Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Pacobird]

Muammar Gaddafi
Saddam Hussein
Osama Bin Laden

did the japanese take a long weekend when harry truman kicked off


this actually is an honest question because i dont know and cant find out but i would not bet a dollar on the answer being yes

[Thad]

and yet there are people reading this right now who can split/merge

Done.  Great post; thanks.

The inherent problem with the whole discussion is that it requires death actually being some kind of vengeance on behalf of anyone. Is killing a murderer good because now suddenly all the deaths they caused are undone? No, that's I'm sure part of the reason you don't support the death penalty, so why feel any better when he's dead than you did when the same murderer was put away? Is it the permanence? Knowing for sure they wont be able to hurt anyone ever again? Again I doubt that because that's not really joy as much as relief.

Not to speak for Bal, but that's what I got out of what he's said so far.  I think he IS talking about relief more than joy, on the whole.

And that's about where I fit on it.  I don't see the deaths of bin Laden or Ghadafi as a cheerful subject, but I do think it's a relief that they won't be able to hurt anybody else.

The same, of course, can be achieved with lifetime incarceration.  Charlie Manson is in prison and the world is better for it -- the world would have been better if they'd kept him in there the FIRST time, or at least transferred him to the secure wing of a mental hospital.

And in some cases I DO think death is an escape from justice.  The world is certainly better without Milosevic -- or even Ken Lay -- but I'd have rather seen them convicted.  In either case, though, the man had already been caught and wasn't going to do any more damage.

[Bal]

Depends on the person. if I found them personally offensive (ie Falwell) then there's definitely a certain amount of satisfaction in it, but really, I don't see what is so hard to understand about the "net gain" simile. My day receives +1 on the good/bad scale because the world is less one shithead.

It isn't really about vengeance most of the time, because on someone like Paterno I'm nowhere near invested enough to really "care". I just hear that he's died, think "Good, one less" and move on with my day. The only reason he's been given as much thought as he has is because of this thread and the discussion that spawned it.

With regards to capital punishment being carried out, I'm not usually satisfied at all because of my objections to that practice, unless the person was particularly monstrous and irrefutably guilty.

[Thad]

Right -- I'm not going to shed a tear for Timothy McVeigh, but he's not worth the innocents who have been executed -- or even the guilty who have repented.  I've no doubt that Tookie Williams was a cold-blooded killer, but I think he was far more valuable trying to make amends from prison than he is feeding worms.

[Bal]

McVeigh was a weird case. I actually happened to watch the news cast the day he was being executed. Live coverage, such as it was, and I didn't feel anything about it at all, but not because I object to the death penalty, as would usually be the case. I think what he did was just of such enormity that there really is nothing you could do to him that could provide any more or less satisfaction than catching him in the first place. Osama was different precisely because they hadn't caught him, and for so long.