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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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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.

Would you demand that someone not rent to gay people, or otherwise profit off of gays, if they can't bear to watch gay sex? If they can't bear to watch an operation, do we forbid them from being operated on?

Squeamishness is not a source of morality.

Squeanmishness is not a source of morality.

Except it literally is. Morality isn't some abstract platonic idea, it's a taste or feeling people evolved, and the sick feeling you get when you drench yourself in the gore of your fellow man is part of it.

I'll go as far as to say that things are immoral because they feel distasteful and for no other reason. Any rationale you can name is a post-hoc rationalization. When surveyed people act according to taste, not to some Kantian formalized system of ethics. We may wish it otherwise, but morality as an actual real world phenomenon is not a pure reason object.

Understanding this means understanding that people act immorally when they are not confronted directly enough with the consequences of their actions (or are themselves deficient). And thus recommending they be brought closer is fitting.

I'll go as far as to say that things are immoral because they feel distasteful and for no other reason

Is gay sex immoral? Plenty of people find it distasteful.

I think you'll find a lot of that same plenty find it immoral too.

Unless you're talking about Catholics, anti-death-penalty sentiment seems to usually come from the left and anti-gay from the right, so I doubt that.

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