Moral justification for the execution of criminals of war?

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, that's part of it, isn't it?  You live in a country where strange kids are bullied, and where strange kids' parents (or anyone they meet online) serve as a source of deadly firepower.  To live in a state like that, and be against execution on the basis that it is too savage-- that's a HIGHLY incoherent position.

No, it isn't, since one is a position, and the other is a circumstance.  I think you know that I have a very dim view of law enforcement and justice here in the good ole us of a.  It's not really an issue of savagery to me - you could make the killings as genteel as you like, and we do.  It's just that I think that not killing each other is one of the best ideas society ever had.  I don't think you even have a society outside of some kind of agreement not to kill each other.  

We're talking about a country where people have a constitutional (re: God-given) right to own a tool that has the purpose of quickly punching holes through homo sapiens, organisms that usually can't survive having holes punched through them.  Most common quote after a GUN-BASED MASS KILLING: "Derrrrp.  If only we had more guns!"

Sounds like something a very silly person would say. 

And then in an explicit attempt to assassinate leaders of hostile nations / organizations, America will send drones into weddings or public spaces.  Drones designed to blow up brown people indiscriminately.  Little arms and legs, bits of dresses and sandals, blown maybe a hundred yards into the sky, because despite an actual fatality ratio of maybe 100:1, it is impoverished brown people who are the terrorists, not the ones who keep bombing them?

Technically, the drones are designed to be more discriminating than your average joe, and more discrete.  Yes, though, that's how words work.  You might find drone warfare disgusting, I know I do..but that doesn't make it terrorism.  You seem to be making the case we shouldn't do it.  That doing something like that..might be bad.  I agree.  My ideal society isn't a drone warfare society.  I don't think it's a great way to live.  Seems to fall afoul of that great "let's not kill each other" idea we came up with.  

Is this not REALLY what the abhorrence of the death penalty is all about?  A kind of moral shell-game designed to hide from the American psychology the fact that the American state is one of the most brutal and ruthless in all of human history, and that Americans are perfectly fine with that?

And then pretend that human life is sacrosanct.

Should we say "These positions seem incompatible?" Or just-- 'Murica be trollin', bruh!

IDK, we put up with seditionists and nutbars screaming rahowa like it's politics as usual.  Only managed to kill one of those guys.  As you may be aware, we're awfully selective in who we punish and how severe (or relatively lenient) those punishments are.  One of our many moral failings, a thing that seems to compromise us all, is that our in-group identities can resist a larger concept of themselves.  We come up with laws for The People, ideas about dessert that apply to The People.  They're often not bad rules or reservations in and of themselves.  In fact, the legal privilege that a dominant social group has is alot of times the picture of how we wish life were for the rest of us.   The distance between those realities not only the difference between castes - but how far from compliance a society has strayed from the better angels of their own nature in misapprehending and mistreating The Other vis-a-vis our own notions of a social contract.  Immigrants, ethnics, and outlaws.

That's why I take a dim view of american law enforcement, in point of fact. Up to and including any death penalties. I don't think it's a power that the state should have, and particularly not my state, as currently constituted. America may be ruthless, but americans by and large are not. Drone warfare is a wonderful example of the same kind of harm that executions cause, to my mind. To victims, to survivors, to the incidentally involved....and it's not a great job to be a drone operator, either. Fucks with their heads.