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On December 3rd, the United States military will publicly livestream the execution by firing squad of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
I’ve made my strong support of the death penalty — and specifically of public executions — abundantly clear over the years. (For a primer, you can listen to this episode of the now-defunct Motte-adjacent Bailey Podcast, my first and to date only podcast appearance.) My initial reaction to this news was jubilant: talk about getting what I voted for! While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging, a firing squad is certainly a step in the right direction in terms of de-medicalizing capital punishment and emphasizing its fundamentally violent and retributive nature.
My observation of the discourse around it has given me pause, though. The apoplectic relationship from the political left has been predictable, and was unfortunately always priced in; the reaction from some on the right, though, has been sobering. Professionally Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect. (“This makes us no better than Al Qaeda! We aren’t some third-world dictatorship! This isn’t Who We Are™️!”) Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists. (We’re giving Hasan exactly the attention and validation he always wanted!”)
These arguments give me pause not because I agree with them, but because they highlight the way that this is a rubber-meets-the-road moment for my ideology. To what extent have I allowed myself to become so radicalized by hermetically-sealed online discourse, such that I imagine my beliefs to be far more popular than they are in reality? Is what I imagine to be a broadly common-sense perspective actually going to prove deeply unpopular and massively polarizing once implemented publicly? Scott Greer, generally a reliable barometer for where the normal Middle American opinion sits, thinks so.
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty. (There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors.) There is a part of me that wishes that the first public execution in America since 1937 should be postponed until it can be overseen by an administration that is less inherently polarizing than this one. To some extent, about a third of the country is fully committed to hating whatever Trump does, no matter what it is; perhaps under a future administration with a higher baseline level of public trust, this event could serve as an opportunity for genuinely restrained public discourse about capital punishment, rather than an opportunity for retrenchment of existing political fault lines. If done incorrectly, this event has the potential to set back the political hopes of death penalty maximalists such as myself for a generation or more.
I’m still planning on tuning in to watch this execution. As someone who discovered the snuff film parts of the internet at a relatively young age, I’m pretty thoroughly desensitized to images of death. (And frankly, having seen a number of videos of firing squad executions, they’re a lot more mild than you might think.) I hope that perhaps there will be some small number of individuals who might find it inspiring — and that there may be others who are in some way deterred, even marginally, from future criminality. The executioners need to strike a delicate balance during the proceedings: solemnity and restraint, acknowledging the humanity of the condemned while also not getting bogged down by mawkish faux-contrition about having to end his miserable wasted life. Keeping the proceedings focused primarily on the victims, including testimony by survivors such as this guy may help to quell any instinctive sympathy for the condemned that viewers could otherwise experience.
The government is bad and is not justified in the morally wrong things that it does. There is no evidence that we need a government at all, and in particular there is no evidence that it does anything positive to kill Nidal Hasan instead of letting him serve out his sentence for the remainder of his life (the morality of prisons is another issue). Murder is simply wrong, it can be excused under very rare circumstances like self defense and government executions are just not that, sorry. The pope is absolutely right on this topic. And all excuses made about retribution and desert are quite hypocritical as soon as you dissolve the silly magic of the thin tinpot badge that separates member of the state from human being.
Morally wrong things not being justified morally is a tautology. Under what moral system is execution of murderers wrong?
Government is an irreducible constant in all human society at any scale. Cooperation requires coordination requires hierarchy.
Let's suppose we abolish the state. Do you like it better if individual families coordinate retribution against those who kill their members? Killing the egregiously guilty is an emergent property of human nature, not the state. The state's contribution is to add rules and safeguards to keep this behavior within bounds. You appear to be teeing up objections to prisons as well, but the existing state is already well-past the point of sustainability in terms of restraining the human instinct toward retribution. Remove the state and you will see much, much, much more retributive killing, not less.
Please read what I wrote as I wrote it and not in a system of definitions I don't use. You can probably tell what I mean is some actions are wrong by default but excuses can be made on a case by case basis as to why a specific instance should be excused.
Any system which says killing is generally wrong. In a time before prisons one could say that less killing was likely to happen overall if murderers were executed in a timely fashion. However this is not timely or necessary under that standard since the prison prevents him from killing anyone else.
So was famine and many other maladies until recently.
Evidence required. With one caveat, I am not anti-hierarchy, I am anti state. The state is a kind of parasite that settlements of people, perhaps historically you could say races or nations, suffer. I claim it is bad because it's a pointless reduction of expected utility that emerges mainly due to reasons not intended by nature. Like how a virus infects a person at the individual level.
A state is a violent organization that claims territory. You can immediately see why this is problematic: when you have a state around it claims the land you live on and it's violent towards you. The very act of taxation is a well known manifestation of this violent parasitism. There is no evidence for example that the United States government requires the amount of taxes it takes in order to do all of the good things it claims to do. In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that it could not survive as a charity, if it were only to do good things. Governments including but not limited to the state(s) active in the USA land area (it has levels of states which has treaties with each other) need to basically extort taxes out of people in order to do bad things, like wage pointless wars and create more criminals through welfare programs so they can appear to justify themselves by later locking up those criminals, who are of the lowest type imaginable and who would not even survive without extorted welfare. The state breeds the base of its own prison population through its welfare programs.
You should be able to see now as you take violence and territory to 0 you turn down the stately nature of an organization. This is orthogonal to whether or not a territory-less and nonviolent organization has a hierarchy. There is thus a spectrum of state. I think the state should be territoriality fractured wherever possible as well as made non-violent wherever possible because that gets us toward no state. You are right to remark that humans have suffered this parasite for at least 3000 years in most places so it would be hard to entirely get rid of it in one step. Still, most thinkers recognize that states are parasites because most utopia ideas are stateless and most dystopia ideas are full of state. Did you ever notice that trend?
Yes it is better because it is less territorial and violent. This is only reactive violence, an extended form of self defense, and their territory could be as low as their own bodies. The state is far worse, it is excessively, proactively violent in a way that is indeed monstrous and despicable.
And there would be less violence overall and you would be safer and more rich. When is the last time you started a blood feud and needed the state to protect you? Does it even do that? (Not well at all. Rather they happen and then the state might arrest an arbitrary amount of the people involved and tax others to pay for their prison forcefully while proclaiming itself as good).
Prisons are morally reprehensible. Justice should be instantaneous - the criminal fined, beaten, exiled or killed - and the matter resolved. Locking people up for years and decades in what are effectively slow-torture chambers, and requiring others to staff those prisons, and requiring law-abiding taxpayers to fund all that, that is unjust and disgusting.
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So... the Amish? I'm not Amish, and I'm pretty sure you're not Amish. America has never been ruled by such a system. No European, and indeed no Asian or African or South-American or Australian or Middle-Eastern nation I'm aware of has ever been ruled by such a system. I understand that hypothetical moral systems meeting this definition exist, and I understand that particular religious or philosophical communities exist attempting to follow such systems; these latter universally exist within much larger, far more complex systems which work the other way.
Prisons are for crimes that don't merit execution; those prisoners would be better off without having to cohabitate with the murderous. Prisons obviously do not prevent murder, and I am not buying arguments that this is due to lack of interest in preventing prison murder.
I can point to complex societies without famine. You cannot point to complex societies without hierarchy.
What is your definition of hierarchy? Can you point me to a real-world, actual example of a large-scale, complex, hierarchical non-state-run society?
It is often said that the police are just the largest gang. In a comparison between the police of a city and the non-police gangs, which do we observe being less territorial and less violent? Which do we observe normal citizens preferring to live under? We recently ran an experiment with drastically reducing or eliminating policing; does it seem to you that the results of this experiment supported the idea that policing was more violent and more territorial than non-policing?
Charlie Kirk was murdered by a private individual for political ends. Bryan Malinowski was, in my view, murdered by the federal government, likewise for political ends. I consider both murders serious problems. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Kirk's murder is a much more serious problem and a much harder problem to solve than Malinowski's. In the case of Malinowski, there is a legible off-switch to the murder machine, even if it's difficult to access and operate. In Kirk's case, there is no off switch and the threat is essentially unbounded.
You attempt to describe merely what societies have done. It doesn't show what is right, possible, or newly possible due to technological development and other changes.
You make excessive isolate demands for rigor / change the evidentiary basis of the conversation on the fly when it suits you. Where I use my brain to think about what could be down better, you shut yours down and and talk at me about what happens to be. Where you don't like what happens to be, you talk about «what merits what». But Most European countries have abolished the death penalty, and in 2018 the Catholic Church formally declared it «inadmissible.»
I assume you wrote this before you read what I wrote on this subject.
A corporation is a non-territorial, non-violent organization with a hierarchy. To get out ahead of you here, there's loose empirical evidence we need one type of hierarchy, economic. The evidence for economic comes from the attempts to do communism that failed. But capitalism can be low state or stateless and has economic hierarchy distinct from the state. Tons of 20th century libertarians write about this. The other type of hierarchy is military and there is no empirical evidence that we need that. There is a game theoretical argument about what-if-someone-else-does-it-and-invades, but I think have a non-military, anti-state populace with nuclear weapons takes care of this. The USA doesn't escape invasion because of its standing army, it escapes it because of its nuclear arsenal. In a post-state or low-state North America, non-state organizations can take parts of this arsenal and promise China a proper glassing if a single Chinese state boot ever touches North America, just like the state does right now. It's a solved problem thanks to technology.
Two points. One, no, policing was not eliminated or else I would have seriously considered moving there, as it would have been Libertarian and tax free. Instead you did anarcho-tyranny, which means if someone walks around with a rifle in public he gets arrested, if someone stops paying taxes he gets arrested, but if a black guy robs a store he doesn't get arrested. But if a store owner shoots the thief he does get arrested. Don't try to make that state free, rather the state just stopped doing something it does to try to appease the people but it kept existing and extorting people for money.
Second, the gangs are created by the state through two ways. The first is biological and I discussed it above, although that seems to have bounced off your ears, like the name of the Gray Fox in TES IV Oblivion. Is this knowledge cursed by Nocturna or what? Second is economic. Gangs mostly operate in black markets the state itself creates through drug prohibition, and they have no legal way to settle disputes, which pushes them toward public violence. That's the state's fault.
Finally, states can be much worse. The state committed the Holocaust, for example.
Why do you have it backwards? Were Malinowski's murderers given a consequence for their bad behavior? No.
You can see this with basic numbers. States lash out for senseless reasons because POSIWID. They are a violent organization that employs the kinds of people that sign up for that. There is no off switch except to lower it's statelyness. You can try to get it to appease gun owners. It will keep lashing out for other senseless reasons, and it's good at making up reasons way faster than you can turn them off. The ATF enforces a shitload of gun laws, not just the one they were there for, all way more than should reasonably exist, enforced way more cruelly and violently than is reasonable, and on top of that there are 2 other letters in the name. All of those laws are also senseless. Then there's basically all of the other laws which are also senseless. Meanwhile the Charlie Kirk thing is limited by the intersection between people willing to troll in public and people crazy enough to murder over that. That's very small and self-contained, as opposed to a category of organization that routinely genocides people throughout history.
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