This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of January 1, 2024
@gog:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The replies you got pre-reset were (in order, but not in hierarchy):
@FistfullOfCrows:
So if lack of oxygen is not immediately obvious why didn't they just make an airlocked room filled with 100% nitrogen and then just throw the inmates in? Why the whole circus. Further if people overdose on opiates all the time to the point their hearts stop while they are purely blissed out of their nogin why aren't we just ODing the executees on pure fentanyl.
@gattsuru
Death penalty procedures operate under a wide variety of legal constraints, some of which are well-meaning attempts to avoid unnecessary pain or messiness, and some of which are pretty overt efforts to make no process lawful. The "unusual" prong has been held to require that death penalty protocols have to be standardized. Ramirez holds that they must allow (when requested) a religious leader to be able to touch the person being killed.
That said, sodiummuffin has a timeline suggesting that you'd probably get a lot of reporting on how the condemned struggled the entire way to the execution chamber.
@ControlsFreak
Executioners are in a bind, because they're always trying to placate the most impossibly small amount of squeamishness in the public. The first choice is whether you can essentially spring the execution on the prisoner as a surprise or not. If you choose to not make it a surprise, well, you don't really get the option you propose, but then you end up pretty much going down the route of having the "whole circus". You likely have to give the prisoner a piece of paper that says, "You are scheduled to be executed at [TIME] on [DATE]." But then people are squeamish about, "How horrible is it to have to live that last period of time, knowing that you're going to be executed?" And moreover, you give them plenty of time to figure out how to 'fight' the execution, and likely a decent chance to do so. You can only restrain someone to a table so well, and if they really want to try to thrash around on it to make a scene and maybe have it written in the newspapers about how terrible it was that this guy thrashed around while being executed, they're probably going to be successful.
On the other hand, if you choose that it can be made to be a surprise, you'll still get squeamishness. "How horrible is it to have to live in prison, knowing that you're going to be executed, but not knowing when. It could be at any moment, what seems like a routine transfer, etc. You'd be constantly on edge in a way that is nearly torturous." And now, maybe instead of just waiting and fighting to make a scene when the preappointed hour comes, maybe they start fighting and making a scene all the time over just trivial shit that is misinterpreted as, "Could this be how they spring the surprise?!"
So, you've got this airlocked room with all the nitrogen that you're going to throw prisoners into. Did they get a notification that this is the time and day? Then they fuckin' know. And they might throw a fit and try to fight. So now, what are you gonna do? Have a whole circus where you tie a guy up before rolling him into the room? Dude's still gonna fight and thrash when he wants to fight and thrash. If you didn't give him a notification of the time/day, then how hard is it for him to figure it out? At the very least, he has access to a lawyer and perhaps occasional communication with other outside family/friends, as well as the 'prison wisdom' network. How many rooms does this prison have which can be made to be airlocked? ...probably just the one; that's expensive. What is it used for besides executions? ...probably not much; I doubt you want prisoners to have regular access to it such that they could potentially sabotage it in some way. So how hard is it, really, for him to realize, either on the way to the room or immediately after he's been thrown in there (probably by himself) that this is the time/date? Probably not very hard. So then, he can decide to fight/thrash.
Given all this nonsense, it's far simpler and less resource intensive to just tie the guy down to a table and put a mask on his face. Sure, he's gonna fight and thrash, but there was literally no plausible situation that you were going to devise where he wasn't going to fight and thrash, especially not one that is considered acceptable to a broad enough swath of the public.
@Grant_us_eyes
This is one of the elements that's hammered into when training for scuba diving; hypoxia is subtle, insidious, very difficult to realize you're suffering from, and can kill due to a cascade of bad decision making.
Funny how the same stuff can kill you whether you're thousands of feet in the air or 30 feet underwater.
@netstack
Every so often, I’m reminded that aviation is absolutely insane. We’ve pushed the limits of transportation so hard that people have to plan for having the oxygen forcibly pulled out of their lungs. It might be crazier that these plans actually work and generally avoid accidents.
More options
Context Copy link