Indoor agriculture?
I have read that Colorado is suffering from an oversupply or glut of cannabis which has forced many retailers to go out of business
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This is a luxury belief. It can be held by people that are insulated from crime and therefore crime can be debated philosophically. One can talk about ideas of it being better to let a thousand guilty go free than to convict one innocent.
The reason that historically people were hung is that communities were small and not segregated by wealth. The people that suffered from crime didnât see the advantage of debating philosophy.
These same people that debate crime are also insulated from the cost so they do not compare options as if the moral question can be answered in isolation.
The way I see it is that if you let 1000 murders go free for every one innocent person that suffers the death penalty, the net loss to society is at least 1000 to 1. Given that murders will likely repeat their offense, it is much worse than that.
Singapore is a diverse nation. It has the death penalty. It has a murder rate of between 0.1 and 0.2 per 100,000. Chicago is around 25. 100 times less innocent people were killed even when you assume everyone Singapore executed was innocent. I think Singapore executed 16 people in 2023.
The drug use death rate in Singapore is 0.26 per 100,000. The US is around 26.
Rape Singpoare ~2.9. The US 41.
If I am worried about innocent people in general, I would take Singapore over Chicago.
I am not saying Singapore should directly be compared to the US. However, I think it is a good data point that the death penalty will deter crime. Nothing makes you pucker like going through customs and the sign says drug smuggling is punishable by death. I really did double check my bag.
Morality, type of government, legal system, etc. are not what is important. What is important is what works. Like I have been saying as of late. At some point in the US, you get all the disadvantages of China with none of the advantages. This is certainly true when compared to Singapore and many other countries.
When the cost of keeping criminals is 50% (likely more than double when you include all the police, attorneys, courts, parole officers, rehabilitation programs, after school crime reduction programs etc.) more than the median household income for people that actually contribute, I am all for reducing the population of criminals and not by letting them out.
Sooner or later when times get tough, people will look around and wonder exactly why they are sacrificing what they donât have so that the people that live in gated communities can feel good about themselves. It is already happening.
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You have your opinion and hereâs mine, which I have held sinceâŚwell, âsince my dear soul was mistress of her choiceâ:
I donât want the state killing its own citizens.
(And BTW, if we ARE going to kill anybody, weâre killing the wrong ones. Anyone who didnât know what he was doing and didnât know it was wrong canât even be tried. Whaaâ? May as well kill those people, you can never let âem out. )
The most common cause of death on Death Row is old age.
Singapore is a teensy liâl trade canton.
A âluxury beliefâ, as though everybody except people in âgated communitiesâ are knee-deep in murderers?
But, yâknowâŚcarry on.
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Spot On! And when people are living closer to the edge, it is not just crime that cannot be tolerated. I have long found it fascinating that in 17th Century Scotland, a âloose womanâ would be punished by being nailed by her ear to the scaffold for a day.
That sounds like cruel & unusual punishment â but look at it from the point of view of her fellow citizens. Poor people who were struggling to feed their own children certainly did not want a single woman dumping the responsibility for looking after an illegitimate baby on their backs â and yet they could hardly let the baby starve to death. The best community solution was for the woman to be severely discouraged from being âlooseâ.
I have wondered if it takes a certain amount of misery to keep a society operational. Either we go with the Moslem approach of cutting off the hand of a thief (great misery for that individual, but it certainly reduces everyone elseâs misery by discouraging crime), or we do the Western thing of coddling the criminal and allowing a much larger group of innocent people endure misery by being victimized.
Letâs also note that prison is stupid. It generally does not reform the criminal, nor does it properly recompense the victims. And letâs further note the destruction the Legal Profession has engendered by undermining the Constitutional concept of a speedy trial.
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You arenât suggesting that Boulder prosecutors are locking people up for smoking weed, are you? If they did that, theyâd need to convert CU dorms to prisons. You could probably get a contact high just walking around campus.
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Be afraid, be very afraidâŚ
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According to Ed Dutton, an important benefit of hanging lots of criminals in 18th and 19th century Britain (probably also true of other countries) was that it reduced the criminality of the population since those individuals did not reproduce. Criminality is somewhat heritable, thus executing criminals reduced the number of criminals in subsequent generations. With the elimination, de jure or de facto, of capital punishment, the prevalence of criminal behavior was bound to increase.
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Actually I believe a good portion of the âcriminal classâ were pressed into service into the Royal Navy. The Royal Marines were the captainâs security division against these scoundrels.
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I agree with @Hypatia . After much thought over many years, I have come down on being opposed to capital punishment, also because of my growing mistrust of state power. What more conveys the notion that they own us than legitimizing their power to kill us? And it, so sadly, has become US versus THEM. It didnât used to be that way.
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The legality of capital punishment has little to do with the oppressive exercise of state power. Just check with Ashli Babbitt or the countless victims of state-sanctioned violence during the Summer of Love. Allowing violent criminals to go free and re-offend is another way for the state to unleash violence on its citizens. Far more people have been killed by indirect state action than through the Byzantine process of official capital punishment â and with far less scrutiny.
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Thatâs another way to keep them from reproducing.
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meaning people that through wealth have the ability to segregate themselves. They may not have physical gates.
You could just say that you will welcome the released criminals in your neighborhood.
What does land mass or population have to do with deterrence? The population density of Singapore is greater than that of Chicago. Population density seems to be correlated with crime.
One big difference is that to a large extend everyone has to live with the policies. I think this is one key. Everyone that wants a given policy should have to live with the policy.
I am mostly Libertarian so I have no love of the State. However, every group that lives together sets rules. The rules have to be enforced. Who gets to decide on the rules and who will do the enforcing? It doesnât matter if it is private or public or what you call it, if rules are set and enforced for all practical purposes it is the same as a State in this regard.
Therefore, I donât want the State in the form of the US government doing much of anything and certainly not killing people. If San Francisco doesnât want the death penalty or doesnât want cops, that should be up to them. As long as, we can have the death penalty in my town and not pay for San Franciscoâs issues. We also should not be forced to accept anyone from San Francisco to enter.
There is nothing wrong with that to the extent that we agree on how to resolve differences of opinion.
This isnât a difference of opinion on rules. Your argument seems to be to not enforce the rules. I think you disguised it in the terminology of reducing incarceration, but your examples suggest that your for not enforcing the rules.
This is why I asked which people you suggest we let out of prison because my response on whatever you would choose would be to eliminate the law. Donât want people that ignore court orders to go to jail, eliminate the law.
Trumpâs pardoning of criminals violates the principal of how we resolve differences as much as Bidenâs forgiveness of debt or Obamaâs ripping off the GM bond holders. The President does not make the rules. They have the power to force a larger majority to agree with the rule and then they are obligated to enforce them. By not enforcing the rules, the President undermines the power of the people to set the laws through their representatives in congress. They undermine people being able to resolve their differences in opinion.
Advocating for the President, the AG, the city council, law enforcement or the courts to undermine the power of the people to resolve differences through an agreed upon system is equivalent of saying only my opinion matters. It is an authoritarian tactic that has been used by Leftists for a very long time.
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Exactly. @civilwestman I think you are hoping that it isnât as bad as you believe it is. If it is unconstrained, it will not be constrained. All ideas about constraining the government have to be implemented before it becomes unconstrained. The death penalty is way down the line. By the time citizens start worrying about the death penalty being the thing needed to constrain the State, the battle has been lost.
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I ainât no Leftist, bud.
I hear it was Singapore that inspired B. Hussein to push to eliminate single family zoning in our country, in favor of âeconomic integrationâ. It didnt seem to have occurred to HIM, either, that differences of size can be quite significant when youâre promulgating governmental policies.
A President has constitutional power to pardon or commute sentences of people convicted of fed crimes, (Ă propos of your comment about Trump.)
Who would I let outta prison, since you ask? Iâd let out (or rather, not imprison) non-violent people convicted of theft, embezzlement. Let those people be monitored, and let them work to make restitution TO THEIR VICTIMS, instead of being put to involuntary servitude for large companies, as they are now. Yeah: let âem be âslavesâ to the people theyâve wronged; the 13th amendment explicitly sanctions this exception.
Of course additionally, this is a legislative task. As prisons and jails at the state level become privatized, thereâll be lobbying to criminalize more behavior and impose longer sentences. It is a very lucrative industry.
Iâm not happy about it. I think it wastes a huge part of our population, their strength, their energy. As for âviolenceâ, all weâre doing is displacing it to prison society. Itâs doing nobody any good.
But thatâs just my opinion based on my experience as an attorney and decades of reading about the issue. So, I mean, feel free to label me a âLeftistâ.
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Now you are talking! A lot smarter than giving violent criminals an unearned 3 square meals per day, a warm bed, a TV screen, a library, full medical & dental attention at no cost to them â but at high cost to the rest of us.
Practical question â We are talking about criminals here, people who tend not to follow the laws set by their fellow citizens. If we make criminals effectively slaves of those they have terrorized, how will we deal with the runaway slave problem?
A fast hanging deals with the problem and may have some effect on discouraging others, although I confess to having some admiration for the Chinese method of publicly shooting the criminals in the local soccer stadium. The humane solution was the one the English adopted â send their criminals to North America (at least until they revolted) and then send them to Australia. But now we have run out of places to send criminals.
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I dk if youâre being sarcastic. But weâre much better equipped now to track ârunaway slavesâ than we were in 19th century.
Just one other thing: prisoners donât get everything for free; thereâs lots they have to pay for even while theyâre inside. And again, that practice will only increase along with privatization.
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Maybe, but I think your daughter is poisoning your mind.
Sorry, strongly disagree. These people are still hazards to the general population if let out, especially the thieves. Iâm ok with involuntary servitude for felons, but strongly prefer it happen in an institution.
I strongly disagree on capital punishment, too.
The vast majority of conservatives disagree with you on these topics, making you at least tilt left. Own it.
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Interesting debate. ?So where on this âlineâ of âobedienceâ does civil disobedience fall. ?Why do we tolerate judges imposing their interpretation of the law. Jury system was meant, and Bills of Attainder specifically made illegal, just to give the jury the final say about a case. You can argue whether it fits the written law, but nothing says the written law is acceptable to the People. Juries are their final control over such behavior.
We have always had scofflaws. These are people who look at a law (or worse - a regulation which isnât even a real law) and said, âThis is stupid beyond reason. I will not follow it.â Speed laws are one such entity. I think it is highly suspicious that the state even has the power to âgrant driving privilegesâ. Those are simply a means of moving about the country, and as a free citizen I should be free to move about as I please. I once did; the state merely noted a new method of me moving about the state and glommed onto it. Rather like owning a firearm - itâs my natural right.
I know this isnât nearly as big a deal as capital punishment, but it is a more common problem, closer to âthe earthâ than capital punishment. And it highlights IMM the issues of laws and how we follow them.
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No dear Phil, it makes me an independent thinker. (In my humble opinion, that is.)
âMy daughter poisoning my mindâ? I hafta laugh. As I think I already wrote, SHE grew up hearing ME say we have too many people in prison! (Mebbe I shouldnâta hit that so hardâŚ
)
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To effectively discuss civil disobedience, itâs essential to agree on the specifics. In what system are we operating? Is there an established framework for resolving disagreements, such as the U.S. Constitution? Additionally, what constitutes civil disobedience? Thereâs ongoing debate about whether it strictly involves peaceful refusal to obey laws.
Let me narrow the focus to the US.
When examining examples from U.S. history, such as the civil rights marches, Vietnam War protests, BLM protests, and current Gaza war protests, significant differences become apparent.
Letâs focus on the Vietnam War protests as a case study. These protests were often not peaceful. The government itself were not following the constitutional rules, as it didnât declare war and arguably lacked the constitutional authority to draft an army. Thus, civil disobedience can be seen as a technique to constrain government actions.
Another perspective is that the protests represented a small group of people trying to assert their views. The Vietnam protests illustrate the difficulty of determining intent.
Comparing the BLM protests to the January 6th protests, we see that neither was entirely peaceful. However, the intent behind each movement is crucial. BLM had a clear list of demands, although they didnât necessarily claim the government was breaking rules. The J6 protests lacked a written document of demands, but many protesters believed the rules governing how we resolve disputes (elections) were not being followed.
Intent is a critical aspect of civil disobedience, yet it is often challenging to discern, especially in real time. If the intent is merely to get oneâs way, civil disobedience should not be tolerated.
Therefore, civil disobedience is appropriate when the system isnât functioning correctly and needs correction. However, it is more akin to revolution than to law and order and involves a form of revolt that requires sacrifice. Part of the reason for this sacrifice is because we cannot necessarily discern intent.
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