Do you think it is ok to fatally harm someone because they are bad or killed someone?

neko said:
what is a glory hole
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You can get STDs from one. Haha.
 
neko said:
what is a glory hole
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Jesus, neko, LMAO.
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JamieUK92 said:
I’ve never come across a Scandinavian with an ounce of hostility ever in my life to be honest. I think it would be bizarre to have to face a knife wielding Scandinavian.
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Oh, yeah, you're not from Yorkshire. Dem Norse have a habit of raping and pillaging their way around these parts.

Gadsden Mountain Ranch said:
Do I believe crime should be handled like the wild West? Hell yeah I do. If there's a random person breaking into your car or slashing your tires, why not have the ability to hog tie the idiot and publicly hang him in the town square? Watch property crime drop.
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Hey, the 'Wild West' didn't work... the murder rate was sky high, 100 in 100,000 in some places.

BritNi said:
Are you sure you're not just putting some really bad energy out there? If people are targeting you that much, then maybe you might wanna take a look inside yourself?
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Bad things happen to bad people? Not a cool idea.

Lady Jolanda said:
If it's okay to kill someone cause they killed someone, you end up with a near infinite chain of killing, with the last person killing themselves. (The chain can only be broken by someone killing themselves.)
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Yes.

People seem to keep forgetting that we already tried this in a lot of places. 'Blood feud' was practiced in most of Western Europe during the early middle ages, and consisted of the legalised practice of revenge killings (for killings). 'You killed my brother, Imma kill you'. Predictably, it ended up causing more violence than it solved in most of the recorded cases, where the tit-for-tat revenge killings spiralled out of control like a Texan pyramid scheme (I imagine). Just take a look at your average Icelandic saga - it wasn't pretty.

Anyway the point I want to make is that punishments serve a functional purpose in practically every society depending on its particular needs, and so it's a little wrong-headed to talk about capital punishment in moral terms as if our conclusions would be universally applicable. Even the aforementioned 'blood feud' had/has a place in acephalous societies (i.e. decentralised ones) based upon kinship groupings or other loci of power/justice. I happen to have a reference to hand that illustrates this somewhat:

Segmentary lineage systems entail a characteristic balanced-opposition mechanism. This mechanism is especially present in acephalous socio-political systems based on real or conventional genealogical groupings. One of the expressions of that mechanism is the feud system which, in the absence of an overarching authority, and in spite of the violence it entails, may ultimately contribute to the group’s stability because it involves the entire lineage in sharing responsibility to avenge a tort or a crime committed against one of its members.*

*G. Ausenda and S. Barnish, ‘A Comparative Discussion of Langobardic Feud and Blood-Money Compensation with Parallels from Contemporary Anthropology and from Medieval History’, G. Ausenda, P. Delogu and C. Wickham (eds.), The Langobards Before the Frankish Conquest: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 309.

Michael Mann's two-axis definition of power, and the theory of deterrence he famously advanced in The Autonomous Power of the State is most illustrative here I think. Essentially he defined 'state power' as the sum of two constituent parts: 'despotic power' and 'infrastructural power'. 'Despotic power' describes the extent of the ability of the state to act arbitrarily and without limit, whereas 'infrastructural power' describes its reach. You might think of it as the ability of the state to find you/get you (infrastructural power), and then what they are actually able to do with you once they have you (despotic power).

There are interesting correlations across historical societies with this index of power, where it seems that the more of one type of power a state has, the less of the other it needs. Mostly, this means that as infrastructural power increases, despotic power decreases - they have an inversely proportional relationship.

In terms of crime and punishment, therefore, as the certainty of arrest (infrastructural) increases, then the need for deterrence (despotic) decreases.

The legal structure of states tends towards promoting stability and the confidence of its inhabitants, whatever its technological or cultural conditions might be. So a medieval kingdom needs a lot of deterrence (despotic) because the king simply can't find/get a large proportion of the criminals who break his laws. This was mitigated as much as possible with institutions like tithings and the like, but generally this was the case. For people to feel safe, the risk-reward ratio of crimes including murder had to be prohibitive for potential criminals; yeah you might get away with murder, but if you were caught, you'll definitely be executed, and publicly! On the other hand, our modern western states are characterised by phenomenal levels of infrastructural power - off the charts by historical standards. You WILL ALWAYS BE ARRESTED for serious crimes (with some notable exceptions). This means that the necessity of deterrence isn't as high to maintain social order, and in fact too much despotic power under these circumstances actually has a destabilising effect because the stare's inhabitants can sense that the power of the state is oppressively out of balance. Of course, if you're a budding dictator, all you have to do to have your citizens tolerate a higher level of despotic power is to increase the perceived level of threat.

So what does this mean for capital punishment? It means that sometimes it's necessary or appropriate, and sometimes its unnecessary and inappropriate (because murder in general is generally undesirable, even in the form of judicial killings). If the state in which I lived lacks infrastructural power below a certain threshold, then I would be in favour of capital punishment; if arrest is certain, then I would be against it since it wouldn't be necessary.

Now, the interesting factor here is that the tolerance of the despotic power of the state to execute by a citizenry is generally determined by their perception of mortal risk. Generally in Europe, we're not afraid of being murdered, and so capital punishment will seem barbaric to us. In the United States, by contrast, we see a population that lives with an objectively higher level of mortal fear, and this is reflected in their tolerance of certain kinds of despotic power (capital punishment, armed police, &c.). Doubly interesting is the fact that the territorial diversity of the US means that some of its people will live in places with much more of this fear, and others in places with much less, and so their opinions will rightly differ highly, but will still be determined by the same essential social mechanism as I see it. So for Americans to lambast their compatriots for having differing views on this than they do is very short-sighted and immature in my view.

Personally, I think Mann's theory here is generally true and valuable in any such mature analysis of the pros and cons of capital punishment, meaning that my opinion is literally that capital punishment is probably right in, say, Mexico City, LA or Baltimore and probably wrong in Edinburgh, Zurich or Reykjavik. Even a cursory look at a list of countries by murder rate shows that there does exist a certain boundary rate below which capital punishment is not sensed as necessary, and above which it is... probably around 2 in 100,000.

For comparison:
Iceland: 0.3 in 100,000
Norway: 0.51 in 100,000
Netherlands: 0.55 in 100,000
Poland: 0.67 in 100,000
Ireland: 0.8 in 100,000
Sweden: 1.08 in 100,000
Germany: 1.18 in 100,000
United Kingdom: 1.2 in 100,000
France: 1.35 in 100,000
Canada: 1.68 in 100,000
Syria: 2.2 in 100,000
United States: 5.35 in 100,000
Afghanistan: 6.35 in 100,000
Russia: 10.82 in 100,000
Mexico: 19.26 in 100,000
El Salvador: 82.84 in 100,000

Here we can see that the US murder rate is closer to Afghanistan than it is to Norway, and so a high level of deterrence is probably appropriate for its populace to feel safe, otherwise the country will have to work on improving its infrastructural power if it wants to adopt more civilised practices. The state is simply too 'weak' really, it probably needs more bureaucrats.

BritNi said:
I'm traumatized from the one time I had a gun pointed to my head.
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Holy shit.
 
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