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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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I don't understand how this can even be a question. Isn't Canada offering these humane and progressive 'treatments' out like candy? What does the BBC reporting look like on that front?

The companies that make those drugs have policies against selling the drugs for use in executions. The perfect execution method exists, but "medical" """""ethics""""" "committees" prevent it from being actualized.

It’s mainly that (a) many of them are based in countries that have outlawed the death penalty and local legislators have threatened them if they provide those drugs, and that (b) many large institutional investors (including eg. pension funds in countries that have outlawed the death penalty) have said they’ll divest if they supply the drugs. Given the low number of executions and this the small size of the business, it’s not worth even minor reputation loss or business risk.

The perfect method is probably the guillotine or something similar, because it has near zero room for error and because death is near enough instant.

Instructions unclear. Started compassionately guillotining terminally ill cancer patients.

Surely the indignity of the guillotine is that it turns someone's execution into a humiliating blood spraying spectacle? You can almost look cool standing in front of a firing squad, blind folded (obligatory: smoking a cigarette). Nobody looks cool on their knees with their head in a guillotine stockade, even with a cigarette.

OTOH, with a firing squad, you probably look much less cool suffocating to death from all of the holes ripped through your lungs; not sure what I'd pick.

The gore is a feature, a token of our respect for life. We’re not “putting people to sleep” here. Each juror should get a splash when the blade falls. They shouldn’t eat meat if they can’t kill the animal.

Because as worthless as it may be, it’s still a life, and we should not get comfortable taking it with the simple push of a button.

On the specifics of the case, I have a problem condemning multiple people to death for a single murder. It’s blowing past the balance of lex talionis, into this exponentially growing orgy of bloody vengeance.

It’s the principle of exact retaliation, not three eyes for an eye.

Think of the justice system’s goal as keeping vengeance contained. Let’s say three men kill another. Their family, their clan, reckon they should walk, because the murdered man, was of an unpleasant sort. If you have them all executed to satisfy the murdered man’s family, and they take revenge in the same disproportionate manner by killing nine relatives, it results in total war and the wipeout of one of the clans. Whereas if you just execute one, they can let it go under the win some, lose some principle. Or if they still retaliate, at least it’s a slow-burning vendetta, not a massacre.

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