In the News

[inulro]

The Today programme informed me that following the shooting of the two policewomen in Manchester, all and sundry are calling to bring back the death penalty.

I guess hoping that we could have learned something from the Norwegians about dignity and maintaining one's values in the face of atrocity was a bit much.

Comments

[moral-vacuum.livejournal.com]

This is the main reason why we should always have representative democracy rather than direct democracy. You'd end up with the legislative equivalent of a howling mob 9and also noever have things like the seat belt law and the smoking ban).

What gets me is that say we bring it back, and leaving aside the fact that we'd get drummed out of large numbers of international organisations, and one or more innocent people get executed. We would then have "isn't this awful, bloody government, bloody useless criminal justice system". I'd rather have the law being an ass by letting occasional people go by mistake than have one that occasionally kills people by mistake.

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

You know, another part of the purification ritual of pharmakos I discussed in my lastest monograph was the bloody execution of criminals. This isn't about some crazy grenade-chucking gangster out of Grand Theft Auto at all. This is about peoples' inner need to effect change in the world and right wrongs - which, being very difficult, is diverted into numerous cleansing rituals based around assauging guilt. This is done by either deliberately committing injustices, thus implicating everyone equally in a social crime, or in the case of the punishment of wrongdoers, by an actual human sacrifice in which we load our sins onto criminals or people in vaguely hostile foreign countries, and then murder them.

What I mean is, there are deep psychosocial reasons for people to go on a death-penalty demanding binge right now, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they got their wish.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I get all that (I've been reading about the evolutionary biology of group pressure lately), I'm just saying, why can't we have a bit of dignity like the Norwegians do.