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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32268 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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I’m on record as opposing the death penalty not because of any high minded ideals, nor because I want an army of thugs in reserve, but because the government is entirely untrustworthy. I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

In theory, not having the death penalty allows for a future government, or the people themselves, to rectify things in the future in the way that the death penalty doesn’t. If society was less bifurcated in their beliefs, I could see it being more of value (as people could more consistently agree on the targets of violence).

In general, though, I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power - people with a monopoly on violence should be severely limited on what else they can do, lest they use violence to seize all else in life.

I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power

That cuts both ways. Do you limit government power by permitting the government to accumulate a reserve army of brutal thugs, or by preventing this by murdering the nascent reserve army in its crib?

I've mentioned Communist revolutionaries. See https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/ for an interesting, horse-shoe twist

The chief instrument of this terror was the secret police—the ÁVO, an acronym for Államvédelmi Osztály, Department of State Protection.

It filled its ranks primarily with two disparate types of people—hardcore Communists, many or mostly Jews resentful towards non-Jewish Hungarians (again of which more later), and former Arrow Cross toughs, usually from the countryside, whose past could be held over them and whose predilections toward violence were of use to the new regime.

But one could read about Oskar Dirlewanger and where he found the men to staff the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade

Coming up to date,

The Wagner Group has been recruiting large numbers of prisoners for Putin's war in Ukraine.

https://www.newsweek.com/inside-wagner-group-criminals-contractors-putins-war-1770392

I must stop writing this comment before I sink too deeply into despair, both about where government power comes from, and the level of counter-ruthlessness needed to oppose it.

The issue is that the government will only perform the death penalty on those that would be the army of their opponents, not their own. A left wing government would give slap on the wrist sentences to those that perform left wing coded violence, while bringing the full force of the law down on those that commit right wing coded violence (and vice versa is true too).

The advantage to “the government can’t kill anyone” is that it removes it’s discretion to do this - there are always ways for a government to avoid prosecuting those in its favour.

I'm more interested in what happens when there is a change of government. The link about the Államvédelmi Osztály was interesting because of who Arrow Cross was.

Arrow Cross were right-wing thugs. After the left come to power, were they taken out and shot? No, they got demoted to junior thugs. They beat up the people that the new left wing government told them to beat up. Only if they were disobedient would they face harsh punishment.

I can easily picture a government deciding that mean tweets warrant the death penalty, while something like assault warrants nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

In the United States? What precedent can you point to in the history of this country to justify this fear? The death penalty was widely practiced across the U.S. until well into the second half of the 20th Century, and is still practiced in many states today. As far as I’m aware there are no historical examples, whether at the federal, state, or local level, of it being used to punish pure speech crimes. Several American administrations have been more than willing to imprison political dissidents — the Wilson administration very famously harassed and imprisoned many socialists and anti-war activists, for example — but none (again, as far as I’m aware) has ever suggested executing them.

In fact, looking at the sorts of crimes people have been executed for over the history of this country, it seems like they’re all pretty much exactly the ones you’d expect. There actually does seem to be pretty widespread agreement, at least among those in this country who don’t actively oppose the death penalty, regarding which crimes merit it. This was true in periods wherein Americans were more “bifurcated in their beliefs” than they are now. (i.e. during the Civil War) It seems like paranoia about being executed for tweets is fairly disconnected from any sober analysis of the actual probability of that event coming to pass.

The USG has executed a few people for basically political grounds, granted that they committed actual crimes those crimes would probably not otherwise have resulted in the death penalty.

Mary Surratt seems like the clearest example; I'd guess you could also add the Rosenbergs even if I have no sympathy at all for them.

I meant mean tweets as shorthand for any politically incorrect speech; and I live in Canada, not in the United States.

Remember that Britain (for example) spent state resources prosecuting someone for misgendering their rapist.

It’s actually not that hard to reach a state where the state could justify it. If words are “literally violence,” it is fairly straightforward to make the case that mean words towards a minority group is exactly what Hitler did (even without the literal violence clause, you could claim that the person in question is encouraging violence and erasure, which is literally genocide).

The political coalition in this country who would find any of this logic appealing is also the one that is dead-set against the death penalty. They’re not even willing to support execution for actual murder and rape, so I don’t see how you can imagine them getting to “death penalty for hate speech”. It just does not strike me as a remotely plausible series of events.

I mean, this coalition is willing to burn cities and churches because of misinformation (the number of unarmed black men killed my cops is estimated to be around two magnitudes higher than it actually is, and they destroyed around 50 churches in Canada because of a moral panic around mass graves that never unearthed even a single bone). What makes you think they aren’t willing to use violence against their outgroup?

You’re just using uncharitable framings of the most extreme versions of your political enemies’ beliefs, in order to avoid having to engage with the specifics of my question. Nobody here is disputing that certain low-level elements of the American left’s coalition were, and perhaps will be again in the not-too-distant future, willing to use extrajudicial violence and criminal activity.

What I’m disputing is the plausibility of that element of the coalition gaining significant political power at the federal or state level, such that they could totally remake not only the party apparatus’ official position, but also the common constitutional interpretation of what crimes merit the death penalty, and could then get the Supreme Court to agree with their novel interpretation, and that rank-and-file members of the criminal justice apparatus would willingly carry out such executions. You’re proposing so many moving parts all coming together in a very particular way which, again, seems to have zero analogue in the history of this country.

I just don’t think there’s any realistic through-line via which we get from “some random black felons started fires in some major cities” to “a high-level progressive government official declares that hate speech, and only hate speech, is now a capital offense, and everyone at all levels below this — and horizontal to this, such as, again, the courts — signs off on this and carries it out. The conditions necessary to facilitate a series of developments like this would really only be possible in the case of full state collapse, catastrophic military defeat, etc.

You don’t need to declare that hate speech, and only hate speech, warrants the death penalty- you only need to declare that it too warrants it, then fail to prosecute cases that would otherwise warrant it if against a favoured group.

I live in Canada, not in the United States - we have an extremely activist judiciary here, imposed on Western Canada by Ottawa and Quebec. It would not surprise me in the slightest if they went this route, as we’ve already seen them declare that race and gender must be considered in sentencing. If all you care about is the states, you probably know more than I do, and I defer to your judgement. However, I’m talking about what I’ve seen in non-US systems, where we have “disadvantaged” individuals who have committed stabbing sprees released immediately - I don’t know why you don’t think the left would use this, given that disparate impact is literally part of their public justification for DEI and similar initiatives.

A significant portion number of such people were willing to support or at least accept extrajudicial execution for being an insurance executive or a trump supporter demonstrating in the wrong city.

They didn’t support the government doing that executing, though. That would be a very significant change in position.

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