Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercurial | Hacker News Reader

> There's historic precedent for that kind of divorce between actions and consequences, and it is not pretty. There's a certain French doctor you should google: his name's Josheph Guillotin.

I'm not sure what analogy you are going for. Guillotin did not invent the guillotine, and only advertised it as a more humane way of execution. He was opposed to the death penalty.

View on HN

They're referring to the French Revolution, and then the Terror. One of the causes of the revolution was the poor being fed up with the massive wealth imbalance. An economic depression was making the masses starve in the streets, while the wealthy 1% enjoyed lives of comfort and luxury enabled by the rigged aristocratic land-owning system. So the peasants had their bloody revolution, killed a lot of the aristocrats using Dr. Guillotine's invention, and now we have modern France.

(This is, of course, a gross oversimplification of a complex historical topic. Please feel free to correct me.)

I am well aware of the French revolution and its causes, thank you. As I said, Guillotin did not invent the machine. He did not like death penalty, but if it had to be done, he would rather have had it done by a machine than by axe or sword (for the nobility) which occasionally did not kill in one hit, or by hanging (for the ordinary populace).

The actual inventor of the guillotine is one Antoine Louis [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Louis

Reply on news.ycombinator.com