This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On that point, hanging is a lot more fraught as a method of execution than you probably think it is. Short-drop hanging is obviously not the way to go: the most fortunate of such condemned lose consciousness in 8-10 seconds from compression of the carotid arteries obstructing bloodflow to the brain (possibly along with the carotid nerve reflex causing decreased heart rate/blood pressure, but this is heavily disputed), though this period is still undoubtedly agonizing. From historical accounts of short-drop hangings, it can be assumed that many of the condemned experienced insufficient cerebral ischemia and suffered terribly for significantly longer.
Long drop hanging, meanwhile, has long been thought of as the humane form of hanging. As practiced by the British after the 1888 creation of the Official Table of Drops, the process involved weighing the prisoner and evaluating the thickness/muscularity of their neck to set the drop they'd get. As the condemned reached the end of the rope, the tightening of the knot would jerk the head backwards with sufficient force to break the C2 vertebra, sending the broken fragment forwards and severing the spinal cord for instantaneous death.
Setting aside the issue with presuming that severing the spinal cord produces instant brain death/unconsciousness (wouldn't it just paralyze them?), some investigative studies suggest that the actual cause of death in long-drop hanging is far more variable than previously assumed. In [this] study, among the 34 examined vertebrae of British prisoners executed between 1882 and 1945, only seven were found with cervical fractures, with only three of those being the classic "hangman's fracture". Contemporary autopsies reported far more fractures than had been found in the study, and the fractures that did occur showed no relation to sex, height, or length of drop. A later autopsy of a 1993 hanging using the British method [here] suggested that the quick loss of consciousness observed after the drop was caused by massive cerebral hemorrhaging from torn vertebral arteries, as the spinal cord was again undamaged.
Even using the most rigorously designed protocols, hanging is an inconsistent and occasionally quite cruel method of death. My preferred method would be Soviet-style shooting, but if you really want executions to be a spectacle while solving the problem of undue suffering, you ought to cut the hangman's knot with the headsman's blade.
It'd be at least a second or two before the brain deoxygenated enough to cause unconsciousness, surely? I was with you up until that point.
More options
Context Copy link
Your point about hanging is well-taken. I’m trying to optimize for a method that the American public could actually stomach. Hanging has a long and lindy history in Anglophone countries — although, much like my concerns about the optics of caning, hanging does of course suffer from the association with lynching, regardless of how long the practice existed both before and after the era of Lynch Law. Hanging can also be performed in a public square, using an apparatus which can be reused many times, and which can execute multiple individuals simultaneously. It is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.
Current “medicalized” execution methods such as lethal injection are too sterile and do not carry any of the desired psychological effects, neither on the condemned nor on onlookers. The gas chamber is similarly medicalized, cannot be carried out before the eyes of the public, and of course suffers from an even more taboo optical association: that of the Holocaust.
The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic; watching someone get decapitated and bleed out from their neck stump is simply too much for most modern people to stomach. It also suffers from an inescapable and unacceptable association with the subversive, anarchic, populist aesthetics of the French Revolution.
As for the firing squad or other forms of execution by firearm, I feel they suffer from three major drawbacks: firstly, like the guillotine, they are simply very visually violent and not something a lot of psychologically-healthy Americans would wish to watch; secondly, it is the method of execution which, barring the old-fashioned execution by axe, might be the most traumatizing for the individual(s) tasked with carrying out the execution; thirdly, since my fervent hope is that in the long run America loses its fixation with guns, a method of execution by the state which prominently features firearms sends the wrong message.
I’m sure some enterprising inventor can (and hopefully will) develop a method of execution which more wholly satisfies the criteria I’m looking for. A method which requires the condemned to, directly before the eyes of the public, come to grips with the enormity of the consequences for his crimes, and to experience both the visible terror and the humiliating stripping of social status which are appropriate for the circumstances. I’m sensitive to avoid methods which overly select for sadism in the executioner(s), and those which risk inculcating such sadism over time. Methods like hanging which involve an apparatus, rather than a direct violent action by an individual, are preferable for that reason among others.
Public execution is already wayyy outside the realm of consideration for modern Westerners; if it should be reinstated, I'd prefer that we go the whole nine yards, as it were. Also, have you seen the comments on gore sites? Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.
Besides, the broader objection I have is towards the instrumental value of your formulation. When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races), you don't really need to drive the point home in that way; it seems like your ought doesn't follow from the is. I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?
I mean, that’s the thing: in the American context, both execution and caning would be wildly disproportionately applied to the “non-blue-blood races”. I obviously have no objection to hanging or caning a white felon; the demographic disparities are, at least in the short term, simply the reality.
When it comes to non-violent crimes, it’s more about the habitual aspect of crime. If someone commits shoplifting, I’m perfectly happy to see them caned once and then everyone can move on. If someone has committed shoplifting 47 times, this person is very obviously an intolerable burden and incapable of being rehabilitated. Career criminals are what I’m trying to focus on.
There are, however, certain non-violent crimes which I’d be perfectly willing to have someone very severely harmed for: scammers, for example. People who steal not from large impersonal entities, but from vulnerable individuals. A very close family member of mine lost his entire life savings to a scammer, who exploited his naïvety and conscientiousness. I myself had a phone stolen because a guy begged to use it to call his mother, then ran from me the second I handed it to him. These people are irredeemably sociopathic and must be culled. Generally any crimes which demonstrate a depraved mind must be dealt with through making it onerous or impossible for this person to reproduce.
More options
Context Copy link
I will note that in the EEA everyone was basically fine with gore. It's the modern, intermediated society where the vast majority of people don't have to kill animals that is unnatural.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why not guillotine?
(That would be the practical implementation, but the syllepsis works better this way. (Also, the image of a hooded executioner with a massive axe fits the demand for spectacle better than a mere scaffold with a blade.))
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link