This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Yesterday a man named Marcellus Williams was executed via lethal injection in Missouri. He was convicted of the murder of a local journalist. The main points of the case are that
a) no forensic evidence at the scene (the victim's house) connected him to the crime; DNA fragments on the murder weapon (a butcher's knife from the kitchen) were not his; a bloody footprint was not the same shoe size he wore.
b) He sold a laptop taken from the house to someone else;
c) Two people, a former jailmate and ex girlfriend, both told police that he had confessed to the murder. However, they had a financial incentive for doing so.
On balance it seems fairly likely that he did it; being a career criminal, having two unrelated people tell the cops you did it, and having possession of an item from the crime scene is pretty damning. It also can't be that hard to avoid leaving behind forensic evidence - use gloves, shave your head or wear a balaclava, even deliberately wear differently sized shoes. But when talking about the death penalty, we must take the 'reasonable doubt' thing extra seriously. So what do you think mottizens?
The thing that pisses me off the most about this case are that so many people are like, "I think we should kill murderers, but executions of innocent people like this is why I oppose the death penalty".
They're the same, terrible, revenge-driven idiots as the pro-death-penalty people, they're just less slavishly subservient to the state apparatus. Whether this guy was innocent or not is totally immaterial-- what matters is the incredible investment of resources we spent as a society raising children to adulthood and how best we might make that investment back. "Hard Labor" is an infinitely better punishment, both for its renumerative and deterrent properties. A life in a reasonably comfortable prison followed by lots of media attention and then a relatively peaceful death is, at best, not very scary. And it wastes an entire human being. People clearly have no conception over how expensive people are. It's. Pure idiocy.
... And also killing a helpless person is morally wrong, but I suspect anyone willing to be convinced by morall arguments against the death penalty already has been.
The cost of prison v the pecuniary benefits from hard labor is probably a net negative. Maybe though if prisoners had to do really truly hard labor (at pains of extreme punishment) prisons would be easier to manage (since no one would have the energy) AND there would be a larger disincentive to commit crime.
This is why for lower level crimes I support public flogging. I think you get probably more disincentive without the deleterious impact of jail.
Weirdly enough, I agree with you about the public flogging. It's also the reason I think arguments in favor of the death penalty fall apart on practical grounds. Carceral systems that include flogging as an alternative or supplement to fines and lengthy prison sentences demonstrate that it's possible to make fundamentally different tradeoffs about how we administer justice.
If you assume we're keeping everything the same about the current system, then the death penalty is verifiably a net economic negative. There's little evidence it is, in its current form, much of a deterrent, and it costs a lot of money to establish someone's guilt to the required standard. If you assume we're going to change the system somehow, to require a higher threshold of surety for guilt but also a lower threshold of double-checking to reduce costs... then why not assume we can change the system in other ways? I refuse to believe we can't engineer a way to make an entire adult human productive enough to be worth maintaining.
The death penalty isn't about material economy. It's about political economy. The people are naturally bloodthirsty. They used to walk long distances to see hangings and breakings on the wheel. They feel a visceral satisfaction in the pain of wrongdoers. It's primal.
Now, we are rational creatures. We can override our base impulses or have them overridden for us for our own good. We don't have to indulge our bloodlust. But denying it carries a cost. Sparing the worst of the worst from the ultimate reprisal has a big psychic cost, since it's a powerful emotion you're overriding.
A state can only spend so much entry in a continuous fight against human nature. Why should we spend our resources on kindness on jurisprudence instead of in inducing some other non-default beneficial behavior?
If we're talking about political economy, The People also hate hate hate to hear about innocent (or at least, insufficiently proven-to-be guilty) people being executed. They're also mad about people being falsely imprisoned, but to a far lesser degree.) There's no objective reason we should be spending our resources to satisfy the vengeance-lovers over the mercy-lovers, and plenty of practical reasons why we wouldn't want to encourage "vengeance" as a core value of our society.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link