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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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"Hang them" was a solution that has gone out of fashion in our modern society, but it definitely had its merits. As is commonly commented on, there isn't much of a sliding scale - most people do nearly no crime and a small number do a huge amount of crime.

I'm anti-death penalty, because courts get it wrong sometimes and the occasional innocent person being executed is a price I'm not willing to pay. But I do sometimes wonder how different society would be if we just strung up the scumbags after their first couple of crimes.

As is commonly commented on, there isn't much of a sliding scale - most people do nearly no crime and a small number do a huge amount of crime.

Lots of people do lots of small and/or technical crimes. If you tried to implement "hang them", you'd have con men and pickpockets working the public executions of jaywalkers, speeders, and people who took home an office pencil.

From Foseti's "Review of 'The Better Angels of Our Nature' by Steven Pinker":

A while back, I linked to a story about a guy in my neighborhood who’s been arrested over 60 times for breaking into cars. A couple hundred years ago, this guy would have been killed for this sort of vandalism after he got caught the first time. Now, we feed him and shelter him for a while and then we let him back out to do this again. Pinker defines the new practice as a decline in violence – we don’t kill the guy anymore! Someone from a couple hundred years ago would be appalled that we let the guy continue destroying other peoples’ property without consequence. In the mind of those long dead, “violence” has in fact increased. Instead of a decline in violence, this practice seems to me like a decline in justice – nothing more or less.

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