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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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?

If this is the best that the Innocence Project has got, it updates me towards the belief that no innocent people are ever executed in the US.

I'll also say this: getting a clearly guilty murderer out of prison on a legal technicality is evil. If that person then goes on to murder someone else, their blood is on your hands.

When the based regime takes over, mass disbarment of probably 75% of defense attorneys needs to be a priority. They know they’re getting guilty people released and they think that’s just great. Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time.

This started as a reply to @monoamine's comment here but I'm posting here for greater visibility.

I do not think that this is "Based". To be "Based" is to have a base, be grounded, firmly planted, to reject the world of wishy-washy postmodernist bullshit (deconstructionism, moral relativism, etc...) in favor of the hard and the fast. That is unless you're going for the alternate etymology where "based" is a reference to freebasing and you really meant to say "When the crackhead regime takes over..." which tbh also fits.

Its a common error amongst wishy-washy postmodernist to conflate "rejects postmodernism" with "retarded and anti-social" and thus there is an inclination to label any anti-social idea as "based". Our justice system was designed as an adversarial system for a reason. Don't go looking to tear that fence down before you demonstrate that you understand why it was built.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen someone accuse Hoff of postmodernism. Or of being wishy-washy, for that matter.

I mean this is the same guy who believes that John Wilkes Booth was a progressive, so I think he might be suffering from a serious case of whatever Hlynka suffered from, which renders the sufferer unable to recognize distinctions between the various alternatives to American-style Christian conservatism.

I mean this is the same guy who believes that John Wilkes Booth was a progressive

No, I called him a "democrat" though to be fair those terms are becoming increasingly interchangeable.

And then in this comment you explicitly said that you were suggesting that he was also a left-winger. I don’t know how much more clear you could have been in this conversation.

Again, i called him a leftist and a democrat. You're drawing your own associations

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