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On December 10 2011 17:51 HunterX11 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2011 17:26 JudicatorHammurabi wrote:On December 10 2011 07:49 lolmlg wrote:On December 10 2011 06:45 JudicatorHammurabi wrote:On December 10 2011 05:35 neoghaleon55 wrote:
Stories like these make me support the death penalty.
We need artificial genetic selection, dammit!
...lol go texas! I would support execution in this case, but no... we don't need to follow the eugenicism of 19th century Britain or 20th century Germany on top of that. No thanks. The United States had a prominent eugenics program. You should really think twice before trying to be clever with comments like these. I take it this is some dark secret I haven't heard of? This was before World War 2: there were no such things as secret laws back then. It was all done openly.
In 1970 (I think) there were a couple states still practicing sterilization of people they deemed "unfit parents".
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It's shocking that such savagery can occur in a civilized country. Somehow, the death penalty seems merciful in this case.
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On December 10 2011 18:39 FallDownMarigold wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2011 18:37 HunterX11 wrote:On December 10 2011 18:28 FallDownMarigold wrote:On December 10 2011 05:39 RageBot wrote:On December 10 2011 05:25 Phisk wrote:On December 10 2011 05:13 Days wrote:On December 10 2011 04:42 Befree wrote:
What an awkwardly racist start to the thread in 2007. Certainly a lot of ignorance of news trends and basic logic.
Murder and rape are terrible things, but they happen a lot the world. If you're disturbed so deeply by this to want to kill the people, how exactly do you view all the terrible things that go on throughout the world every day? Arbitrarily picking out one particularly sensational story and making it some sort of exception isn't reasonable.
The idea of wanting to kill the accused, or these fantasies of causing them pain, I don't think are acceptable. I myself don't believe in retribution in general. I don't understand what sick drives cause people to crave the death of those who cause pain and I don't know what they imagine to be the benefit of it.
People are just products of their society/upbringing and their genes. Punishing people for the sake of retribution because of their genetics and childhood doesn't seem productive. We certainly want to discourage their appalling behavior and help them change their behavior, but just wanting to go out and kill them or torture them? For what purpose? To satisfy the irrational, ignorant, vindictive, violent drives of the average person? I oppose that. Ugh seriously? Yeah yeah, enough with "an eye for an eye makes everyone blind" bull shit. Let's see if you felt the same way after your very own father and mother we're the victims in this case, would you still be screaming out for peace to the ones who committed the crime? What kind of kinder garden argument is that? There is no room for bias in the justice system, if we treated every crime as if we were the victims, judging from a place of emotion rather than logic, society would fall apart. Befree's argument that we cant punish people for their "genetics" (as if there was a "criminal" gene...) or upbringing is obviously idiotic though, because then nobody would be responsible for their actions. There is such a thing as free will and every action that anyone has a ever made has a consequence and we are all responsible for what we do.Even the most horrible upbringing that somebody has been through doesn't give you a free pass to commit horrible actions. Actually, there's a big philosophical debate about that subject. Is is actually true that most pepole have free will? Or are most pepole simply slaves to their emotions and education. Yes, it's entirely true if you ignore all the philosophical bullshit. Based on neurological evidence it's quite apparent that we have "free will", or the ability to act according to our own choices without constraints. These decisions might be influenced by our environments, but there is no doubt that all our actions elicited begin at neocortical/prefrontal regions. I thought the neurological evidence rather suggested that most people begin a course of action before being consciously aware of any decisionmaking on their own part? There are electrical activities that are initiated before you act, but that actually proves it's you that is in control of your actions. Your brain. Not someone else's.
I was with Hunter in being surprised that you cited neurological evidence to counter the claim that it's controversial whether or not most people have free will (why the "most" Ragebot? There is a philosophical debate but both sides generally think that it's going to be all or none, not some or most). When I saw the term "neurological evidence" I assumed that you were going to cite the Libet experiments to show that the debate has been closed in favor of us not having free will.
Quite the contrary, this latest post reveals that you're at least somewhat familiar with these experiments but have concluded that they prove free will's existence. This is an amazingly heterodoxical interpretation (it certainly isn't what Libet thought), and I'm not quite sure how you arrived at it.
As a brief background to those not familiar, the experiments in question basically showed that for a range of seemingly freely chosen behaviors, our supposed acts of choosing (or at least our consciousness thereof) take place after the processes in the brain that determine our choices. At least for the type of actions tested (and plausibly all actions) this has generally been taken to show that what we experience as our free will does not actually determine our actions. It is merely an awareness we receive of how we are about to act which is caused by the same underlying neurological processes that result in the action itself.
You counter this interpretation by noting that it all happens in "Your brain", but honestly I don't feel the force of that objection. Of course it happens in your brain; who else's brain would it occur in? The worry for free will here is that we don't have the antecedent control over our brain states necessary to make us responsible for actions determined by our brain with no further input from what we take to be our choosing.
If you're simply trying to argue a compatibilist position, then I can understand that (though I certainly wouldn't call the alternative "philosophical bullshit"). But if you're doing something else, I don't know what that is.
edit: spelling
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On December 10 2011 14:45 mastergriggy wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2011 14:39 snIJIJzer wrote:On December 10 2011 14:27 mastergriggy wrote:On December 10 2011 14:20 snIJIJzer wrote:On December 10 2011 14:14 mastergriggy wrote:On December 10 2011 14:00 Subztance wrote:On December 10 2011 12:29 Mafs wrote:On December 10 2011 12:19 Probe1 wrote:
I grew up staunchly against capital punishment but the older I get the more I realize how much it's needed. You can deter shoplifters by sending them to jail for the weekend. Murderers can fear capital punishment and life in prison.
But when it comes to this, there needs to be less fanfare and discussion. Just a summary execution. There should be a point where we all agree to just skip formality, wasting no more than 3 minutes and 5 bullets on these fucks. Who actually wants to see any of them remorseful or rehabilitated. Fuck that.
Our culture has gotten so bloated with wet foot dry foot that it's acceptable to bomb the living shit out a wedding on accident but not vivisect 5 sick bastards that mutilated and murdered an random innocent couple. Agreed. The purpose of prison is to rehabilitate, and if they cannot be rehabilitated, they are sucking tax payer money from the budget, and should just be killed because they are such a huge minus on society. The cost our country spends on each death penalty prisoner is greater than it costs to hold a man in prison for life. The purpose of prison is not exclusively to rehabilitate, or else there would be no life sentences. Sometimes the purpose is just to punish criminals and educate the general community that committing crimes does not pay. That being said, while I believe that our death penalty system is severely flawed, it is hard not to feel that it is sometimes necessary for people who commit truly heinous crimes. However, you must remember that in our nation, innocence is assumed until guilt is proven. In some cases it is easy to say "why don't we just kill them and get it over with", but think about how this might affect less clear-cut cases... a quick execution might mean an innocent man dies before other evidence is found that might exonerate them (over 100 exonerations of death penalty inmates have occurred in the last few decades, and this number is quickly increasing with the improvement of technology like DNA matching.) A bullet in the head for each of them equals five bullets. You could probably get that for about 6 bucks at walmart. Also, I think it's clear that there is proof. The fact that the judge was on drugs just means they have to do a retrial, not that any of the evidence against them has changed. So if it's up to you the US would, if there is enough evidence, execute it's citizens with a bullet through the head? edit: nvm i guess you are. Yep a person found guilty of murdering and raping two people would be executed if there was enough evidence and a conviction with an applicable death penalty. It's called capital punishment, and yes we do it. On December 10 2011 14:20 phosphorylation wrote:
I'm against the death penalty, not because i think it's inhumane, but simply because i think that's a waste, not to mention, bit unquantifiable (10 years in prison vs 20 years can be compared but death? hard to quantify; could mean different things to different people).
Instead, I suggest that these really bad criminals, beyond rehabilitation, should be sent to concentration camps to do hard labor for rest of their lives. This serves a few purposes; this is probably worse than death penalty for most people (maybe criminals will actually fear the criminal system now) and it is also malleable depending on the weight of their crimes (length of sentence and severity of labor). They will also be doing something is productive to society (make them mine or fertilize a desert or something like that), so that they at least make up partially for the harm they did to society. It also would lessen the strain on tax payer's money. I also think any profit they make should be sent to the victim and victim's families. To an extent, I agree with this. I think isolation from the rest of humanity for the rest of their life (ie solitary confinement) would be much worse than a death penalty. If you've ever seen that episode of law and order (it's in season 12) where they have that guy explain what solitary confinement is like, I think it much better suits it. Or throw them in a prison cell full of other rapists and let at it. Have you even read the last pages? I was arguing capital punishment in general is more expensive to the tax payer then a life sentence. The fact that in this case there might be clear evidence doesnt change that. Then you point out the price of bullets at walmart; that's pretty absurd and i was reacting on that as a method of execution. Also, law and order? Lulz. I was using an example law and order episode that used a real life testimony of solitary confinement? And yes I've read the last few pages, maybe you're missing my point. If instead of setting up everything involved in the cost of a lethal inject, we just use one bullet, it would be a lot cheaper. Is that to hard for you to understand or do you purposely ridicule others posts which you disagree with because you don't understand?
LOL.
You really think the COST of the death penalty which is roughly 10x more than a life sentence is caused by the actual physical cost of the lethal injection? The cost difference is something like 180k for life in prison, and 1.2 million for the average death penalty case, which means you actually think a lethal injection is what is costing the other million dollars in fees?
No sir, no. It's lawyers fees, and all the extra work that goes into any potential death penalty that make it cost such an exuberant amount, not the actual cost of the execution.
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On December 11 2011 09:33 Legate wrote:
I don't know.. If a group of people attacks, mutilates and rapes another group of people, where the individuals of each group were exclusively of a different race, then there is always the possibility that the motive was racial.
Nobody argues it's generally wrong to think a conrete crime may be (at least partially) motivated racially. Obviously, a sadistic group of sexual murderers might also have been racist, however, that's not the "racial" concern the OP raises.
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On December 10 2011 18:39 FallDownMarigold wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2011 18:37 HunterX11 wrote:On December 10 2011 18:28 FallDownMarigold wrote:On December 10 2011 05:39 RageBot wrote:On December 10 2011 05:25 Phisk wrote:On December 10 2011 05:13 Days wrote:On December 10 2011 04:42 Befree wrote:
What an awkwardly racist start to the thread in 2007. Certainly a lot of ignorance of news trends and basic logic.
Murder and rape are terrible things, but they happen a lot the world. If you're disturbed so deeply by this to want to kill the people, how exactly do you view all the terrible things that go on throughout the world every day? Arbitrarily picking out one particularly sensational story and making it some sort of exception isn't reasonable.
The idea of wanting to kill the accused, or these fantasies of causing them pain, I don't think are acceptable. I myself don't believe in retribution in general. I don't understand what sick drives cause people to crave the death of those who cause pain and I don't know what they imagine to be the benefit of it.
People are just products of their society/upbringing and their genes. Punishing people for the sake of retribution because of their genetics and childhood doesn't seem productive. We certainly want to discourage their appalling behavior and help them change their behavior, but just wanting to go out and kill them or torture them? For what purpose? To satisfy the irrational, ignorant, vindictive, violent drives of the average person? I oppose that. Ugh seriously? Yeah yeah, enough with "an eye for an eye makes everyone blind" bull shit. Let's see if you felt the same way after your very own father and mother we're the victims in this case, would you still be screaming out for peace to the ones who committed the crime? What kind of kinder garden argument is that? There is no room for bias in the justice system, if we treated every crime as if we were the victims, judging from a place of emotion rather than logic, society would fall apart. Befree's argument that we cant punish people for their "genetics" (as if there was a "criminal" gene...) or upbringing is obviously idiotic though, because then nobody would be responsible for their actions. There is such a thing as free will and every action that anyone has a ever made has a consequence and we are all responsible for what we do.Even the most horrible upbringing that somebody has been through doesn't give you a free pass to commit horrible actions. Actually, there's a big philosophical debate about that subject. Is is actually true that most pepole have free will? Or are most pepole simply slaves to their emotions and education. Yes, it's entirely true if you ignore all the philosophical bullshit. Based on neurological evidence it's quite apparent that we have "free will", or the ability to act according to our own choices without constraints. These decisions might be influenced by our environments, but there is no doubt that all our actions elicited begin at neocortical/prefrontal regions. I thought the neurological evidence rather suggested that most people begin a course of action before being consciously aware of any decisionmaking on their own part? There are electrical activities that are initiated before you act, but that actually proves it's you that is in control of your actions. Your brain. Not someone else's.
There is also processor activity that happens before stuff occurs on the screen. Doesn't say anything about free will.
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