would qualify as well, but I can't think of a case of that in the past 50 years.

99% of terrorists don't fit the right criteria for me. They believe they are acting against an external enemy. Like MP said, western political/legal thought really doesn't have this concept any more.

[magic princess]

I include terrorists because of their targets and their lack of organized identification by the laws of war. If the 9/11 hijackers had hijacked cargo planes, having pulled on shoulder patches immediately before producing their knives, forced the crews off at other airports, and then instead of fleeing like hijackers usually do, flown the airplanes into docked aircraft carriers, they wouldn't have been terrorists, but rather fairly heroic and dedicated kamikazes. I think this distinction is important for keeping war civilised, and that even if the rules don't make sense, the value of some brutality in forcing the other side to play by them is generally a reduction of brutality toward civilians from both sides.

[Jung]

If the 9/11 hijackers had hijacked cargo planes, having pulled on shoulder patches immediately before producing their knives, forced the crews off at other airports, and then instead of fleeing like hijackers usually do, flown the airplanes into docked aircraft carriers, they wouldn't have been terrorists, but rather fairly heroic and dedicated kamikazes.

And, I get the feeling, much less likely to have been successful.

I wonder how many military operations by "respectable" countries would be considered wrong under equivalently scrupulous restrictive ROEs?

[Questor]

True, but that's a different kind of crime. One maybe just as deserving of the death penalty, but a different kind of crime.

I'm not sure what the punishment for the actual perpetrators should be, it's kind of moot. For the planners and trainers, well, if they are caught by the тела людей (EDIT: or captured in the jurisdiction of another group while military law is not in effect and handed over using an extradition style process) they belong to, they arguably fall under the political murder category, because their acts would arguably have damaged their own тела людей, at least indirectly.

If they are caught by us, despite the fact that they violated the rules of warfare (and they believed they were waging war) that does not absolve other nations from a responsibility to follow the rules of warfare. The complications that arise out of the fact that the rules of warfare assume more than one state actor is probably the biggest question in military ethics of our generation.

Without an enemy, victory or defeat under the "old" rules is clearly impossible. As there is no way to "end" hostilities in the traditional manner, this makes indefinite detention of non-paroled individuals the normal situation. What's hilarious about the whole Gitmo situation is that if it weren't for the whole torture/interrogation aspect, the whole thing would be not only within the rules of war, but REQUIRED. No one, from either side of the political spectrum has been willing to address that little issue.

[Questor]

If the 9/11 hijackers had hijacked cargo planes, having pulled on shoulder patches immediately before producing their knives, forced the crews off at other airports, and then instead of fleeing like hijackers usually do, flown the airplanes into docked aircraft carriers, they wouldn't have been terrorists, but rather fairly heroic and dedicated kamikazes.

And, I get the feeling, much less likely to have been successful.

And have absolutely zero chance of having the desired effect.

I wonder how many military operations by "respectable" countries would be considered wrong under equivalently scrupulous restrictive ROEs?

Assuming the paperwork were done properly (The paperwork must ALWAYS be done properly!) they would not be considered wrong. Suicidally stupid, but not wrong. Take the US's behavior in Iraq. The paperwork was done improperly, and that's what people focus on. The question of "should" is raised, but the question of "was it legal" only ever seems to seriously come up in the context of the Powell speech. Afghanistan is an even better example because the paperwork WAS done properly there.

[Questor]

Otherwise I have to use about five different terms in ways that they haven't really been used in for the past fifty years to string together an English approximation I'm really happy with.

This is a fairly good description of me trying to describe my politics, interestingly enough.

"Isolationist interventionist meritocratic regulationist libertarian with a slight lean to the left" was how my favorite polisci professor described me. He said I may be the first one in the US in almost a hundred years (he said 90, but that was 10 years ago.)

[xon]

For Linux people :

A thought-provoking opinion piece regarding the involvement of corporations in the open-source world.

Big software houses chasing mobile or console computing has made some rage inducing software changes for desktop and server enviroments.

[Jung]

Marina, I'd kind of be interested if you would explain this more:

All of these things combined to create essentially psychological self-enforcement mechanisms in the mind, and I would contend the logical endpoint of the argument in Foucault is that these mechanisms are why people in first world countries consistently are found to be less happy than in some third world countries where these mechanisms have not developed, despite their vastly improved medical and economic conditions.

Therefore, I drew the conclusions that, really, we would probably all be happier if state power was enforced through blood and iron and brilliant paegentry instead of a sophisticated mechanism of enforcing morality and law through propaganda, mass media, and psychological indoctrination.

The second argument of course is that it's better to just live in a society that rules by fear than a society that teaches you to hate yourself. If you're going to be oppressed, why the fuck sign up to be your own policeman? But that's exactly how society has evolved in the past 200 years.

How do you think modern society teaches people to "hate themselves" in a way past societies didn't?

[RogueIce]

have you followed the LP of the Blizzard stuff they're doing on sb.com? It's pretty well thought-out.

UA Plays? I'd seen the WarCraft III topic but I never gave a shit about WC3 so I kinda skipped it. I did go check it out and went through the WarCraft II campaign and am starting on BtDP. Pretty good stuff. Does he go back and do the Orc Campaigns or just stick to Humans?

I have to say I kind of stop my personal continuity at WC2. I just...never liked where Blizzard went with stuff after that. I never did play through WC2X so I don't know what they did or didn't do with the story, though I keep the Heroes around...they just never went to Draenor and did their own shit back home.

And as I think I mentioned on SDN, it's the fucking Kingdom of Azeroth now and forever, fuck Blizzard and their Stormwind bullshit.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Has a serial murderer done more harm than those responsible for the economic collapse?

[Aaron]

Not even close.

I keep wanting to post this over there but I don't really want Marina to get in trouble:

There's always been an odd streak of authoritism on here, so this example stuff isn't exactly surprising. What is suprising is that Duchess has been doing this stuff for years and you all rise to the bait, after admitting during the senate shitshow that she does it just to see the reaction.

And frankly if a brain damaged former alcoholic and morphine addict can remember this, why can't you guys?

[Crazedwraith]

That depends on us actually having known that in the first place; either having read that thread, or even having been on the board at the time ( a lot of people discussing stuff in that thread actually weren't. Contrary to the 'everythings dead' notion, there are a very slow influx of new members that are staying around on teo)

And us actually caring enough to remember. Much important things to remember you know! trivia about long dead scifi programs for example

[Aaron]

"There's only a finite amount of space in your head! If you know that, what have you lost?"

[Aaron]

See, thats why I posted that here. I knew one of you dudes would see something I didn't.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Not even close.

I just want to see if she's consistent.