• 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 9th, 2023

help-circle



  • Hit the nail on the head. I’m not proud to admit that I’m absolutely okay with execution purely for the reason of retribution in the face of truly unforgivable acts (I’m talking the Epsteins of the world; beyond any doubt guilty of years of atrocity). I acknowledge that this isn’t justice, it’s vengeance, but my ape brain admittedly doesn’t really view the two separately - a relic of our evolutionary past, I’m sure.

    However, I absolutely don’t trust the state to be the one setting the requirements for what meets the definition of unforgivable, and I certainly don’t trust them to do their due diligence, so the whole thing has to go. As it stands, capital punishment isn’t about what you did, so much as it is the state proving to you and everyone else that only they have a monopoly on violence. That they can, if they so choose, end your life and nobody can do anything about it. It’s about proving that they, at the end of the day, own you.


  • Trigger warning: this is about to get fairly gruesome; I’ll be going in depth on botched hangings.

    But short answer: 100%. Hanging can be botched in a variety of ways. More detailed explanation below.

    Tap for spoiler

    The ways that it can go wrong tend to be fairly unpleasant as well. The ideal is that you get the perfect height relative to your weight that it breaks your neck, but if that gets messed up, you’re likely going to end up slowly suffocating instead (too short a drop) or having your head literally pulled straight from your body (too long a drop). There are (potentially apocryphal) accounts of people being hanged who weren’t actually heavy enough for it to effectively suffocate them or break the neck, so others would have to get involved and literally grab them by the legs to pull them down to add more weight. If the noose isn’t tight enough, it could come loose and wrap partially around the face instead, leading to a slow strangulation and/or severe lacerations. Skin can be fully or partially degloved as a consequence as well.

    All in all, if we’re going for classic execution methods, I’m personally going guillotine.


  • I love this being framed as inhumane as if lethal injection isn’t the most consistently botched method of execution and as if firing squad isn’t by far the most effective and painless. People are shocked by it, and they want to abstract away from the barbarism inherent in the taking of a human life, but no matter the method, the end result is always the same.

    Capital punishment shouldn’t exist in my opinion, not because I have any moral issues with it in principle, but because the burden of proof is simply too high to be met by the legal system as it exists now. Given that it does exist, however, I would personally choose firing squad as my way to go ten times out of ten. Better that than the paralytic working, the anesthetic not working, and feeling lava in your veins for the final minutes of your life as you can’t even scream.



  • Tbf, I’m a zoomer who knows a lot of people who vape, and the overwhelming sentiment among people I know isn’t the denial of “this won’t give me cancer”, but rather the nihilism of “I cannot be bothered to give a shit if this will give me cancer, because I probably won’t live long enough for it to matter.”

    That’s not to say there isn’t a denial crowd, but the prevailing view in my experience seems to be that if, in the end, it’s the cancer that does us in, then we have already survived past all expectations, and in the present we’re just trying to get through the day.



  • Genuinely, invest in education and you can resolve a lot of this in one fell swoop. I firmly believe that a large part of the reason the US is in its current state is because of the systematic cuts to our education system which have been happening for damn near half a century (fucking Reagan). Invest in the youth, give them the critical thinking and media literacy skills needed to draw their own conclusions, and I think you’ll have made significant progress on the issue.

    Easier said than done, though, I’ll admit, and it’s a plan that operates on a pretty goddamn long timeline - a much longer one than the current critical situation is likely to allow us.