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Notes -
After having read the piece: I really don’t understand how he’s going after men here?
The woman doesn’t belong on society, she should be killed, it doesn’t matter if she was psychotic at the time (she was), it just doesn’t fucking matter … the rest of us deserve peace from people who murder.
I don’t need empathy for a child murderer - I guess I have some, like it sucks this happened to her? I just don’t want her in my society … same way I view any violent criminal or weird foreign religion (Islam, not Judaism).
I have some empathy for a child murderer. I spent years within sight of the clock tower where a mass murderer might have been provoked by his undiscovered brain tumor, and years later I watched incurable brain tumors kill my father mind-first, and it turns out I've got the same nasty oncogene mutation he had. So, while I could never murder any children as I am now, I'm quite aware that I'm made of meat and sometimes meat breaks. There's a one-in-a-billion chance that one cosmic ray hitting exactly the wrong spot on the wrong DNA strand in my head could end in tragedy, and there's probably similarly slim but non-zero odds that some non-cancerous failure of biochemistry could do the same.
So, if that ever happens: please kill me.
If whatever's left in my brain is no longer describable as "me", then I'm already gone, and the faster my body becomes an example to deter any other broken people on the margins, the better. If some part is still me and is still aware enough to know I've killed children, then it will want to die as soon as possible rather than live with that knowledge. I could see some justification for Eighth-Amendment-forbidden flagrant torture, making me suffer more before death for additional deterrence value ... but the quiet, subtle torture of making me suffer a long pointless life of stewing in my own regret, while people loudly congratulate themselves on how compassionate they are to killers? Please, no.
This is all true even if I don't also imagine that the dead kids are my own; my brain just throws an error when I try to make the scenario even worse.
I read that prosecutors are arguing that Lindsay Clancy's apparent suicide attempt was faked, that she didn't cut herself deeply enough for a real suicide and didn't realize that throwing herself out a second-story window would still at least render her paraplegic. I guess their motivation is "we need to make her look more sane if we want first-degree murder to stick", but trying to kill herself out of guilt would have been the sanest thing she did that evening, and it would be both sane and kind of us to help her finish. The vast majority of suicidal ideation is just depression-induced confusion that even the suicidal person will recognize as mistaken in hindsight, if they survive to have the opportunity, but I believe this magnitude of situation is an exception.
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