Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Also, while I find all of those things grating, a meta principle that questioning an election means you don't get to run in future elections is a terrible set of incentives. Cheating to win becomes that much more appealing if no one in the political sphere is even allowed to say, "my opponents seem to have done a lot of cheating". A strong norm of never questioning election is only a good thing if elections are actually of unquestionable integrity.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Why would you complain about fact checking other than if you were lying?
This reminds me of my previous post on the brutal NPR fact check of Trump.
Really though, I think it was a poor choice by Vance to even remotely accept the frame as a "fact check". His answer is excellent and correct. When speaking to me, I will hear "fact check" in this context as meaning "pedantic bullshit that's irrelevant to the core claim". I will hear his explanation of how these migrants have become technically temporarily legal, and think, "exactly, the fact that this has a veneer of legality is the core problem, we must stop this". But yeah, other people still believe that a media "fact check" is actually just them checking the facts, so I think it would have been smarter to say something like, "you agreed to not argue with Governor Walz and I about our statements".
My stance on January 6 and the quality of the 2020 election has already been articulated at length. I think it's politically unfortunate that the more popular position is that January 6 was a calamity and that the 2020 election was good and fair. I suspect that Vance's honest position is much closer to mine that Trump's, which is that the 2020 election was bad and unfair, but not exactly "stolen". Either way, he's kind of stuck because he can't directly contradict Trump, but also doesn't want to say very unpopular things. I'm not sure what I would say in his spot. I suppose pretty much the same things - his opponents egged on riots all through 2020, insist on keep elections insecure so we can't actually trust them, and want to censor anyone that questions the quality of elections. Maybe that's a losing position, but it's one that I do sincerely believe is basically accurate.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is.
I greatly doubt that this would actually result in expedited processes. The legal profession is hardly alone in finding that the amount of putative work that exists tends to increase to meet the number of individuals that are doing that work, but it's a stark example of the phenomenon. The United States has no shortage of attorneys, but legal proceedings have tended to increase in length rather than becoming quick and straightforward processes. Much like many of the other issues caused by endless legal wrangling and treating obvious bullshit as worth 120 day waiting periods, these aren't problems with no known solution to man, but problems created by the legal profession and the love its practitioners hold for artificial complication.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I agree with your second paragraph. I've gotten a couple replies in this vein, which makes me think I must not have written clearly with regard to viewing the death penalty as a cap on possible punishments. I am not in favor of inflicting additional suffering, it's a gut impulse, but a bad impulse and overriding it with a justice system that allows no further punishment beyond what a firing squad or hangman delivers is my preference.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
So why does that not extend to the accomplice, rather than the triggerman, in a felony murder case? What if witnesses testify that the triggerman was at the counter alone while his accomplice was in another room, but cannot identify which was which? It seems odd to say, well we wouldn't kill both of them if we knew which one was which, but since we don't know which one was which we'll kill them both.
See this post for some elaboration. In the Littlejohn case, I don't think it's obligatory that he be executed, just that there is no miscarriage of justice in doing so. Had the jury gone the other way, I wouldn't have follow-up questions for them, it's fine.
Though I'll note that capital Felony Murder seems like a fine rule to me in that a felony is a sufficient predicate for an execution, but we can draw ever more outre cases. How many Jan-6th type "felony trespassers" can you charge with the murder of Ashli Babbitt? Felony murder has been used to charge felons for the deaths of their accomplices, on the theory that violence was a predictable result of their felonies on the day, and so the deaths of their accomplices were a predictable result of the violence they invited. We're only looking for a sufficiently tyrannical prosecutor.
Well, yeah, this is where a jury of your peers comes in, plus a little help from a judge in sentencing. I don't think planning on armed robbery where things going as planned results in someone getting a gun pointed at their face is all that similar to the guys that walked into the capital and were technically trespassing. Many lacked proximity to violence that would look like any sort of meaningful moral culpability. Further, Babbitt died because she charged a semi-fortified position with an armed officer there - her own death could easily be avoided with her own decisions. I get your point, but ultimately, it's hard to say much other than that this is exactly why judgment is relevant. There is no scalable, generalizable principle that would lead me to treat literally all plausible felony murder cases the same; two thugs deciding to knock over a convenient store and one of them shooting the owner in the face is pretty much a canonical example of what felony murder cases should be about though.
If the concern is really just that felony murder is too flexible a charge, I may well agree, but this isn't the case where that seems relevant to me.
Let's set up a hypothetical: five guys are at a party, all drinking, assume the same amount and tolerance for the sake of the hypo, all clearly plan to drive home. Four of them are caught at a highway checkpoint and arrested, the last is not so "lucky" he took backroads and crashed into oncoming traffic and killed another driver. Should the four men who did not kill anyone be charged just as harshly?
Nope. Like I said, I'm just willing to bite the bullet on the moral luck there. I can come up with reasons why I'm willing to do so, but I kind of suspect that they're all just post facto, formulated to serve the intuition rather than the other way around. On the flip side, if there was a clearly articulated law that DUI is always punished equally harshly, based on the known facts about the level of inebriation rather than the outcome of the driving, I wouldn't feel a great deal of sympathy for the guys at the checkpoint that got "unfairly" punished. Some behaviors are beyond the pale - whether drunk driving is one or not seems less obvious to me than whether armed robbery is. In either case, my intuition is that your punishment should coincide with the actual outcomes rather than a probabilistic model of outcomes, but I don't think I can muster a great defense of that position at the moment.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
They don't use it often, but Japan still has the death penalty, has executed 98 people in the last 25 years, and has done as recent as 2022. Taiwan restored the death penalty in 2010 and it enjoys substantial polling popularity.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
They're also much easier to steal than cars [citation needed], so I could see that driving behavior in some cities. Being able to just drop it off at a dock rather than making sure you're locking it in a good, visible location could be worth a few bucks to people. For small apartments, storage could become relevant as well - small studios aren't exactly rare and storing a bulky e-bike is kind of clunky.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
If it were about justice, why would it not matter who pulled the trigger?
Entering a criminal conspiracy to point a gun at man's head suffices for me to say that someone is morally culpable if that trigger gets pulled. Other people will draw the line in different spots. I'd be fine not executing Littlejohn, not knowing the details of the case, but I'm also fine with sentencing him to death. He was tried by a jury of his peers and sentenced accordingly. Had they decided that he was substantially less culpable due to mitigating circumstances that aren't obvious, I wouldn't really question it. The point in the Littlejohn case isn't that he absolutely must be executed, but that it's absurd to claim there was some horrible injustice done by executing him. His actions clearly and directly led to an innocent man being shot in the face and dying, execution is perfectly acceptable as a punishment.
Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?
I think I covered this explicitly in my post - my gut feeling that someone deserves worse should be overridden and limited. It's trivial to imagine worse punishments than being put in front of a firing squad, one of the legitimate goals that I think is served with the death penalty is providing finality without becoming perverse. I am not in favor of deliberately painful executions. I have explicitly stated that I think it's immoral to deliberately condemn someone to a lifetime of physical and mental torture - executing them is the moral solution to avoid such a temptation.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I'm fine with biting the moral luck bullet. Drunk driving is the clearest example of this for me, where there is obviously no literal intent to kill anyone, but we punish those who do kill someone much more harshly than those that are merely negligent. I have no intuitive reaction to how attempted murder should be punished, but it seems basically fine to me to not escalate punishment to execution without a successful murder.
Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:
rest in power Emmanuel Littlejohn
may your memory drive us to continue fighting for the abolition of the death penalty
To be clear on who Littlejohn was:
On the night of June 19, 1992, a robbery occurred at a convenience store in Oklahoma City, resulting in the death of the store owner, who was gunned down by two robbers.[2]
On that night, at around 10:15 p.m., 31-year-old Kenneth Meers, the owner of the convenience store, was working with two employees, Tony Hulsey and Hulsey's brother, Danny Waldrup. While they were still doing their work, 20-year-old Emmanuel Antonia Littlejohn[a] and 25-year-old Glenn Roy Bethany entered the store and held Meers at gunpoint, with the intention of robbing him.[3]
…
In a separate case, together with William Arnold Penny, Littlejohn was also charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, two counts of first-degree rape and kidnapping.[9]
To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:
I was a witness for Alabama's execution of Alan Miller by nitrogen gas tonight. Again, it did not go as state officials promised. Miller visibly struggled for roughly two minutes, shaking and pulling at his restraints. He then spent the next 5-6 min intermittently gasping for air
Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.
How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.
I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Refusal to follow triage best practices in order to try to make people care says more about the medical system than it does about anyone victimized by that choice.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I'll commit to reading it in full unless the writing is terrible with a high likelihood of at least upvoting, a decent chance of engaging further, and a non-trivial chance of sharing anecdotes with friends in conversation if it's compelling.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I will commit right now to insistently not giving one single solitary fuck unless there is actually a noticeable number of otherwise healthy young people dying. No, I will not be strapping underwear to my face or staying out of the parks. I will absolutely maximize civil disobedience against anything the public health retards experts cook up.
To weigh in somewhat in between you and /u/roystgnr, I have my license with me 100% of the time when I leave the house, but also have repeatedly had a "why in the world do you not have your license?" conversation where my wife has been denied alcohol for lack of ID. So, I am well aware that this is way above lizard man constant levels, but am also absolutely baffled at what the upside is to not just having your ID in your wallet.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Realistically, I wouldn't expect even something as dire as the current North Carolina situation to happen in literally an hour. If you live in a hurricane state, you should have some sort of reasonable plan laid out and be ready to execute in the event that something happens. This is probably good advice in general but becomes more important if you're somewhere that has a non-trivial probability of your house just being destroyed. If I lived in such a state, my go bag would include a few documents - it's not like these chew up much space or weight. Currently, I just always keep my passport in the backpack that I travel with, so that would be an automatic one without needing to think about it any further than chucking a few other things in and bugging out. Otherwise, top priorities would vary based on what the situation is. Things that I would pretty much always bring:
- Handgun and magazines
- Passport
- Box of Clif bars and Maurten gels (seriously, it's a shitload of calories without much weight)
- Phone (my case has my driver's license, debit card, and credit card)
- Wool running gear - all-purpose across weather and keeps me warm even if wet
- Handwarmers
Imperfect, but doesn't weigh much, is enough calories to survive for a few days even with heavy movement, includes self-defense, some warmth, and includes money and ID restoration.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
It's all in the optics of the president being in control or out of control.
Which, in this case, has the bizarre twist of everyone knowing that the President isn't in control of much of anything, but the VP popping in and out of acting like she's in charge depending on whether it would be electorally helpful or not.
Insuring beach houses that get flooded every couple years to preserve homeowner value after the private insurance market refuses to play there.
This continues to infuriate me. Even if someone thinks it's a public problem, I have no idea why it would be a federal problem. Florida has hurricanes. This is a known aspect of Florida. Florida has a GDP comparable to Spain's, they can price in their local natural disasters without coming to the Midwest demanding handouts. Floridians, in my experience, are often smug about what they view as excellent weather and the lack of income taxes, but also demand that the rest of the country subsidize them because they have dangerous weather.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Someone who has lost their house is less likely to have all their documentation, and getting new copies will take longer than the time before the election.
Less likely, on the margins, sure. But realistically, what things would you grab on your way out the door if there was a catastrophic weather event? Personally, I'd be grabbing my phone, which has my driver's license in the case. Even in the event that my home was wiped out by a catastrophic flood, I would still almost certainly be able to provide the required identification to vote. If anything, this makes me even less sympathetic to the idea that it's actually totally normal and reasonable for legitimate voters to lack identification.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
To addend that, any actual time goal on a run or lifting one rep max is also going to be effectively arbitrary in the sense that the goal is pretty much always just, "better than yesterday". Setting something that you know is completely unrealistic is silly, setting something you can easily accomplish is pointless. No one else is ever going to care all that much about a level of physical accomplishment that is good, but nothing special. Looking at graphs of how many people finishes races at round number is pretty funny. Running a sub-3 (or sub-4, or sub-5) marathon doesn't actually matter to anyone other than the people doing it, but you set a number that's hard but achievable and go from there.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Right, understood, that's the type of argument that I agree includes tradeoffs and has differing levels of willingness to tolerate error. If someone insists on a very high evidential bar for execution, I have no qualms with them. It's the refusal to accept finality even in cases where there is absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that I refer to as evil. The fact that a guy like Ed Kemper still walks the Earth is, put simply, evil.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I firmly believe that the anti-death penalty stance is evil inasmuch as any relatively normal political stance can be. I think I understand the philosophical underpinnings for it fairly well and can countenance certain object-level objections (e.g. requiring very high certainty), but at some point, we slam into a values difference that I really do think is flatly evil. When considering a case like Payton Gendron (the Buffalo Tops shooter), a man that filmed his actions on live stream, there are no outstanding questions about the certainty of his guilt or the pointless evil that he committed. The purpose, arguably a core raison d'être for a state is to dispense justice, and I simply cannot accept that less than public execution of such an individual is anything but evil. I suppose we could get into what exactly "evil" means or should mean, but this sort of sniveling weakness, extending completely unwarranted sympathies to the worst criminals seems like a vacuum where someone's sense of justice should be.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I was going to say something snarky about how little stake the chap has in the United States, but on looking him up, he appears to have gotten his education in the States and spent a significant chunk of his legal career here. My own attitude about a Brit inserting himself into American racial politics with attacks on the integrity of white Americans would be unsurprisingly negative, but I am forced to admit that he's not a complete outsider.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
From the AJ article:
Experts say that racism remains a significant issue in the US, and could have played a role in this case.
“If I’m representing some white person who kills a Black person, it’s relatively easy to get them off,” Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer and director of the UK charity 3DC told Al Jazeera.
“But if it’s a Black person who kills a white person, it is vastly harder. And that’s totally racism,” Stafford Smith, who has defended many death row prisoners, added.
I am, of course, skeptical of that claim. But whatever, let's accept it as dicta for the moment. If this were true, how is it even slightly exonerating of Williams? In both of these scenarios, we're talking about murderers. If white murderers have gotten away with it, I think that's a very bad thing and we should stop letting white murderers get away with it. I want white murderers caught, tried, and executed. If it's true that they're getting away with murder because of their race, I don't find some solace in the idea that my race is getting away with crimes. My enemies are the murderers, not people of any particular race. With comments like this from Clive and the famous reactions to the OJ trial, the black and progressive belief seems to be that if whites get away with murder, blacks should too.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Outside of situations where people in the military or foreign service are obligated to be elsewhere, I'm basically just against absentee balloting altogether. If someone isn't home on election day, oh well, they don't vote. My preferred policy is for everyone to just go to the polls on election day... or don't.
I am aware that's unpopular though. I do think this specific example is illustrative of how far we've gone in the opposite direction, being so insistent on universalizing suffrage and getting ballots out to people that just shouldn't be voting at all that it's just downright silly.
Yes, I think this is a good explanation for why Democrats are fine with electoral shenanigans and blatant First Amendment violations. I couldn't have said it better myself. When people are convinced that their opponents are honest-to-god fascists, they can convince themselves that they're actually patriots for some minor foible like counting ballots received after election day in violation of black letter law or telling people that they should just list themselves as indefinitely confined so they don't need to provide ID to vote. Most of the people articulating these sorts of ideas really believe it, they really think they're the good guys saving the Republic.
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