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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45540 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Same thing can be said eg about prisons. So you shouldn't have prisons...

There shouldn't be.

Fines, disfigurement/dismemberment, death. Those should be the only punishments.

Taking decades off someone's life is vastly more cruel than taking a limb, and the dilution of killing someone across 50 years by making them waste in a prison dilutes the resistance you get.

If every life sentence or decades long interment had to be replaced with a public execution or a public cleaving of limbs with the judge in mandatory attendance... there'd be a hell of a lot less of it, and a very good shillings point for public outrage and resistance.

Prison is like all bureaucratic solutions, it exists to dilute responsibility for the decision and to impose the costs of the decision with a minimum of potential for resistance.

But that is the same with death. If you give people the power to kill others, they will certainly abuse it. They can abuse it for censorship reasons, for example: I do not like what you said so I will find a false reason to kill you. How is that any better?

Well, my personal problem with libertarian arguments is precisely that they are absolute and unbounded. I think it is actually a trade-off between freedoms. Most of the time freedom of speech must win but sometimes it is harmless if it does'nt.

I didn't want to go further than "there are practical cases where it is acceptable to use a bit of censorship", so what you say seems ok to me.

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