Delaware Court Strikes Down Capital Punishment

[brewer]

---

Nice of you to troll, I happen to know Min would more or less agree with the comment I just made. Capital punishment is a barbaric, horribly primitive and uncivilised form of punishment, that only the world's lot of scurvy-infested backward thinking mostly theist nation states practise today.

You know, when I was a really young adult - 18, 19. I learned that the USA practised capital punishment, punished prostitution, and did not have mandatory voting. Being a Christian I thought the first two points were probably OK, but I thought the third was pretty fucking stupid. Now, since that time I have learned a lot more, and I'd love to explain to you why I think those first two points are absurdly primitive.

In fact it wasn't much longer after that when I discovered something called stigma that exists as a negative form of prejudice as well as confirmation bias. Now, interestingly our society is much more conjunctive to acceptance of different minority groups then is the case with a place like the US. Nevertheless the phenomena of Stigma and Confirmation Bias, and especially when combined to form things like Dogma, fascinate me greatly. Dogmatic ideology is NOT a reflection of there being negative individuals, it is instead a metaphysical structure - something that most people here would fail to understand.

So things that I see as unbelievably goddamned primitive, people in the US think are somehow "essential" to their way of life, or connected to their beliefs and values, or are important to them in some other way.

Now, interestingly, the only way to fight dogmatic ideologies is to convince the primitive fucks that you're right. And you can't achieve that by telling them that they're primitive assholes following god-awful ideologies harmful to society. If you try that, their defences go up, their confirmation-bias kicks in, and you are out on your ass. The only way to convince people is to inform them in some way, without labelling them as being the problem. This is exactly the problem with the militant arm of Islam at the moment, and the US (because they're of their primitive stuck-in-the-past ways of thinking) continues to think that divide-and-conquer will eventually bring "peace". Then when that doesn't happen they say "we couldn't have known that" - even though as it turns out, they are explicitly told about the likely outcome in the first place and ignore it. Clinton did this, Bush did this, Blair did this.

Everything I've just said can apply to capital punishment. The benefits of capital punishment fall well short of meeting its costs. In individual cases you will be able to find successful examples of where it might have been the most appropriate form of punishment, but only very rarely - and even then the benefit to society above life imprisonment is very small. So, those primitive assholes that believe in this shit can use examples to support their dogmatic ideologies - of course they can! And that's what they do, and as long as there are at least a good chunk of people to support it (even if it's nowhere near a majority) they can keep at it. We've moved on, Europe has moved on, Canada has moved on. If the US wants to be stuck in the past with Asia and Africa, that's their business.

---