> What about 20 years? What about 1 year? Those are all irreversible.
You are using linguistic tricks to make a bad argument.
The fact that the past is immutable doesn’t mean that things can’t be reversed.
If you’re planning your day in the morning and you decide you’re going to have chicken tonight, you can never change the fact that you decided that you’re going to have chicken, but you can choose to not have chicken.
One way to stop yourself from making these sorts of bad linguistic arguments is to ask yourself, “does my argument mean that a word has essentially no use or meaning?”
That applies here, because your argument basically makes “irreversible” a nearly useless word.
Any time your argument is effectively making an adjective tautological, there is a problem. Because otherwise, why does the word exist?
> but there's a continuum all the way to death sentence. Are you also against life in prison?
And now you have moved to making a like kind argument that the death penalty is essentially the same as a slap on the wrist, since the past is immutable.
Here is another opportunity for a sanity check on your argument.
When the state has executed someone, that person can never be apologized to.
That person can never receive any sort of restitution.
That person went to their death, very often in extreme physical agony. (Both electric chair and lethal injection have horrific failure rates on this. Firing squad, hanging, and guillotine are all much more humane).
That person dies while a roomful of people who hate them watch through a pane of glass, sometimes cheering.
They die, knowing that most people think of them as an awful person undeserving of pity, sympathy, or love.
“””It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have.”””
To make an argument that this is essentially the same as any other punishment, even life in prison, is really kind of gross.
> and never thoughts about it for 2 seconds.
Sometimes more than 2 seconds is good, too.