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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28317 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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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.

Al Jazeera

This is literally enemy propaganda, the point is to sow chaos in your society. Why are you even reading this? What’s the point of contaminating your mind with an obvious psy-op?

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.

If I were a white racist, I'd actually prefer if white murderers got punished more severely and with less stringent proof than black ones. In very broad strokes, whites are more likely to murder whites, and blacks are more likely to murder blacks. Killing off murderers of a particular race is of disproportionate benefit to that race.

The Reddit-progressive beliefs about such a thing seems, to my mind, to be the belief that the death penalty shouldn’t exist- and possibly neither should extremely long prison sentences- and that these things serve no criminal justice purpose because they don’t reduce crime, the reason they exist is to keep black people down.

This belief is wrong. But they’re wrong, not evil.

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.

To me, it is the finality and chance of a mistake. I’d concede the point where someone livestreams it. But I worry in other cases.

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.

Is Clive here American (and directing a UK charity), or is he speaking in outrage-inducing hypotheticals? Because if I were British, I'd be ashamed at the Crown's tyrannical encroachment on the free speech rights of Man.

But I'm not British.

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.

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