I appreciate your comment as you quite lucidly expressed your viewpoint.
For the USA to make good on what it seems to be saying, that they'll hunt down the baddies and not put up with nations that harbor them, we would be guilty of what bin Laden and others have claimed as grievance against the USA. Using our might to push the world around. I'm concerned about that. I am not enough of a student of recent history to see how the world sees the USA. No matter, it could be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
My problem with this is the notion of civilized and moral... on whose morality do you judge someone? On yours or on theirs? If a person is willing and able to murder, their morality must say that murder is somehow acceptable. Or, some other extenuating circumstance. If you, as society-at-large don't think so, that's fine. But it's hard to deal with if your society has a lot of people who think differently.
But, it still doesn't seem just or fair. Do human rights belong to everyone no matter how they act towards their fellow human? No matter whether they act in a way that respects other's human rights?
I am guessing that your answer is that incarceration is for those who violate this contract. But even prison seems too cushy for some of these, for lack of a better word, people.
To ask a blunt question, if any of the perpetrators of genocide were tried today in Sweden or the Netherlands or any other of the nations who deemed death-penalty "beneath them", they would be locked up for life as a sentence for the death of thousands and millions?
And as far as the US requesting other nations to try and convict those responsible for various crimes committed in the US, what's to say that that nation won't be more inhumane than the US?
Even though the US does generally consider the death-penalty cruel-and-unusual, in general it seems the justice systems here do all they can to make sure that nobody who is deemed undeserving gets it. Since there have been recent revelations of fraud in the system as evidenced by DNA techniques, then perhaps the system is fundamentally flawed.
But to say that a butcher deserves to live at the courtesy of the state, that seems a bit hard to take.
Of course, there's always the question why there's so many people who are locked up here and who do get tried for crimes that could lead to the death-penalty. That, I have no answer for.
It's not a deterrent from the looks of it... if anything, laws like California's three-strikes seem to be worse in some senses. You get people who are facing their third-strike and resist arrest like crazy since they don't want to go down for life.
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Date: 2001-09-14 12:06 pm (UTC)For the USA to make good on what it seems to be saying, that they'll hunt down the baddies and not put up with nations that harbor them, we would be guilty of what bin Laden and others have claimed as grievance against the USA. Using our might to push the world around. I'm concerned about that. I am not enough of a student of recent history to see how the world sees the USA. No matter, it could be a self-fulfilling prophesy.
My problem with this is the notion of civilized and moral... on whose morality do you judge someone? On yours or on theirs? If a person is willing and able to murder, their morality must say that murder is somehow acceptable. Or, some other extenuating circumstance. If you, as society-at-large don't think so, that's fine. But it's hard to deal with if your society has a lot of people who think differently.
But, it still doesn't seem just or fair. Do human rights belong to everyone no matter how they act towards their fellow human? No matter whether they act in a way that respects other's human rights?
I am guessing that your answer is that incarceration is for those who violate this contract. But even prison seems too cushy for some of these, for lack of a better word, people.
To ask a blunt question, if any of the perpetrators of genocide were tried today in Sweden or the Netherlands or any other of the nations who deemed death-penalty "beneath them", they would be locked up for life as a sentence for the death of thousands and millions?
And as far as the US requesting other nations to try and convict those responsible for various crimes committed in the US, what's to say that that nation won't be more inhumane than the US?
Even though the US does generally consider the death-penalty cruel-and-unusual, in general it seems the justice systems here do all they can to make sure that nobody who is deemed undeserving gets it. Since there have been recent revelations of fraud in the system as evidenced by DNA techniques, then perhaps the system is fundamentally flawed.
But to say that a butcher deserves to live at the courtesy of the state, that seems a bit hard to take.
Of course, there's always the question why there's so many people who are locked up here and who do get tried for crimes that could lead to the death-penalty. That, I have no answer for.
It's not a deterrent from the looks of it... if anything, laws like California's three-strikes seem to be worse in some senses. You get people who are facing their third-strike and resist arrest like crazy since they don't want to go down for life.