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I do not think this will help deter anyone. It will not deter a single jihadist. It will hardly deter any normal criminal -- the ones who don't have the stomach for it will simply not watch. And the ones who will watch will not decide that the threat of getting shot after a few decades of prison will make it not worth it.
And it will very much not be a grim if dignified affair like Ned Stark beheading someone. People will watch it on TV in bars. School boys will make bets if the condemned will shit himself before or after being shot.
Let me try an analogy. Many parents want grandchildren, and many royalists want a royal heir. However, this rarely means that either group would be very interested in observing the process of the baby being conceived or born on live TV. As long as the processes are handled competently, most parents and royalists will prefer to see the end result without the various fluids involved along the way. The ones who would prefer to watch everything are probably perverts.
With a public execution, most of the public in favor of it will decide that as long as it happens, they do not need to see it done. A few will tune in because they feel it is their duty as citizens to bear witness. The main audience will be people watching out of morbid curiosity. Some will watch to confirm their opinion that the death penalty is barbaric.
And MAGA will obviously turn this into a media circus. Hegseth has a day job, he is in charge of the most expensive military on the planet. The particulars of the implementation of the judgments of military courts are only a tiny part of that job, in most administrations they would be handled three layers of management below him. Instead, the former Fox News moderator decided not only to make the execution public, but also to personally announce it.
Can I be sure that he does not share my aesthetic revulsion regarding death by shark? Not really, it could be that for once our aesthetics and moral judgments would agree. His previous readiness to embrace war and warrior aesthetics would make it surprising, but you never know.
Still, I concede that attacking MAGA over what I think they might want to do was bad on my part. I am confident there will be enough for me to criticize after their circus without me having to speculate what the distasteful particulars might be beforehand.
What part of the sentence you quoted do you think was referring to jihadists or normal criminals?
You are arguing public perception. I am also arguing public perception. I believe that execution of murderers is good and proper. I believe, both in this matter and in many, many others, that attempting to reach accommodation with those of incompatible values has been an obvious chronic failure, and the proper path forward is to do what I and others like me perceive to be correct, with little to no regard for how this is perceived by the outgroup. We should offer the public a concrete alternative to the Blue Tribe consensus, not in terms of theory but in terms of actual practice, so that our way and their way can be directly compared. The outgroup does not grant consideration to our moral positions, and we should cease to grant consideration to theirs. the alternative is to be led by the nose in a game of "optics" designed from the ground up to be unwinnable; "only do things that Blue Tribe bigots won't hiss slurs at you for" is a recipe for paralytic abdication.
I do not perceive public execution of a traitorous mass-murderer to be shameful. I do not care if he is in a wheelchair; why should I? His powerlessness is not in question here, this is an execution of a condemned prisoner, not an honorable duel. I do not perceive a valid moral argument against execution of violent criminals, much less murderers, still less mass-murderers, and am entirely comfortable with a debate over the consequences of this approach versus the status quo. I think it is better to force Blues to burn resources attempting to shame us for doing what we perceive to be correct, than to do things we perceive to be wrong in the false hope that they will not shame us, thus granting them further power without contest. I perceive the latter strategy to have resulted in vast ruin, while the former strategy has delivered more victories in a shorter timeframe than any within my tribe dreamed possible. If you believe that this will in some way offend the normies, feel free to explain why widespread celebration of actual lawless murder in numerous previous and quite recent cases has not offended the normies even more.
What evidence leads you to believe this is the case? I think they do need to see it done. I think seeing it done, and the national conversation that follows, will have a significant positive effect on the state of our nation. Certainly I will be drawing comparisons to the reaction to this execution and to previous lawless murders. The disparity in reaction is obvious and instructive.
Should we discuss media circuses, and what they tell us about the people generating them? I do not perceive a shortage of actual, past-tense media circuses with which we might contextualize the hypothetical media circus you are predicting, nor is such an analysis one I expect to get the worst end of. It seems to me that your post above was exceedingly uncharitable; if you want to talk about media circuses and their effect on public opinion, why not reach for the rich context readily available? I think it unlikely that MAGA is going to turn this execution into more of a media circus than Blues did the murders of Kirk and Thompson, or the Lindsey Clancy saga, or the attempted assassinations of Trump, or the death of George Floyd and so on and on and on. Is it somehow worse to have a media circus over the execution of a traitorous murderer than it is over the murder of a law-abiding businessman or a milquetoast political activist or a multiple-felon drug addict ODing in police custody because he swallowed his stash? Or is this a Russell's conjugation thing: my social movement, your media circus, his shameless propaganda? Do these questions seem unreasonable to you, and if so, why?
Fair enough. Let's pick it up when the facts are in.
TL;DR - you are appealing to an image of social norms that seem entirely fictional to me, based on direct observation of the real world. I decline to be swayed by such fictions, and I think confronting them head-on is straightforwardly better than attempting compromise with them. The idea that there is some sort of stable, respectable social consensus that must be respected or accounted for is entirely unsupportable, and it is better to actually have the argument here and now than to allow appeals to this fictional consensus to pass unchallenged.
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