astercontrol:

Progressives on here will go to great lengths to remind each other that “no group inherently deserves to die,” including people who have been convicted of the worst possible crimes

and that this is because

1. death is the most irreversible punishment, and

2. the moment there’s ANY ideology justifying death as the punishment for (X), law enforcement is going to use that as an excuse to redefine (X) to include “belonging to any vulnerable minority,” and will carry out executions accordingly– with or without any (dubious) legal process

But then we see how very, very easy it is to get this whole worldview to leave all our bodies, the moment (X) is “racists” or “fascists” or something. Obviously all racists and fascists deserve to die!

Because no evil conservative would ever do the “redefining to include minorities” with THAT kind of group, would they?


….uhh.


https://www.peoplefor.org Charlie Kirk Thinks the KKK and Antifascist Protesters Are 'Equivalent' Aug 20, 2019 — Charlie Kirk, the president and founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, told Breitbart radio listeners on Sunday that prominent Democrats had been silent when it came to vocalizing opposition to antifascist activists because antifascists were the Democrats' “paratroopers,” ...ALT

I don’t even know what exactly my own position on this is.

Mostly, I try to avoid stating any generalization as an absolute law. Especially ones about what should be punishable by what.

And this is because laws and rules will always be subject to the problem of getting reinterpreted by corrupt law enforcement.

But I also don’t believe that eliminating all laws would make things any better.

(Because corrupt law enforcement could then just make its own laws to enforce, and change them whenever. Even more than they do now, that is. And that’s true even if you tried to abolish law enforcement completely– because who’s gonna enforce that abolishment?)


So I guess the closest thing I have to a worldview here, is that laws should be enforced on a case-by-case basis– in as thoughtful a way as possible, taking into account the specific circumstances– and we should do whatever we can to try and get reasonable, thoughtful people into the positions of doing that.

(Which unfortunately has failed, in the case of police forces in general and also the current Supreme Court.)

(And I do not have any idea how to either fix this or prevent it getting worse.)


Which I think is why I’m somewhere in the realm of:

1. “no group (i.e., a category of people identified by means of a definition, including specifiers like something they’ve done) inherently always deserves to die,”

but also,

2. “there may be some individual people who act in such a way that their death may be the only way to remove the danger they pose to society.”

And the difficulty with that is in trying to decide who among us has the right to make the judgement on which people those are, and how to deal with them.


…..But at some point it’s less a moral ideology, and more just a description of how the world works.

Part of which is, “When people make a big enough problem of themselves, someone –right or wrong –is eventually gonna step up and do something about it. And we might not like the results as much as we would if we’d done something less severe about it sooner.”