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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   33752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:

rest in power Emmanuel Littlejohn

may your memory drive us to continue fighting for the abolition of the death penalty

To be clear on who Littlejohn was:

On the night of June 19, 1992, a robbery occurred at a convenience store in Oklahoma City, resulting in the death of the store owner, who was gunned down by two robbers.[2]

On that night, at around 10:15 p.m., 31-year-old Kenneth Meers, the owner of the convenience store, was working with two employees, Tony Hulsey and Hulsey's brother, Danny Waldrup. While they were still doing their work, 20-year-old Emmanuel Antonia Littlejohn[a] and 25-year-old Glenn Roy Bethany entered the store and held Meers at gunpoint, with the intention of robbing him.[3]

…

In a separate case, together with William Arnold Penny, Littlejohn was also charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, two counts of first-degree rape and kidnapping.[9]

To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:

I was a witness for Alabama's execution of Alan Miller by nitrogen gas tonight. Again, it did not go as state officials promised. Miller visibly struggled for roughly two minutes, shaking and pulling at his restraints. He then spent the next 5-6 min intermittently gasping for air

Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.

How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.

I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.

To "steelman" the opinion you're reacting to, I imagine that the person who wrote "rest in power" didn't do so in spite of recognising that Littlejohn and his accomplice really were collectively responsible for the murder in question. If pressed, I imagine that the person who wrote that would argue that, institutional racism being what it was, he or she doesn't recognise Littlejohn's conviction as legitimate, followed by confecting some conspiratorial just-so story about the cops planting fingerprints on the murder weapon and hiring a lookalike to commit the murder etc. etc. you've all seen the ending of JFK, you know how this story goes.

The reason I put "steelman" in scare quotes is because this alternative interpretation isn't much more generous to the person who wrote that than your interpretation is. Either they're a nutcase who thinks that we should remember this villain fondly in spite of the indisputably monstrous crime he committed (your perspective); or they're more paranoid and deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system in particular (and American society in general) than the average person with QAnon in his Truth Social bio. Either evil, or hopelessly conspiratorial and deluded - not a good look either way.

The anti-death penalty campaigner position is that no one should be executed, and all of the obfuscating about ‘this guy is innocent! He was at the scene of the crime because he stopped to help an old lady change her tire on the way back from volunteering at the homeless shelter!’ Should be read in that light- they don’t want him back out of the streets, they want him not executed, and if calling him a choirboy gets him not executed then they’re happy to do that.

Well, maybe. It's one thing to say "We concede that Joe was a monster, but he still shouldn't be executed, because no one should be." I can imagine a progressive person saying that about a particularly monstrous white person e.g. Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy.

I agree that "this person is a monster but they shouldn't be executed" is a harder sell than "this person isn't a monster, therefore obviously they shouldn't be executed" so I can understand why someone would feel motivated to lie for tactical reasons. But I don't know - surely that can't describe everyone saying "rest in power" about a black criminal where overwhelming evidence exists that they are guilty of the heinous crime they were convicted of. Surely some of those people must really believe that they are innocent, even if they have to resort to extremely tenuous and unlikely distortions of the evidence to get there (or retreat into the methodic doubt of "a black man will never get a fair trial in Amerikkka").

I do think it’s likely that such a conspirator exists. Do you have any evidence this guy, in particular, is in that category?

It’s a genuine question, because I don’t have a Twitter account and can’t peruse his posting history. But I think a “steelman” should never look so much like straw.

But I think a “steelman” should never look so much like straw.

Well for starters, I'd like to point out that your interpretation of this person's motivation for expressing this sentiment (advocating for life in prison without parole instead of capital punishment, and hence knowingly lying about this criminal's virtues for tactical reasons) is only marginally more sympathetic than mine (conspiratorially deluded about the state of the American criminal justice system), which was in turn only marginally more sympathetic than the OP's (straight up expressing admiration for a violent criminal).

As to whether any evidence exists that this specific tweeter is conspiratorial in the way I described, he recently retweeted (I believe in reference to Marcellus Williams):

Nothing more American than executing innocent Black men who were denied due process under the law.

and

This Black August, we remember past and present freedom fighters and political prisoners. Our FLM team recently connected with the African American Cultural Group at Joseph Harp Correctional Center, drawing strength from their stories and commitment to justice.

and:

10 years ago, Ferguson sparked a national reckoning on race and policing after the tragic death of Michael Brown. Today, we reflect on the progress made and the work still ahead to build a just society for all.

[a photo of Michael Brown with the caption "Rest in Power"]

After scrolling through about four months of tweets and retweets, I have not been able to find a single example of this specific tweeter claiming that a non-black person was wrongfully executed (despite several men meeting that description having been executed this year) or unjustly shot by police officers (although I will concede it's possible that this person is trapped in an echo chamber/media bubble in which he genuinely never hears about white or Native American men who've been executed). This strengthens my opinion that the tweeter's outrage over the executions of Williams and Littlejohn has more to do with BLM than with principled opposition to capital punishment in general.

Yeah, @gattsuru had a pretty damning quote, too.

My interpretation of the original quote was not “knowingly lying.” It was “genuine preference for LWOP over death.” Given the rest of the statements, it’s clear I was being too charitable. I concur with your interpretation that he is culture warring first and foremost.

My straightforward argument against the death penalty as that I'm pro-life in all cases (thus, anti-abortion and anti-death penalty).

I believe this because I think there has to be a hard fix on the sanctity of human life. If there is room for slippage, slippage does indeed occur and, after a few decades, you have what we have today - several million people "okay" with third trimester and even post delivery abortion. To be intellectually consistent, I don't think we should have that kind of slippage on the other end of life either (ask me how I feel about assisted suicide!)

On the death penalty side, while the cases you highlight are incredibly egregious, I don't think the State should be in the business of killing its own citizens. I like your argument about it not mattering who pulled the trigger. In death penalty cases, it seems to me like they're constructed to diffuse responsibility through a heavily bureaucratic process so that no individual has to bear full responsibility for condemning a person to death and then effecting that sentence. The prosecutor is simply adhering to their office's guidelines, the Judge allows for the consideration or pursuit of the death penalty, the jury validates that such evidence exists and was compelling, the hangman simply carries out that which has already been handed down. Who "pulled the trigger?" It doesn't matter. We've just bureaucrat-brained ourselves into collectively thinking "surely, not me!"

I also believe in the idea that someone can find meaning and redemptive power in their life even in the most awful conditions. Man's Search For Meaning is a small book about how even in Auschwitz, a guy was able to find a reason to keep going. After his experience, Frankl then had a full career. If I can forgive anyone for, instead, curling up into a bottle forever, it would be a literal holocaust survivor. I have little personal sympathy to criminals, but I believe they should have the ability to choose to try to find redemptive meaning. Now, that does come with caveats...

I absolutely believe there are many types of crimes that not only deserve but necessitate strict incarceration for one's entire natural lifespan. There are people who are either too dangerous or who have violated the social contract too egregiously to ever be let out again. They should be caged until they die. Though difficult, I do believe they still could find their own redemptive meaning even in prison. Finding that meaning, however, is not a ticket out of jail.

Yes, I am that guy that thinks that Red from Shawshank Redemption should've never been granted parole.

I don't write any of this to convince you. I'm trying to offer the best description of what / how / why I am anti-death penalty.

EDIT:

@Hoffmeister25 has a death penalty argument that I don't agree with, but 100% respect. As I read him, he believes swift execution is necessary to control the potential spread of defective genes, as well as to give clear and obvious consequences for violating the social contract. This is a consistent and honest opinion. But I worry about the "slippage" here - do we eventually turn into a state where one's potential for violent crime results in a minority-report style pre-execution? That may seem hyperbolic, but, you know, think about it duuuuude.

First, a tangent: this "pro-life in all cases" mindset seems to me a case of a whole swathe of society confusing a slogan with a moral principle. It's baffling to me why so many on both sides seem to have the idea that killing should either be absolutely indiscriminate or not done at all. Most of us are pro-jailing criminals but no one has ever insisted that we ought to jail babies as well to be consistent.

If you are a pacifist or have a principled objection to the state executing people in cold blood, by all means make that case, but abortion has absolutely nothing to do with it.

To interact with the case that you do make, I'm not sure if your slippery slope argument is supposed to apply to abortion / euthanasia only or to the death penalty as well. If it is aimed at the death penalty, I don't think it's well-supported and would be hard to meaningfully reason about given that practically every society in history up until the past hundred years has put some people to death. There's essentially no example one could look at of stepping onto the slippery slope since humanity has always existed on the supposed slope.

Your other support doesn't seem to be an argument but just an expression of your belief that the state ought not to be executing its own citizens. I think it ought to be, because the only human justice possible for a murder is the execution of the murderer, and only the state is in a position to do this with due process which at least attempts to ensure that the guilty is punished rather than the weak. What's your support for the belief that the state shouldn't do it?

If responsibility is diffused between many different people in the process of executing someone, that's fine by me as long as the person is actually guilty. They should all feel good for having worked together to achieve the only earthly justice possible under the circumstances. The fact that, in the modern west, most of them don't feel good about it, because they aren't persuaded of the goodness of justice, is a hindrance to the system working well in practice, but not an argument that the death penalty is principally unjust.

If it is aimed at the death penalty, I don't think it's well-supported and would be hard to meaningfully reason about given that practically every society in history up until the past hundred years has put some people to death.

I don't think this is a good thing. I don't want societies to put their own citizens to death.

but just an expression of your belief that the state ought not to be executing its own citizens.

Yes. This was my intent. To offer an explanation of belief for the OP.

What's your support for the belief that the state shouldn't do it?

Because I believe human life is one of the few things that is intrinsically beyond the State to decide on. Again, as my original post said, I 100% support the State's ability to put you in a box forever and never let you out. What is the meaningful distinction between that and death from the perspective of the State or the aggrieved? Or, to flip it around, what is the marginal utility / justification / satisfaction found in execution versus life imprisonment? If a prisoner is alive, there exists some chance that they may develop sincere feelings of remorse and regret. It'll never be enough to justify their release, but I believe a State ought to give its citizens every last chance to be human. If, as some will argue, some of these prisoners are just beyond-the-pale insane and unpredictably dangerous, I'd offer that raises a much more difficult argument; should the State be in the business of exterminating those we deem mentally incapable? You can see how quickly it gets to eugenics.

Are you raising the utilitarian perspective because that's the grounds for your opposition to a state putting people to death? If so, I'm not sure it works out very well.

what is the marginal utility / justification / satisfaction found in execution versus life imprisonment?

This one's pretty easy, it's incredibly expensive to house an unproductive prisoner for 50+ years and incredibly inexpensive to e.g. build a gallows.

But I only address the utilitarian argument because you raised it, my belief is in no way utilitarian and is simply founded on the principle of retributive justice that a murderer should die for justice to be done.

That's cool. I think we're just going to hard disagree on this one.

A society gets to decide if human life is sacred or it isn't. Our current society says "no, not sacred" at the beginning of life and well through to the end. My belief is the opposite - human life is sacred and should never be treated otherwise within the society[1]. There isn't much beyond this strict categorization. That's why, in my original post, I cited hoffmeister as having an argument I disagreed with, but still respect.

I look at justification of beliefs to be a problem of recursion. "I believe x based on y ... I believe y based on z ..." At the end of the day, a lot of belief (and justification for it) boils down to what you place your value in and how various value-having things rank relative to one another. I put human life at the tippy top. Perhaps you don't, or your relative ranking is weaker. Either way, it's fine as long as your own argument is cohesive, which I believe it to be. But you won't be able to reason me out of my belief unless you reason me out of my value rankings. If you have an argument for why human life ought not be my number one value, I'll hear and consider it.

[^1]: When you have issues outside or between societies you're talking about war or something extra-judicial that by its very definition cannot be handled by the same codes and laws as within a society. Let's just leave this as is for now and not try to get into just war theory.

First, a tangent: this "pro-life in all cases" mindset seems to me a case of a whole swathe of society confusing a slogan with a moral principle. It's baffling to me why so many on both sides seem to have the idea that killing should either be absolutely indiscriminate or not done at all. Most of us are pro-jailing criminals but no one has ever insisted that we ought to jail babies as well to be consistent.

While I have problems with 'seamless garment' and 'consistent ethic of life' ideas as theological mandates, they are philosophically consistent- society shouldn't sanction killing people is a sentiment that doesn't preclude jail terms at all.

To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be.

To interrogate this a little: do you think that attempted murder should have the same punishment as accomplished murder?

Historically attempted murder has often drawn a lower penalty than completed murder, with there being an underlying assumption that failure to complete the act indicates some lack of mens rea to do so, or that cosmically it is wrong to execute a man without another body on the other side of the scale. After all, for Hammurabi "An eye for an eye" represented a gentler moderation rather than a harsher extreme, by that logic one cannot execute one's enemies unless they have taken a life.

One can, of course, focus on the mens rea and say that it's the evil intent that is most important.

I'm just curious where you come down on that argument.

I'm fine with biting the moral luck bullet. Drunk driving is the clearest example of this for me, where there is obviously no literal intent to kill anyone, but we punish those who do kill someone much more harshly than those that are merely negligent. I have no intuitive reaction to how attempted murder should be punished, but it seems basically fine to me to not escalate punishment to execution without a successful murder.

So why does that not extend to the accomplice, rather than the triggerman, in a felony murder case? What if witnesses testify that the triggerman was at the counter alone while his accomplice was in another room, but cannot identify which was which? It seems odd to say, well we wouldn't kill both of them if we knew which one was which, but since we don't know which one was which we'll kill them both.

Though I'll note that capital Felony Murder seems like a fine rule to me in that a felony is a sufficient predicate for an execution, but we can draw ever more outre cases. How many Jan-6th type "felony trespassers" can you charge with the murder of Ashli Babbitt? Felony murder has been used to charge felons for the deaths of their accomplices, on the theory that violence was a predictable result of their felonies on the day, and so the deaths of their accomplices were a predictable result of the violence they invited. We're only looking for a sufficiently tyrannical prosecutor.

Drunk driving is the clearest example of this for me, where there is obviously no literal intent to kill anyone, but we punish those who do kill someone much more harshly than those that are merely negligent.

Let's set up a hypothetical: five guys are at a party, all drinking, assume the same amount and tolerance for the sake of the hypo, all clearly plan to drive home. Four of them are caught at a highway checkpoint and arrested, the last is not so "lucky" he took backroads and crashed into oncoming traffic and killed another driver. Should the four men who did not kill anyone be charged just as harshly?

So why does that not extend to the accomplice, rather than the triggerman, in a felony murder case? What if witnesses testify that the triggerman was at the counter alone while his accomplice was in another room, but cannot identify which was which? It seems odd to say, well we wouldn't kill both of them if we knew which one was which, but since we don't know which one was which we'll kill them both.

See this post for some elaboration. In the Littlejohn case, I don't think it's obligatory that he be executed, just that there is no miscarriage of justice in doing so. Had the jury gone the other way, I wouldn't have follow-up questions for them, it's fine.

Though I'll note that capital Felony Murder seems like a fine rule to me in that a felony is a sufficient predicate for an execution, but we can draw ever more outre cases. How many Jan-6th type "felony trespassers" can you charge with the murder of Ashli Babbitt? Felony murder has been used to charge felons for the deaths of their accomplices, on the theory that violence was a predictable result of their felonies on the day, and so the deaths of their accomplices were a predictable result of the violence they invited. We're only looking for a sufficiently tyrannical prosecutor.

Well, yeah, this is where a jury of your peers comes in, plus a little help from a judge in sentencing. I don't think planning on armed robbery where things going as planned results in someone getting a gun pointed at their face is all that similar to the guys that walked into the capital and were technically trespassing. Many lacked proximity to violence that would look like any sort of meaningful moral culpability. Further, Babbitt died because she charged a semi-fortified position with an armed officer there - her own death could easily be avoided with her own decisions. I get your point, but ultimately, it's hard to say much other than that this is exactly why judgment is relevant. There is no scalable, generalizable principle that would lead me to treat literally all plausible felony murder cases the same; two thugs deciding to knock over a convenient store and one of them shooting the owner in the face is pretty much a canonical example of what felony murder cases should be about though.

If the concern is really just that felony murder is too flexible a charge, I may well agree, but this isn't the case where that seems relevant to me.

Let's set up a hypothetical: five guys are at a party, all drinking, assume the same amount and tolerance for the sake of the hypo, all clearly plan to drive home. Four of them are caught at a highway checkpoint and arrested, the last is not so "lucky" he took backroads and crashed into oncoming traffic and killed another driver. Should the four men who did not kill anyone be charged just as harshly?

Nope. Like I said, I'm just willing to bite the bullet on the moral luck there. I can come up with reasons why I'm willing to do so, but I kind of suspect that they're all just post facto, formulated to serve the intuition rather than the other way around. On the flip side, if there was a clearly articulated law that DUI is always punished equally harshly, based on the known facts about the level of inebriation rather than the outcome of the driving, I wouldn't feel a great deal of sympathy for the guys at the checkpoint that got "unfairly" punished. Some behaviors are beyond the pale - whether drunk driving is one or not seems less obvious to me than whether armed robbery is. In either case, my intuition is that your punishment should coincide with the actual outcomes rather than a probabilistic model of outcomes, but I don't think I can muster a great defense of that position at the moment.

In the Littlejohn case, I don't think it's obligatory that he be executed, just that there is no miscarriage of justice in doing so. Had the jury gone the other way, I wouldn't have follow-up questions for them, it's fine.

This aligns with my basic intuition, I'd agree that the jury verdict should absolutely be respected absent a near certainty of error.

This, though, strikes me as a little shakier:

I don't think planning on armed robbery where things going as planned results in someone getting a gun pointed at their face is all that similar to the guys that walked into the capital and were technically trespassing.

The armed robbers planned for a gun to be pointed at someone's face. The crowd charging at armed police officers intended for someone to confront the armed police, that it wasn't them personally who ran into that police officer is moral luck.

Though your point about Juries is well taken.

Complete aside, but I've always been curious about the word "interrogate" when used in this way. It's such an aggressive and presumptuous substitute for "investigate" that until more recently was most associated with criminal interrogation--an inherently manipulative, unfair, and coercive type of investigation. I can't say these connotations are inappropriate given the people who tend to use the term "interrogate" in this context, but usually they're better at picking their euphamisms to sound nice and cuddly.

To me the use of the term indicates to be that Walter and I are playing Socratics, where you offer an answer to one question and then your interlocutor asks additional questions meant to pull out more information about your original position. By contrasting the answers to similarly situated cases we produce more nuanced rules or better understandings of underlying logic.

In my mind it's the opposite of manipulation, I'm inviting Walt to play the game with me. He can choose not to.

It’s a relatively standard word in the contemporary philosophical literature and it doesn’t have any aggressive connotations (you can “interrogate” a position you’re friendly to as well).

I associate it with post-2000s prolifieration of predominantly lefty critical theory type work, though it has clearly been adopted more broadly. I don't think it carries the aggressive connotations in those intellectual communities today, but I suspect outsiders would still make those associations. I also see it frequently used in a struggle-session way.

My take on it is that punishment should more be based on what is best for the rest of us. Do we want to live next to this person? Is this person a massive risk for the rest of us and a drag on society? My main argument for the death penalty is that we are far better off without these people. They high risk.

To commit such extreme crimes they most likely have an outlier awful personality with high levels of psychopathy, poor impulse control and low IQ. They are pretty much the extreme left tail of the bell curve. We are simply better off without them. Also getting rid of these people is a eugenic measure that is highly effective as we would be removing the people with the worst possible traits.

Yes, but not unlike the problem of schools (nobody cared when dumb kids were dumb when everyone was white, but thanks to Multiculturalism if too many dumb kids are non-white you need to stop teaching algebra or calculus to anyone, and abolish standardized testing, and remove all discipline) we now have a problem with the death penalty, or even imprisoning anyone. When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death. I'm not sure anyone cared if a bunch of poor whites from the same zipcode were always getting thrown in jail. Add a dash of Multiculturalism however, and suddenly we aren't allowed to have a functional civilization anymore. To many non-whites end up in jail or get the death penalty? Time to start depolicing and just letting people go. Sure they might murder someone you love a week later, but at least we won't be racist.

When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death.

The SCOTUS-ordered moratorium on the death penalty was in place 1972-1976, at which time the US was still roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. European countries mostly abolished the death penalty back when they were still monoethnic. The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

So if anything, the empirical evidence points towards monoethnic countries being more abolitionist, not less.

The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.

Japan and Taiwan both execute people often enough to qualify, no?

It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.

https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/states-landing

Looking through states that everyone agrees maintain the death penalty, there's lots of low-single digit numbers of annual executions and lots of 'carry out one execution every other year' type states. Like yes, they're much smaller than Taiwan or especially Japan, but Taiwan and Japan have much lower murder rates- and Japan in practice seems to use the death penalty for much the same things as retentionist US states. When you take that into account, a multiple murderer is possibly more likely to get the death penalty in Japan than in the US south.

They don't use it often, but Japan still has the death penalty, has executed 98 people in the last 25 years, and has done as recent as 2022. Taiwan restored the death penalty in 2010 and it enjoys substantial polling popularity.

Does China count as a first world country?

No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.

Uh, do you understand the history of the death penalty in the USA? Until the very late 20th century, the death penalty was quite strongly associated with, and mostly used on, large black populations.

That’s not an argument against, but the death penalty being in heavy use against blacks has been going on for a long time, and recent shifts in demographic composition are not the reason many opponents tie it to civil rights.

The US movement to abolish the death penalty goes back to the 18th century, when multicultural considerations weren't a thing. I will leave this link to Perplexity's quick summary that has further links.

You are correct that currently people are concerned with the death penalty in part because it affects black men more than white men. (And that nobody cares that it affects white men more then Asian men or black women, etc.)

What are you talking about?

Multicultural America is the only majority white country left that has the death penalty.

When England permanently put a moratorium on executions, it was 90% white British.

To interrogate this a little: do you think that attempted murder should have the same punishment as accomplished murder?

It's a difficult question, but there is a compelling (to me) consequentialist argument as to why it should not have the same punishment. It's a variation on the Dazexiang Uprising issue; if the consequences are the same, the moral event horizon of having "nothing left to lose" is crossed earlier, which could harden the resolve of would-be murderers in cases where they might have otherwise hesitated. It might also encourage them to take more extreme, deadlier methods because the risk of their victim surviving and becoming a witness becomes too great. One might chose to go with shooting or stabbing when they would have gone with a less effective "softer" poisoning because the downside of failure has increased dramatically.

*EDIT: Context for those unfamiliar with the Dazexiang Uprising story; two Qin dynasty officers who were going to be late taking their men to defend a village figured that since the penalty for lateness (no matter the reason) was death, they might as well take their chances in an uprising since the penalty for that was the same.

Historically attempted murder has often drawn a lower penalty than completed murder, with there being an underlying assumption that failure to complete the act indicates some lack of mens rea to do so, or that cosmically it is wrong to execute a man without another body on the other side of the scale.

Historically both attempted murder and murder were punished by hanging. More recently as criminal justice evolved into a more formalized system attempt murder was considered less serious by, usually, 1 tick. So murder would be a class 1 (or A or whatever based on the state) then attempt murder was class 2, which realistically meant 30 years instead of 40 or something along those lines.

my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil

I'm not an absolutist. Or, let me phrase it this way: to the extent that I'm opposed to the death penalty, it's not due to an overriding commitment to pacifism. If a man were to witness another man murdering his wife, for example, I would not fault him for disposing of the murderer in whatever manner he pleased. When we speak of the "death penalty" though, we aren't speaking of an impassioned response to a personal injustice; we are instead of speaking of an impersonal state apparatus, one which operates over vast distances and vast quantities of time, and which publicizes (the knowledge of) its executions as a spectacle. Now things are different.

Nietzsche said most of what needs to be said in On the Genealogy of Morality, specifically in the second essay, which deals with the historical genesis of criminal punishment:

But in particular, the creditor could inflict all kinds of dishonour and torture on the body of the debtor, for example, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt: – from this standpoint there were everywhere, early on, estimates which went into horrifyingly minute and fastidious detail, legally drawn up estimates for individual limbs and parts of the body. [...] Let’s be quite clear about the logic of this whole matter of compensation: it is strange enough. The equivalence is provided by the fact that instead of an advantage directly making up for the wrong (so, instead of compensation in money, land or possessions of any kind), a sort of pleasure is given to the creditor as repayment and compensation, – the pleasure of having the right to exercise power over the powerless without a thought, the pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire’, the enjoyment of violating: an enjoyment that is prized all the higher, the lower and baser the position of the creditor in the social scale, and which can easily seem a delicious titbit to him, even a foretaste of higher rank. Through punishment of the debtor, the creditor takes part in the rights of the masters: at last he, too, shares the elevated feeling of being in a position to despise and maltreat someone as an ‘inferior’ – or at least, when the actual power of punishment, of exacting punishment, is already transferred to the ‘authorities’, of seeing the debtor despised and maltreated. So, then, compensation is made up of a warrant for and entitlement to cruelty. –

The right to inflict misery - or rather, the right to know that misery is being inflicted on your behalf, the right to know that somewhere out there, people are "getting what they deserve" - is its own reward, a reward that the state so generously apportions out to citizens as an incentive for good behavior. It is straightforwardly pleasurable; there are hardly any complexities or nuances to mention here. The idea that justice is painful to those that mete it out, the idea that it is only done begrudgingly and through gritted teeth, is of course nonsense - all advocates of "justice" like to imagine themselves as the executioner. Legal executions serve as a socially acceptable, state-sanctioned outlet for cruelty that cannot permissibly find expression elsewhere. The erotic pleasure of the business itself is the operative animating impulse behind the expansion of the state execution apparatus - likely ahead of any utilitarian concerns about reducing crime, and certainly ahead of any concern for a formal, symmetrical notion of justice.

Perhaps this state of affairs is the only alternative to a society of unrestrained vigilante justice (although, if that's true, it can only be true of a given culture at a given time - many countries have abolished the death penalty without descending into madness). Perhaps this impulse - the impulse to delight in the misery of others, the impulse to pawn off one's own injustices by proxy onto the condemned - must necessarily engage in subterfuge, must necessarily take on the false appearance of "justice" while it performs its vitally important social function. But, that needn't prevent us from performing an honest analysis of its origins.

Your post adduces evidence for the view I have outlined:

I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary.

If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger? A life for a life - that's at least a plausible principle of justice. But "a life for an intent to take a life", or "a life for being an accomplice to someone else taking a life" - now things are no longer so clear. The fact that such nuances are of little interest to you indicates that the execution itself is the prize for you. Of course you can find other "tough on crime" advocates who don't even want to stop at murder, but are happy to advocate capital punishment for rape, assault, even perhaps petty theft in the case of repeat offenders. Is it really about justice at that point, or is it about casting an ever widening net so we have enough sacrifices to fuel the revenge machine?

Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath.

Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger?

Entering a criminal conspiracy to point a gun at man's head suffices for me to say that someone is morally culpable if that trigger gets pulled. Other people will draw the line in different spots. I'd be fine not executing Littlejohn, not knowing the details of the case, but I'm also fine with sentencing him to death. He was tried by a jury of his peers and sentenced accordingly. Had they decided that he was substantially less culpable due to mitigating circumstances that aren't obvious, I wouldn't really question it. The point in the Littlejohn case isn't that he absolutely must be executed, but that it's absurd to claim there was some horrible injustice done by executing him. His actions clearly and directly led to an innocent man being shot in the face and dying, execution is perfectly acceptable as a punishment.

Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

I think I covered this explicitly in my post - my gut feeling that someone deserves worse should be overridden and limited. It's trivial to imagine worse punishments than being put in front of a firing squad, one of the legitimate goals that I think is served with the death penalty is providing finality without becoming perverse. I am not in favor of deliberately painful executions. I have explicitly stated that I think it's immoral to deliberately condemn someone to a lifetime of physical and mental torture - executing them is the moral solution to avoid such a temptation.

Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?

It's important to note here that Nitrogen gas is now being used, because anti-death penalty ideologues have lobbied chemical and drug companies to stop supplying the materials for the prior method (lethal injection). So for anti-death penalty advocates to point to nitrogen asphyxiation as cruel is to decry the results of one's own side.

Cruel and unusual punishments were banned at the founding to move past the medieval drawing and quartering, but definition creep has reached the point where it is used to ban the death penalty by the back door. We must settle on some standard of pain that is necessary and work from there.

Well, the catch there is that places like Oklahoma did manage to screw up lethal injections in new and exciting ways.

We don’t have a very good track record standardizing pain or suffering, either.

I'm biased here in that I find lethal injection disgusting for humanist reasons, I think it is below the dignity of a murderer to be put down like a dog, that it is more dignified to be hung or shot, to be blamed. The hanged man is a moral actor whose actions we deemed worthy of death, the lethally injectee strapped to a gurney is reduced to an object to be disposed of with minimal fuss.

Technically, there is one state where the default method of execution is shooting- Utah(technically the condemned is given a choice between the firing squad and lethal injection, but in practice every execution in Utah has chosen a firing squad).

Revealed preferences?

Mormons believe that atonement for murder requires the literal shedding of blood, so that might be part of it in some cases, given that this is Utah.

The lethal injections were screwed up because drug companies stopped providing the drugs, right? IIRC the original lethal injection was a three drug cocktail with the killing agent being specialized potassium salt(and also a sedative and anesthetic), but as it became harder to obtain the necessary chemicals states switched to using a lethal dose of horse tranquilizer, which is less instant and humane.

Well, they had that stumble, and ended up switching to midozalam. But they also managed to inject the wrong drugs.

Shortly before Glossip's scheduled execution, the state learned that a drug supplier had sent the Oklahoma Department of Corrections a supply of potassium acetate rather than potassium chloride. Potassium chloride is the third drug prescribed in Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol.[12] An autopsy on Charles Warner's and Clayton Lockett's bodies revealed that the state had used potassium acetate during each of their executions as well, in violation of their protocol.

Fortunately, potassium acetate works just fine.

Though a nice sharp blade would work too, with less fiddling. For all its indubitably French origins, the guillotine really fits well with America -- the execution technique of the nobility, packaged and commoditized for the masses.

ISTM that the reason that primates take pleasure in punishing wrongdoing is that it is group-selectively-adaptive to evolve to take such pleasure. Cue all those game-theory results (I assume you've read them, otherwise will cite) in which participants willingly pay to punish defectors even at personal cost.

Same as eating a ripe piece of fruit or seeing a beautiful flower, the pleasure in punishing the wicked might be the result of evolution creating a brain that maximizes fitness.

If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger?

I hold both men equally responsible for the killing. You might have had a point if one of them was only an accomplice after the fact, but from my reading they both went into that business fully intent on murdering the staff member in question.

Hitler doesn't have to personally turn on the gas in Auschwitz to be responsible for the Holocaust.

Aren’t you and @Folamh3 excluding the most common, most defensible objection? Would either of those accounts be dissatisfied with life in prison?

(Edit: @gattsuru pointed out that, yes, the Aurelius guy remained 100% partisan about life without parole. And in one of the other cases I cited, too! Mea culpa.)

You can see a similar conclusion in other cases. Clemency is portrayed as (specifically Christian) mercy and a chance to further reduce the false alarm rate. More cynically, it’s a way for governments to look responsive to public outcry without actually releasing a possible murderer.

The status of Oklahoma’s parole board is interesting. It looks like they’ve recommended clemency 5 times, always on grounds of inhumanity, and always on a 3-2 or 3-1 vote. But there’s no shortage of cases where they decline to recommend it. Clearly there are limits to any stonewalling. Regardless, Governor Stitt usually declines the recommendation.

The most defensible objection to what?

To the death penalty.

I think most death penalty protestors are neither evil nor conspiratorial. They just really reject killing. That leads to protesting whether or not innocence is in question.

See my other comment. I don't think this explanation describes all anti-death penalty activists.

Aren’t you and @Folamh3 excluding the most common, most defensible objection? Would either of those accounts be dissatisfied with life in prison?

I'm not sure I follow. I suspect that they would be dissatisfied, but I don't know that and I don't wish to mischaracterize them if I'm wrong.

Consider the response to a commuted death sentence in the same state:

“After prayerful consideration and reviewing materials presented by all sides of this case, I have determined to commute Julius Jones’ sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole,” Stitt said in a news release.

A crowd of Jones’ supporters at the Oklahoma Capitol broke out into loud applause and cheers when the decision was announced shortly after noon Thursday, and more than 100 supporters who had gathered outside the prison in McAlester erupted in cheers.

These protestors had more skin in the game, more publicity and a better case for innocence, but they were still cheering for life without parole. I think that suggests a true distaste for killing.

In the absence of other remarks on those Twitter accounts, I’d assume they feel the same, and would be glad to accept commutation even though that admits guilt.

In the absence of other remarks on those Twitter accounts...

Uh:

Hopefully the LWOP ruling pushes you to PIC abolition. Death by imprisonment is still death. Anytime behind bars is gross inhumanity, trauma, and violence. Every additional hour Julius remains there is cruel. It all must go. Our urgency must remain.

Well, there you have it.

I get nervous about the death penalty for the same reason I think it should probably be legal: death is irrecoverable. When the state puts someone to death in error, that is an error that should shake the government to its foundations. Basically everyone involved in allowing that to happen should be removed from government office or employment, permanently, and strictly speaking at least some of the police, lawyers, and judges involved seem to have earned the death penalty themselves as a result. And wrongful execution does seem to happen, sometimes, and the consequences for it happening are basically nil; redistributing a bunch of tax money to the family of the innocent deceased is no solution at all.

But by the same token, when a murderer ends someone's life, there's just literally nothing anyone can do to "make it right." We sometimes allocate money to the bereaved, but their loss is inescapably paltry by comparison to the permanent, irrecoverable loss imposed on the deceased. The death penalty is society's way of saying, "the impossibility of restorative justice in these cases means that Hammurabi is all we have left."

Discourse on this topic is frustrating because a rather labyrinthine motte-and-bailey complex has arisen in connection with the retribution/deterrence/rehabilitation theories of criminal justice. In the United States, at least, we refuse to really commit to any particular theory of criminal justice (probably as a result of the democratic process). Instead, we engage in laundered mob justice, demanding our lawyers dress it up in whatever theory has the best fit, or happens to be in fashion. This strikes me as... inadequate.

So I end up being kind of weakly opposed to the death penalty, more because I tend to despise government than because I have any philosophical objections to executing known murderers. This is all in much the way that I vehemently reject the idea that "all cops are bastards," while comfortably believing that, say, "all traffic cops are bastards" is basically correct.

That said, it’s quite puzzling to me from a rationality and decision-theoretic framework to incorporate these kinds of predicted value-shifts into your views.

I think it's the sign of a particularly self-aware mind. The spectrum would go like this:

  • Everyone believes what I believe.
  • Not everyone believes what I believe but they've always been wrong when they didn't.
  • I have been wrong before, but I was always right to believe what I believe (my mistakes are only bad luck, my reasoning and my information are flawless).
  • I have been wrong before, but I always had the correct position for the information I had (my reasoning is flawless but I can sometimes have incomplete or incorrect information).
  • I have been wrong before, sometimes due to my reasoning, but now I am right (my reasoning was flawed, but now it is flawless). <- Most people are here
  • I might be wrong. <- Most people who are not in the previous category are here
  • Considering past trends in my belief, I am probably wrong now. <- You are here

Personally I have always had a hard time pinning down my actual beliefs. I have the habit of being a devil's advocate in the extreme, defending positions whenever I see a hint that they might actually be defensible. So I would probably incorporate the anticipated value shift, even if I find myself on shakier ground to defend for now.

No, that's just how I schematize it personally. Thanks for the link, though, that's a very interesting video!

Considering past trends in my belief, I am probably wrong now. <- You are here

I'd go one step further. What he expressed is closer to

  • Most beliefs and values, including the ones I hold now and the ones I will hold in the future, are the end product of a process of ultimately self-serving rationalisation and mental gymnastics

That said, it’s quite puzzling to me from a rationality and decision-theoretic framework to incorporate these kinds of predicted value-shifts into your views. For example, imagine I anticipate becoming significantly wealthier next year, and I observe that previously when I’ve become wealthier my views on tax policy have become more libertarian. What’s the rational move here? Should I try to fight against this anticipated value shift? Should I begin incorporating it now? Should I say what will be will be, and just wait for it to happen? Should I actively try to avoid becoming wealthier because that will predictably compromise my values?

Isn't this the problem that Rawls' Veil of Ignorance is designed to solve?

Given, that is normally offered to justify a socialist solution to problems. The Veil of Ignorance is offered to the rich man to say, imagine if you were poor, wouldn't you prefer a socialist system?

But there's nothing in the mechanics of the Veil of Ignorance that prevents it from being used the opposite way: imagine you were rich, would you dislike any of the redistributive policies you currently advocate for?

Given, it suffers from the flaw of many philosophical tools, in that it relies on "then think really hard about it" as the final step. But it's the clear solution to the value shifts: try to imagine a system of values that would appeal to you regardless of your position.

I'm not sure it's ever rational to choose which values you will be inculcated in and then forget all about the choice. Ie if you take the course on Marxism, you should later realize that fact and keep it in mind when making value judgments.

Nor am I sure such a thing is entirely possible. I know I spent years of my life trying to shop for a religion that would inculcate values that I liked, only to realize that it was impossible to really believe in a religion learned under those circumstances.

On the off-chance you aren't aware of this already, a similar thought experiment is discussed in Parfit's "Reasons and Persons" and Korsgaard's "Self-Constitution".

If you really knew in advance that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X, you should immediately believe X even without taking the courses based on your knowledge that the rationally persuasive evidence exists.

I doubt that you know that the courses contain rationally persuasive evidence for X. What you do know is that after taking such courses, you feel that you have been rationally persuaded. But being irrationally persuaded feels like being rationally persuaded.

But there's nothing in the mechanics of the Veil of Ignorance that prevents it from being used the opposite way: imagine you were rich, would you dislike any of the redistributive policies you currently advocate for?

There is, the mechanic is "would you hate being poor in a dog-eat-dog world more than you'd hate being taxed a lot as a rich man?".

@anon_

Sure, but that's just a percentage thing, easily disposed of. Rawls would tell you that some degree of redistribution is optimal, but it can still justify Capitalism on a "more goods produced" logic, and set the level of redistribution to maximize everyone's happiness. That's a logic that holds from behind a veil of ignorance. What one shouldn't do within Rawls' paradigm is undertake policies that are not overall utility-maximizing.

Nor is mere quantity of poor and rich people enough to make anything justifiable. Neutral between whether I am the one or the other, I can still feel that there is some level of "fans harassing famous person" that isn't morally correct, for example.

But there's nothing in the mechanics of the Veil of Ignorance that prevents it from being used the opposite way: imagine you were rich, would you dislike any of the redistributive policies you currently advocate for?

I don't at all agree with Rawls, but I think the point is that there are far fewer rich than poor.

I disagree that the death sentence is a qualitatively different punishment from the usual.

We do not have a 100% accurate legal system, or even one that approaches it. It is still, speaking broadly, an acceptable one. I and most people present here have negligible chances of ending up behind bars if we go on leading relatively normal lives.

If I were someone wrongly convicted of a crime, and only released at the hoary age of 80 with a few million dollars as an apology, it isn't much better than being dead. Better, yes, but assuming I was in there for most of my natural life, I would have lived a very substandard existence, I would have lost the opportunities that I cared about.

Life is fungible with time, and time with money.

Look, I get where you're coming from about the irrecoverable nature of death, but I think we're missing the forest for the trees here. Sure, death is final - but so is losing decades of your life to imprisonment. Many seem to consider that there's there's this huge, qualitative difference between execution and long-term incarceration, but I'm not convinced it's as big as we make it out to be.

Think about it - if you're wrongfully convicted at 25 and spend the next 40 years in prison, only to be exonerated at 65, what exactly have you recovered? You've lost the prime of your life, missed out on career opportunities, relationships, family, and pretty much everything that makes life worth living.

Most of us need to donate a decade or two of our lives laboring to make ends meet. And (for the moment), death has been an inevitability for 97 billion anatomically modern humans. You steal my life savings, and I can draw up a figure for the years of my life you've stolen for me.

Keeping someone alive in custody for decades is expensive. Yet, the damage done, if done wrongly, cannot be trivially reversed.

Executing someone, in the USA, even those guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, is somehow more expensive, but that speaks more to political opposition and organizational failure than the price of a bullet or a noose. It is not intrinsically difficult or expensive to end a human life, quite the opposite.

You mentioned the idea of Hammurabi being all we have left when restorative justice is impossible. I'd argue that this applies just as much to life sentences as it does to the death penalty. In both cases, we're essentially saying, "We can't undo the harm done, so we're going to remove this person from society permanently."

And that may as well be cheaply. Because the rest of us are paying for it with our finite time and money. Not without due process, extra care even, but the kind of people who end up on Death Row aren't particularly sympathetic characters if the recent discussion about the questionable candidates that the Innocence Project were forced to advocate for are any indication.

I'm an unabashed transhumanist. I think there is a very significant probability that human lifespans could be made nearly unbounded in the span of our current life expectancies. I think it's a tragedy that anyone dies, especially today, when the end is potentially in sight. That only changed the values of the calculus, not the core of it. Still, beyond wishful optimism, I know no reason to assume that humans can live literally forever, not while thermodynamics and Feynmann's quip about it stands. But as the world exists, reformative and restorative justice seem farcical to me. The closest we can get those congenitally inclined towards to criminality to desist within the tender caress of a prison is to age them out of their proclivities. While still outside, with the fear of swift and likely punishment (hence why the perceived odds of being brought to justice outweigh the kind of justice involved, the death penalty isn't a detterent over life in prison). Thus, without access to better ways of removing the crime from the criminal, we keep them away from those they might hurt. Maybe one day we'll be able to edit minds or genes to turn even the most murderous maniac into someone who sobs at the idea of hurting a fly, but that day isn't today. If the possibility of killing someone before that eventuality seems too much, oh well, cryopreserving their brains in a vat preserves some possibility of reform even after death, and is more than their victims received. It's a rounding error compared to the costs of trial, prison, or execution at the end.

Almost all societies recognize the necessity of governments making hard decisions, often unpleasant decisions, about who goes behind bars and who dies. We simply have to choose how to calibrate that curve, decide how many innocent men die and how many guilty men go free. For a functional society, the optimal number of either is not zero. When you bite that bullet, I genuinely don't see any reason to be squeamish about the most villainous biting theirs.

Nominating for a late-in-the-game AAQC purely on the strength of that marvelous closing sentence.

Heh. I can't resist to throw in some alliteration, a pinch of prpsody, and I'm glad someone appreciates it!

Executing someone, in the USA, even those guilty beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt, is somehow more expensive, but that speaks more to political opposition and organizational failure than the price of a bullet or a noose. It is not intrinsically difficult or expensive to end a human life, quite the opposite.

And that may as well be cheaply. Because the rest of us are paying for it with our finite time and money. Not without due process, extra care even, but the kind of people who end up on Death Row aren't particularly sympathetic characters if the recent discussion about the questionable candidates that the Innocence Project were forced to advocate for are any indication.

The only extra care given to capital cases in the United States is the bifurcated nature of the trial with both guilt and penalty phases and the requirement for death-qualified juries. While these impart some additional amount of time and expense, the biggest contributing factor is the lengthy appeals process. This is what's usually in the crosshairs of people who want to speed up the execution process, because it's the most obvious contributing factor; the trials may take a bit longer, but people don't start the clock on these things until after the sentence is pronounced. The problem, though, isn't that the appeals process is any different for capital cases than it is for other cases, but that the entire process is almost always utilized.

Most criminal convictions in the US are the result of plea bargains, and there isn't much to appeal in those cases. You could theoretically claim that an incompetent attorney talked you into taking a bad deal, but winning that appeal would at best get you a trial, at which you could be convicted and sentenced to a stiffer penalty. So no point in appealing that unless the situation is desperate or your attorney really likes your chances of winning. Also if there's a DNA exoneration or something like that, but those are rare. Even without a plea, though, most defendants don't appeal because it simply isn't worth it. Defendants who do appeal will usually only do so when there are clear avenues for appeal, and they will limit their appeal to those avenues. They'll also usually stop after losing at the first stage, and will only press further if there's a serious constitutional issue at stake.

Death penalty cases never result from plea bargains, and the defendants have no incentive to not file every appeal they can. So rather than focus on a few key issues they'll throw the entire record into question. Challenge everything in there that can be challenged. And capital cases are complicated and bifurcated so they have incredibly long records. This means the prosecutor has to wade through thousands of pages of trial transcripts to properly contest the appeal, and he's on the public payroll. So take your appeal to the intermediate appellate court and wait a couple years. When that appeal is rejected, take it to the state supreme court to be rejected (some states have tried to short-circuit this process by giving all capital appeals directly to the supreme court). Then maybe appeal that ruling to the US Supreme Court. They probably won't take it, but you'll by some time waiting for them to deny cert.

By this point, your appeals are exhausted, but that's not the end of it. Now you start filing for post-conviction relief. This is where you argue that defects outside the record merit reconsideration. Things like ineffective assistance of counsel, discovery of new evidence, and an intervening court decision. These also take a while. But then after that you get to argue the same things in a Federal habeas corpus petition. All of this by itself take a long time, but in a significant number of cases the defendant actually wins an appeal or a motion for relief. The thing is that winning these doesn't get you out of jail, but simply gets you a new trial, or a new sentencing phase. So now the defendant goes back to square one (or two) and starts the whole process over again.

The incentives in this process line up so that the goal is to expend as much time as possible. Someone serving a ten year sentence isn't going to do it this way because he's probably going to be out of prison before the appeals are exhausted. Someone serving a life sentence isn't going to do this because if they can theoretically get out they want out as fast as possible; buying time does nothing. But death row inmates aren't that stupid (or at least their attorneys aren't). Any postponement is a bonus, even if the end result is the same.

I honestly don't see any way around this. I understand the sentiment around not wanting to waste time, but these are protections that are enjoyed by everybody, and we have to look beyond death row if we want to scuttle them. Yeah, most death row inmates are total pieces of shit, but in some cases there really were serious procedural mistakes, in some cases there really was ineffective counsel, and there occasionally are exonerations. I'm not comfortable with the idea of intentionally scuttling constitutional protections across the board for the sole purpose of making it easier to execute people. I'm not sure what exactly is gained from that.

I think the answer is 'fast track appeals, so capital cases who appeal their sentence get a hearing almost immediately, and if they lose, it's over quickly'.

That sounds good in theory, but the reality is that court backlogs aren't the reason these cases take so long to resolve, and trying to force the issue actually increases the chance that the prosecution loses. Technically speaking, appeals are on a strict timeline. In reality, like most things in law, nothing is that strict. I can't speak for all states, but here's how it works in Pennsylvania:

After sentencing, the defense has 10 days to file a post-trial motion. This is where you list all the errors you think the court made and politely ask the court to reconsider them. Since you only have ten days to file, though, you pro-forma list every adverse decision the judge made. At this point, the judge has 120 days to grant or deny the relief. Since these motions are rarely granted, the default is that if no decision has been rendered in 120 days, they are automatically denied. Since this doesn't require the judge to actually do anything, you can expect to wait the full 120 days. Then you have 30 days to file notice of appeal. Once the notice is filed, the court will send a docketing statement, that has a deadline by which you must file a Statement of Errors with the trial court. Except you just got the transcript after 4 months, and this transcript is 11,000 pages long, and you need time to go through it to catch all the errors. So 2 weeks before the Statement is due, you file a motion with the court for an extension, which they grant, because the prosecution doesn't oppose it, because if they did then defense counsel would never agree to their extension requests. So the deadline gets extended by a month.

Once the Statement is finally submitted, the trial judge has to actually respond to every argument. And he's going to take his sweet time responding because he's about to start another trial which he isn't about to postpone for the third time just so he can respond to your long-shot motion, so add another couple months onto that. Once he's explained why your arguments are bullshit, you have to file a brief in support of your motion, which you nominally have 30 days to do but which you're going to ask for an extension on because you've raised so many issues that you need time to properly research the issues and apply the law to the facts in this monster transcript. And the prosecution again raises no opposition, because they don't exactly have an attorney assigned to handling this appeal and the trial team are all busy trying to incarcerate criminals who aren't in jail indefinitely and don't have the time to spend going through that 11,000 page transcript themselves and countering all of your arguments. After all, if they contest your motion then you're not exactly going to be inclined to grant them any extensions, which means their brief would be dogshit and you'd waive oral argument while the appeals court remands the case for a new trial and they're back to square one. So you get your extension. And since you got your extension, you're in no position to request their request for an extension, and they get one as well. And once you get their brief you now have 14 days to file a reply brief, which you probably don't do unless they made a particularly bad argument, but anyway. Now, a year and a half after sentencing, we're finally at the point where the case can even get scheduled for argument.

The upshot is that it's not so much the court's time that's the problem but the attorneys' time. We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is. Why would we prioritize these cases? These defendants have already been convicted and are going to be in jail forever and a day regardless of what happens. Every capital case that gets fast tracked means another case gets bumped. Is this really more important than a free speech case? Or a case where there are legitimate questions about illegal searches? Or even a commercial case where the law is genuinely ambiguous? Shouldn't we dedicate what limited resources we have toward prosecuting crimes where the defendants haven't been convicted and might not be? Or do we raise local taxes to give DA's offices more money? That won't sit well in red areas. In Washington County, a rural/exurban county outside of Pittsburgh, the new DA has decided to make a statement by charging every murder he can as a capital case. His first year in office there were 9 murders in a county of about 200,000 people. He charged 5 capital cases, including 1 woman whose only connection to the crime was that her fingerprint had been found on a shell casing. This isn't a particularly large office. He probably could've gotten plea deals on most of these, but instead he has to waste taxpayer money on a quixotic attempt at securing the death penalty in a state that has a moratorium on executions, and that is considering abolishing capital punishment on the grounds that it's an inefficient generator of the bullshit described above.

We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is.

I greatly doubt that this would actually result in expedited processes. The legal profession is hardly alone in finding that the amount of putative work that exists tends to increase to meet the number of individuals that are doing that work, but it's a stark example of the phenomenon. The United States has no shortage of attorneys, but legal proceedings have tended to increase in length rather than becoming quick and straightforward processes. Much like many of the other issues caused by endless legal wrangling and treating obvious bullshit as worth 120 day waiting periods, these aren't problems with no known solution to man, but problems created by the legal profession and the love its practitioners hold for artificial complication.

I get nervous about the death penalty for the same reason I think it should probably be legal: death is irrecoverable. When the state puts someone to death in error, that is an error that should shake the government to its foundations.

Amusingly, for largely the same reasons, I find myself mostly ambivalent (and maybe weakly in favor of) the death penalty. IMO for all the advocacy of "life in prison instead," that lifetime in prison isn't recoverable either: "Sorry grandpa, we realize you didn't do it 50 years ago. Here's some cash in exchange for the life you never got" isn't much, if any, better than a mistaken execution. They deserve the same standards of evidence as death penalty cases, at which point we shouldn't really be questioning guilt. The state already claims the right to expend lives in its service or at its discretion --- see The Draft and plenty of generally-approved-of kinetic actions against adversaries, even when those adversaries are citizens, or even the actuarial acceptance of marginal, but measurable increased risks of death in exchange for other goals, like banning DDT.

Okay, but the government does things which can’t be made right all the time. So do individuals. Can’t un-drop the bomb, can’t un-eat that cake, can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. That’s entropy.

But governments can survive scandals, and we might forgive our neighbors, and toothpaste is cheap, anyway. For any detector, the only way to get zero false alarms is never to respond at all. We have some tolerance for errors in proportion to how badly we want something done.

So why is killing different? Why should a mistake costing one life shatter the government? We make decisions with equal permanence, but vastly larger scope, all the time and without insisting on perfection. I don’t think you can develop a permanence-based objection without throwing out most every other core function of government. I’m not sure you can do it without throwing out most core functions of individuals. As soon as interests collide, someone is going to be harmed, and it’ll probably be irrevocable. Any theory which relies on reversing those harms is woefully incomplete.

Why should a mistake costing one life shatter the government?

Keep in mind that the last 4 years have taught us that even intentional mistakes by the government can cost millions of lives. Nobody seems to bat an eye at that (probably because it raised their socioeconomic standing)- whereas the death penalty is not, has the disadvantage of being showy and dramatic, and the media class can't make money off of it.

Eh? Which part are you talking about?

The simplest explanation is that Daddy Stalin was right about statistics. I don’t find that very compelling from a moral standpoint.

Isn't "intentional mistake" an oxymoron?

You really think someone would do that? Do the wrong thing on purpose just to spite their enemies?

I don't understand what you mean by "intentional mistake". I understand the concept of doing the wrong thing just for the sake of spiting your enemies. I understand the concept of doing what you thought was the right thing (morally or epistemically) at the time, but later coming to realise you were wrong. But I don't know what "intentional mistake" means in the context in which you're using it.

There's a billion possible things ThisIsSin could be referring too, but a simple one would be delaying the COVID vaccine trials so it could not be an October surprise thereby dooming high 4 digit to low 5 digit elderly Americans to dying in winter 2020-2021.

"Intentional mistake" seems like a weird way to describe that. It was an indisputably evil thing done for tactical, realpolitik reasons. The term "mistake" implies that the perpetrators have come to regret that decision, and I very much doubt they have.

The thing is that such a standard is literally impossible as long as you actually have a death sentence. And as it stands, the death penalty has been purposely turned into a very expensive, time consuming, and private process that because of the time between sentence and execution it has been neutered of any deterrent effects. And while I think the death penalty should only be used in extreme cases, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it such that it has at least some positive effect of deterring people from committing those particularly bad crimes we’re using it on.

My reaction to him (putatively, let's say) suffering is that if Canada and others can figure out MAID, it's not a technical problem.

That said, regardless of what he deserves, there is a valuable fence in not engaging in cruelty or barbarity for our own sake. Civilization is discipline and if we wish to impose it on others, we must be willing to impose it on ourselves.

[ Conversely, I accept the observation that since civilization isn't imposing it and is countenancing disorder on a large scale, the breakdown is happening across the board. ]

I agree with your second paragraph. I've gotten a couple replies in this vein, which makes me think I must not have written clearly with regard to viewing the death penalty as a cap on possible punishments. I am not in favor of inflicting additional suffering, it's a gut impulse, but a bad impulse and overriding it with a justice system that allows no further punishment beyond what a firing squad or hangman delivers is my preference.

He then spent the next 5-6 min intermittently gasping for air

You oppose capital punishment because you don't have the stomach for it.

I oppose capital punishment because I don't trust the state and its justice system further than I can throw it.

We are not the same.

Have you considered the possibility that this is a case of 'arguments as soldiers'? The parent post implies as much, and I think they are correct.

I think we have had a humane method for executing people for a long time: the guillotine. A society which has to sugarcoat their killings as medical procedures (lethal injections) is simply lying to itself about still having the stomach for killing.

Not sure how it is elsewhere, but in Texas the people who would vote out politicians that abolish the death penalty don't give a shit- they'd be perfectly happy with hanging, firing squad, the chair, whatever. Lethal injection was just fashionable the last time the topic came up for discussion.

A society which has to sugarcoat their killings as medical procedures (lethal injections) is simply lying to itself about still having the stomach for killing.

The "society" is a heckler's veto by death penalty opponents. I'd be fine with not making executions look like fake medical procedures. But death penalty opponents would seize upon this and use it as lawfare to stop the execution, so we can't do it. Don't blame "society" for this.

my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil.

I disagree with you there. Modern society has the means to imprison people for decades.

I see the punishment of the worst criminals not in terms of revenge, but merely as society deciding 'you have hurt people badly enough that we will reduce the amount of freedom to enjoy to a degree where you will not be able to hurt anyone again'.

I do not believe that a state should punish murderers by killing them. Or torturers by torturing them. Or rapists by raping them. Or cannibals by eating them. There is all kind of scumbag behavior which decent society should not reciprocate.

Of course, I am also not going to glorify the median inhabitant of death row as some kind of martyr. Murderous fuck got himself caught and killed in some weird rite by the barbarians inhabiting the new world. Not gonna shed many tears for him.

--

I think that having the death penalty seems like a weird hill to die on for anti-crime people. It is not universally accepted in the US, only 12-13 states still execute people. It provides a rallying point for the people opposed to it, from BLM to pacifists.

I get abortion as a CW topic. It matters. I would estimate lifetime abortions per capita to be somewhere between 0.1 and 2. Depending on your stance, that is a lot of innocent fetuses brutally murdered or a lot of women forced to give birth.

The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.

The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd).

Well yes, the death penalty is more expensive than life imprisonment because we imprison these people for twenty years first anyways.

The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.

The fight is worth it merely to distract that crowd. They aren't the types to stop fighting battles, and if you can have them spending years on end getting death sentences reduced to life in prison, that stops them from shifting the focus to getting pedophiles sentences reduced from life to 3 weeks or whatever cause celeb comes next.

That is a reasonable argument.

I think that you meant "people who have committed sex crimes against children" when you wrote "pedophiles". There is certainly a large overlap between the two groups, but using the one term for the other discards the criminals who are not exclusively attracted to pre-pubescent humans but still fuck kids when the opportunity arises and the poor fucks who find themselves attracted to kids exclusively but don't break any laws regarding their fetish.

Sure. As someone who has prosecuted people who committed sex crimes against children, I assure you we and the police involved in such cases are not so careful with our words. And frankly, all we care about is what you do, not what is in your heart. Its simply like the "you fuck one goat" situation as far as I am concerned.

I think that having the death penalty seems like a weird hill to die on for anti-crime people. It is not universally accepted in the US, only 12-13 states still execute people. It provides a rallying point for the people opposed to it, from BLM to pacifists.

I get abortion as a CW topic. It matters. I would estimate lifetime abortions per capita to be somewhere between 0.1 and 2. Depending on your stance, that is a lot of innocent fetuses brutally murdered or a lot of women forced to give birth.

The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.

This idea that the issue doesn't matter for your opposition, but it matters for opponents of the death penalty that ought to be appeased is pretty contradictory.

Clearly you oppose the death penalty, and you are trying to get the pro death penalty people to support you, by claiming they should appease groups like BLM, and how pro death penalty position is just clinging to tradition. A theme of outdated tradition vs inherently better progressive evolution appears.

I find it a subversive argument to act as if conservatives and other non progressives should adopt your values on this issue, and somehow it will help them from "dying on a hill". It seems like an attempt to fool them to abandon their preference, and adopt yours, without you giving sufficient due care about whether they might be right. On the face of it, this isn't a valid argument. But since it isn't a new one, there are more that can be said.

We know from experience that more appeasement and compromise on issues like death penalty will not satiate those willing to proclaim likely black murderers as innocent. Nor will it satisfy those who think that more appeasement and compromise by the right is necessary. Conservatives who listened to many of this iterations of bad advice to abandon their non progressive positions out of a mentality that it is a dying hill to not do so, either actually became the liberals, or failed to oppose the liberals enforcing the BLM agenda. It has been a consistently self destructive way for non progressives to act, and had played its role in things moving further left.

Like many issues is a legitimate issue that its proponents have valid reasons to fight for. Why are you so confident on this issue to ask others to stop fighting for it?

Are you sure you should be fighting on this hill?

I see the punishment of the worst criminals not in terms of revenge, but merely as society deciding 'you have hurt people badly enough that we will reduce the amount of freedom to enjoy to a degree where you will not be able to hurt anyone again'.

I do not believe that a state should punish murderers by killing them. Or torturers by torturing them. Or rapists by raping them. Or cannibals by eating them. There is all kind of scumbag behavior which decent society should not reciprocate.

Just like taking stolen money and giving them to the rightful owners is not theft.

And like kidnapping and imprisonment the crime is not equivalent to putting the same people in prison.

Neither is executing sufficiently vile criminals and murderers the same scumbag behavior to their actual murders. Equivalency in this case, can lead to too little empathy towards those suffering from murderers, including towards the ideological opposition.

There is an element of justice that is about punishment and retribution and making things whole for the victims by punishing perpetrators which is stronger towards sufficiently vile crimes. Bringing catharsis to the victims and their relatives, and to society by taking from the criminals what they have taken from those who suffered. Symbolically, it can also help avoid a society that sympathizes too much with criminals, or even with black criminals in particular, or shows some crossover with these kind of sympathies. The death penalty can reinforce the ways of thinking of a society that symbolically cares more for victims of crime. And then your wording of "barbarians" and "scumbag" in this issue has a symbolic significance in the opposite direction.

Cost, is the result of organizations and a general faction that are pro releasing even guilty criminals. And which also care about race and support a pro black criminal two tier system. And the way to deal with this, is to target the organizations, and the faction who are pushing this agenda even outside the death penalty.

Additionally, there are other valid considerations where the death penalty would apply. Cost and showing more care for victims than criminals which is connected to general anticrime policies is one thing. Others can be for example, mob bosses that remain influential, or people who would continue to murder inside prison, or the possibility of people being released in the future, by a more pro criminal system. At least by executing them now, you don't give them the opportunity to reofend. Which is a realistic issue in the circumstances.

I do agree that harsher treatment is not always better. There are crimes that it would be disproportionate, but these isn't the ones the death penalty is talked about in this debate. Still, empathy even towards offenders has its role. But too much empathy towards the worst criminals, does compete with empathy towards victims and is directly related with policies that help them reoffend.

While there are less passionate opponents of the death penalty who are so for various reasons, the death penalty debate among those who are more animated about it is also to a great extend about people who are willing to call actual murderers as innocents. It is a part of the general pro criminal vs anti-criminal conflict and the general conflict between people who have a wrong, and ironically racist view about black Americans being victimized by a white supremacist anti black system, when the reality is that black Americans are actually the demographic that engages in statistically the more predatory and criminal behavior, and black criminals should be punished for the common good. The response to those who sympathize with murderers and especially sympathize with black murderers, can't be to agree with them that an injustice of any sort is happening to these people. Or that society is failing to fulfill its duty towards them.

Executing criminals that are sufficiently vile is not barbaric, scumbag behavior, or a moral affront.

I guess one area I do agree with people more of your persuasion, is that prisons should not be unsafe, and there should be sufficient oversight so the places have order, are relatively clean, and there isn't violence and rape. Ironically, executing people who murder other inmates in prison, might help with that.

Rehabilitation like punishment is an element of justice, one that like punishment, becomes more significant in certain cases. And this applies more so in the less violent offenses.

I find it a subversive argument to act as if conservatives and other non progressives should adopt your values on this issue, and somehow it will help them from "dying on a hill". It seems like an attempt to fool them to abandon their preference, and adopt yours, without you giving sufficient due care about whether they might be right. On the face of it, this isn't a valid argument. But since it isn't a new one, there are more that can be said.

Let me try an analogy. I am pro choice of Singerian variant, which means that I don't think that fundamentally, third trimester abortions to the point of infanticide are not evil per se (only evil in so far as someone would like to raise the kid, and is deprived of that chance). However, I think that politically, it is not savvy to campaign for third trimester abortions. There is a significant demographic which is fine with first trimester abortions but which will strictly oppose third trimester ones. Also, the number of cases for third trimester are small compared to the earlier ones. Allowing 3rd trimester abortions will allow pro life radicals to pull a lot of moderates to their side with pictures of dead babies.

I don't think that policy issues generally are resolved better when they become partisan, with each side claiming an extremist position.

For the purpose of my argument, the radical pro life side ("abortions should always be tried as murder") corresponds to BLM radicals ("When we say 'defund the police', we mean abolishing it"). The moderates are the ones who dislike the death penalty or the 3rd trimester abortions, but don't really care too much about Dobbs or criminal justice otherwise. The point of view I am arguing is people who care strongly about criminal justice or abortion rights, and are fine with the death penalty or 3rd trimester abortions, but would lose popular support if they demanded that.

(Another thing to consider is that among the left, the moderates generally refuse to be alienated by the radicals, with the moderates claiming that 'When people demand X, they obviously don't mean Y, but Z'. (X: "defund the police", Y: "abolishing the police", Z: "move some of the police budget to social services" or X: "From the river to the sea", Y: "destroy Israel", Z: "a two state solution").)

Now, you could counter that late abortions are much less popular than the death penalty, and that could be correct, especially if one considers individual jurisdictions like Texas.

I think that we agree that there are some crimes which are similar to means states should use -- with sufficient procedural safeguards -- as punishment (theft, kidnapping). We likely also agree that there are some acts which are considered crimes when random citizens do them which would still be bad it we had the state do them (rape, torture). We seem to have different moral intuitions into which of the two camps the act of killing a person against their will should fall.

FWIW, I do not consider the death penalty with sufficient safe guards for sufficiently evil crimes to be a great moral failing of the US. I don't like it, but only to the point that I will write on the motte about it. I really hated gitmo, though.

I think that justice should strive to be color-blind. If there are more violent criminals in a minority, the way I would spin this is that this very likely means that the non-criminals in that minority are exposed to more crime than suburban Whites. If police is more reluctant to take action against Black men abusing their partners than against White men abusing theirs, then they are failing Black women, which is something the wokes should care about.

You are pro murder in my view if you don't care about killing babies that are sufficiently late term. There can be some very rare exceptions, but supporting it in general is a rightfully hated position.

I don't understand your analogy. How is killing "vile criminals" similar to killing developed babies?

Supporting third trimester abortions is not just not savvy but a position that people find morally abhorrent for valid reasons that are much more understandable than any claim of moral abhorrence towards execution of murderous criminals.

For the purpose of my argument, the radical pro life side ("abortions should always be tried as murder") corresponds to BLM radicals ("When we say 'defund the police', we mean abolishing it"). The moderates are the ones who dislike the death penalty or the 3rd trimester abortions, but don't really care too much about Dobbs or criminal justice otherwise. The point of view I am arguing is people who care strongly about criminal justice or abortion rights, and are fine with the death penalty or 3rd trimester abortions, but would lose popular support if they demanded that.

Third trimester abortion is an extreme position. Singerian viewpoint can even support infanticide. In my view, treating after birth bill or immediate abortion as equivalen of murder is also an extreme position. But certainly your position is far worse.

I can understand how "all abortion is murder" can be not savvy electorally. Although, calls of compromise it is very harmful to the right. It's part of the mechanism for why things are so far left, because leftists including leftists who captured influence in right wing circles, ask for more compromise, with the end result the right becoming more of the left.

So, for example as far as late term abortions go, there is nothing wrong with making supporting it a taboo, and even criminal prosecutions of legislators and those doing them. Outside of some few exception.

Not caring too much is so commonly offered by people here as a "moderate position" especially by liberals towards right wingers. It is not a moderate position to not care. It can even be the opposite. It also not sensible to paint valid positions as extreme.

The death penalty is not an extreme position. It might be an unfashionable position in certain countries today, but that doesn't make it an extreme position. I would give you that, it doesn't make you an extremist to oppose the death penalty, weakly. Frankly, I respect to an extend the argument of fear of getting it wrong, or fear of the state abusing its power.

But the animating feelings among those strongly opposing it in discourse I have seen is about this idea of inoccent, framed, or falsely accused, especially black murderers. And how an injustice is done to them.

I would say that the right and people in general need to support valid positions that go against the pieties and orthodoxies of the left and of its associated sacred cows. Ironically easy conformism is the road to the worst extremism and what is fashionable is not something to just compromise and allow others to define, but something that can be fought over and change.

(Another thing to consider is that among the left, the moderates generally refuse to be alienated by the radicals, with the moderates claiming that 'When people demand X, they obviously don't mean Y, but Z'. (X: "defund the police", Y: "abolishing the police", Z: "move some of the police budget to social services" or X: "From the river to the sea", Y: "destroy Israel", Z: "a two state solution").)

Moving the budget of the police to social services and defunding police somewhat has lead to increase of crime rates and is in fact an extreme position. The so called moderate left have promoted a very distorted picture of the world, and soft on crime and two tier justice policies. As always as narratives of that.

The moderate left are just extremists who are more moderate about their destructive agenda in my view. To a great extend, the moderate left doesn't exist, because what they want which is similiar to the BLM type agenda but not as far, is not moderate! To the extend something that can be considered moderate left exists, which is genuinely moderate, it must be a very small faction.

I think that we agree that there are some crimes which are similar to means states should use -- with sufficient procedural safeguards -- as punishment (theft, kidnapping). We likely also agree that there are some acts which are considered crimes when random citizens do them which would still be bad it we had the state do them (rape, torture). We seem to have different moral intuitions into which of the two camps the act of killing a person against their will should fall.

FWIW, I do not consider the death penalty with sufficient safe guards for sufficiently evil crimes to be a great moral failing of the US. I don't like it, but only to the point that I will write on the motte about it.

Fair.

I think that justice should strive to be color-blind. If there are more violent criminals in a minority, the way I would spin this is that this very likely means that the non-criminals in that minority are exposed to more crime than suburban Whites. If police is more reluctant to take action against Black men abusing their partners than against White men abusing theirs, then they are failing Black women, which is something the wokes should care about.

You can't address the problem of pro black bias, by making it all about how blacks suffer more. You reinforce the woke ideology when your opposition to it is about primarily how it hurts blacks more. It can be part of the things you mention that such murderers also harm blacks but you shouldn't adopt the morality that prioritizes blacks.

Yes, it is pretty obvious that a great deal of the people who are outspoken about cases like this, have misplaced empathy, and are quite willing to be anti life in other circumstances. There is also a strong element of especially sympathy towards black murderers. People are very animated and care and even some willing to call black murderers as innocents.

Personally, in most cases of vile criminals I don't have that strong of a position of life in prison vs execution. Death penalty certainly has a role though, as some people can become a problem later on, or remain one in prison through influence. Not to mention that in a system that is becoming more favorable to criminals, they might be freed to reofend in the future. While if executed, they won't get that opportunity. There have also been murderers who have been in prison for life, and then they keep committing murders or rapes in prison.

Even outside of the dangers of reoffending, it also might provide more catharsis to society and the relatives of victims. I strongly disagree with the idea that society has done any wrong when executing certain vile criminals.

While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night, I decided to do a little research into the company who produces the duck sauce packets. Hidden businesses like this are always interesting to me, even if I find the quality of soy sauce in these packets to be so far below par I can't stand to use them. The NY Times had a great little article from 1994 on the same corporation. Interesting to see single serve packaging as a somewhat recent innovation instead of so ubiquitous as to be background noise.

As any article would, the footer was packed with items to read next, which led to an expose on the hustlers "gamifying" the load balancing algorithms for Citi bikes. That's a bit too polite of a way to put it. The TL;DR: is that some folks have figured out the precise algorithm used to pay volunteers, including timing intervals and calculations behind the scenes. Volunteers of a high status get unlimited bike unlocks, and have formed gangs that empty whole racks, move them a trivial distance, then move them back, to pull down up to $6,000 a month.

A small group of people purposefully wiping out whole bike racks for commuters, all day every day for their gain is about what you'd expect in 2024. I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.

The comment section is perhaps even more enlightening than the article. The "journalist" spent quite a bit of time running interference for the gang, with the classic playbook of repeating how much money Lyft makes and bitching about the downsides of the gig economy. To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.

I’ve long wondered why people are habitually renting e-bikes. They’re much cheaper and easier to store than cars, so I’d point to the usual reasons given as not applying.

Like, it might be trendy social contagion, but you’d think people would notice that just buying the things is the better deal.

They're also much easier to steal than cars [citation needed], so I could see that driving behavior in some cities. Being able to just drop it off at a dock rather than making sure you're locking it in a good, visible location could be worth a few bucks to people. For small apartments, storage could become relevant as well - small studios aren't exactly rare and storing a bulky e-bike is kind of clunky.

But e-bikes aren’t much bigger than a regular bike, and most people don’t rent those?

You have a point about theft, but I don’t know that it’s a huge one in a world where existing responses to theft are already priced into major purchases with things like insurance.

Before ebikes became common there were plenty of similar rental programs for pedal bikes, and the program in Pittsburgh still has pedal bikes. They're just slowly replacing them with e-bikes because they're an easier sell to the typical American who's allergic to exercise.

But honestly, even my very-fit parents for example still ended up springing for e-bikes, because... have you ridden one? The feeling is at least that you still get a workout (with lower assistance settings) but without a lot of the misery. They are wonderful (in everything but the price) Now, I'm well aware that in some sense, misery is a sign that exercise is working, and is not a "bug", but anyone who has biked a steep hill will tell you that they might wish that specific part of the ride would disappear. And lo and behold, with e-bikes, it has! Plus, the lower effort might be at least partially offset, or surpassed, if an e-bike gets you to ride more often than you otherwise would.

As an avid cyclist, I've taken a couple of test drives, and I'm honestly not that impressed. To be fair, the one I took the most extensive ride on was a mountain bike, so it's not exactly typical commuter conditions, and with that in mind, the whole experience felt kind of stupid. I felt less like I was riding a bike and more like I was driving some kind of motorized vehicle. Pedaling felt less like moving the bike and more like actuating the motor, as if i was just flipping switches. Shifting seemed pointless; why bother with the higher gears when I can just keep it in low gear and adjust the power output as necessary? Now, I don't want to knock e-mountain bikes particularly, because I know a lot of older riders who are only able to stay out because of them. I also don't have any problem with people who use them for commuting or otherwise as a form of transportation.

My issue is with the people who buy them for recreation and take them on bike trails. It used to be that the only people who would do 20 mph on these trails were serious riders on serious bikes who were skilled enough and had enough courtesy that they weren't a problem. It also didn't hurt that there are few people in good enough shape to do 20 for any distance. Now that any schlub can do 20 there are regular near-collisions with teenage jackwagons who think they're on dirt bikes. At a state park near me, where several concessionaires run e-bike liveries, they're having serious problems with erosion on the crushed lime surface. This isn't a problem with e-mountain bikes, because the terrain naturally limits speed (the only advantage is on uphill sections, which already see much faster speeds from downhill riders). On a wide open trail though, it doesn't take much skill to open up the throttle.

Beyond that, what's the point? I fail to see how much advantage there is to an ebike when riding on a relatively flat path at normal speeds. As much as I dislike the asshole riders, there are plenty of normal people riding them slower than I'm riding my pedal bike, and all I can think of is "Why?" Only the frailest among us would have trouble pedaling a normal bike at reasonable speeds, and these people don't seem to ride their ebikes any faster, or at least much faster. And I lied about e-mountain bikes. One problem I do have isn't with the bikes themselves, but the people who claim they get just as good of a workout on them as they did on pedal bikes. Bullshit. I went on a weekend trip with friends this past summer, a couple of whom had ebikes. A friend of mine had a gizmo you could use to estimate wattage, and we took turns trying it out. Those of us on pedal bikes averaged about 225 watts, and the hardest riding guy peaked at over 700 watts on a tough climb. The ebike guys averaged around 70 watts of output at the cranks, with little change on hills. Like I alluded to earlier, it's an equivalent workout to riding a pedal bike in low gear at low cadence.

I'll counter @Rov_Scam here. The studies (admittedly that bike companies have done) suggest that people with e-bikes burn more calories and go further. I know with a high-class e-bike I'd feel more comfortable on the road to connect non-road sections for instance and open up my total range.

I also know that the appeal of a top-end E-MTB is fucking huge. Going downhill is 10/10 on the fun scale, but masochism is required to go up. An E-MTB lets you... double? the number of runs you get in a given day or carb bucket, so even very serious mountain bikers I know either have or would consider one.

From my perspective E-Bikes let people with a tiny fraction of my fitness level come with me on journeys. That's reason enough to consider them compelling for other people and me as a second-order effect.

I also would be able to use one as a substitute for my desire for a motorcycle. I can pedal very fast but only rarely get the experience of controlling the turning and maneuverability of a cycle which is super fun on its own. An E-bike would let me do that, so I've definitely thought about getting one.

I have to say, as an accomplished and fast road cyclist, e-bikes have ruined everything. People’s skills and awareness generally rise with experience and the shortcut (e-bike) means the roads are now packed with idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. You expect a rider who can pace at 20-25 mph to have the skills commensurate with their fitness. E-bikes ruined that. It’s decidedly worse now for actual cyclists. Delivery guys and out of shape people without the situational awareness of a seasoned rider have no place on a heavy, dangerous electric moped going 25 mph.

These folks do have the answer. The cycle in every American city has been:

  1. Pedal Bikes - The obese and the stylish simply won't use them.
  2. Electric Scooters - Cheap to produce, but a friend who works for the CDC has mentioned these are a public health nightmare. The fast-twitch nature of scooter handles, no suspension, and the tendency to be on the sidewalk meant cracked skulls everywhere. Plus they're easy to steal.
  3. Electric Bikes - These can be made heavy and difficult to steal, store bigger or auxiliary batteries, and are far more stable than a scooter. We'll see if they stick.

As a cyclist I can say that the risk of thievery is high enough there's no way for me to justify ever leaving my nice, light bike out of my sight. I'd rather outsource the risk to someone else, and they're great mobility enablers for tourists who misjudge the relative risk of public transport vs being on their own two wheels.

Pedal Bikes - The obese and the stylish simply won't use them.

To be hard to steal and stand up to abuse at all, they're also heavy and slow. My 20 year old boat anchor of a low-end hardtail mountain bike is far nicer to ride than a Citibike.

Bikes are hard to lock, and easy to steal, and police generally aren’t going to do a single thing about your $1500 bicycle being gone.

Ubiquitous e-bike/scooter rentals are preferable because almost all of the downsides are hidden from me.

Because, depending on the program, it can be significantly cheaper than owning. In Pittsburgh, the bikeshare program charges $120/year for a subscription with unlimited 30 minute rentals. Compare that to owning one, which is going to cost at least $2,000 for one that's worth buying, and comes with the attendant maintenance and theft risk. Compare that to transit, which in Pittsburgh is over $1,000 for an annual pass and requires you to operate on their schedule. Compare that to a parking lease, which is going to run you between $170 and $350 per month depending on where it is. And the network of stations is much larger than I would have thought, covering pretty much the entire East End plus the South Side and most of the lower North Side. (It should be noted that other parts of the city are cut off from any potential bike network by extreme topography and dangerous roads. This is doable for some people, but most will balk at the idea and it's certainly a liability nightmare.) For a certain kind of person, this subscription makes sense. Based on the pay-as-you-go rates, this makes sens for anyone who thinks they're going to use the service 20–30 times per year. I can't speak to how this works in New York or any other city.

Seems like the math will make sense for any young person who doesn't have kids nor a need to carry large loads around, and for whom a car + insurance + gas + parking would be a serious burden.

I don't know as much about the associated expenses of owning a bike, but reducing the risk of theft takes a pretty decent concern off your mind.

In Pittsburgh, the bikeshare program charges $120/year for a subscription with unlimited 30 minute rentals.

Ok, this makes sense why you wouldn't buy one, but I have questions about the economics- are there just huge numbers of people who buy a subscription but prefer cars and only use it twice a year, or is this the product of a low interest rate environment?

You're paying for the optionality here -- you can take the bike for one ride then pivot to bus/Uber/walk for the next.

Buying is the better deal in money but severely constrains options.

I do it all the time. Renting is not opposed to owning. I own my bike and rent e-bikes all the time.

Few reason:

  • I use it when riding my own bike isn't an option. It's normal to be going to some event where I don't want the hassle of carrying around my own bike. * * Renting is expensive. But, it's cheaper than an uber.
  • Can be faster and more pleasant to some. (me)
  • Bikes get stolen all the time.
  • Some employers give free memberships, which're significantly cheaper

I do own a bike but I rarely use it because using it involves bringing it in from my back balcony, through my apartment to the front door, then carrying it downstairs 2 floors (and all that in reverse when I'll be back, maybe tired). Then I have to carry a lock, I have to find a place to lock it at my destination and hope it's still there when I go get it. And that's a normal bike, NOT an e-bike, which is usually heavier, more expensive and appealing to thieves, and adds the concern of having to have it topped off before I take it out.

Browsing quickly, it seems the low-end of the "worth buying" ebikes starts around 750$ (so close to 1000$CAD). Mechanical components and batteries wear off on bikes, and those bikes at the low-end of the spectrum are likely Aliexpress specials that you cannot expect to get any significant post-sales service for. This is also no counting any electricity cost.

The local bike share program is 107$CAD from mid-april to mid-november (the months non-crazy dedicated "bike people" would consider riding in). After that it's 0$ for any number of "up to 45 minutes" rides in non-electric bikes, or 17c CAD/minute for an ebike.

Unless it's for daily commute, and/or you live at the ground floor and have a safe place to keep your bike, I can see the bike share system having massive appeal!

just buying the things is the better deal

You're paying for the ability to ditch the bike literally anywhere, and someone stealing it or wrecking it is not your problem.

In places where property crime is actively encouraged that is an underrated part of the package- and people don't bother stealing them anyway, because even if they weren't all GPS-tracked, they're very obviously stolen to pawn shops whereas private e-bikes are not (and if you want to be more cynical, the police will go where the local rental company tells them the stolen scooters are, where private citizens don't generally enjoy that even if you can prove it with an AirTag or similar).

While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night

A succulent chinese meal? Hopefully you go through it without experiencing any manifest democracy!!

Here's that cyberpunk future you ordered.

Seriously though "e-bike load-balancing grifter" is a job description right out of Snow Crash.

I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.

More than likely its some ex-programmer for the company who wrote or worked on the algo and just let someone else have it.

I kind of hate it in the same way I really despise hackers/exploiters in online multiplayer games. Yes yes, very clever, you're technically staying within the confines of the rules as defined by the computer code, but any other player can tell you that isn't how they intended to play the game and it ruins the point for them, can you spare any thought for that?

Sure, maybe the game dev/Lyft can update the code and fix things to be less hackable. But in the meantime you're making everything subtly (or not so subtly) worse for everyone.

Grumble grumble low trust society grumble grumble

ON THE OTHER HAND. I'm also not a fan of gamification intended to save a company money by offloading labor to users by using incentives that explicitly aim to change their behavior patterns. At least this one pays out actual money rather than amorphous reward points or 'achievements' that have no intrinsic value.

Ultimately it is impossible to make any system that is even slightly complex 'perfect.' There are always weird edge cases, and always tons of people motivated to find and exploit those edge cases until the weakness is patched. Either you foster a level of social trust high enough that people will intentionally not exploit these loopholes (and indeed, will be white-hats and report them on sight!) OR you can have a society that is wealthy enough that these niche 'parasites' aren't worth addressing.

Me, I would never even consider this kind of approach to making money (unless I was truly desperate) because there is absolutely nothing about it that is fulfilling to me, and I'd be very acutely aware that I'm basically imposing an externality on other users of the bikes.

But I understand and mostly accept that there are people who get a lot of 'fulfillment' out of finding out ways to exploit systems and 'get one over' on the powers that be and for them the mere knowledge that they're getting away with an unintended boon is probably enough motivation to do it. They like this better than being a sucker with a 9-5.

And they have a role in society too. It doesn't do to have your entire society simply ignore weaknesses in their critical systems because everyone is too polite and honest to comment on them, and thus vulnerabilities can persist until a catastrophe emerges.

And at least in theory this type of person, it must be said, might still end up contributing quite a lot. A very significant number of big tech players in the early internet era got their start as phone phreakers, scamming the phone companies in a sort of similar way.

Yeah.

My preference for a high trust society isn't because I want all systems to be designed naively so that they only work if everyone does things the specific way and break as soon as people start doing things to exploit the system.

Its more like I want everyone to have a shared goal of keeping systems intact AND in generally improving them over time, rather than breaking them for immediate personal gain.

Phone phreakers weren't causing much damage (that I'm aware of), and the personal gain was minimal.

The day I learned that there existed fake soy sauces (like La Choy) was a sad day indeed. Soy sauce is great. Now I check any new soy sauce to see if it's fake or not, and sure enough, last time I went to a takeout place, the soy sauce there was fake.

My boss insists La Choy is the best soy sauce and Kikkoman is inferior. This might say something about his tastes.

The other throwback from that article is the listing of the ingredients without sneering at them as a contemporary journalist would - Hydrolyzed Soy, Corn Syrup, Sodium Benzoate, and a metric fuckton of dye.

I've always wondered why the soy sauces in the packets always tasted off compared to the real sauces I've had. I always just thought that they were of extremely low quality. I never knew that they were simply not soy sauces. Thanks for the heads up.

To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.

I think what you're getting out of this is less, they don't care, and more that they make more money off of honest people than they would spend on labor to fix the problem and so they pursue a profitable path. They have no problem paying dishonest people, as long as they keep making money they don't care who is getting paid.

I'm of the schizo opinion that things like self-checkout are a form of psychological warfare against trust in society. Every time I self-checkout, I scan everything correctly, but I'm aware of how easy it would be not to. To tuck a couple small items in the corner of my tote bag and never scan them, to scan the $2 switch five times instead of scanning the four $10 switches, to ring up the organic carrots as ordinary carrots. And in my head I'm aware there is nothing the store will do to stop me, and that their profit margin is such to account out of the money they make on me for the person who doesn't scan it all. And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.

We've already seen this happen with "free" media, where internet commenters will act as if it is a personal affront that Youtube has advertisements, while ignoring that they can pay a pittance each month to remove all ads. Once people get used to free stuff, they can't stand the idea of paying for it.

Most people put media goods in a different mental bin than tangible physical goods I think, even if the physical good is very cheap. That's why "you wouldn't download a car" didn't land with anyone. The to-go rebuttal is "I bloody damn would, if cars could be downloaded".

I can't say your mindset is something I relate to. Even if I didn't have a reptilian aversion to even looking like I'm in position to take something without paying, I imagine I would feel disgusted with myself for contributing to the lowtrustification of my society for the sake of a few dollars of groceries. (I completely lack that aversion when it comes to downloading pirated media from the internet.)

I imagine I would feel disgusted with myself for contributing to the lowtrustification of my society for the sake of a few dollars of groceries.

How would you be contributing?

To be clear, I don't steal from self checkout, and doubt I will begin to. But it grates on me, as a citizen, that I know that I am paying Home Depot, and they have decided to allow dishonest people to steal from them rather than pay an honest cashier, counting on me to not steal from them.

Presumably, shops go from "self-checkout" to "hiding shit behind metal bars" because they found out that if they leave things out, they get stolen (more than the shop could absorb through raising prices). Thus, every additional thief contributes to the removal of high-trust features.

(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)

(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)

But here the transaction isn't between the developer or the musician, it's between you and the host who builds the platform and pays for it so that you can view the video. Why is youtube obligated not to turn a profit on you?

Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle. They don't seem to be struggling. (Wikipedia famously makes money from donations. I wonder if Youtube could do that, even in theory.)

I find that letting people who watch ads provide Youtube's profit margin instead of me doesn't make me feel guilty. Perhaps it's because I don't believe they're watching ads out of civic duty, but rather out of indifference/ignorance of adblock.

Compare: freemium mobile games where a couple of whales make it profitable, and the rest of the players are just there to bulk the audience up. Should the f2p players feel guilty, or whales feel like chumps? (Whales should feel like chumps in my opinion, but due to vastly overpaying for pixels, not for being taken advantage of by f2p players).

Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle.

And my point is what right do you have to any experience of their service without paying for it?

The same right as I have to play a freemuim game without paying for it, or use a donation-based service without donating. There's no explicit or implicit contract that says I must pay; they simply expect me to willingly make some money for them.

Like I said, I simply don't viscerally parse it as stealing if I'm not taking any physical items away and they're clearly thriving. Whatever their contract is with their ad providers, or a game developer's contract with a publishing platform, it is beyond my inner morality. If and when it turns out that free ad-based platforms are dying out in favor of paid access only, I will consider how my actions contributed to that. Until then, it appears that my eyeballs are payment enough for Youtube.

P.S. Advertisement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, in general. If I watch a thousand ads for a product I don't want and would never buy, or in some cases would avoid out of spite, it appears that both me and the ad provider are worse off.

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Because I can and there is nothing unethical about this?

I can download youtube videos and strip out ads added by creators with sponsorblock, Youtube can try blocking this actions.

And Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service.

And I am free to not pay for Twitter and Youtube.

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Truth be told, their pricing reflects the extra "shrink", so you actually are indirectly paying for other people stealing due to their corresponding margins that they choose. It's been a while since I worked there, but I'd hazard a guess that they increase margins by about 2-3% to offset increased theft.

You are paying indirectly for other people stealing, but not because they raised prices, just because they couldn't lower prices as much as they'd otherwise be able to after reducing cashier hours.

If the money they have to spend to offset increased theft was less than the money they'd have to keep spending on non-self-checkout cashiers then they'd happily keep the extra cashiers and the extra profit.

That assumes we all just care about store prices, though. If self-checkout raises shrinkage from 1.5% to 2.5% of revenues and reduces labor costs from 15% to 13% of revenues (all numbers here are 10% from Google and 90% pulled out of my hat) then price conscious shoppers are going to push for self-checkout, but there may be shoppers who hate the extra work, or like or hate the reduced contact, or have opinions on changes in line lengths ... or, while we're on the subject, I suppose there may be a few shoppers who would rather pay 2% more to employ more cashiers instead of 1% more to enrich more thieves.

And in fact slightly nicer grocery stores (and fancy ones) both currently still exist and at least appear to be doing well for precisely this reason! Hard to separate out the geographic effects, and I do have an admittedly suburban bias, so can't say that the tradeoff you describe is for sure the reason why, but seems reasonable despite that.

I still opt for the line almost every time though. Scanning, let alone bagging, really does feel like work to me, so if someone will do it for free? Sign me up. I'll wait a little longer in line, no problem (though shorter would be better, and long lines do actually drive some people away -- my mother hates WinCo for this reason)

There's lots of high-end options out there these days. We tried delivery and curbside pickup in 2020, and the former wasn't worth the price but the latter is still how we do our regular grocery shopping. A few bucks extra, and we can't pick produce ourselves, but saving 40 minutes per trip is usually more than worth it.

And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.

I don't experience this feeling myself, but I kind of agree that Self-Checkouts exist in an unusual 'middle-trust' zone where they are giving you some benefit of the doubt and yet still making you go through the motions to 'prove' your honesty by scanning everything and in theory if they find out that you took something without paying they could drag you back in and prove that you knowingly failed to scan an item with the intent to steal it. They won't because evidently the losses to such incidents are not worth hiring somebody to man a checkout counter, much less pushing the prosecution of a <$50 shoplifting case.

The real 'high trust' option is Honesty Boxes and that's surely not an option for any large corporation.

And it isn't like they're watching you to reward honest behavior! You don't get a prize for "100 items scanned at self-checkout without incident" or a badge that says "Certified Honest Customer". They just expect to make more money off you than they lose over the course of your patronage, and they are trying to zero in on the minimum level of surveillance needed to get you to follow the rules.

Me, I like the option of self-checkout because most of the time I'm picking up very few things at one time and if the self-checkout can shave 2-5 minutes off waiting in line I'm happy to do the work myself.

They won't because evidently the losses to such incidents are not worth hiring somebody to man a checkout counter, much less pushing the prosecution of a <$50 shoplifting case.

The places around me that have kept their self-check out counters almost always have some staff at hand that man multiple counters at once, both to supervise and help out if there are any issues. Perhaps 1 staff member per 5+ counters.

Right, there's probably some benefit to honesty by having a real human present, I'd bet on the margins it makes people less likely to cheat.

But that staffer isn't going to catch someone failing to scan a $10 item or scanning something as a different item unless they're aggressively looking for it.

And in the hypothetical where I scan the ham twice and miss the prosciutto, or scan the cheap lightswitch ten times and throw the heavy duty switches in the bag, and they catch me, "Oh man, lucky you noticed! Long day at work, I screwed up, let me fix it quick." No one is getting arrested, no consequences.

And they're always needed, because at some places they'll refuse to accept those shitty mandated-by-law cloth bags are empty when you start.

Pro tip: Don't put the bag down until it already has a heavy item in it (Canned/Frozen food). The scale is more forgiving with heavy items.

And that person is always busy, either helping someone who can't figure something out, or verifying ID for alcohol sales, or taking an item off for a customer who accidentally scanned it twice, or...

yet still making you go through the motions to 'prove' your honesty by scanning everything

As opposed to what? Tallying everything in my head? "Oh, how much was this carrot again? Let me go back to the carrots to check."

Barcodes are a labor saving device, not a compliance mechanism. It's absolutely trivial to circumvent.

Yes, and if YOU have to scan everything, rather than a cashier, that is also a labor-saving device... for the store that doesn't have to pay the cashier.

They're adding in an extra step for YOU, the customer to undertake mostly for the store's convenience. And they expect you to be honest while you do it, while still implementing anti-theft measures.

If you want an alternative, Sam's Club does Scan and Go where you can use your phone to scan your stuff as you shop, pay online, then mosy on past the checkout counter to the friendly staffer at the door who briefly checks if you've paid for all the items you said you bought.

Yes, we live in an era where every single person has a bar-code reader in their possession at all times.

THAT would be one hell of an alternative. Scan everything you're buying, and pay digitally (or pay at some automated kiosk), and then walk out the door.

We can quibble about who benefits the most from self checkout. The point I'm making is that the reason you scan stuff at self checkout is not to prove that you are honest, it's because that's the simplest way to implement self checkout.

Now, the guy at Sam's club who checks your cart and your receipt - that's obviously a compliance mechanism. It's probably not feasible to stop and frisk every shopper in a normal store, especially since in normal stores you bag your groceries and at Sam's club you don't.

Seems petty to me to complain about scanning your own items when it's a miniscule additional task compared to visiting the store in person, carrying items from the shelves to the exit and (gasp!) bagging your own items.

I also don't see how using your own phone to scan the things and using your own phone to pay makes it easier. What if I have a 10 year old brick that takes a minute to open anything?

Amazon Fresh had the best model for this, Just Walk Out. Cameras watch everything you do, associate you with the items you pick up and walk out of the store with, and charge you.

Unfortunately a few weeks back the store near me abandoned this. Now they've got a regular self checkout and "dash carts" that are basically a mobile self checkout, where you still have to scan items. According to Amazon customers didn't like it, which is baffling to me. Here's the press release: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-just-walk-out-dash-cart-grocery-shopping-checkout-stores

The accuracy was perfect in my experience. To use Just Walk Out you'd have to scan your Amazon app when you entered and exited. Maybe folks figured out a great way to defeat the tech and theft was too great? But if not then they'd be much harder to defeat than regular self check out.

From what I recall, Amazon Fresh was the one where they needed to outsource the recognition to Indians for double-checking?

That was the media lying about RLHF.

Does self-check-out work differently in the States? At least in the UK, you need to put everything on a counter with a scale, that's pretty sensitive to the point where a minor discrepancy between an item put there and an item scanned and put in the bagging tray will get it to lockup till manual intervention by staff. All on camera too. Everything has barcodes too, so I doubt you can just scan produce differently. Or maybe I'm just naive here, I don't know.

I think you're being naive here.

The scale exists, but it doesn't know the difference between a pound of ham and a pound of prosciutto, scan the ham, put the prosciutto on the scale, scan the ham again, put the ham on the scale. And they're not constantly monitoring the tape for minor irregularities in movement.

Hmm.. I'd like to claim that I've been prevented from just rescanning the same item twice, but I'm not sure of that. I'll try and see if that works for duplicate items next time I'm shopping.

Maybe the scanners used in other countries are different, but here you will not be prevented from scanning the same item twice, provided that an equivalent item is placed on the scale. I often do this with multiple half gallons of milk for convenience reasons. The UPCs are the same.

This ignores Target and Home Depot, which allow you to use the hand scanner and never weigh the items anyway.

I can scan the same item twice at my local grocery store. (The legitimate use-case is to scan one item X times when you're buying X copies, rather than manually going through the entire stack of the copies).

I could 100% see fresh sliced deli meat being unique enough in a barcode (Item, weight to 1/100th of a pound, timestamp down to a second) that simple double scanning logic would catch you messing with this.

For pre-packaged anything meat with similar package weights, though, you'd doubtless be able to double scan.

The most I steal is exotic peppers being coded in as jalapenos or white onions as yellow, and that's 90% convenience of fast scanning and 10% the price difference.

I just double-scanned some store-labeled bagels today. I had two packages and one of the barcodes was damaged, so I scanned the other one twice. Worked fine. Even when I picked up the first one off the scale (to rescan it) and put the second one on, Indiana Jones-style.

They’re very precise. Steaks are individually plastic wrapped here, so you’d have to find a ham that weighs exactly 454 grams or whatever. They beep very loudly when there’s any issue. The staff meticulously check your bag if the system flags any issues. I’m sure people still steal stuff, but it’s less easy than the original post assumes.

THey have the technical ability to be very precise, but any modern store is going to have them calibrated to allow some gratuitous shifting.

You need only look at the difference between plastic and reusable bags to see how generous they must be by default. If you put a reusable bag down without an item, they're heavy enough to register as one, so there's a bit of technique to putting your first item down.

They make you weigh the bags first here. I suppose this presents the opportunity to finagle the system, but they always seem to watch me like hawks, and I’m hardly the median grocery store shoplifter demographically.

My local grocery stores' self-checkout kiosks all have a special "reusable bag" button - you press it, put your bags on the bagging surface, and continue on with grocery scanning. My one issue with it is that my bags tend to collapse in on themselves when empty, and the scale freaks out when I correct that to put stuff in them.

You clearly live in a much nicer area than me; meticulousness is absolutely not part of standard operating procedure at my local grocery stores.

I hate any store with self-checkout that does not disable those scales. They seem to have been designed with the assumption that you will not ever want to reorganize the inside of your bag as you put stuff in it. I end up having to bother the attendant every 2 items.

At the two major grocery chains near me, most fresh produce does NOT have a barcode to scan, just a four-digit code you have to type in yourself. So if you set an expensive steak on the checkout scale and type in the code for broccoli, it'll ring up as broccoli no problem. The self-checkout does have a voice announce out loud what fruit/vegetable you just rang up, but that's about it for enforcement.

The US mega grocery chain I shop at has all these things, but they are so hopelessly clapped out with no maintenance that the single attendant covering all 8 units spends 75% of their time clearing malfunctions so people can keep scanning and the rest of the time staring at their phone.

I'm reposting a top level comment that got posted yesterday, because I don't think it got enough discussion.

Historic flooding in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Whole towns washed away. People retreating to their attics as water levels rise. People losing everything.

Tragic. Horrific. But this is the Culture War thread so I am going to ask the insensitive question, what does this mean for the election in <40 days?

My first thought is that there is a certain irony that these states are among those that just limited the forms of ID allowed at a voting booth. Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.

Rural areas that were wiped out will have a harder time finding their polling location under the mud and timber. Mail-in voting will be difficult without a mailbox.

People are going to watch the Biden-Harris's administration to see how they respond.

Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red? Buncombe County, one of the hardest hit, went 60% for Biden in 2020.

I want to add, as I commented, I am beyond frustrated by the federal response. Biden just put out a press release today, over 5 days after it happened, and he just sounds so tired and apparently has a cold. That being said, he says a lot of the right things even if the delivery is bad.

But why has it taken so long to get things out there? As another commenter said, why aren't planes and helicopters air dropping supplies and Starlink in?

And if there has been a major relief effort, where is the news on it? The left controls pretty much the entire mainstream media, so where are the videos of airlifted supplies? I know internet is out, but people on X have shared plenty of videos of waters washing away homes etc.

I'm just shocked at how poor the response has been, though I guess I shouldn't be. Also man, those videos really are something to watch. Reminds us how fragile things really are if Nature decides to make us face her wrath.

I think we’re lead by incompetent people. We just plain lack the ability to solve any of these kinds of problems. Biden gave an interview and claimed to be leading from the beach because he’d been on the phone with Homeland Security for two hours. That’s barely trying in my opinion. What amazes me is that we have a lot of disaster relief programs out of Fort Bragg (or whatever it’s been renamed to) and nobody seems interested in using those resources at all.

Counterpoint: I have always felt and continue to feel that the top leadership can't actually do much that's useful in the immediate aftermath. Right? It's the type of thing that reliably happens somewhere at some point in the US every. single. year. Without fail! Most people whose job it is to help, are helping, and I don't really think that someone with very little background in disaster relief is going to be much help, and in fact might just hurt responses by doing the equivalent of C-suite meddling.

A governor can probably do something useful, but the President? Their job is mostly in the aftermath: if they can pass a recovery bill, and if so how much $?

The president controls air assets that could be used to airlift supplies to isolated mountain communities.

Probably it’s the sort of thing where once we know who needs what and where then conditions have improved enough that normal emergency responders can get through.

For what it’s worth, we’re already doing that through the state national guard. And other states, apparently. I think there’s diminishing returns on number of helicopters.

From the link:

In addition, a total of 550 National Guard personnel were deployed to the region to assist first responders with search and rescue missions, delivering supplies and working to restore infrastructure to the affected areas.

From a naive perspective, 550 NG personnel seems low. commitments from the other states list three helicopters with 17 crew. Again, that seems kinda low.

Since it's the comparison people are drawing, here's the numbers for the 2010 Haiti earthquake:

The response included personnel from all branches of the military.[3] The U.S. Navy listed its resources in the area on 19 January [One week after the event] as "17 ships, 48 helicopters and 12 fixed-wing aircraft" in addition to 10,000 sailors and Marines.[4] By 26 January, the U.S. military had 17,000 personnel in and around Haiti.[5] Between the beginning of relief efforts and 18 February the US Air Force had delivered nearly 6,000 support members and 19 million pounds of cargo while evacuating 15,000 American citizens and conducted aeromedical evacuations for 223 critical Haitian patients.[6]

Naively, it sounds like they're sending ~1/10th the resources, and that does seem a bit surprising. Maybe the state and federal resources have things under control, so there's no need for NG resources, but that's not what I would expect for a very large and highly unexpected natural disaster.

Either way, I imagine we'll know the truth soon enough: either they'll handle the situation swiftly and in good order, or this will become another insignificant event not worth talking about.

That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.

Most of the region can receive supplies by road. Same for repairs and evacuations. Areas which are only accessible by air are the exception rather than the rule.

The worst damage is localized to places like Asheville, a tourist city with less than 100,000 residents. As of this afternoon, ~60 were unaccounted for. More people were killed in the Haiti quake than lived in Asheville!

That quake hit about 3M people living in ridiculously poor and dense conditions. It’s a terrible comparison for the electrified, paved, American-standard-of-living Southeast.

This is an excellent point.

Is your general sense that the cleanup and rescue efforts are proceeding more or less as well as we could ask for? I've heard complaints, but I haven't seen strong evidence either way, nor had the time to track down the details to a level where I could be confident that I understand the actual situation.

On the one hand, partisanship obviously dominates from both ends; the people running things have every incentive to present everything as fine, and the people opposing them have every incentive to present everything as a total disaster. This is complicated by heavy bias in the media, so the default narrative is definately going to favor the people running things in the current situation; the flipside is that any complaints are going to come from the opposition ghetto, which observably has poor quality control.

On the other hand, this is a time-sensitive issue; the three days between your comment and this reply could have been quite significant. If there is actually a problem, it would have been imperative to identify and correct it as quickly as possible.

On the gripping hand, I have no expectation that this can actually be done in a timely manner in the present environment. I mainly want to discuss it now as a marker, and check back in a month or two as the facts present themselves. The problem there, as I snarkily alluded to, is that it seems to me that after-the-fact, sober assessments of what really happened don't actually penetrate, even here. They become old news and people move on, even if the weight of evidence falls hard on one side or the other. There are exceptions; Ymeshkout did what seemed to me to be a very good job hammering election fraud claims, for example, but exceptions don't seem like they're enough.

My sister is currently visiting from an affected, neighboring city.

She reports most of that city was without power and there were lots of downed trees. Still, traffic was redirected rather than stopped, so people were able to get back to work or get out of town quickly.

One of her neighbors was picked up from Asheville Monday because it was in terrible shape. Looters and still no power or water. But it’s worth mentioning that she could be picked up without Katrina- or Haiti-scale congestion.

The death toll remains under 300, and I expect it to stay low. Maybe sub 500. There are no stadiums full of refugees. Water access is still poor, but on the other hand, it’s much easier to get in and out of the area. Regional infrastructure is relatively intact even in cities directly on the path, so long as the geography didn’t funnel water.

I think relief is going about as well as expected. That’s not to say we couldn’t spend more to do more—this is America, after all—but that we aren’t being negligent or incompetent. Not sure how to formalize that as predictions, not ones which would satisfy a conspiracy theorist.

You're thinking in purely material terms, this isn't all that leadership is about. All of the material good that could have been managed already has been, but there are immaterial ways to act out leadership.

Corny impassioned speeches about thinking of your fellow countryman, denouncing the inhumane looters and calling onto the charity of everyone in these trying times; these do not require years of prep time, and they can help both your political standing and the spirits of those that are helping or being helped. For all their sins, Dubya and Obama were clearly good at this part of the job.

Biden doesn't have the constitution to be in the muck delivering supplies even for a photo-op, but he sure could start touring the US collecting donations for disaster relief and using the silly charm he clearly still has to enjoin solidarity.

I bet he'd be remembered more fondly by history if he did it too.

Personally, I am not a big fan of politicians doing photo ops after disasters.

In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder won an election this way, standing in rubber boots near some flooded village. Ever since, whenever there is a flood, politicians will decent on the affected areas like vultures on a carcass looking serious. Armin Laschet famously lost his bid at chancellorship because a photograph of him laughing at one of these events surfaced.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I generally find this disgusting. These poor people have already been visited by one plague, do we really have to subject them to a torrent of politicians as well? I mean, if a politician said 'as a sign of solidarity, I will live a month with them in an emergency shelter' that would be some serious commitment (but still net negative for the victims in the case of quite some politicians). But arriving by helicopter, getting helped into your rubber boots, making a short speech and then returning to whatever upper class home you have does not feel like a show of solidarity, but just turns the flood victims into extras in your election ad.

You don’t have to literally go there to make a speech. Hell you don’t even need to leave the resort your in (he’s on vacation). Any hotel will have some sort of conference room, and you could easily give a speech from there. Just something reassuring the people that he’s actually working on the problem. The thing he actually did, not only isn’t reassuring, but honestly gives the opposite impression. If he’s only in touch on this issue by phone for 2 hours, how can that make a person living through that confident in the response? Really, entire towns destroyed is worth stopping your vacation for two whole hours? It’s almost a show of indifference to give an answer like that.

For that matter, I’m sure you can get a computer with connection to the White House and check in at some point.

Rumors, but it seems deliberate.

ETA: More evidence that it's deliberate

I was waiting for someone to bring up the fact that, outside of Buncombe and Watauga* counties, the affected areas are deep red, very very white, and very very poor.

*it's only blue because of the university located there, which is also the main economic driver in the county

I mean, the government is also at a low point in competency. The top job is a vegetable, the cabinet level positions are diversity hires who weren't very dedicated to their jobs at the best of times and are currently in campaign mode.

Setting aside the debate over Biden’s personal acuity, who do you think is a diversity hire to the cabinet? And who do you think is neglecting the job to campaign?

Woah these links are super concerning. For people not on twitter, basically none of the military units at nearby Fort Bragg are being deployed, even though they were deployed for Hurricane Katrina, Sandy, etc. pretty much immediately.

Very huge issue if true.

Or—hear me out—Twitter randos don’t actually have the scoop?

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3921723/statement-from-pentagon-press-secretary-maj-gen-pat-ryder-on-dod-support-to-hur/

Yes, but also Tennessee NG is deploying to fight in the Middle East (on Israel's behalf) this week.

Interesting. I didn’t know we sent the Guard overseas.

Looks like it’s part of a rotation dating back to 2012. Operation Spartan Shield. Where does Israel come into it?

What else would we be doing in the Middle East for the last year?

What else would we be doing in the Middle East for the last decade?

There are exactly three reason why American cares about the Middle East. In no particular order, they are the Suez Canal, the Petrodollar, and defense of Israel. The first two can be explained by rational self-interest, but the latter only makes sense when you consider AIPAC. I consider Israel to be the primary driver of American intervention in the area since at least the 2003 invasion of Iraq, if not Desert Storm a decade prior.

Given that this deployment involves parking in Kuwait, I’d think the petrodollar more likely than either of the others.

The operation started right before Obama was reelected. We’d just pulled out of Iraq and planned a draw-down in Afghanistan. Advisory roles and “capacity building” were the buzzwords. That’s not a focus on Israel.

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Very huge issue if true.

The fact that 100% of the anons promoting this meme insist on misnaming Fort Liberty in honour of a slaveholding traitor strongly suggests that it is partisan bullshit. Unless you favour calling it Fort Bragg in honour of Braxton Bragg's noteworthy contribution to the Union victory in the Civil War, which I suppose would kind of make sense.

  • -10

You know, renaming something "Liberty" has been a central example of overly-politically-correct euphemism since WWII's "Liberty sausage", "Liberty cabbage", "Liberty steak".

I agree with your points on the merits of "Fort Liberty". "Fort Sherman" or "Fort Burnside" would have been better given both generals won important victories for the USA in the area. But ostentatiously refusing to use the official name of the base is clearly an attempt to dogwhistle something, and the rules of this board require me to charitably assume that what they are dogwhistling is support for the MAGA campaign to retain military bases named after white supremacist traitors, rather than actual support for white supremacism or treason.

In any case, "Troops from nearby Fort Liberty have not been deployed to the relief effort. Does anyone know why not?" is an attempt to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." "Fort Bragg or whatever it's been renamed to" (when the correct name is well-known and can be found with thirty seconds' Googling) is what you say if the only audience you care about is the kind of person who cares strongly about naming military bases after white supremacist traitors.

Roads around me get renamed from time to time. Decades go by and all the locals still refer to them by the old names, because that's what they called them for 30-60 years.

Once upon a time, the way the Soviet Union renamed cities and shit every time the political winds changed was looked down on with mockery.

Twitter has been renamed X for over a year now. I've yet to encounter a person who actually calls it X except with sarcasm.

Names are sticky, stop reading so damned much into it.

Ask someone in New York about the Avenue of the Americas, or in Philly about Columbus Boulevard, Martin Luther King Drive, or the Avenue of the Arts. (The only renaming Philadelphians accept is Kelly Drive)

You missed the best one, The iconic Lake Shore Drive in chicago got renamed to Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable Lake Shore Drive during BLM. Dusable was a french black man who maybe discovered Chicago but probably didn't and has a half dozen other things in the city named after him.

I assume Chicagoans still call it "Lake Shore Drive" and nothing else?

There's also the case of the bridge over a wide part of the Hudson River in New York, originally named for that widening -- the Tappan Zee (from Dutch for "Sea") Bridge. It had the name "Governor Malcolm Wilson" prepended to it, but nobody cared and nobody used it. Then it was replaced by another bridge, which is named the "Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge". They managed to get the traffic reports on the local news station to call it that (I assume the Cuomos have stock), but no one else does. Even the signs indicating directions to the bridge in New Jersey still say "Tappan Zee Bridge". People call the new bridge by the old name of the former bridge.

Yeah, LSD is too icon to actually change the name, it's just a trap for out of towners using voice gps navigation now when it suddenly interrupts their song for like 10 seconds while it says the fake name.

It's not a dog whistle, it's a train whistle; everyone can hear it. And no, you're not being charitable by implying your opponents are white supremacist traitors.

It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness? People will still call it Fort Bragg out of reflex. It also sounds cooler than 'Fort Liberty'.

And is there anything truly terrible about consciously refusing to use its new name if you think the entire sentiment animating "NAME CHANGE FOR JUSTICE NOW" is toxic?

It was renamed in 2023. You don't think it takes a while for this name update to course through the public consciousness?

I was not aware that it was renamed, but at least one of the people @MadMonzer linked to was very clearly aware, as they made an explicit point of refusing to use the current name.

One can object to the practice of renaming things to fit modern political sensibilities without supporting the politics or the actions of the people they were originally named after. The idea that this sort of renaming is required arises from a a whole constellation of beliefs about the scope of politics, the role of language, the lens through which history should be interpreted, etc. that many people simply don't share.

Too antagonistic by half.

Your original comment is fine. Maiq’s comment is fine. But Nybbler is right—insisting that your interlocutor is dogwhistling is not particularly charitable.

Look I’ll just cut in here and say that really the reason I worded that name as I did was that I was aware of the fact that the name had been changed, but wasn’t precisely sure what it had been changed too. The sources of the information were still calling the base Fort Bragg. I figured that was more clear than googling the new name and having everyone confused about which base I’m referring to as most people would likely know Ft. Bragg is an American military base in North Carolina. If I’m creating confusion, I’ll edit if needed. I tend to go for clarity over anything else.

Hm? No, you did fine, in my opinion.

You’re allowed to call it what you want, @MadMonzer is allowed to question the credibility of the xitters, all good. It’s only the last response that pushed too far, and it’s because of tone more than content.

For calibration purposes: In your view, is Ken Burns a supporter of white supremacism and/or treason?

This makes an awesome bookend to the recent discussion of Marxism, and whether the term is too widely applied. More generally, another brick in the "there is no 'we'" wall.

For calibration purposes: In your view, is Ken Burns a supporter of white supremacism and/or treason?

Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct, Ken Burns was a useful idiot of Shelby Foote. Burns was not a historian, and was not aware that the Dunning School history he had learned in high school was largely bogus. So when Foote basically recounts the high school history Burns is familiar with added military detail and colour, Burns doesn't feel the need to consult a second historian. I think both Burns and Foote would have preferred to make a film that treated the Civil War as a series of battles between two groups of martially virtuous men with no underlying political causes, but obviously you can't do that and have it make sense.

Shelby Foote was unambiguously a supporter of treason (he said in 1997, "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.") but was probably not a white supremacist - I think an argument whether a Nathan Bedford Forrest fanboi who nevertheless supported Civil Rights is a white supremacist or not would quickly degenerate into a futile argument about the meaning of words.

about The Civil War are roughly correct, Ken Burns was a useful idiot of Shelby Foote.

...And PBS as well, of course? No one involved in the large bureaucratic government organization knew any better?

Burns was not a historian, and was not aware that the Dunning School history he had learned in high school was largely bogus. So when Foote basically recounts the high school history Burns is familiar with added military detail and colour, Burns doesn't feel the need to consult a second historian.

...Like the black historian prominently featured in the series, who talks at length in multiple segments about the black perspective on the war and its surrounding events? Further, my understanding of the standard Dunning School narrative is that the Civil War wasn't actually fought over slavery, that slavery wasn't actually all that bad and so on. My recollection is that PBS's The Civil War very explicitly claims that the civil war was fought over slavery, and is very explicit about the many ways in which slavery was barbaric and horrifying. So what exactly is the "largely bogus" history they're supposed to be communicating?

I think both Burns and Foote would have preferred to make a film that treated the Civil War as a series of battles between two groups of martially virtuous men with no underlying political causes, but obviously you can't do that and have it make sense.

And the fact that the series they actually produced heavily engaged with the underlying political causes leads you to this conclusion how? Certainly they did not cover all the intricacies; just for one example, they portray John Brown as an honorable man driven to extremism by principle, glossing over the part where he and his companions engaged in straight-up terrorist murder of innocent civilians. Nevertheless, having read deeper into the details, it seems to me that their account does a good job of capturing the essence. John Brown was, in fact, a murderous terrorist, but he was also driven to extremism by recognizable principles, and his actions are understandable for the same reasons that, say, a person car-bombing a Blue Tribe office building over abortion would be understandable: at some point, the blood of the innocent must be answered for.

And by the same token, I can extend sympathy to the Confederates for the same reasons I can extend sympathy to current Blues: the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. No one is simply "evil", and the misery of humanity is not simply the fault of "bad people". We all have it coming, one way or the other, and we should at least consider valuing mercy over swift justice, because swift justice means not an axe in our hands, but our head on a block.

If I could summarize the narrative of the series, it would be that our society's embrace of evil brought ruin on a vast scale, but through the conflict people found a way to both end some of that evil and to restore peace again. The bloodletting was probably unavoidable, and given that it resulted in the end of slavery, pretty clearly a net-positive. The people on both sides had many admirable and many deplorable qualities, but in the end the admirable qualities came to the fore, and peace was restored. The result was not a just utopia, or even a particularly good society; as in our own time, the price of peace was the toleration of considerable evil. Nonetheless, it's hard to argue that things weren't better at the end than they were at the beginning, and in the history of warfare that is in fact a fairly notable outcome.

To the extent that this is not good enough for you, I think you are quite foolish, but we all make our own choices freely.

Shelby Foote was unambiguously a supporter of treason (he said in 1997, "I would fight for the Confederacy today if the circumstances were similar.")

Hypothetical support based on "the circumstances" from a guy who, as you've noted, supported the civil rights act actually seems at least somewhat ambiguous; if he'd fight for slavery, why support the civil rights act? If he'd side with his state in a fight against the federal government over some actual present point of conflict, that would also be "similar circumstances", wouldn't it? Your entire case against him is that he has opinions on history and on hypotheticals that you don't like, not on anything of consequence he actually did.

Or perhaps I'm splitting hairs. Maybe you're right, and Shelby Foote was a Traitor. Presumably then, negative affect accrues, and we all join together to condemn his name and works, and to look with disfavor on those foolish enough to associate with him. Obviously this stance is principled, and not merely word games to exploit perceived vulnerabilities in those considered to be intellectual inferiors. So, just to be really clear here:

Bill Ayers: Traitor, or not? Worse than Foote, or not?
Angela Davis: Traitor, or not? Worse than Foote, or not?

It's hard to escape the impression that you are using "Traitor" and "Treason" as a conditioned call to obedience, as though you can apply the label and conservative types like me will fall in line because The Rules Are The Rules and we're All In This Together. It's an appeal to a system we share, and of course, you'll totally have our backs when the shoe is on the other foot; it's our turn to tear down the properly designated Bad Person, and of course, unquestionably, you also will do the same when we apply the label to someone in your general vicinity, because The Rules Are The Rules. This labeling-of-bad-people process is a thing we mutually share and respect, right?

Right?

Do you believe that a significant portion of Reds still recognize some degree of binding loyalty to your tribe, such that a concept like "treason" is meaningful? Do you think if a plane hits an office building in New York tomorrow, Reds are going to be lining up at the recruitment offices to avenge their "murdered brethren"?

After the Civil war, there was a "We" again. We made peace, and slowly, painfully, we tried to make a better society together. We weren't perfect at it, or even particularly good; I wish the southern Blacks had been armed en masse, and the KKK had gutted itself on organized community defenses rather than being allowed to dwindle into a jobs program for federal snitches. On the other hand, we actually made some pretty good progress, and The Civil War does a reasonable encapsulation of how we did it: we accepted that people in the past were neither saints nor monsters, and we tried to mourn the bad and move on with the good. And after much struggle and conflict, and after no small measure of injustice, things were legitimately pretty good there for a couple decades, Confederate statues and Confederate flags and all.

And now, because of arguments of the sort you're advancing here, the confederate statues and flags are gone, and all it cost us is a few thousand extra black people murdered every year for the last four years and continuing indefinitely into the future, a price that was predicted in advance, and that Blues here appear to find more or less acceptable. Respect for the valor of a defeated opponent wasn't killing massive numbers of black people, but deliberately spreading lies about how our whole society is based on "white supremacy" absolutely has. Blues needed a scapegoat for their own failures, and they didn't much care who got hurt so long as they could keep portraying themselves as the good guys.

For this and similar reasons, there is not really a "We" any more. Things are much worse than they were a mere decade ago, and they seem likely to continue to get worse for the foreseeable future. Another massive bloodletting is a distinct possibility. Like last time, people can see it coming, but cannot figure out a way to avoid it, or even properly understand the mechanisms of its arrival.

I, like you, blame Traitors. We would probably not agree on who they are, though.

This is a serious post and deserves a serious response, which I don't have time to write tonight. But one thing I will say right now is that I put the disclaimer "Assuming the secondary sources about The Civil War are roughly correct" in for a reason. The movie you are discussing bares no resemblance to the one discussed by Wikipedia and the most updooted reviews on IMDB. I would not be that surprised if I have been misled by wokestupid propaganda on IMDB, and not surprised at all in the case of Wikipedia.

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Being a traitor is underrated. George Washington was a traitor to his King.

And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him, and in general monuments to him in the United Kingdom are discreet and found in places associated with his family.

FWIW I am with Cecil Rhodes on this point - the American Revolution was an avoidable mistake on the part of the British, and had it been avoided we would have seen earlier and more complete Anglosphere supremacy, which would have been a net benefit for humanity.

That seems...well, not to go full Jared Diamond, but do you (and/or did Cecil Rhodes) really think that America would never have eclipsed Britain and striven for hegemony, or that Britain would have let it come to pass without resistance?

Cecil Rhodes favoured reforming the British Empire to be a federation of equals with all parts of the Empire represented in the Imperial Parliament. (Rhodes' views on how this incorporated non-whites are a matter of dispute.) He spent a lot of money promoting constitutional Irish nationalism and Home Rule, hoping that an internally self-governing Ireland within the Empire would be a proof of concept. He thought that a future generation of American leadership heavy with Rhodes scholars could be persuaded to join this reformed British Empire voluntarily. In a world where Rhodes' plan happens and the Anglosphere is a loose federation including the US by 1930,

  • The structure of the federation would be designed to prevent one member being hegemonic
  • Relative power of the constituents would be such that the US would be primus inter pares rather than a hegemon in any case
  • My read is that Rhodes believed that the various Anglosphere countries were sufficiently similar that the kind of competition which makes "hegemony" a useful concept would not be relevant - for example (not from Rhodes), if the Imperial Parliament broke down into a Tory/Dixiecrat faction, a Liberal/Republican faction and a Labour/New Deal Democrat faction then which part of the federation was "hegemon" wasn't relevant because politics would be ideological, not sectional.
  • In any case, given that his political career was almost entirely in South African "colonial" politics and he made no attempt to get seriously involved with Westminster politics beyond his Irish scheme, I don't think Rhodes cared about his bit of the Anglosphere being dominant - he cared about the Anglo-Saxon master race being dominant over the lesser breeds without the law.

Various reform schemes of a kind that would have appealed to Rhodes were proposed during the lead-up to the American Revolution, of which the one that came closest to being adopted was Galloway's Plan. Supporters included Benjamin Franklin on the American side and Edmund Burke and Pitt the Elder on the British side - i.e. it wasn't a fringe position. If something like this had been done, then eventually the American colonies would have become the tail that wags the dog. But the same provisos apply with the added bonus that sectional divisions among the American colonies mean that there isn't a united "America" competing against Britain for "hegemony" at all.

And of course something what did happen with the development of Dominion status is that the Dominions gradually became de facto independent while remaining close friends and allies of the UK. I think this is proof of concept that something similar could have happened to British North America a century earlier, meaning that the "special relationship" was baked in from day one rather than being forged in the fire of WW2. The Commonwealth is exactly the sort of thing that Rhodes would have approved of, although he would obviously prefer it to be more significant to its members that it is.

Even in our timeline, where Britain and the US are separate countries without the kind of close ties that the UK retained with the former Dominions, the attempt by the British to resist American hegemony was pretty nugatory. British naval supremacy begins with a battle (Quiberon Bay in reality, but Trafalgar per schoolboy history) but it is significant that it doesn't end with one.

This is nuts. I love it, and I want to see it represented in alt-history fiction.

The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

We probably delay the English abolition of slavery, and I would expect we have a civil war over it anyway. But the export-reliant, heavily coastal Confederacy of our timeline stands no chance against peak Victorian England. Unless they're committed in India or, I dunno, Russia at that point, the war is much shorter and favors the Union.

Russia probably ends up in the same mess over the 19th century. Their problems didn't depend on Napoleonic devastation or the Continental balancing act. I don't know nearly enough about German and Italian unification to say where that derails. Bonus points if Marx gets lost to the butterflies, though I suppose something like communism was bound to happen.

And that's before we even get to renegotiating WWI.

For Want of a Nail:

  • The US loses the Battle of Saratoga. France and Spain develop no faith in the rebels' ability to win the war, and refuse to provide aid, so the US then loses the war. However, Britain recognizes its errors and reforms the US and Canada into a dominion-ish Confederation of North America.

  • With no extra debt from fighting Britain in the American Revolution, France does not collapse into revolution (though it comes close after losing a war to Prussia and Britain in 1799), and Louisiana remains under Spanish, and then Mexican, control.

  • The American rebels that have not been executed for treason emigrate to form the Republic of Jefferson (Texas fifty years early). In 1816, Jefferson (led by Andrew Jackson) intervenes in a Mexican civil war to form a United States of Mexico that later degenerates into dictatorship.

  • The CNA abolishes slavery in 1841, after an economic depression with roots in London bank failures causes the price of cotton to plummet, making owning slaves uneconomical.

  • Republicanism in Europe is crushed by the failure of the American rebels, and is not revived until 1879, when, after Louis XX abdicates in the face of advancing German troops, socialist rioters in Paris execute the royal family and, aided by defecting French troops, beat back the Germans. The ensuing continent-wide wave of republican/socialist spirit in 1880 (comparable to OTL's Springtime of Nations) overtakes all the major powers except Britain and Russia.

  • Russia collapses in 1900, after losing Alaska and eastern Siberia to the USM in a conflict analogous to OTL's Russo-Japanese War.

Et cetera. The book extends to year 1970. It is written in the style of a textbook, with hundreds of footnotes and fake citations.

The Louisiana Purchase would probably look quite different if we were still a British subject. Does that put a damper on any industrial snowball? No doubt Napoleon still does Napoleonic things, so I expect we end up with it eventually, unless Britain springs for a separate colony.

Assuming that the French Revolution and ensuing Anglo-French wars happen on schedule, North America is a theatre in the same way it was in all the previous Anglo-French wars. The War of 1812 equivalent in that timeline is a "British" invasion of Louisiana (presumably with local troops led by Jackson and a modicum of Royal Naval support). Given that the UK and allies win the Napoleonic wars, I suspect British North America incorporates the Louisiana Purchase by conquest.

But the biggest question about a "No American War of Independence" timeline is how the French Revolution is affected. As @ToaKraka points out below, the natural assumption from a US-centric perspective is that with the radical ideas of e.g. Thomas Paine discredited and the French spending less money helping the Americans, the French Revolution doesn't happen. And essentially everything in non-US political history is downstream of the French Revolution - and possibly more American history than you think is too given that the main "real issue" in the First Party System was which side the new US should take in the Napoleonic Wars. I could defend the proposition that no French Revolution means no drive to universal white male suffrage in the US. But this depends on whether we are in a timeline where the Americans were defeated or one where a deal was done - if the Galloway plan happens then Thomas Paine is a prominent British statesman by 1789 and proto-democratic Whiggery is the dominant politics of the British Empire.

But from a non-US-centric perspective, the US as of 1776 is too small to determine the fate of France. Something like the Anglo-French War of 1778 happens roughly on schedule because the British and the French have unfinished business, and the British can still run the bill up until the French cry uncle. (The British cope for losing the American War of Independence is that we took a tactical drop in what we wrongly believed was the least important theatre of a three-ocean war against France - the larger Anglo-French war was a true World War).

If I do an alt-history timeline, it would be one where Cecil Rhodes makes a miraculous recovery from his chronic disease, returns to the UK triumphant after his victories in Africa, and enters UK politics as a Liberal Imperialist. He was born in 1853 so you can easily have him in the cabinet through WW1 and alive as an elder statesman into WW2. I agree with you that the "successful Galloway plan" timeline would be a lot of fun too.

And there is a reason why the British armed forces do not name bases after him

Because the territory controlled by the British today doesn't overlap very much with the places where Washington did stuff, not because Washington was a traitor.

There are several statues of Mahatma Gandhi in prominent places in the UK.

For what it’s worth, I have heard of Ft Bragg before and this thread is the first I’ve ever heard of a Ft Liberty, let alone that it’s a renaming of a prior base.

I can’t speak to the writer’s intentions but it’s worth considering that using an older, more widely known term could be just about avoiding confusion.

For scale:

1,400 people died in Katrina. 300 some died in Sandy.

As of now the death toll from Helene sits around 100. Is anyone familiar with the rhythm of these, what multiple should we apply to it?

ETA: She's already top 10 since 1950 and probably ends up Top 5, or even with the silver medal.

I'm kinda lost on all these social media comments about where is the news, where is the response. It's front page in all three newspapers I read since it happened, including reporting on federal level responses. The idea that the government isn't doing enough seems based in a combination of there being no news in reporting things that are done every time this happens post-Katrina, and an expectation that somehow Mommy Government will clean everything up so fast you'll never even notice anything went wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I highly doubt that Biden is contributing much of anything to this process, but I also don't think that any president should be interfering in the disaster relief process for what is ultimately fairly routine levels of disruption. If we're counting on some superhero president to be needed to get things going every time we get hit with a hurricane, well, George Washington ain't walkin' through that door. We should be focusing on building institutions that respond to routine disasters on a routine basis. Like FEMA, when it isn't putting everyone in camps or whatever.

Is there an estimate for how many of die within the first few hours of the hurricane ?

If most people die on impact, then there isn't much point to organizing an extraordinary response 2 days later. It'll make lives less miserable, but those who were going to die have already died.

I mean there's definitely not an estimate for how many would die without ordinary emergency response efforts. We're talking about basic food-clean water-medicine issues for a very large group of people, there will be many deaths if responses are too delayed among the elderly or otherwise frail.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, it seems easy to avoid death from hurricanes. If the broad path of the hurricane is known, then the city should be able to evacuate within a couple of days.

Dunno if this one is an exception, but I believe hurricanes are routine occurrences in this region. Neighboring cities should be able to preemptively provide shelter to the fleeing populace. 5-10 stadiums can hold ~200-500k people. The west coast deals with wildfires, and routinely evacuates entire cities with no reported deaths.

The economic damage is another story. But loss of human life should be avoidable.

NHC had predicted the Karina would make landfall near New Orleans, about three days in advance of its actual landfall on August 29. Sandy's exact landfall (in New Jersey on October 29) and the storm surge threat were solidly predicted about four to five days in advance.

In either case, broad predictions were made a full week in advance and precise impact zones were predicted with 3 days to go.

What am I missing here? Surely the death toll should have been a lot lower ?

At the risk of sounding insensitive, do you know anything about this hurricane? Evacuating the entire "broad path" of the hurricane would mean evacuating an area about 600 miles long and 200 miles wide that includes several major cities such as Tallahassee, Charlotte, and Atlanta. Evacuating at least 10 million people potentially hundreds of miles on short notice isn't exactly easy, or even desirable.

Dunno if this one is an exception, but I believe hurricanes are routine occurrences in this region.

No, they aren't. Asheville is in the western part of North Carolina, at least 250 miles from the nearest coastline.

In the case of Helene, it got all the way into parts of western North Carolina that haven't had flooding of this magnitude since 1916 and absolutely do not routinely experience this type of disaster. I believe they have a lot more experience with snowstorms.

If we were talking about the eastern half of the state this would be very different.

That's rare!

I can see why the locals might not have evacuated in time.

Is there an estimate for how many of die within the first few hours of the hurricane ?

There's a lot of controversy about even measuring how many people die from a hurricane at all. Hurricane Maria very famously had a long serious of upscaled estimates for almost a full year, because studies pioneered the use of excess death methologies to measure the total impact of a hurricane, and this lead to a 20x difference in estimates.

((Which stopped happened not long after))

But the lower-end estimates of immediate or near-immediate deaths in recent days reflect, to a large extent, American society's ability to bring very high levels of assistance fairly quickly. And a lot of these tools have optimized for coastal areas, and/or are difficult to apply in this particularly mountainous area.

A few thoughts on flood risk:

  • There are huge swaths of the United States that have only been populated by literate civilization for 100-200 years. This isn’t enough data to get good risk estimates on the 100-year flood zone, much less the 500-year flood zone.

  • Rainfall is NOT NORMALLY DISTRIBUTED! If you try to take historical rainfall totals, calculate the mean and standard deviation, and then use basic statistics to predict the likelihood of out-of-distribution events, you are going to get rekt because you didn’t have a term for “giant hurricane dumps five months worth of rain in two days”.

  • Because of this, there is essentially no market for private flood insurance in hurricane-prone areas. The federal government has to operate a flood insurance program at a loss in order to make the market. These policies are often underpriced given the true risk, and thus are a source of moral hazard.

can't private insurers hire a mathematician who can count non-normal distributions?

Yeah, but the numbers knock your socks off.

They did, and they came to the conclusion that they couldn't profitably write flood insurance policies in most of America at prices the property owners were willing to pay. Flood insurance in the US is largely provided by FEMA at below-market rates.

I think you need to refine your definition of “controlling the media.”

If you were expecting Katrina-level coverage, well, Asheville isn’t New Orleans. It has like 20% of the pre-Katrina population. While I’m sure they’re having a miserable time, the logistics are almost certainly much easier. Yes, the total strip of destruction is much larger, but density matters.

I have lots of family and friends in the Upstate. Most have power back already. People are driving to work. We aren’t looking at Katrina or Sandy levels of devastation.

That said—relief is happening and well-documented; it’s just on local stations or the groups involved. Twitter is the wrong place to look for anything other than spicy takes.

I fully agree on the point of scale, but I disagree that Katrina-level coverage was driven primarily be scale. Even within the context of Katrina, the primary media focus was on a Democratic political machine city in a form that was used as a political attack vector on a Republican president... which also helped deflect attention and blame from numerous local-level mismanagement issues within the responsibility of the political machine.

Media coverage levels are a function of the political alliances of the media in question. The political incentives in the current context would not support Katrina-level coverage even if there was Katrina-level damage.

Do you have evidence and statistics of how the response is bad? As in, comparing it to past hurricanes. This site leans heavily right, and with a Democrat as president my default assumption is that the party out of power complains like broken clocks.

One barometer that can be checked is power outages. Florida has actually recovered very quickly, going from >1M without power to <100K in just a few days. The poorer inland Appalachian regions have fared worse and are only 33-50% reconnected, but it's still just been a few days since the hurricane hit.

As another commenter said, why aren't planes and helicopters air dropping supplies and Starlink in?

They are, at least supplies.

And if there has been a major relief effort, where is the news on it? The left controls pretty much the entire mainstream media, so where are the videos of airlifted supplies? I know internet is out, but people on X have shared plenty of videos of waters washing away homes etc.

Disaster porn always gets more views due to human negativity bias. There's a few people reporting on the relief efforts like the article I linked, but most don't focus on it for normal reasons of optimizing for views.

Do these factors make it more likely for these swing states to turn Blue or Red?

Not really much at all. Hyper polarization means any changes will be miniscule. Obviously Trump could say it's a huge Democrat disaster no matter how bad it was but I haven't really seen much of a compelling narrative yet among even Republicans, let alone swing voters.

Fair points here! Thank you for providing a counterbalance.

You're right I haven't done any sort of objective or statistical analysis. I'm also fired up because I have family in some of the affected areas.

I'd be curious to see a more detailed and thorough breakdown of the response over time.

It's only been a few days. The flooding still hasn't subsided and larger rivers are still rising from the water working it's way downstream. Three of the four interstate routes into Asheville are closed due to landslides. Bridges are washed out, making some areas hard to reach without an airlift. Roads are destroyed. When this happens in the mountains it isn't like a storm surge that recorded rather quickly. Flat land doesn't slide, and while rivers may flood, the velocity they reach in the mountains makes it more likely they'll take out bridges. And bridges are everywhere; here in Western Pennsylvania pretty much every road has a creek running alongside it, and a lot of people have bridges to get into their driveways. We're just getting to the point where we can even start cleaning up; Gov. Cooper just called up the National Guard yesterday. Biden said he's visiting later in the week. It's also a bit rich for Trump to criticize Biden's disaster response after Hurricane Maria.

https://x.com/TheKanehB/status/1841819478033645919

Apparently the Appalachians are now under Palestine rules. MTG is claiming "they" can control the weather.

FEMA has been central to conspiracy theories forever.

Let's not get worked up about the obvious.

Ugh I hate that so many conservatives are genuinely wackadoodle. I guess that's why we're all exiled here.

Alas. Also who is MTG?

Marjorie Taylor Greene


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