Last Statements
walzr.com
walzr.com
MUMON GENSEN
Died on the twenty-second day of the third month, 1390 at the age of sixty-eight
Life is an ever-rolling wheel
And every day is the right one.
He who recites poems at his death
Adds frost to snow.
In other words: if they want to have any chance of making it out alive, they have to at least pretend to be religious.
They knew how broken the world is— they took part in the mayhem. They knew there is great evil around.
They found peace. Most asked forgiveness and apologized for what they had done. They left their relatives and friends with reasons to think of them as deeply flawed, but not completely terrible.
It seems a smart thing to do. It’s better than staying evil, frustrated and scared of your impending death.
Wow so they kept this guy for almost 30 years on death row and then killed him. USA is so fucked
Lack of free will is not the same is predeterminism.
That 'the system' is responsible for driving them to their actions ?
not the system, but the design of life itself we all sustain. the "system" is only a projection of it.
everything that happens in the world is your responsibility also, as you help make it happen. it's our world after all.
if something happens but is not supposed to happen, either the person made a mistake, or the design is broken and nudges to make it happen, or both. blame-the-person is the default strategy, but it doesn't lead to a better design, and it denies the plain reality that the design puts some people at the center, so they can party and are not to be bothered by the downsides of their actions, and others are pushed to the edge, and will fall off. by design.
you probably prefer to pay the police than to pay someone a meal so she doesn't need to steal and expose herself to the risk of killing someone. it's what people at the center would think, but it's not a good idea to give them power over the design of our lives that puts them first.
there's clearly worthless trash on both sides of the equation.
No, there clearly are things that are 'outside the individual or groups control'. There are three kinds of events, things we can control, things we have partial control, and things we can't control.
Nobody is responsible for the sun rising, nobody is responsible for gravity. Nobody is responsible for another persons actions, each person has choice, love it or hate it they do.
If you can't see that I don't know what to say, we fundamentally have a disagreement on reality.
If individuals are 'responsible' for everything, we all should share the same yolk of punishment for individual actions, and this should extend to all sentient life, why stop at people, why not kill their pets and farm animals, trees and plants nearby, (I assume this is what you want, see what i did there ?)
> you probably prefer to pay the police than to pay someone a meal so she doesn't need to steal and expose herself to the risk of killing someone
Please don't assume my take on caring for people, this take is very wrong.
> there's clearly worthless trash on both sides of the equation.
Right back at ya ;P
Besides, aren't their last words the entire point of the site?
Those apologies are too little too late. Good riddance.
I have no sympathy for them, and I’m all in for using those for involuntary dangerous drug testing and stuff like that. Those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did.
There are multiple reasons we put people in jail:
1. the victims can feel some vindication and retribution
2. other members of society can feel some vindication and retribution and a sense of justice
3. other would-be criminals are detered from committing similar crimes for fear of punishment
4. making people feel safe by showing them criminals are punished
5. removing a bad actor from society
6. reforming a bad actor and reintroducing them into society
Different cultures emphasize different combinations of reasons. For example, ine notable divide is how, in the US, 6. is considered to be the product of a naive mind, whereas in some nordic countries, that goal is taken seriously, with some amount of success (and perhaps at the detriment of other goals).
Anyway, I think your point is that, even if you take the convicts' apologies at face value, goals 1. and 2. remain unfulfilled. And 3. is probably weakened.
I sometimes see this behavior in close friends, and it totally changes the way I see them. I don't know if it's a moral failing on their part, but I just don't experience the desire for vengeance the same way they do, and it really scares me to see how they experience it. What will they do when they start to have mental decline, and (incorrectly) decide they were wronged in some way? :(
Life is hard enough, we should deter crimes at every possibility, people are rarely punished for every evil they commit.
Does that count me as sufficiently wronged to not be dismissed for sharing the parent posters viewpoint?
I’m sure there are enough people who will consider goals 2, 4 and 5 fulfilled. I disagree with your assessment.
As I said - those pieces of shit lost their human privileges after what they did. You don’t fix them or reintroduce them to society.
I don’t care about abstracts. I care about the fact that some of those scumbags were kept alive longer than their victims lived on this earth, and suffered less in their demise.
In this case, I was thinking of the family as the "victims", but, yes, you do have a point.
If inmates don't get human rights, then every single person is just a corrupt judge away from becoming a non-person.
No matter how horrible a person has acted, the government simply cannot be trusted not to abuse such power.
I am not talking about generic inmates, who deserve all protection (“no cruel and unusual punishment”), I’m talking about people like ones from the website. Who did horrible stuff and were convicted to death for it.
I’m sure that if needed, society can develop necessary framework (declare them “legally dead” or something like that).
Even if 95% would totally deserve it, I don't think we should just accept that on average 4 innocent people every year are just treated as subhumans just so we can unleash our wrath over those who did truly horrible things.
Death is still a better option rather than being used as lab rat
At the same time, I think that with the advancement of the tech (surveillance cameras everywhere, dna tests, the cell tower triangulation and/or mobile device location tracking) there are cases when the guilt can be established without any doubt, and the overall chance of wrongful conviction will drop down.
Hell, have you read the website? One of those pieces of shit made his accomplice to video the murder on the phone.
But paint me skeptical as to whether increased use of technology can actually improve the reliability of the proofs.
Imagine a world where deep fakes are much better quality but our system hasn't yet caught up to take that into proper consideration etc.
Serving for life is already a big deal as punishment goes. I'm just asking to not have experimental medical experiments on people. I'm not saying they should walk free
Let’s look at, let’s say, Apple and its tight control over entire hardware and software iPhone stack. Nothing prevents them to announce that starting from iPhone 19 they cryptographically sign the video to ensure that it’s authentic and, at least, the video and sound are what the camera saw. Pro cameras can do it, for Apple it’s even easier, more or less. I’m sure that even on this site there are experts who can design such system that is as secure as we expect from Apple devices. And that thing will slowly spread due to competitive pressures.
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Involuntarily drug testing was one of examples that I gave, and you seem to be against. To some it may be extreme, and I completely understand where you’re coming from. To me… as I said - for some examples from the side the murderers surely lost their human privilege. That comment summarized my feelings after reading the website in much more succinct form: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47302490#47305803
Killing 13 month infant, putting bleach on 20 yo gas station employee and setting her on fire, stranding female who was screaming for help during sa. Mate, if your kidney is compatible with someone who is in need, you made your choice way too long ago to have any right to say anything now. Or if there are other uses that will benefit society and humanity as a whole - they are allowed. You are guilty (without doubt and with clear evidence) and sentenced to death. Now you have same amount of rights as cadaver on the table, but probably more uses while you still breathing.
But I think that society should prevent this kind of basic instinctive response to become the way that we collectively handled those monstrosities, mainly because those punishments will be abused against innocent scapegoats.
https://exonerationregistry.org/sites/exonerationregistry.or...
In the end it's more about the appearance of justice than actually performing it. And even in the performance of it, it is still just that: a performance.
If you were to have capital punishment, I'd make prosecutors liable for any knowingly false accusations and the withholding of evidence. And even without that, things could change fast after a few posthumous exonerations when the pitchforks of the deceased's relatives come out for the phony witnesses and corrupt cops.
It's called the "justice system" but how can people be so sure it is? Justice only for the rich or the "club members"? Is it audited? Who gets to hide or shield from it under the guise of "national security?" Are juries being manipulated through the "Reptile Brain trial strategy?"
I recently heard someone say: "Cops kill cops who don't trust other cops?" Why is that? Is a cop killing another cop part of national security too? Who decides? Who do you trust?
It's always naive, unlearned, horrible people who clamor for "deterrence" and "revenge" via "throw away the key" and executions. Like Trump and the Central Park Five.
Invoking Trump (that I don’t care about, especially in the context of this conversation) is so cheap... I suggest you to go straight to Godwin law and compare me to literal Hitler, because that’s the quality of your argument (lack of there of, to be precise).
The most horrible people, some of whom were actually innocent?
I understand your emotional desire to (indirectly) hurt them, but the fact is that we can never be 100% sure that they were fully guilty of the acts exactly as described and everyone else in the world was completely innocent.
This means there is a nonzero chance of a miscarriage of justice, and you can't exactly un-execute someone. The only question remaining is: how many tortured and/or killed innocent warrant one monster not being harmed quite as much as your desire for revenge would like?