On August 29, a New York state trial court in Westchester County put an independent candidate on the ballot for Putnam County Highway Superintendent. Stern v Putnam County Board of Elections, 50372/2023. The candidate had enough signatures but the county board of elections still kept him off the ballot because a form arrived late. The candidate had mailed it to the Board six days before the deadline, but the post office did an inefficient job and it arrived after the deadline. See this story. Thanks to Joe Burns for the case number and name of the case.
ELECTION DAYS/DEADLINES MEAN ANY- THING WITH ROTTED SNAIL MAIL SO-CALLED ***SERVICE*** ???
I thought AZ was a big fan of USPS and all mail voting? Yet another contradiction!
I think maybe you were thinking of Max, who converted me from skeptical supporter to hardcore advocate of all-male voting. However, Max and many of us who are now the new Max Disciples (primarily based in English speaking countries and populations; there may be a separate Russian speaking Max cult with which we are not in touch, but we are not aware of it) are not fans of the US Penal system.
Max and Max Disciples believe that penitance and rehabilitation are failed liberal/enlightenment illuminati reforms, and that as part of the dark enlightenment (endarkenment? Reendarkenment? Fade?) more traditional forms of crime punishment should be reintroduced or reinvigorated, e.g., capital punishment, corporal punishment, enslavement, judicially ordered rape, public humiliation, disfigurement, judicially ordered torture, dispossession, exile, entombment, judicially ordered combat to the death, etc.
I concur with saving whales. Respect!
How do Max and Max Disciples / Max cult members feel about family or neighborhood punishments, such as in Hunger Games, Israeli demolition of Palestinian family homes, or judicially ordered rapes of a male criminal’s female family members, to take a few illustrative examples?
Politically ordered mass starvation is not a game. Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes could be improved by having the family remain inside while the home is demolished. Judicially ordered rape of a male criminals female family members seems unnecessarily discriminatory.
In general, group punishments are an excellent deterrent. I’ve seen them used with great effectiveness by my parents, kindergarten and school teachers, bosses at work, correctional officers while I was incarcerated at a county jail in southern California, police during riots and gang sweeps, etc. During my time working in a criminal organization, I saw that the crime bosses preferred group punishment to individual punishment most of the time, and got excellent results.
A friend I had for many years (sadly now deceased) who was a fundamentalist LDS polygamist often entertained me greatly with detailed accounts of his cruel group punishments for his sisters wives and daughters, some of whom were the same people.
While I was in jail, some of my dorm cellies were pimps, and I always enjoyed their tales of group punishments for their sex workers with metal coat hangers, motel room bibles, walking sticks, and various other implements. One pimp who was awaiting trial for murder told me about how, when a prostitute failed to make her minimum shift quota of a thousand dollars for him, she’d get a day off and all the other girls would have to work 24 hours straight and come back with at least 2000 each.
When a prostitute would escape, he liked to intentionally overdose the whole team and bring them back with narcan repeatedly, give them several rounds of dirty swirlies and atomic wedgies, punish them all night long with tasers, stun guns, and electric cattle prods, perform tooth extraction with rusty pliers without anaesthesia, make them give freebies to all comers for several days and nights on end without breaks, etc. Sometimes he would punish the escaped prostitute by kidnapping her younger sisters and turning them out.
In one case, he made an escaped prostitute who returned of her own will believe he forgave her without any punishment, then set up hidden cameras in her room, confiscated her cell phone, and sent videos of fetish sex acts to all her contacts, including all her family and former boyfriends, all her friends back home in her small town, former high school classmates, her underage kids who were being raised by her mom, bosses and HR departments at straight jobs she applied for, college application reviewers, members of churches she had attended, friends from 12 step programs, etc, as well as posting the videos on free porn tube sites.
Some of the videos included some very bizarre stuff with pets, body writing, verbal self-humiliation, etc. He then cut her loose and didn’t take her back until she brought him $30,000 she made on her own. After a week after that he sold her to another pimp. Three days later she killed herself.
One last story if you all will indulge me. Another pump told me how he would make his hos cut their own bamboo canes at a trailer park he had them working out of that had a bamboo grove. He would then make them cane each other, switching places when one was not caning vigorously enough or tiring out. If one girl would lose count, all the other girls got extra strokes.
When they were done, he poured salt and vinegar on their wounds, muzzled them, and tied them in stress poses to the walls. He leashed his pit bulls in the same trailer (vocal cords cut, not muzzled) just barely out of leash length from the girls. Didn’t leave food for the girls or dogs and took the one girl who caused the whole ordeal on a 3 day Jamaican all expenses included resort vacation and an all day shopping trip after getting home before returning to the trailer park. Her transgression was telling some of the girls she had skimmed money and sent it to friends and family members.
None of the other girls were in any condition to work for the next week, so she was rented a motel room and had to work 168 hours straight. At the end of that week the pimp renewed the room for a second week and told her she needed to work another 168 hours nonstop. Within less than a day she had a heart attack from shooting too much meth. She survived, but had serious brain damage. After that he sold her to freaks with a coma fetish out of her hospital room. The extended motel room wasn’t wasted, as some of the other prostitutes had recovered sufficiently to work by then.
Which is all to say, three thumbs up for group punishments. The point of punishment is to be effective (sadistic pleasure can be a side benefit, but should never be the main intent). Group punishment is the most effective form of punishment I’ve ever seen.
I didn’t know I had a cult following. Should I be worried they might turn on me, or that I might cease to be humble?
Contrary to what might be implied above, I don’t think cruelty for its own sake is a good thing. I’ve suggested cruel punishment for crime, but only because it’s effective at deterence, thus making crime rare and therefore sparing many innocent people more and greater cruelty at the hands of criminals, and society as a whole the negative costs and ripple effects of crime and fear of crime.
However, even if it’s effective, I think group punishments take things too far. I’m not a radical individualist, but I am enough of an individualist to see group punishments as taking things too far in the other direction. The fact that they’re already used by police and corrections officers now is an additional argument for my thesis that incarceration is a highly suboptimal form of crime prevention, rehabilitation, deterence, or punishment.
The one area I can think of where group punishments are appropriate would be in billing a family for the cost of an execution, rather than billing taxpayers, but only as a lesser evil. If the executed criminal had assets, they should be used before billing the family.
The example of Israel demolishing family homes of terrorists is marginal. That may be appropriate in exigent circumstances, but certainly not with family members intentionally trapped inside.
Hunger games are horrible. My parents were old enough to remember the real thing, as practiced by the Stalinist regime. I would never wish that on anyone.
I’ve speculated about judicially ordered rapes before. I think I overindulged the concept. Aside from corrective rape as a possible way to cure lesbians, I think it’s probably best not to go there. That would be especially true of raping family members by judicial fiat. It’s important to note that the concept is not far fetched, because everyone is aware that prisoners are frequently raped by guards as well as each other, which is one reason jail/prison is supposed to be a deterrent. In my mind, it’s actually a reason why the jail/prison way to address crime has failed and should be replaced. Rape is not a legal part of the incarceration punishment, but there’s apparently no effective way to adequately prevent it. It’s a perverse incentive to commit crimes or work in corrections for some sexual sadists as much as it’s a deterrent to some other would be criminals – if anything, more so, since criminals tend to have a short time horizon and to be risk takers by nature.
The pimps and LDS patriarch mentioned above are not good examples to emulate, in my opinion. Neither are the parents, child care workers, educators, or employers of my alleged cult member, as evidenced by him having gone on to work for a criminal organization and doing time in jail. There are other methods for incentivizing good behavior and performance which are, in my opinion, better. I think overall that group punishments have negative impacts on individuals and on society.
RFY, while I’m for all-male voting, I’m against all-mail voting, or any mail voting. You are correct that AZ has frequently called for all-mail voting (he likes women voting, though, for reasons he never bothered to explain, as far as I know). AZ often contradicts himself on many subjects, and when it’s pointed out he ignores it, name calls, and/or changes the subject. According to AZ, he’s never been wrong, except for typographical errors.
Unlike myself, AZ is a big fan of incarceration as a way of dealing with crime. Perhaps it’s the group punishment of taxpayers that is his favorite part, or perhaps the attendant extrajudicial rape punishment part of the system appeals to him. I can’t say. However, I’m fairly confident that by USPS he meant postal service, not penal system.
Max, you disappoint me greatly. What happened to team incentives???
And Israeli home demolition, marginal? That’s just bleeding heart liberal bs. It’s really just a dramatic version of fines and property seizures, which are common in our judicial system much as they are in yours. I don’t know if Russia does civil asset forfeiture, but it’s common in the US. It’s basically property seizure, but without a conviction, and sometimes without any arrest or charges. The legal theory, or more accurately excuse, is that it was the property, not its owner, which committed crimes. The burden of proof then becomes on the newly impoverished (former) owner of confiscated property to sue the government to win it back. That’s a hell of a catch, that catch 22.
Anyone who thinks that group punishments in our current judicial system are limited to rogue corrections officers and police bending the law or turning a blind eye has obviously not done enough research into the RICO and various other conspiracy statutes and the ways they have been used. In some cases, defendants end up doing long stretches of many years in prison for things like answering the phone, letting someone else use their phone or vehicle or crash at their house, picking up a package or delivery for someone else, making or selling legal products later used in crimes, etc. More frequently, the threat of doing such long prison terms causes innocent people to plead guilty and/or provide sometimes false testimony against other alleged conspirators.
Me ending up working in a criminal organization and doing time in jail was not because of group punishments I received growing up. Everyone else I knew growing up received group punishments when they were kids. Many of them never worked for criminal organizations, as far as I know, and have never been to jail. Group punishments are common at many workplaces. What’s the big deal?
Your thoughts were an epiphany for me, but now I see you turning into a politically correct wimp. You should be more manly, or the cult may need to cast you aside and develop your ideas independently. Is it too early for schisms?
If there is a Russian speaking Max cult, I never heard of it. Then again, this is the first time I ever heard of an English speaking Max cult.
It’s never too early for anyone to develop my thoughts independently. If any such people want to collectively punish themselves and each other by forming some rigid thinking group, I’m not sure how I would dissuade them, but I certainly wouldn’t encourage it.
I’m well aware that there are many injustices and elements of hypocrisy in the currently prevalent law enforcement and justice systems. My aim is a more rational system which minimizes those as much as possible, not perpetuating them and using them as an excuse to make things even worse. You missed gang injunctions among currently prevalent forms of group punishment.
My apologies about the crack regarding your upbringing. I was subjected to plenty of group punishments myself as a child and young adult, as was everyone I know. That doesn’t make them either optimal or justified.
The thing about home demolition that’s marginal is the egregious waste. In that particular circumstance it’s done because the Israeli government can’t sell those homes. If other Palestinians bought them, they would give the home back to the terrorist’s family or get killed. If Jews bought them, they’d be murdered for moving into a Palestinian community. They are a very effective method of combating terrorists because Palestinians are very family oriented and home based, often cash and resource poor, and terrorists are often suicidal or at least prepared for the possibility of martyrdom or imprisonment, but not to hurt their families.
ABOLISH USPS MONOPOLY ON 1ST CLASS MAIL — IE FINISH OFF THE NEAR DEAD USPS SNAIL.
Yes, but then you’d be complaining about companies messing with snail mail elections, which you’re still in favor of. Actually, you’d be complaining about anything that happened. If by some infinitely unlikely chance all your proposals passed you’d find new reasons to complain.