(urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Wed, 4/11/12, Matthew Knight <jacobeiserman at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Matthew Knight <jacobeiserman at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 6:45 PM



On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 7:38 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:
I think the ultimate detterent from repeat offenses is clearly a quick death not tied up in a too long and costly appeals system.  How can that not be a crime deterrent?  (Remember that some people in charge of the venue were executed for not enough seats at the Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and Foreman - wow!)

Okay, I've said my conservative "people need to be held accountable" bit, I will run back to the Wolfe short stories now.


OK, veering.  Gwern has already addressed the likelihood of repeat offenses.  But if this remains your position, for justice's sake there has to be not the slightest shred of doubt of the executee's guilt.  Proving this absolutely may be marginally easier than proving that the convicted is "highly likely" to murder again, if you think probability should play a role in the math of deciding who lives and who dies.

 
My politics are detestable to every human being on earth so I will bow out of the conversation with an acknolwedgment that repeat offense of murder is not the norm but does occur, that the nebulous definition of "life" applied by liberals in the United States seldom extends to the unborn, that a spirtualist stripped of absolute certainty will laugh at all these humanistic ideals created by fallible man in the absence of true right and wrong - empty traditions where might may indeed seem to make right. Why except strength of numbers should your relative values apply when there is no absolute divinity behind it?  If I can get away with it there are no consequences.  It is entirely predicated on the ability of a law to be enforced and punished.  Take that away and there is NO reason to behave in a humanistic way - men are merely advanced apes, subject to no special rights or claims to life but must always exist at the whim of an arbitrary zeitgeist of
 power, an accumulation of numbers.  If enough people can enforce it, it then becomes right, but there is no absolute behind it.
 
 What is the picture of justice to my young self?  A large, strong ignorant man bumps into my father because he is unaware of my father's existence as a smallish sort.  My father checks him brutally, and when the conflict resolves the man is severely beaten by a very small but very experienced olympic level wrestler.  Because my father is half his size, the case is thrown out of court.  Justice is served - realistic expectations have been overthrown, might has triumphed, ignorance  of the existence of others outside the self and preconceptions are defeated. 
 
No argument can sway me from the idea that people choose their actions, and no argument save moral absolutes divinely enforced could ever convince me that humanistic philosophy could overthrow the strong and those in power from imposing their desires and punishments on the relatively weak - the criminal is strong when he commits the crime, and weak when the power of the law descends upon him.  Thus it must be.
 
But this is really not at all about my politics, which are reprehensible to almost everyone, so I keep them (usually) locked away in the silence of my chest.  But occasionally I have to ask, how can humanistic people (especially in the United States) care about the guilty who have made their choices and hurt others and allow the innocent children unborn to be terminated under the auspice of "choice" and a simple denial of their burgeoning humanity?  It breaks my heart. 
 
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