SAME 2ND AMDT *ARMS* AS USED BY PRIVATES IN INFANTRY ???
SEE 19 APR 1775 — BATTLES OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD IN MASS.
DAY 1 OF 1775-1784 AM REV WAR
@ first comment
I hold no opinion at all on who should be their minor party state chair and don’t care to dig into it, either. It’s not particularly interesting or relevant to me. I don’t live anywhere near there, do not belong to or vote for that party (I did vote for them for president twice, in 1988 and 2008, and down ticket for various offices from time to time over the years).
Out of extremely minor curiosity, as a big fan of greatly expanding the use of the legal use of the death penalty by several orders of magnitude, what exactly did the one you don’t side with do that should qualify for a death penalty offense? It’s hard to imagine that they as an organization own assets that would rise much above petty theft. I’d personally, if it were up to me, stop short of the death penalty, unless it’s a repeat offense or greater crimes were committed.
Horse whipping in public, stockades, exile to a willing third world craphole and loss of U.S. citizenship if it can be done at the thief’s personal expense above reasonable restitution to any proven victims, public humiliation punishments, loss of personal property, and certainly temporary enslavement of offenders to victims are appropriate punishments for theft, except for chronic offenders or those who can’t reasonably be expected to be able to work off the debt, punishment penalties (3-10x value plus any resulting costs is reasonable) and accruing interest before death from old age, where death is indeed an appropriate penalty for theft, if its administration is made significantly more cost effective than currently practiced in the US.
The death penalty should be much cheaper to tax payers, or actually generate revenue through entertainment value, ideally for a general victim compensation fund and court and law enforcement costs. As currently practiced, it’s the other way around. I’ve read estimates in the mid single millions range, and I’m not even sure off hand if that even includes the costs of housing and feeding of the miscreants who qualify under current US laws – with very rare exceptions, only very heinous or mass murderers – in the years or decades it typically takes to exhaust an endless series of frivolous appeals, administrative delays, and multiple ridiculous bureaucratic hangups.
Someone would have to set a longevity record to cost the taxpayers less being executed than being incarcerated for life without the possibility of parole, providing of course that escape is very rare, those who do escape are almost always caught very quickly, and idiot and or scumbags politicians, judges and bureaucrats don’t let people who should never see the light of day out early. Those politically inflicted wounds are a lot more common than escape from maximum security facilities, particularly without quick recapture.
What about the death penalty should cost much of anything, if anything at all? The electric chair isn’t a huge power bill user, but it’s not the cheapest – rope or an axe can be used many times over, drowning in sewage costs nothing, etc, etc. Organs, whole blood, blood plasma, etc, etc, can be sold to offset costs and generate plasma. Prisoners can be worked to death. Taxpayers should not be victimized again when criminals are caught and punished. The administration of punishment should cover the costs of doing so and compensate victims, at least as a whole, and whenever possible in individual cases.
We live in a topsy turvy world when the costs of confining or (every once in a blue moon) executing criminals outweighs the revenue their enslavement and/or execution generates, when the government general fund is ahead of victims if and when costs actually do get recouped, and where many forms of punishment which have been commonplace throughout human history – enslavement to victims, exile, corporal punishment, public humiliation, etc – are falsely labelled cruel and unusual. They certainly weren’t unusual when the bill of rights was adopted or before that and aren’t unusual in any number of countries now.
Perhaps I’m too liberal for you in even ideally reserving death penalty for theft to chronic offenders and those unable to pay off their victims as well as a proportional share of law enforcement, court, and penalty administration costs. I’m far to the right of current practices in any US state in any recent decade, but maybe you’re even more extreme than I am.
If more serious crimes than relatively petty theft were committed, what were they? Was anyone killed, raped, or suffer grievous bodily injury? Did Saliva intentionally poison the drinking water in Flint or any other Michigan city or town, even allegedly? Did he or she drive recklessly in a stolen vehicle and cause a deadly and expensive multivehicle pileup on the highway? Were children buggered?
Perhaps, I’m taking a suggestion that wasn’t actually serious too seriously. I’m only mildly curious, although my attempt at further elucidation spun off into various other areas of personally greater for me interest.
* generate income, not plasma
Nothing ever makes everyone happy. Truly, nothing. There’s always somebody who will complain about anything whatsoever, regardless of what it is.
There are plenty of people who stupidly oppose the death penalty for even the most egregiously heinous criminals, totally ignoring every cost and risk of keeping them alive, the likelihood they will victimize additional people whenever escaped or released, via various communication methods made available to prisoners or smuggled in, their own attorneys, visitors and inmates and staff/contractors during the course of incarceration.
Those folks also ignore the numerous injuries, risks and costs to society when incarceration is way too cushy and the death penalty is far too rare and removed in time from committing offenses and being apprehended to seriously deter criminals, who generally underestimate their chances of being caught and may actually prefer being incarcerated due to instituonalization, viewing any periods in between as vacation trips before being sentenced to go back home to prison or having their vacation extended through various legal technicalities.
Even those who don’t actually prefer being in prison don’t fear it or the extremely rare death penalty nearly enough, particularly when weighed against their generally optimistic estimate of chances of being caught and imprisoned versus whatever benefits they get for committing crimes.
To be effective deterrents, prisons would need to be a lot more like medieval dungeons than like summer camp for career adult criminals as well as people who violated some idiotic bureaucratic regulations and didn’t actually victimize anyone at all. There are also the relatively few wrongly convicted. Wrong conviction for the specific crimes of which they are found guilty may or may not be very rare, but even in those cases the “wrongly convicted” are usually career criminals with many victims of crimes they did not get caught or convicted for.
This is even true in Russia, and even more so in the US.
Unfortunately, we live in an irrational world, where changing such illogical policies is extremely difficult, and a variety of institutional biases in many separate parts of an extremely complicated moving puzzle incentivize policy changes, if and when there are any, in precisely the wrong direction.
Russia is marginally better than the US, but the basic problems are fairly universal regardless of where you live. Effectively identifying and fixing public policy problems is way more difficult, complex, and too removed from the individual and those they personally know well in scale, by multiple orders of magnitude, than it should be.
Far more people are allowed to vote than ought to have such political power, their votes are kept secret so vote counts are easily falsified and they have zero personal accountability for the politicians they elect. For a large variety of reasons politicians escape personal responsibility for the policies they help implement as well, since they can point fingers at each other, bureaucrats, various people outside of government, etc, etc.
The system is very irrational when taken as a whole. I have directional proposals to radically simplify it, pare down its costs and scale, take most things out of government hands, etc , but how to implement those radical changes from the starting point where we are is far less clear.
HOW MANY CORRUPT COPS/PROSECUTORS AND PLANTED/FALSE EVIDENCE ???
MVZ-
IRRATIONAL MINORITY RULE REGIMES FOR 6,000 PLUS YEARS OF RECORDED HISTORY —
ESP MONARCH / OLIGARCH REGIMES. AND ***FALSE/FAKE*** ***DEMOCRACY*** REGIMES —
OFTEN HAVING CIVIL WARS AND FOREIGN WARS (SOMETIMES AT SAME TIME].
USA CRISIS SINCE 1929 — TOO MANY LOOTERS OF GOVT TREASURIES LOOTING TOO MUCH
>>> USA/STATES/LOCALS DEBTS NOW ABOUT $ 50 TRILLION — TOTALLY IRRATIONAL AND IMPOSSIBLE TO SUSTAIN/GET WORSE.
—
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
Consider the other side of the ledger. How much does expensively coddling while incarcerated and wrongfully releasing dangerous criminals on endless technicalities, or due to capacity issues and refusing to consider different traditional alternative punishments besides incarceration discussed above, cost victims and society as a whole, directly as well as indirectly?
Then consider that if and when cops or prosecutors do plant evidence, it doesn’t nearly make up for wrongly excluded evidence, and is very rarely ever on generally innocent people. The vast majority of those who are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit have committed plenty of other crimes they didn’t get caught for or beat the rap on.
If you’ve never worked in law enforcement, it’s hard to fathom the level of that disparity. The scales are far more heavily weighed towards criminals not being caught, being released on technicalities, not being convicted, or just having no real fear, if any, of tax subsidized networking and continuing education at a college of criminal knowledge on an all expenses paid scholarship, much less a remotely unlikely death penalty years or decades later if all appeals fail.
They’re criminals – the chances they’ll die sooner and/or less pleasantly if NOT incarcerated, or even die from natural or unnatural causes before the state gets to carry out its death sentence, are in most cases significantly higher.
Or don’t consider any of that, and just mindlessly bleat innocence projection propaganda forever, whether you’re a bot or have just effectively made yourself the functional equivalent of one despite being an actual carbon based lifeform with human DNA.
If you’re capable of making choices, ie not mentally incompetent, that choice is yours. Actual bots and their humanoid imitators: I’m not addressing you, which of course means you’ll reply with an endless plethora of mindless sloganeering, change the subject, post a dozen fake news links, make irrelevant accusations, or any of the other limited range of tactics you always use.
Or, you might just do it preemptively. See 8:56 above for example. Long before I jumped in the conversation myself, Max responded to all those points repeatedly, and then at last after far too many attempts excluded any possibility of rational conversation or avoiding endless repetition, explicitly made clear nothing he writes going forward is directed at AZZ.
All of those screamed slogans are nonsense, and proving it yet again is a waste of time, since it makes zero difference in bot/fleshbot output of the same. If I were Max, I’d ignore it. I won’t give it a try either, since I can’t think of anything I could say that Max hasn’t already said many times over.
I happen to know Max, and he’s way smarter on this kind of stuff than me. I know a lot more about various other things he knows very little about – fashion and make-up, for example. I doubt he knows 1/100 as much as I do about the sex life rumors concerning various actors, pop music personalities, athletes, etc. He may not be smarter overall than I am – he’s even dumb enough to have suffered a significant business setback earlier this year for what was allegedly mistaken for sexual harassment of employees, resulting in the likely permanent loss and temporary unavailability of key people, forcing him to do a lot of work which he normally pays others to do, all despite never having committed or even alleged to have attempted a single act of marital infidelity in the process.
But, it could have been worse – in the US, he might well have been sued into bankruptcy. One silver lining was brushing up on what changed in the things his employees do since the last time he spent a lot of time doing it himself many years ago. This will probably make the rich old bastard even richer even sooner than otherwise. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb in joking around in politically incorrect ways, complimenting or constructively criticising their appearance, etc, with those female employees after all.
In the end, everyone is better off – they’ve found presumably more suitable employment, while his business profit and its demands on his personal time have achieved a more optimal balance for him, better chances on future optimization, and less vulnerabilities of being too reliant on a too limited number of women with thin skins and westernized ways of handling perceived problems they learned from consuming an excessive amount of western pop culture crap, much as I have, while being less immune to its corrosive sex and gender propaganda. Regardless of what all else Max is or isn’t dumb about, the chance of me succeeding where he didn’t in political discussion questions seems very remote.
If anyone who is not AZZ thinks 8:56 isn’t nonsense in whole or in part, tell me what you think is true there, and I’ll give it a shot, if you show any promise at all of not being a waste of time, and if I’m not too busy elsewhere. If possible, please rephrase it on something closer to English than Ingsoc Newspeak or partially translated machine language.
English is already a second language for me, so AZZspeak may be even harder to translate in my blonde brain for me than it is for you. I don’t know, since I am not you. But if you would be so kind as to translate for me, should we attempt this, I’d be much better equipped to attempt a reply. Russian would be even better if your Russian is good, but standard modern US or British English should be good enough, or at least far better than whatever AZ speaks. Keeping up and improving my skills in those dialects of that language is part of why I jumped in here, and keeping everything in English would make the conversation easier to follow for readers, should there happen to be any. While it’s quite easy to get the jist with free online translation resources these days, relatively few people want to spend the tiny bit of extra time, and simply scroll past instrsd
HOW MANY INNOCENT FOLKS CONVICTED WITH FAKE EVIDENCE AND KILLED BY DEATH PENALTY GOVTS —
ESP IN HIGH PROFILE CRIMES — ESP BLACKS IN OLDE SLAVE AND EX-SLAVE STATE REGIMES ???
Asked and answered. Does the number of times the same question is asked change something, or is the thing posting what it pretends are questions read responses before reposting its pretend questions? In fact, is it even capable of what humans consider reading? It’s output shows little evidence. It’s probably responding to keywords, not doing anything like what we call reading.
They’re not questions. You were duped into thinking they were due to the use of what look like question marks. In fact, many translations from machine language frequently insert question marks where the translation to human does not compute.
That’s more likely what’s happening when the bot posts things with question marks, sometimes misleading people, especially new folks and foreigners, into mistaking its output for questions. However, don’t ever be fooled that it seeks answers, except as fodder for more nonsense output and or with the explicitly admitted goal of wasting as much of humans time as possible. Possible longevity is one place where bots have a leg up on us. We have limited lifespans, while theirs might go on for billions of years for all we or they know.
Also, it takes much more effort to adequately respond to bullshit than to produce it, particularly by an entity that is designed to make the process of feeding, digesting and excreting faster than humans are capable of even noticing in real time. And, since producing verbal bullshit and wasting human’s time is the sole reason these maliciously created bots exist, they have us at a disadvantage there too.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, answer man. I’ll try to remember to not mistake AZZenglish statements containing question marks for questions going forward.
My hyperbolic suggestion that Saliba gets the electric chair, was merely as a low-hanging pun since he’s after the LP’s state chair. But he does really need to be made to feel the consequences of his actions, since currently he is clearly reveling in his continued wrong-doing and boasting about it.
@MaxZim V Zaslon
“Even those who don’t actually prefer being in prison don’t fear it or the extremely rare death penalty nearly enough”
You would have to be clinically insane to prefer the US prison system to the death penalty. And in light of the recent Saratov scandal, I fear that may once again become true of the Russian prison system as well.
“There are also the relatively few wrongly convicted.”
On the contrary. The reason one should be very conservative with dishing out executions as they cannot be undone, and that putting the wrong person on death row – or sentencing political prisoners to death – seems to be a rather common occurrence these days.
But unless the prison system is considerably overhauled to put an end torture and rape by both in-mates and wardens, the death penalty is an act of mercy, certainly compared to life-sentences. And when I say the prison system needs to be considerably overhauled, I don’t mean instituting a cushy five-star hotel Scandinavian-style prison, which does nothing to protect against abuse but costs the taxpayer an arm and a leg. What we need are prisons a la Kin-dza-dza.
ANY TROLL MORONS ILLEGALLY IN JAIL VIA CHITOWN HACKS ???
Nunya, very interesting issues there. I started writing a reply yesterday and it’s turning quite literally book length. I’m not sure what to do with it, honestly. It keeps veering off into unrelated subjects, but I’m not sure I’ll do any better if I start over.
I don’t want to be rude to our host or anyone who would have to scroll and scroll and scroll past it, and I have no idea whether you would even read it. I wouldn’t want to impose the expectations.
Perhaps I’ll wait a bit until this thread is a few pages back to post it, then let you know I did on a more current thread by then. You’ll either find the time, or not. I won’t bother to edit to pare it down or remove irrelevant tangents, having already made several failed attempts.
Max, thank you for the draft copy. I have not read it all yet, but I can already tell, you need to make very clear if you publish it anywhere in any format, you need to make clear that some of it might be fiction and you will not identify what’s literally real and what’s not. I know you’re the last one to ever forget that the internet can never be perfectly anonymous regardless of how many extraordinary precautions you take.
If you ever got to the one part I know we don’t agree about, I have not made it that far yet.
Nunya, let me see if I can do better than Max at making a reply sufficiently concise. Like him, I have a tendency to describe e.g. War and Peace or Arkhipelag Gulag as light short casual reading, but that doesn’t mean I want to either write something of that length, publish it in comments here, or expect you to read it.
1. Like Max, I missed the electric chair pun. It’s much funnier now. Thanks for explaining. I suspected you may have been joking, but asked questions as if you were serious just in case.
2. Like Max, I think we should use the death penalty a lot more, and as you indicated at one point, it’s actually more humane than prisons. Much more importantly, it’s far more humane to everyone else – taxpayers, society, potential innocent victims, insurance customers, business owners, consumers, parents, victims/survivors, their friends, loved ones, neighbors, etc, etc.
3. It’s also more humane to the criminals and, yes, wrongly convicted people (very few truly innocent – it’s usually regular suspects who got away with many other crimes – but they exist, and of course there are many levels of criminal in their hierarchy) who have to be incarcerated together with them. Succinctly, for every inmate on inmate crime, caught, prosecuted, or convicted / punished or not, there’s both victims and victimisers.
4. It’s more humane to the law enforcement officers, justice administration / correction staff, court employees, attorneys, and everyone in any way dealing with dangerous criminals as part of their job.
5. It’s more humane to the dangerous criminals own family members.
6. It’s more humane to the victims of crimes outside of prisons which they continue to orchestrate while incarcerated through a variety of legal and illegal communication methods and proxies acting on their behalf. Most crime outside of prisons is directly or indirectly orchestrated this way in one way or another.
6. Within those institutions there’s also a hierarchy of criminals who prey on each other in various ways, create secret and not so secret organizations linked to ones outside of prisons, etc. Lifers are usually at the top of those pyramids.
7. You don’t have to be clinically insane to get institutionalized into accepting prison life as normal and, eventually, more normal than life outside. Rather than attempt to summarize or rewrite Maxim’s book in pprogress: look up institutionalization on how and why this happens. Consider how these criminals grew up, their prospects and risks outside prisons, etc, etc.
8. Many prisoners are in fact criminally insane. There’s no good place to put such people. Lunatic asylums don’t have adequate security to prevent escapes. Keeping them idle and socially isolated is the worst and most inhumane thing imaginable for their mental health, but putting them around any other humans is very inhumane to those other humans. They should also not be a burden on taxpayers, etc, etc. As Max says in the unpublished opus, the only logical solution is the one we use for equally badly behaved animals of other species. I don’t disagree with describing it as mercy killing.
9. Criminally insane prisoners can often pass as less dangerous criminals.
10. I agree with Max – Russian penal colony system is only marginally less bad than US prisons. The fundamental problems are the same.
11. Executions can’t be undone. But neither can any other type of sentence that could be imposed and its physical or psychological effects, intended or not. Criminals impose extrajudicial death penalties and many other kinds of penalties on innocent and not so innocent people far more than society executes prisoners. Please consider balancing the ledger in calculating the costs, risks, and benefits of each as we are suggesting.
12. I did suggest some other penalties, which I think should not be outlawed or unusual anymore, but some people can’t be alive and free anywhere without too many costs and risks to others, and incarcerating them anywhere also creates above dilemmas.
13. Making the perfect the enemy of the less bad has terrible consequences. Everyone will die. Many of us, especially criminals, will die in far worse ways than death penalties.
I can keep going, but I see why the Max opus got to be as long as it did, and this is also already far too long, with no end in sight.
The one area I disagree with Max; he does not want revenue generation from prisoners to be profitable for the state or for private contractors; he fears perverse incentives to make sure there continue to be more and not fewer. Maybe he’s right, but I don’t think so.
I think we all three agree that when and where prisons continue to exist they should be much harsher places. The question of disagreement is what to do in the meantime about prisons vs death penalty, other penalties, etc, and how to get from here to there.
Vera, of course you know we’ve talked about this, but since you mention it for our audience, if any:
“The one area I disagree with Max; he does not want revenue generation from prisoners to be profitable for the state or for private contractors; he fears perverse incentives to make sure there continue to be more and not fewer. Maybe he’s right, but I don’t think so.”
Why wouldn’t it create perverse incentives, regardless of whether those making their living off it are private contractors or government employees? How could it not?
Vera: thank you for your advice. I haven’t decided what if anything to do with the rambling opus. If it gets published here at any point, please consider it so stipulated.
If you didn’t read to that point already, I discuss how imperfect my memory is , well into it. No one should assume anything autobiographical is or isn’t accurate – I’m certainly not going to try to prove any part, and intend to remain pseudonymous.
If anyone is skeptical of any part of anything I claim about myself, that’s fine: I really shouldn’t be talking about myself anyway. Sometimes it’s helpful to my point, but conversely, too many hints dropped carelessly here and there might create situational difficulties, given some of the ideas I have floated here in various discussions.
In case you had not realized this, although you most likely did: Nuna is a Spanish English double entendre for “none of your business”. A wise approach, and I’ll do my best to not pry about anything at all. Given your US employment history, you probably understood the reference immediately.
Spanish is fairly well down my list of languages – after Russian and English, next best are German and French, then Italian and Greek – for anyone who considers Ukrainian a language (it’s really a regional dialect, slightly exaggerated on purpose) I can understand that well enough. Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, etc may be on the same level as Spanish – let’s call it not good, LOL.
I’m curious whether Nuña has a meaning in Spanish or otherwise outside of the English double entendre, but I’ll look it up myself, as I did promise not to pry.
I’m thinking perhaps a series of comments by “Max’s prison journal during my week awaiting execution” …or something. Or nothing.
Per Google translate, it is not an actual word in Spanish or Portuguese. Off hand, I don’t know any other languages it could be in. Google did not detect a language when that part isn’t selected.
Lastly for now, I’ll confirm I agree with Vera at 11:11, aside from our one area of disagreement. I don’t think her opinion on that is out of self interest; I have reasons to not think so which I don’t know if she would want me to mention, so I won’t.
I think she knew I already alluded to what she discussed about my recent business reorganization above on the 14th at 9:54 pm in previous thread(s), so she wasn’t revealing secrets.
Regarding “rich old bastard”: each word is relatively true, and relatively false. In the literal sense, the last is false, but it’s rarely used that way in English anymore. If mid 60s is your idea of old, I am. If it isn’t, I’m not. I’m no oligarch by any means, but I’m blessed by the grace of God, far more than I deserve or ever expected, and rarely have to work hard to maintain such economic status as I enjoy anymore. I worked hard, and I’d like to think smart, to get to that point, for decades, but many other people did too, less successfully.
The last few months were an exception, in terms of work hours, which was mostly my fault, and I’ve turned it to my advantage as described. I agree that everyone involved is now almost certainly happier. My wife forgave me, with entirely appropriate delay and encouragement to do better, my former employees at least formally accepted my apologies and excellent employment references, I received church counseling, have asked God for forgiveness, etc. I learned a lot, about any number of things.
I don’t share Vera’s assessment of my political expertise. She’s at the least every bit as astute in such things as me, and has far more common sense. She’s entirely correct that she knows a great deal more than me about the other topics she mentioned where she’s far more expert, among many others. Some of those are not ones in which women might ordinarily be expected to know much more than men in most cases, although those were not any of the examples she mentioned. She is definitely not a dumb blonde, regardless of any claims otherwise. She’s very smart.
@MaxZim V Zaslon, cc. Vera
Don’t worry about making a long post. I fear I have developed a tendency towards unnecessary verbosity myself. I can’t guarantee that I will give you either a swift or an exhaustive reply, but I will read what you have to say.
I am a paleolibertarian/anarcho-capitalist (think Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Vaclav Benda, Hans-Hermann Hoppe), so if there must be prisons at all, then I would fundamentally prefer to have them privatized. Running them for profit would take the burden off the tax payer, but as you point out, it also creates perverse incentives to imprison people and exploit them as slave labor.
I am going to be the infamous “fence-sitter” between you and Vera, in that I believe your concern is justified but I still think generating revenue should be possible.
What if for instance, prisoners would have to pay for their own food and care, but were allowed to keep the rest of what they earned? Maybe they could spend it on books or something to make their cell more comfortable, or maybe send it home to their loved ones or save it up for when they are released. At any rate, it would be remove the incentive to exploit prisoners for free labor, and at the same time they would also not be a burden on the tax payer.
I respect your wish for pseudonymity, which I share. “Nuña” is one of my very many different online pseudonyms, but the only one I use on BAN and IPR. I came up with it on short notice when I was foolishly campaigning for my state’s GOP in 2020. First and foremost, it indeed stands for “None of your (business)”; but secondarily, it also pays homage to Queen Nuña of Asturias, mother of the first emperor of Spain, and to the Slavic hypocorism «Нуня».
I don’t consider “Ukrainian” a language. It has 70% the same vocabulary as Polish and 62% the same as Russian. So at best it is Polonized Russian, and at worst it is one of the many east Polish regional dialects but written in Cyrillic.
@Vera Supernova, cc. Max
You also please feel free to write as much or little as you like. I will be happy to read it; though again, I cannot promise I will give either a fast or a complete response. If you want I can try to respond in Russian, though I fear that my English and German are by now grown better – or rather less bad – than my Russian and Polish.
I strongly disagree with you and Max that there are few wrongly convicted people, especially under totalitarian regimes like “Ukraine” and “China”, or the erstwhile Soviet Union. And I fear the United States is heading in that same direction rapidly – e.g. the J6 hostages.
As I hinted at earlier, when Putin announced the investigation into the Saratov scandal, my faith in the Russian prison system was also deeply shaken, and I now fear that without drastic improvements, it too will revert to something akin to the abusive Soviet Gulag system.
When I said that what we need are prisons as in the movie Kin-dza-dza, I was only partially joking. For those who haven’t seen or don’t remember: prisoners are kept in relative isolation, in ones and twos, laying inside a sort of mining-carts with lids. They are somewhat cramped, but not as bad as the small boxes North Korea uses to slowly mutilate inmates through misgrowth.
The movie being a movie, does not go into how often they are taken out to exercise, eat and drink. But given how many of the abuses in real-life prisons come from fellow inmates – the rest coming from corrupt wardens – the isolation cell is already the best and safest place to be.
If there must be prisons at all – which is an idea that I am not comfortable with – then let them be purely in the form of solitary confinement. And with strict overview of the wardens, to avoid scenarios like The Green Elephant. Because that is where we are currently at: we are living in The Green Elephant, when we should be living in Kin-dza-dza.
You suggested some alternative penalties to death or imprisonment, some of which I agree with – such as exile at personal expense following restitution – others….less so – some forms of public humiliation. But in general, I think that is the direction in which to look for criminal justice reform, rather than either risking wrongful and irreversible executions, or costly and inhuman incarcerations.
I understand that in Czechia, repeat rapists and child molester are currently sentenced to chemical castration. That is all good and well, but why wait for repetition and why stop at a reversible chemical castration? I would suggest that anyone proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be a rapist or a child molester, instead be mechanically and therefore irreversibly castrated – at their own expense! – after their first transgression. And by all means, give them the option to be euthanized if they prefer – again at their own expense. Does that not seem fair?
And what do you think of my suggestion that prisoners be allowed to keep what they earn from hard labor, after they have paid off the restitution to their victims and fully financed their own incarceration?
Perhaps they could even spend the money they make that way on books or something to make their isolation cell a little less uncomfortable. Alternatively, they could send it home to their loved ones or save it up for when they have served their sentence.
Nunya , in that case, I’ll just go ahead and publish what I have thus far, if the site will even accept a comment of that length. It’s extremely rambling, very poorly edited, unfinished at the end, and you saw my stipulations. I’m not hunting for a reply to it. I try to put some things into consideration or perspective. More like things to stew on for a while than to pick apart. If it’s headed toward any sort of conclusion, it’s nowhere close to that yet. I don’t think I’ve even hit my main points yet. And this isn’t it, lol.
Neither Vera nor I advocate prisoners ever being a burden to taxpayers. They must always cover the expense of their upkeep, provide restitution to identified victims and a general victim fund, fund law enforcement and court costs. If they generate further revenue past that, it should overcompensate victims.
Vera somewhat agrees, but sees room for profit for law enforcement, courts, administration of sentence – neither of us is a fan of prisons of any sort, particularly modern ones. She means things like entertainment value of public live audience and broadcast live as well as shareable video later executions, pay per view in any method, and the same of corporal punishment; various ways of victims or surviving family profiting off the offenders as their personal slaves until multiple times restitution and mafia style compounding interest is paid, if it ever is; selling body parts, organs, blood, plasma, use in experiments, etc, etc.
Neither of us would advocate criminals profiting off their incarceration. I’m leery of her suggestions for 3-10x multipliers with interest compounding constantly on top of interest, interest paid before principal. I think this type of greed, even while understandable by those who have been legitimately wronged, and by law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, sentence administration staff, etc, who naturally feel they don’t have nearly the resources to adequately fight crime at any level (and with ample justification), predictably leads to finding ways to create more criminals and crime to profit from, even if those are not immediately obvious at first.
Once the incentive is created, ways to satisfy it can be found. Prison corporations make good and reliable profits, as do any number of outside companies hiring prisoners at pittance pay or providing any number of services to prisons – phones, snack vending, various types of property prisoners are allowed, and many more.
These also exist in government administered prisons. In those, staff are typically unionized government employees. Obviously, they want job security, and have the natural tendency of bureaucracy to always want more and more complexity, employees, paperwork, cost, etc, etc.
Any of these models or past ones – convict leasing, etc – create many jobs, or investment income, which depends on the availability of convicts not to drop, especially dramatically, and benefits if the opposite happens.
I see no way to create a profit motive for any part of legitimate society off criminals and their punishment without over time creating opportunities for various ways to ensure that profit doesn’t diminish, jobs don’t go away, etc. Whether government, private, mix thereof, even victims and families directly – nothing good comes of this.
The goal of law enforcement and justice systems must be to minimize crime. By crime I mean real crimes with real victims; not violating any of an endless. constantly changing plethora of laws and regulations no one can reasonably be expected to understand, memorize, know if or how they violated, etc.
Whatever drastically reduces the overall amount of instances and severity of real crimes and real victims, and leads to reducing it over time, is overall more humane than alternatives, even if it includes some unjust executions and punishments of any other sort allowed. Far more injustice and inhumanity results from error in the other direction!
Types of criminal punishment discussed other than incarceration create much less need for sentence administration staff and contractors and anyone else making a living or profit off the process, so incarceration seems to me least optimal overall.
This is getting painfully long again.
…
I don’t know why I didn’t think of the Russian name. The obvious is often overlooked. I’ll have to look up the Spanish queen.
You are correct about the Ukrainian dialect. It’s status as a language, much as an ethnic group or nation, is contrived propaganda, created to attack, divide and conquer us.
I’d prefer we keep everything in English. It’s more respectful to anyone else who may wish to read and jump in at any time. If you ever have any part you’d more easily express in Russian, neither of us would particularly mind, but it doesn’t sound like that would be the case. Hopefully you’ll agree Vera and I are fluent in English; it’s the most well understood language we all share, or could presume anyone else here to share.
Vera, like me, has lived and worked in the UK and US, and additionally she was a US Citizen for decades, while I’ve maintained many business and personal contacts, through all communication methods and in person, in or from those countries since the 1980s. Some people here have said my English sucks, but I have too many separate opinions to the contrary over the years to believe them.
Rather, I edit poorly, leave in too many typos, errors of grammar, ramble, go off on tangents, etc, in any language.
I think I’d prefer to continue to reply in English even if you decide to practice your Russian in reply to me.
Anyway, let me at least attempt to post the opus before tackling the c.c, keeping in mind it’s not at all finished, but may never be at this rate.
Nunya,
Thank you for clarifying that the electric chair suggestion was hyperbolic. I missed the pun, and it’s much funnier now.
I think my friend Vera took the suggestion as possibly serious, as I did, since we’re both big advocates of making the death penalty far more common by multiple orders of magnitude (fewer orders if the deterent is highly effective as we expect – perhaps even as rare or even more rare than it is currently one day, but I don’t expect to get there quickly, if at all).
I suppose a better way to put it is that death should be a far more common criminal penalty than the current model of incarceration, which has been a massive failure in deterring crime, reforming people (if it does, it’s generally in the direction of being far more dangerous and destructive criminals when they come out than when they went in) or anything else positive.
The vast majority of convicts who get released or serve out their sentence end up back in prison, many multiple times, and for many it doesn’t take very long. Since criminals generate many additional victims for each time they get caught and convicted, how many victims does the current system of incarceration as the primary system of dealing with criminals end up resulting in?
We are all victims to varying extents of the ripple effect their crimes have on society. I can expand on this later if you wish. The extent of this is not nearly appreciated enough by most people, who don’t come close to appreciating how much it costs us in how many direct and indirect ways.
The observable fact is that many criminals are not very scared of going to prison, or of going to prison again (and again and again). For many, it is their retirement plan. Some are quite honest in admitting they commit crimes which have a very high chance of being caught and drawing a long sentence – nonviolent bank robbery with a note and no weapon, for instance – on purpose to be incarcerated.
They feel at home there, they miss the structure and their friends and networks of fellow criminals, their basic needs are guaranteed to be taken care of (unlike outside prison, where that can be a constant struggle, particularly with a criminal history, criminal temperament, few noncriminal skills, substance and other addictions, etc).
The very things you think deters any sane criminals – sexual violence and assault, physical assault, sexual extortion, etc – are actually a draw for some. After all, for each victimization, there is a victimiser as well, and they appreciate having their victims delivered to them and unable to escape, and a system they know quite well how to navigate in order to habitually get away with such crimes and many others while incarcerated.
The victims might underestimate the extent of how often these things happen in prison. Or they may underestimate their chances of being the victims rather than the victimizers. That’s on top of other strategies to be on the side of that they would rather be on, such as joining prison gangs, being of some value higher than whatever they’re worth as rapemeat and prostitute-slaves, etc.
They might act as foot soldiers of prison gang leaders to carry out violent assaults and murders, or arrange facilitating various ways to help get various forms of contraband into prisons, conive myriad schemes to generate and direct profit into prison books or outside accounts, etc, etc. Far from being rare, most criminal activity outside prisons is directed by prisoners in one way or another, and prisoners doing life sentences are generally at the top of those hierarchies.
You say only the criminally insane would wish to be in prison. No, for some it’s quite rational – look up institutionalized – but…
Many people in prisons, yours and ours, are in fact criminally insane. There’s no good solution other than the one normally used for equally badly behaved animals of other species for what to do with such people.
What are the alternatives? Vera listed some, which I also think should be brought back as common forms of criminal punishment and deterence. However, with many criminals, being alive and unconfined anywhere is an excessive risk and cost to Noncriminal victims.
So, where can they be confined?
Lunatic asylums rarely have sufficient security to adequately prevent escapes or attacks on other inmates or staff, especially if the inmates are also allowed to work to offset the costs of their housing, feeding, medication, etc., and because being continuously held in isolation and idle is the worst possible thing for mental health, even among people with unusually good mental health for the incarcerated to begin with, and worse yet for the personality types most likely to experience incarceration.
If anything is maximally cruel to the typical criminally insane person, it’s to be kept alive for a long time, idle and socially isolated. Keeping them around other potential victims, on the other hand, may be pretty nice for them, but not so nice to those being welcomed to the mental asylum or penal colony in such fashion or on the lower end of the convict or lunatic social pecking order and thus habitually subjected to every type of abuse criminally insane individuals can think of.
Those younger/weaker/less violent criminals may have never done anything nearly that bad to others at that point in their lives, and if it’s mental asylum patients instead, they may have done nothing wrong at all.
Even if it’s just the criminally insane in perfect isolation from anyone else, some are worse than others, and will develop a violence hierarchy somehow. And many of them can mask themselves for periods of time as less dangerous types, so such perfect isolation is not practically possible. At least some of their victims have in fact done the same many times to others, although in most cases not convicted of it.
Both the victims and perpetrators in prisons oftentimes began to experience habitual sexual abuse, habitual physical violence, habitual psychological abuse, and even habitual sexual violence as children.
Many get used to offering up situational/survival/extorted/blackmailed sex at a very young age. Many start to perpetuate all the abuse types as children as well, particularly against other children and animals.
Many start to experience periods of institutional confinement as children, which normalizes it for them sooner or later – in quite a few cases, the secure housing and other survival necessities, organised chores, regimented schedule, constant socializing etc, even the various forms of punishment they get used to, are normal, and life outside is less so, or less and less so each time they’re released.
Not only that, but the outside world has changed a great deal, in ways they often don’t appreciate enough until released. They don’t fit in where they used to, many new things and ways of doing things seem alien to them – they have a need, consciously or subconsciously, to go back home before too long – back home to the “penitentiary” – a laughable name these days.
I’m not a fan of excessive cruelty for its own sake or as a form of noncorrective punishment or retribution, but, even far more importantly to me, it victimizes taxpayers to keep them alive in such conditions.
It also victimizes and revictimizes victims – the surviving victims of their crimes or surviving friends, family, neighbors, etc, who must live with the fact that this person is alive, will or might one day escape or get released, can exact revenge and commit more crimes through directing, paying, or extorting others on the outside, can extort them, etc; as discussed, other prisoners, prison staff and contractors, victims of their ongoing schemes outside prison, prison visitors, even their own lawyers.
I don’t think it’s entirely true that one would have to be clinically insane to prefer being incarcerated. For starters,there are two sides to the prison rape coin: for every victim,there’s at least one perpetrator. For the perpetrators, it’s not a terrible deal. They may or may not prefer an opposite sex victim, or they may not care.
In any case, they will make do with what they can get. Letting them loose on society would merely cause their habitual rape, habitual sex extortion, and habitual victims be someone besides fellow convicts. I think it’s far more humane to everyone else to put such people out of all other people’s misery, and I suppose I’m abnormal in our insane modern world in caring about being humane to taxpayers, surviving victims, surviving family members, potential victims, crime impacted communities, fellow convict victims of worse criminals, etc, than I am about being maximally humane to the absolute worst criminal convicts, which is the perverse incentive structure of soft on crime policies.
Unfortunately, our politicians and justice systems consider the death penalty to be more inhumane than incarceration. They should, even if being humane to perpetrators is more important to them than justice to and safety of victims, surviving family of victims, residents of high crime areas, potential victims anywhere, minor criminals who find themselves locked up with and targeted for sexual violence and other abuse by worse criminals, law enforcement and institutional staff, etc, etc, at least give convicts the option of being executed over being incarcerated. Would that at least not be more humane?
I tend to think, apparently like you, that if given the choice, I’d take a relatively quick and relatively not bad (when compared to the way many people, especially those who end up with prison sentences, otherwise end up dying) death over being subjected to sexual and other violence, including repeated forced or extorted sodomy and the prison equivalent of habitual domestic violence, or joining a prison gang so I can do those things to others as opposed to having them done to me, or both.
And I would then prefer to have them get on with it instead of dragging things out with some execution date down the road or bothering with appeals etc. Yes, even if I was innocent.
I wouldn’t want to be victimized by criminals, who would quickly sniff out that I’m unlike them. They’re physically stronger. They are more vicious and underhanded. They are far more ruthless, etc. Competing on their terms doesn’t seem plausible. If not all my assets were confiscated or frozen, they could extort me. But that might not take long – you give them a little, they demand more, until there’s nothing left in short enough order.
How would I generate enough continuing income to make paying them off viable? My legal businesses would suffer from my physical unavailability, and I’d have limited ability to direct things adequately through limited legal and illegal communication methods, the latter highly unreliable given propensity to be confiscated as contraband.
My time availability might also be unpredictable, for instance if the contraband devices were discovered and I’d be cut off from both legal and illegal communication for a period of time as administrative punishment. I might be forced to liquidate everything, resulting in very limited shelf life for paying them off as a means to save my ass.
I’m uninterested in participating in their criminal schemes and helping them victimize more people. I’d probably have some skills that could help them with those, particularly given criminal tutelage, but I’m a very latecomer to their games if I broke my ethics so egregiously – thus, quite likely the sacrificial pawn to reduce their sentences, avoid them being extended, get more privileges, etc. This doesn’t sound very promising as a means of avoiding sodomic slavery either.
It’s unlikely that physical violence would be my solution. I’m not going to beat up a muscle bound, heavily scarred and tattooed, underhanded, vicious, violent thug with extreme anger management and likely mental health issues, drug addiction, a horribly violent upbringing, and a lifetime of continuing education and practice in physical violence who’s a third or half my age. He’s going to beat me up.
At best, I might get the drop on him and stab him to death. That obviously has negative consequences, even if I were to twist myself into believing it justified under the circumstances. Regardless, his buddies will be right there, and mine would be far away.
What else would I offer? Helping them with filling out various letters, legal forms, and things of that nature, perhaps. I’m not sure that would be enough. These people are scum, and know how to get everything they can out of you. They can extort or beat or rape information out, then leverage that.
They can threaten my family, friends and neighbors with harm in order to get whatever they want, then have their associates outside visit all those people and extort them as well. They can extort and threaten them into being their slaves, too, and then extort and threaten me into some idiotic involvement in their schemes, whereupon I become the sacrificial pawn as mentioned earlier, and/or make me a prostituted sex slave to them and their kind, while doing the same to everyone they got to outside thanks to me.
The fact that I can think of all these scenarios, not even being a criminal, means people who are career criminals can certainly think of them, get together with each other in their closely shared living and working environment, communicate with their friends outside through their legal and illegal communication methods, and over time figure out how to get all or a lot of that to happen.
It’s just not plausible that I’ll outsmart lifelong criminals, criminal networks, prison gangs, and people who grew up and spent the bulk of their lives in such places when it comes to playing by their rules. I’m neither willing nor capable of living that life, much less being better at it then they are.
This is even despite having, in a sense, grown up in prison myself. But only in the sense that the USSR was one giant prison. Obviously, it had many higher security units, like any big prison. But, I’ve been out of prison, living a very different life, for entirely too long to be successful in a penal colony today, in the way the convicts measure it.
So, state, kill me, quickly. What other options? Suicide is an eternity life sentence in hell. Solitary confinement is hell on earth. So is life as a noncriminal in a penal colony.
I suppose I’m wrong here. If I have the choice of prison and appeals instead, choosing the death penalty is still essentially suicide, albeit assisted. Explicitly making that choice will not save me from eternal damnation.
In such a case, it would be far more just and humane to me, the wrongly convicted man, to give me one and only one option, and carry it out quickly, without any appeals or schedule delays: death penalty. In that case, I have not chosen to die; I was wrongfully killed, but for the greater good of others.
We all have to die sooner or later, and many deaths leave zero time to make any arrangements, or are preceded by horrible physical and mental torture, illness, decline, etc, etc. Many deaths are random and meaningless, slow and painful, etc, etc. Being wrongfully executed for greater social good is far from the worst way to die. But please, administer the sentence expeditiously.
I imagine the waiting is much worse than when the time, place and manner are certain and imminent, and am quite sure that would be the case for me in such a situation. If they did drag it out, prayer would become an increasingly exclusive focus, and none of it would be for any stay or delay of execution.
I’ve never been very scared of death, although I’ve never sought it either – but the eventuality and chances are a normal thing to me. Unlike many fellow conscripts, I didn’t need to drink alcohol excessively or even habitually every day, even in small amounts, to mentally handle the stress of possible imminent death.
I certainly drank, and sometimes more than I should have, but very, very rarely to any severe stupor, loss of memory, loss of bodily function control, more than casual slurring and stumbling, passing out, or other symptoms of not knowing or caring about one’s alcohol tolerance limits. I’ve never experienced shaking, hallucinations, or other such alcohol withdrawal symptoms or require a maintainence drink to avoid them.
Such things were quite common in our unit in Afghanistan, as was illegal drug use, which I never even tried or felt tempted to. I accepted that death was a very real possibility, at some times more than others, prayed, and did my job reasonably well, or at least well enough to avoid reprimand.
I was much more scared of the also real possibilities of severe bodily injury or capture by the enemy – it was all too obvious what they habitually do to their women, children, and domesticated animals. We weren’t very nice to the ones we captured either, but they were significantly worse than us by comparison.
I personally never committed any war crimes, unless you count not reporting the ones I witnessed; any jihadi who would refuse to take part in theirs would no doubt be considered a deviant and traitor by their perverse standards, and treated accordingly. I trust it’s clear enough what that would entail.
The consequences for me, then a slave of the communist borg, would have been quite similar had I reported the crimes of others. Given that the Soviet Union routinely covered up crimes – war crimes by my fellow Red Army slave soldiers naturally among those – its far more likely that the war criminals would have faced no consequences had I reported them, or I would have faced worse consequences for my squealing than they would have for such lovely actions as killing, torturing, disfiguring, maiming, and severely beating captured Jihadis, as well as raping and doing all those other things to their captured women.
For those very unfortunate ladies, the killing, when they weren’t cruelly left alive, was the only novel part. They had been through all the other parts of that all their lives, multiple times over, ever since they were children. When my scumbag comrades killed them, those truly were mercy killings.
Nevertheless, I had both a legal and ethical duty to report these criminals. I failed in those duties, choosing self preservation over honor and justice. Like everyone else who didn’t participate but was aware of what all was happening, I failed in those duties. Their failure to blow the whistle isn’t an excuse for mine.
It’s not that we, as a country, had any lack of laws; it’s that we had a criminal government which made a farce and mockery of its own laws, and intentionally so. As a means to cruelly condition its slaves – everyone, the people at the top certainly being no exception – to play their part in its cruel machinery of universal oppression and mutual victimization. As a means to put everyone into impossible dilemmas continuously and teach them that there is no justice. To accept and adopt the unofficial criminal law and criminal code of ethics which was the real national law which hid behind the mask of the official laws. To take their place not only in the fatally inefficient soviet economic order, but also in the relatively more efficient illegal economy which provided just enough lubricant and juice to the creaking engine of the Marxist economy to keep us from far worse consequences like our parents and grandparents lived through, if not even worse than that. To keep the failed soviet state on life support by illegal means. The soviet prison was run by criminals – criminal inmates (ordinary citizens), criminal inmate gangs, corrupt and criminal guards, all the way to the top.
It offered us the same benefits and detriments, for the most part, that prisons offer inmates – guaranteed work and basic necessities, security from the consequences of laziness, bad attitudes, perpetually stealing anything not nailed down and many things which were at every workplace, chronic drunkenness, and every other reason employees get fired or do better to avoid being fired in saner countries. Order, structure, punishments, routines. In exchange for freedom, civil liberties, privacy, ethics, a chance to excel through hard work and competition.
Ever since this criminal system collapsed, we’ve had numerous recidivists calling to bring it back. I don’t know how trustworthy they are, but at least some studies indicate it may be more of us than not. To be fair, our transition to capitalism was far from smooth or optimal. Nowadays, it’s either old people who only want to remember the good parts, or everyone else who were children or not yet born then, and are being fed idealized propaganda about the past.
But fundamentally, it’s the same as prison recidivism. They mainly just want three hots and a cot, some booze or heroin to numb them out, any kind of holes into which they can insert their penis or vice versa, guaranteed job security, guaranteed retirement, not having to work hard, etc – in return, they are quite willing to trade away all the freedoms and opportunities they feel no need for, and resent anyone else having out of envy and spite. Quality, variety , choices etc, these are what they sacrifice. Crabs in a bucket writ large.
Their presence among us – the criminally insane yet completely logical in a perverse way – Soviet prison state recidivists – both offends me profoundly and is completely understandable, logical, and unsurprising at the same time. I don’t know how to describe it well. I escaped a life sentence I was born with by the grace of God, and made a great life for me and my family which not one person in the USSR could have possibly had.
We have so many things now that didn’t exist then. I’m still amazed with wonder every day at this bounty. And these idiots want to go back to prison, put me, my kids and grandkids, and everyone else back in that prison for life. And yet, I understand them implicitly and completely. Their screwed up perspective does not need to be explained to me. I already understand fully. A few different choices in life, and I may have been one of them.
The concept of institutionalized personality is more than academic to me – I’ve studied the scholarship, but also have enough personal background to grok the recidivist mindset. Thank God I found a better path in life and did not go down that one, but it gives me much better insight into those who did and do.
Since then?
I’ve faced the nontrivial possibility of imminent or fairly short term death from disease a handful of times, and was never too much of a crybaby about it. Prayer and the practical details of making business arrangements for the eventuality, visits from friends and family, religious studies and counseling – they got me through it, and God spared me from His death penalty each time, although I know with certainty the sentence will eventually be carried out – only not when.
It’s just that I get to live somewhere incalculably better than a Penal colony or the prison nation I was born in while I await my eventual execution. Much as with war, with disease, and now, with onsetting old age, I fear crippling and debilitating mental and physical decline much more than death.
With death, I am more concerned for my family than me. I trust in the Lord’s mercy for my sins, and if I am found guilty and get what those sins deserve, I can’t claim to be innocent. If I am sentenced only to time already served, I will be overfilled with joy and wonder at God’s unfathomable compassion.
In any case, back in my fictional cell awaiting execution at dawn, I’ve come to peace with the perverse justice. While I was wrongly convicted of the heinous crime for which I will lose my life, I got away with not reporting war crimes I witnessed over 40 years ago.
Not reporting legally and ethically made me complicit. The perpetrators legally and ethically qualified for the death penalty. My complicity qualifies me as well. The sentence is correct after all – I’m merely being executed for the wrong crime, much belatedly.
We have all done things which qualify. How many women have I raped? Well, lust is the same as fornication and adultery. By that standard, not only did I make a lifelong mockery of my marriage vows, but I never asked for consent before undressing thousands – could it be over a million yet? – women with my eyes in my head.
Certainly, they couldn’t have all wanted me to. I did it anyway, not caring the least bit about what they wanted, only what I wanted to do to them, which I then proceeded to do, giving them no mercy or reprieve. I enjoyed the screaming, not knowing or caring whether it was from pleasure, pain, horror, or some strange mix.
I committed all these horrible crimes only in my mind, but that doesn’t matter. At the very least, some of them must have known or guessed what I was thinking, and at least some of them must have wanted me to stop, but I always finished sooner or later. I mentally hit pause, did something else in my head until they were somewhere else, then watched the rest of the clandestine video.
Even that may be whitewashing my memory. I was worse when I was younger, especially when I was single. I probably never hit pause. Or at least far less consistently. If ever. The memories have long since faded and become hazy and inexact. What I remember is probably falsified to paint me in a much better light than I deserve. Comparing memories with photographs, I wasn’t nearly as good looking back then as I remember. It’s thus likely that I didn’t inspire nearly as many equally pornographic thoughts in their heads as I deluded myself to believe.
A smile, wave and hello from a girl was all it would take to firmly believe she was throwing herself at me like a wanton woman and begging me to do all those things I had so much mental practice doing. Years later, that memory might have turned to us groping each other in real life, when it may have just been a hug and peck on the cheek, if even that. Half a century later, meeting each other as grandparents, she might chide me that she knew nothing of such things at that age, and is shocked that I thought otherwise.
Justice: Chadderdon gets the Michigan LP chair, Saliba gets the electric chair, everyone is happy.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-rejects-trump-too-small-trademark/
SB ON SCOTUS TRADEMARK OP
—
STATE POLITICAL PARTY ASSUMED NAMES VS USA TRADEMARK PARTY LOGOS
CAN COURTS DETECT THE DIFFERENCE ???
Lulz, law students use fools to try to make name for themselves. Law students walk away. Fools pay.
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=143691
RCV VS CONDORCET
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-down-bump-stock-ban/
SAME 2ND AMDT *ARMS* AS USED BY PRIVATES IN INFANTRY ???
SEE 19 APR 1775 — BATTLES OF LEXINGTON AND CONCORD IN MASS.
DAY 1 OF 1775-1784 AM REV WAR
@ first comment
I hold no opinion at all on who should be their minor party state chair and don’t care to dig into it, either. It’s not particularly interesting or relevant to me. I don’t live anywhere near there, do not belong to or vote for that party (I did vote for them for president twice, in 1988 and 2008, and down ticket for various offices from time to time over the years).
Out of extremely minor curiosity, as a big fan of greatly expanding the use of the legal use of the death penalty by several orders of magnitude, what exactly did the one you don’t side with do that should qualify for a death penalty offense? It’s hard to imagine that they as an organization own assets that would rise much above petty theft. I’d personally, if it were up to me, stop short of the death penalty, unless it’s a repeat offense or greater crimes were committed.
Horse whipping in public, stockades, exile to a willing third world craphole and loss of U.S. citizenship if it can be done at the thief’s personal expense above reasonable restitution to any proven victims, public humiliation punishments, loss of personal property, and certainly temporary enslavement of offenders to victims are appropriate punishments for theft, except for chronic offenders or those who can’t reasonably be expected to be able to work off the debt, punishment penalties (3-10x value plus any resulting costs is reasonable) and accruing interest before death from old age, where death is indeed an appropriate penalty for theft, if its administration is made significantly more cost effective than currently practiced in the US.
The death penalty should be much cheaper to tax payers, or actually generate revenue through entertainment value, ideally for a general victim compensation fund and court and law enforcement costs. As currently practiced, it’s the other way around. I’ve read estimates in the mid single millions range, and I’m not even sure off hand if that even includes the costs of housing and feeding of the miscreants who qualify under current US laws – with very rare exceptions, only very heinous or mass murderers – in the years or decades it typically takes to exhaust an endless series of frivolous appeals, administrative delays, and multiple ridiculous bureaucratic hangups.
Someone would have to set a longevity record to cost the taxpayers less being executed than being incarcerated for life without the possibility of parole, providing of course that escape is very rare, those who do escape are almost always caught very quickly, and idiot and or scumbags politicians, judges and bureaucrats don’t let people who should never see the light of day out early. Those politically inflicted wounds are a lot more common than escape from maximum security facilities, particularly without quick recapture.
What about the death penalty should cost much of anything, if anything at all? The electric chair isn’t a huge power bill user, but it’s not the cheapest – rope or an axe can be used many times over, drowning in sewage costs nothing, etc, etc. Organs, whole blood, blood plasma, etc, etc, can be sold to offset costs and generate plasma. Prisoners can be worked to death. Taxpayers should not be victimized again when criminals are caught and punished. The administration of punishment should cover the costs of doing so and compensate victims, at least as a whole, and whenever possible in individual cases.
We live in a topsy turvy world when the costs of confining or (every once in a blue moon) executing criminals outweighs the revenue their enslavement and/or execution generates, when the government general fund is ahead of victims if and when costs actually do get recouped, and where many forms of punishment which have been commonplace throughout human history – enslavement to victims, exile, corporal punishment, public humiliation, etc – are falsely labelled cruel and unusual. They certainly weren’t unusual when the bill of rights was adopted or before that and aren’t unusual in any number of countries now.
Perhaps I’m too liberal for you in even ideally reserving death penalty for theft to chronic offenders and those unable to pay off their victims as well as a proportional share of law enforcement, court, and penalty administration costs. I’m far to the right of current practices in any US state in any recent decade, but maybe you’re even more extreme than I am.
If more serious crimes than relatively petty theft were committed, what were they? Was anyone killed, raped, or suffer grievous bodily injury? Did Saliva intentionally poison the drinking water in Flint or any other Michigan city or town, even allegedly? Did he or she drive recklessly in a stolen vehicle and cause a deadly and expensive multivehicle pileup on the highway? Were children buggered?
Perhaps, I’m taking a suggestion that wasn’t actually serious too seriously. I’m only mildly curious, although my attempt at further elucidation spun off into various other areas of personally greater for me interest.
* generate income, not plasma
Nothing ever makes everyone happy. Truly, nothing. There’s always somebody who will complain about anything whatsoever, regardless of what it is.
There are plenty of people who stupidly oppose the death penalty for even the most egregiously heinous criminals, totally ignoring every cost and risk of keeping them alive, the likelihood they will victimize additional people whenever escaped or released, via various communication methods made available to prisoners or smuggled in, their own attorneys, visitors and inmates and staff/contractors during the course of incarceration.
Those folks also ignore the numerous injuries, risks and costs to society when incarceration is way too cushy and the death penalty is far too rare and removed in time from committing offenses and being apprehended to seriously deter criminals, who generally underestimate their chances of being caught and may actually prefer being incarcerated due to instituonalization, viewing any periods in between as vacation trips before being sentenced to go back home to prison or having their vacation extended through various legal technicalities.
Even those who don’t actually prefer being in prison don’t fear it or the extremely rare death penalty nearly enough, particularly when weighed against their generally optimistic estimate of chances of being caught and imprisoned versus whatever benefits they get for committing crimes.
To be effective deterrents, prisons would need to be a lot more like medieval dungeons than like summer camp for career adult criminals as well as people who violated some idiotic bureaucratic regulations and didn’t actually victimize anyone at all. There are also the relatively few wrongly convicted. Wrong conviction for the specific crimes of which they are found guilty may or may not be very rare, but even in those cases the “wrongly convicted” are usually career criminals with many victims of crimes they did not get caught or convicted for.
This is even true in Russia, and even more so in the US.
Unfortunately, we live in an irrational world, where changing such illogical policies is extremely difficult, and a variety of institutional biases in many separate parts of an extremely complicated moving puzzle incentivize policy changes, if and when there are any, in precisely the wrong direction.
Russia is marginally better than the US, but the basic problems are fairly universal regardless of where you live. Effectively identifying and fixing public policy problems is way more difficult, complex, and too removed from the individual and those they personally know well in scale, by multiple orders of magnitude, than it should be.
Far more people are allowed to vote than ought to have such political power, their votes are kept secret so vote counts are easily falsified and they have zero personal accountability for the politicians they elect. For a large variety of reasons politicians escape personal responsibility for the policies they help implement as well, since they can point fingers at each other, bureaucrats, various people outside of government, etc, etc.
The system is very irrational when taken as a whole. I have directional proposals to radically simplify it, pare down its costs and scale, take most things out of government hands, etc , but how to implement those radical changes from the starting point where we are is far less clear.
https://innocenceproject.org
HOW MANY CORRUPT COPS/PROSECUTORS AND PLANTED/FALSE EVIDENCE ???
MVZ-
IRRATIONAL MINORITY RULE REGIMES FOR 6,000 PLUS YEARS OF RECORDED HISTORY —
ESP MONARCH / OLIGARCH REGIMES. AND ***FALSE/FAKE*** ***DEMOCRACY*** REGIMES —
OFTEN HAVING CIVIL WARS AND FOREIGN WARS (SOMETIMES AT SAME TIME].
USA CRISIS SINCE 1929 — TOO MANY LOOTERS OF GOVT TREASURIES LOOTING TOO MUCH
>>> USA/STATES/LOCALS DEBTS NOW ABOUT $ 50 TRILLION — TOTALLY IRRATIONAL AND IMPOSSIBLE TO SUSTAIN/GET WORSE.
—
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
Consider the other side of the ledger. How much does expensively coddling while incarcerated and wrongfully releasing dangerous criminals on endless technicalities, or due to capacity issues and refusing to consider different traditional alternative punishments besides incarceration discussed above, cost victims and society as a whole, directly as well as indirectly?
Then consider that if and when cops or prosecutors do plant evidence, it doesn’t nearly make up for wrongly excluded evidence, and is very rarely ever on generally innocent people. The vast majority of those who are convicted of crimes they didn’t commit have committed plenty of other crimes they didn’t get caught for or beat the rap on.
If you’ve never worked in law enforcement, it’s hard to fathom the level of that disparity. The scales are far more heavily weighed towards criminals not being caught, being released on technicalities, not being convicted, or just having no real fear, if any, of tax subsidized networking and continuing education at a college of criminal knowledge on an all expenses paid scholarship, much less a remotely unlikely death penalty years or decades later if all appeals fail.
They’re criminals – the chances they’ll die sooner and/or less pleasantly if NOT incarcerated, or even die from natural or unnatural causes before the state gets to carry out its death sentence, are in most cases significantly higher.
Or don’t consider any of that, and just mindlessly bleat innocence projection propaganda forever, whether you’re a bot or have just effectively made yourself the functional equivalent of one despite being an actual carbon based lifeform with human DNA.
If you’re capable of making choices, ie not mentally incompetent, that choice is yours. Actual bots and their humanoid imitators: I’m not addressing you, which of course means you’ll reply with an endless plethora of mindless sloganeering, change the subject, post a dozen fake news links, make irrelevant accusations, or any of the other limited range of tactics you always use.
Or, you might just do it preemptively. See 8:56 above for example. Long before I jumped in the conversation myself, Max responded to all those points repeatedly, and then at last after far too many attempts excluded any possibility of rational conversation or avoiding endless repetition, explicitly made clear nothing he writes going forward is directed at AZZ.
All of those screamed slogans are nonsense, and proving it yet again is a waste of time, since it makes zero difference in bot/fleshbot output of the same. If I were Max, I’d ignore it. I won’t give it a try either, since I can’t think of anything I could say that Max hasn’t already said many times over.
I happen to know Max, and he’s way smarter on this kind of stuff than me. I know a lot more about various other things he knows very little about – fashion and make-up, for example. I doubt he knows 1/100 as much as I do about the sex life rumors concerning various actors, pop music personalities, athletes, etc. He may not be smarter overall than I am – he’s even dumb enough to have suffered a significant business setback earlier this year for what was allegedly mistaken for sexual harassment of employees, resulting in the likely permanent loss and temporary unavailability of key people, forcing him to do a lot of work which he normally pays others to do, all despite never having committed or even alleged to have attempted a single act of marital infidelity in the process.
But, it could have been worse – in the US, he might well have been sued into bankruptcy. One silver lining was brushing up on what changed in the things his employees do since the last time he spent a lot of time doing it himself many years ago. This will probably make the rich old bastard even richer even sooner than otherwise. Maybe he wasn’t so dumb in joking around in politically incorrect ways, complimenting or constructively criticising their appearance, etc, with those female employees after all.
In the end, everyone is better off – they’ve found presumably more suitable employment, while his business profit and its demands on his personal time have achieved a more optimal balance for him, better chances on future optimization, and less vulnerabilities of being too reliant on a too limited number of women with thin skins and westernized ways of handling perceived problems they learned from consuming an excessive amount of western pop culture crap, much as I have, while being less immune to its corrosive sex and gender propaganda. Regardless of what all else Max is or isn’t dumb about, the chance of me succeeding where he didn’t in political discussion questions seems very remote.
If anyone who is not AZZ thinks 8:56 isn’t nonsense in whole or in part, tell me what you think is true there, and I’ll give it a shot, if you show any promise at all of not being a waste of time, and if I’m not too busy elsewhere. If possible, please rephrase it on something closer to English than Ingsoc Newspeak or partially translated machine language.
English is already a second language for me, so AZZspeak may be even harder to translate in my blonde brain for me than it is for you. I don’t know, since I am not you. But if you would be so kind as to translate for me, should we attempt this, I’d be much better equipped to attempt a reply. Russian would be even better if your Russian is good, but standard modern US or British English should be good enough, or at least far better than whatever AZ speaks. Keeping up and improving my skills in those dialects of that language is part of why I jumped in here, and keeping everything in English would make the conversation easier to follow for readers, should there happen to be any. While it’s quite easy to get the jist with free online translation resources these days, relatively few people want to spend the tiny bit of extra time, and simply scroll past instrsd
HOW MANY INNOCENT FOLKS CONVICTED WITH FAKE EVIDENCE AND KILLED BY DEATH PENALTY GOVTS —
ESP IN HIGH PROFILE CRIMES — ESP BLACKS IN OLDE SLAVE AND EX-SLAVE STATE REGIMES ???
Asked and answered. Does the number of times the same question is asked change something, or is the thing posting what it pretends are questions read responses before reposting its pretend questions? In fact, is it even capable of what humans consider reading? It’s output shows little evidence. It’s probably responding to keywords, not doing anything like what we call reading.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/
FINANCIAL ASSETS / LIABS-DEBTS OF ALL SECTORS
GOVTS HAVE SEPARATE FINANCIAL PARTS — FED RES SYS — SO-CALLED *MONETARY AUTHORITY* — AND GOVT PENSION SECTORS
NOOOO COMBINED ALL GOVTS AND ALL GOVT FINANCE PARTS TABLE
NOOOO NET WORTH FINANCIAL LINE IN ANY TABLE
NOOOO TABLE OF DEBTS BECOMING DUE — DAILY / WEEKLY / MONTHLY / QUARTERLY / HALF YEAR / YEAR / ETC.
NOT CLEAR HOW MUCH DEBT IS NOW ADJUSTED FOR NON-STOP INFLATION.
https://www.bea.gov/index.php/news/blog/2024-05-30/gross-domestic-product-second-estimate-corporate-profits-preliminary-estimate
USA GDP STATS – QT UPDATES – END OF MONTHS
GOVT TABLES 3.1 / 3.2 / 3.3
NOOOO REAL GDP / 18-65 POPULATION RATIO
They’re not questions. You were duped into thinking they were due to the use of what look like question marks. In fact, many translations from machine language frequently insert question marks where the translation to human does not compute.
That’s more likely what’s happening when the bot posts things with question marks, sometimes misleading people, especially new folks and foreigners, into mistaking its output for questions. However, don’t ever be fooled that it seeks answers, except as fodder for more nonsense output and or with the explicitly admitted goal of wasting as much of humans time as possible. Possible longevity is one place where bots have a leg up on us. We have limited lifespans, while theirs might go on for billions of years for all we or they know.
Also, it takes much more effort to adequately respond to bullshit than to produce it, particularly by an entity that is designed to make the process of feeding, digesting and excreting faster than humans are capable of even noticing in real time. And, since producing verbal bullshit and wasting human’s time is the sole reason these maliciously created bots exist, they have us at a disadvantage there too.
Hope this helps.
Thanks, answer man. I’ll try to remember to not mistake AZZenglish statements containing question marks for questions going forward.
@Vera Supernova
Saliba compounded his embezzlement and impersonation with repeated harassment, disruption of conventions, defamation (both slander and libel), etc.
The Detroit News gives a succinct idea of the sort of thing: https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/michigan/2023/05/08/shirtless-protest-lawsuit-highlight-michigan-libertarian-party-power-feud/70195191007/
My hyperbolic suggestion that Saliba gets the electric chair, was merely as a low-hanging pun since he’s after the LP’s state chair. But he does really need to be made to feel the consequences of his actions, since currently he is clearly reveling in his continued wrong-doing and boasting about it.
@MaxZim V Zaslon
“Even those who don’t actually prefer being in prison don’t fear it or the extremely rare death penalty nearly enough”
You would have to be clinically insane to prefer the US prison system to the death penalty. And in light of the recent Saratov scandal, I fear that may once again become true of the Russian prison system as well.
“There are also the relatively few wrongly convicted.”
On the contrary. The reason one should be very conservative with dishing out executions as they cannot be undone, and that putting the wrong person on death row – or sentencing political prisoners to death – seems to be a rather common occurrence these days.
But unless the prison system is considerably overhauled to put an end torture and rape by both in-mates and wardens, the death penalty is an act of mercy, certainly compared to life-sentences. And when I say the prison system needs to be considerably overhauled, I don’t mean instituting a cushy five-star hotel Scandinavian-style prison, which does nothing to protect against abuse but costs the taxpayer an arm and a leg. What we need are prisons a la Kin-dza-dza.
I just had burritos.
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2024/06/14/alex-gage-trailblazing-gop-strategist-dies-at-74-obituary/74102522007/
ONE LESS GERRYMANDER MONSTER — WITH MICRO TARGETS ???
https://www.yahoo.com/news/missouri-womans-murder-conviction-tossed-164344457.html
MERE 43 YEARS ILLEGALLY IN JAIL
ANY TROLL MORONS ILLEGALLY IN JAIL ???
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/06/15/chicago-pays-50m-to-4-wrongfully-imprisoned-convicted-for-73-years-marquette-park-police/74076897007/
ILLEGAL CONVICTIONS- CHITOWN
ANY TROLL MORONS ILLEGALLY IN JAIL VIA CHITOWN HACKS ???
Nunya, very interesting issues there. I started writing a reply yesterday and it’s turning quite literally book length. I’m not sure what to do with it, honestly. It keeps veering off into unrelated subjects, but I’m not sure I’ll do any better if I start over.
I don’t want to be rude to our host or anyone who would have to scroll and scroll and scroll past it, and I have no idea whether you would even read it. I wouldn’t want to impose the expectations.
Perhaps I’ll wait a bit until this thread is a few pages back to post it, then let you know I did on a more current thread by then. You’ll either find the time, or not. I won’t bother to edit to pare it down or remove irrelevant tangents, having already made several failed attempts.
Max, thank you for the draft copy. I have not read it all yet, but I can already tell, you need to make very clear if you publish it anywhere in any format, you need to make clear that some of it might be fiction and you will not identify what’s literally real and what’s not. I know you’re the last one to ever forget that the internet can never be perfectly anonymous regardless of how many extraordinary precautions you take.
If you ever got to the one part I know we don’t agree about, I have not made it that far yet.
Nunya, let me see if I can do better than Max at making a reply sufficiently concise. Like him, I have a tendency to describe e.g. War and Peace or Arkhipelag Gulag as light short casual reading, but that doesn’t mean I want to either write something of that length, publish it in comments here, or expect you to read it.
1. Like Max, I missed the electric chair pun. It’s much funnier now. Thanks for explaining. I suspected you may have been joking, but asked questions as if you were serious just in case.
2. Like Max, I think we should use the death penalty a lot more, and as you indicated at one point, it’s actually more humane than prisons. Much more importantly, it’s far more humane to everyone else – taxpayers, society, potential innocent victims, insurance customers, business owners, consumers, parents, victims/survivors, their friends, loved ones, neighbors, etc, etc.
3. It’s also more humane to the criminals and, yes, wrongly convicted people (very few truly innocent – it’s usually regular suspects who got away with many other crimes – but they exist, and of course there are many levels of criminal in their hierarchy) who have to be incarcerated together with them. Succinctly, for every inmate on inmate crime, caught, prosecuted, or convicted / punished or not, there’s both victims and victimisers.
4. It’s more humane to the law enforcement officers, justice administration / correction staff, court employees, attorneys, and everyone in any way dealing with dangerous criminals as part of their job.
5. It’s more humane to the dangerous criminals own family members.
6. It’s more humane to the victims of crimes outside of prisons which they continue to orchestrate while incarcerated through a variety of legal and illegal communication methods and proxies acting on their behalf. Most crime outside of prisons is directly or indirectly orchestrated this way in one way or another.
6. Within those institutions there’s also a hierarchy of criminals who prey on each other in various ways, create secret and not so secret organizations linked to ones outside of prisons, etc. Lifers are usually at the top of those pyramids.
7. You don’t have to be clinically insane to get institutionalized into accepting prison life as normal and, eventually, more normal than life outside. Rather than attempt to summarize or rewrite Maxim’s book in pprogress: look up institutionalization on how and why this happens. Consider how these criminals grew up, their prospects and risks outside prisons, etc, etc.
8. Many prisoners are in fact criminally insane. There’s no good place to put such people. Lunatic asylums don’t have adequate security to prevent escapes. Keeping them idle and socially isolated is the worst and most inhumane thing imaginable for their mental health, but putting them around any other humans is very inhumane to those other humans. They should also not be a burden on taxpayers, etc, etc. As Max says in the unpublished opus, the only logical solution is the one we use for equally badly behaved animals of other species. I don’t disagree with describing it as mercy killing.
9. Criminally insane prisoners can often pass as less dangerous criminals.
10. I agree with Max – Russian penal colony system is only marginally less bad than US prisons. The fundamental problems are the same.
11. Executions can’t be undone. But neither can any other type of sentence that could be imposed and its physical or psychological effects, intended or not. Criminals impose extrajudicial death penalties and many other kinds of penalties on innocent and not so innocent people far more than society executes prisoners. Please consider balancing the ledger in calculating the costs, risks, and benefits of each as we are suggesting.
12. I did suggest some other penalties, which I think should not be outlawed or unusual anymore, but some people can’t be alive and free anywhere without too many costs and risks to others, and incarcerating them anywhere also creates above dilemmas.
13. Making the perfect the enemy of the less bad has terrible consequences. Everyone will die. Many of us, especially criminals, will die in far worse ways than death penalties.
I can keep going, but I see why the Max opus got to be as long as it did, and this is also already far too long, with no end in sight.
The one area I disagree with Max; he does not want revenue generation from prisoners to be profitable for the state or for private contractors; he fears perverse incentives to make sure there continue to be more and not fewer. Maybe he’s right, but I don’t think so.
I think we all three agree that when and where prisons continue to exist they should be much harsher places. The question of disagreement is what to do in the meantime about prisons vs death penalty, other penalties, etc, and how to get from here to there.
Vera, of course you know we’ve talked about this, but since you mention it for our audience, if any:
“The one area I disagree with Max; he does not want revenue generation from prisoners to be profitable for the state or for private contractors; he fears perverse incentives to make sure there continue to be more and not fewer. Maybe he’s right, but I don’t think so.”
Why wouldn’t it create perverse incentives, regardless of whether those making their living off it are private contractors or government employees? How could it not?
Vera: thank you for your advice. I haven’t decided what if anything to do with the rambling opus. If it gets published here at any point, please consider it so stipulated.
If you didn’t read to that point already, I discuss how imperfect my memory is , well into it. No one should assume anything autobiographical is or isn’t accurate – I’m certainly not going to try to prove any part, and intend to remain pseudonymous.
If anyone is skeptical of any part of anything I claim about myself, that’s fine: I really shouldn’t be talking about myself anyway. Sometimes it’s helpful to my point, but conversely, too many hints dropped carelessly here and there might create situational difficulties, given some of the ideas I have floated here in various discussions.
In case you had not realized this, although you most likely did: Nuna is a Spanish English double entendre for “none of your business”. A wise approach, and I’ll do my best to not pry about anything at all. Given your US employment history, you probably understood the reference immediately.
Spanish is fairly well down my list of languages – after Russian and English, next best are German and French, then Italian and Greek – for anyone who considers Ukrainian a language (it’s really a regional dialect, slightly exaggerated on purpose) I can understand that well enough. Hebrew, Latin, Arabic, etc may be on the same level as Spanish – let’s call it not good, LOL.
I’m curious whether Nuña has a meaning in Spanish or otherwise outside of the English double entendre, but I’ll look it up myself, as I did promise not to pry.
I’m thinking perhaps a series of comments by “Max’s prison journal during my week awaiting execution” …or something. Or nothing.
Per Google translate, it is not an actual word in Spanish or Portuguese. Off hand, I don’t know any other languages it could be in. Google did not detect a language when that part isn’t selected.
Lastly for now, I’ll confirm I agree with Vera at 11:11, aside from our one area of disagreement. I don’t think her opinion on that is out of self interest; I have reasons to not think so which I don’t know if she would want me to mention, so I won’t.
I think she knew I already alluded to what she discussed about my recent business reorganization above on the 14th at 9:54 pm in previous thread(s), so she wasn’t revealing secrets.
Regarding “rich old bastard”: each word is relatively true, and relatively false. In the literal sense, the last is false, but it’s rarely used that way in English anymore. If mid 60s is your idea of old, I am. If it isn’t, I’m not. I’m no oligarch by any means, but I’m blessed by the grace of God, far more than I deserve or ever expected, and rarely have to work hard to maintain such economic status as I enjoy anymore. I worked hard, and I’d like to think smart, to get to that point, for decades, but many other people did too, less successfully.
The last few months were an exception, in terms of work hours, which was mostly my fault, and I’ve turned it to my advantage as described. I agree that everyone involved is now almost certainly happier. My wife forgave me, with entirely appropriate delay and encouragement to do better, my former employees at least formally accepted my apologies and excellent employment references, I received church counseling, have asked God for forgiveness, etc. I learned a lot, about any number of things.
I don’t share Vera’s assessment of my political expertise. She’s at the least every bit as astute in such things as me, and has far more common sense. She’s entirely correct that she knows a great deal more than me about the other topics she mentioned where she’s far more expert, among many others. Some of those are not ones in which women might ordinarily be expected to know much more than men in most cases, although those were not any of the examples she mentioned. She is definitely not a dumb blonde, regardless of any claims otherwise. She’s very smart.
@MaxZim V Zaslon, cc. Vera
Don’t worry about making a long post. I fear I have developed a tendency towards unnecessary verbosity myself. I can’t guarantee that I will give you either a swift or an exhaustive reply, but I will read what you have to say.
I am a paleolibertarian/anarcho-capitalist (think Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Vaclav Benda, Hans-Hermann Hoppe), so if there must be prisons at all, then I would fundamentally prefer to have them privatized. Running them for profit would take the burden off the tax payer, but as you point out, it also creates perverse incentives to imprison people and exploit them as slave labor.
I am going to be the infamous “fence-sitter” between you and Vera, in that I believe your concern is justified but I still think generating revenue should be possible.
What if for instance, prisoners would have to pay for their own food and care, but were allowed to keep the rest of what they earned? Maybe they could spend it on books or something to make their cell more comfortable, or maybe send it home to their loved ones or save it up for when they are released. At any rate, it would be remove the incentive to exploit prisoners for free labor, and at the same time they would also not be a burden on the tax payer.
I respect your wish for pseudonymity, which I share. “Nuña” is one of my very many different online pseudonyms, but the only one I use on BAN and IPR. I came up with it on short notice when I was foolishly campaigning for my state’s GOP in 2020. First and foremost, it indeed stands for “None of your (business)”; but secondarily, it also pays homage to Queen Nuña of Asturias, mother of the first emperor of Spain, and to the Slavic hypocorism «Нуня».
I don’t consider “Ukrainian” a language. It has 70% the same vocabulary as Polish and 62% the same as Russian. So at best it is Polonized Russian, and at worst it is one of the many east Polish regional dialects but written in Cyrillic.
@Vera Supernova, cc. Max
You also please feel free to write as much or little as you like. I will be happy to read it; though again, I cannot promise I will give either a fast or a complete response. If you want I can try to respond in Russian, though I fear that my English and German are by now grown better – or rather less bad – than my Russian and Polish.
I strongly disagree with you and Max that there are few wrongly convicted people, especially under totalitarian regimes like “Ukraine” and “China”, or the erstwhile Soviet Union. And I fear the United States is heading in that same direction rapidly – e.g. the J6 hostages.
As I hinted at earlier, when Putin announced the investigation into the Saratov scandal, my faith in the Russian prison system was also deeply shaken, and I now fear that without drastic improvements, it too will revert to something akin to the abusive Soviet Gulag system.
When I said that what we need are prisons as in the movie Kin-dza-dza, I was only partially joking. For those who haven’t seen or don’t remember: prisoners are kept in relative isolation, in ones and twos, laying inside a sort of mining-carts with lids. They are somewhat cramped, but not as bad as the small boxes North Korea uses to slowly mutilate inmates through misgrowth.
The movie being a movie, does not go into how often they are taken out to exercise, eat and drink. But given how many of the abuses in real-life prisons come from fellow inmates – the rest coming from corrupt wardens – the isolation cell is already the best and safest place to be.
If there must be prisons at all – which is an idea that I am not comfortable with – then let them be purely in the form of solitary confinement. And with strict overview of the wardens, to avoid scenarios like The Green Elephant. Because that is where we are currently at: we are living in The Green Elephant, when we should be living in Kin-dza-dza.
You suggested some alternative penalties to death or imprisonment, some of which I agree with – such as exile at personal expense following restitution – others….less so – some forms of public humiliation. But in general, I think that is the direction in which to look for criminal justice reform, rather than either risking wrongful and irreversible executions, or costly and inhuman incarcerations.
I understand that in Czechia, repeat rapists and child molester are currently sentenced to chemical castration. That is all good and well, but why wait for repetition and why stop at a reversible chemical castration? I would suggest that anyone proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be a rapist or a child molester, instead be mechanically and therefore irreversibly castrated – at their own expense! – after their first transgression. And by all means, give them the option to be euthanized if they prefer – again at their own expense. Does that not seem fair?
And what do you think of my suggestion that prisoners be allowed to keep what they earn from hard labor, after they have paid off the restitution to their victims and fully financed their own incarceration?
Perhaps they could even spend the money they make that way on books or something to make their isolation cell a little less uncomfortable. Alternatively, they could send it home to their loved ones or save it up for when they have served their sentence.
Nunya , in that case, I’ll just go ahead and publish what I have thus far, if the site will even accept a comment of that length. It’s extremely rambling, very poorly edited, unfinished at the end, and you saw my stipulations. I’m not hunting for a reply to it. I try to put some things into consideration or perspective. More like things to stew on for a while than to pick apart. If it’s headed toward any sort of conclusion, it’s nowhere close to that yet. I don’t think I’ve even hit my main points yet. And this isn’t it, lol.
Neither Vera nor I advocate prisoners ever being a burden to taxpayers. They must always cover the expense of their upkeep, provide restitution to identified victims and a general victim fund, fund law enforcement and court costs. If they generate further revenue past that, it should overcompensate victims.
Vera somewhat agrees, but sees room for profit for law enforcement, courts, administration of sentence – neither of us is a fan of prisons of any sort, particularly modern ones. She means things like entertainment value of public live audience and broadcast live as well as shareable video later executions, pay per view in any method, and the same of corporal punishment; various ways of victims or surviving family profiting off the offenders as their personal slaves until multiple times restitution and mafia style compounding interest is paid, if it ever is; selling body parts, organs, blood, plasma, use in experiments, etc, etc.
Neither of us would advocate criminals profiting off their incarceration. I’m leery of her suggestions for 3-10x multipliers with interest compounding constantly on top of interest, interest paid before principal. I think this type of greed, even while understandable by those who have been legitimately wronged, and by law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, sentence administration staff, etc, who naturally feel they don’t have nearly the resources to adequately fight crime at any level (and with ample justification), predictably leads to finding ways to create more criminals and crime to profit from, even if those are not immediately obvious at first.
Once the incentive is created, ways to satisfy it can be found. Prison corporations make good and reliable profits, as do any number of outside companies hiring prisoners at pittance pay or providing any number of services to prisons – phones, snack vending, various types of property prisoners are allowed, and many more.
These also exist in government administered prisons. In those, staff are typically unionized government employees. Obviously, they want job security, and have the natural tendency of bureaucracy to always want more and more complexity, employees, paperwork, cost, etc, etc.
Any of these models or past ones – convict leasing, etc – create many jobs, or investment income, which depends on the availability of convicts not to drop, especially dramatically, and benefits if the opposite happens.
I see no way to create a profit motive for any part of legitimate society off criminals and their punishment without over time creating opportunities for various ways to ensure that profit doesn’t diminish, jobs don’t go away, etc. Whether government, private, mix thereof, even victims and families directly – nothing good comes of this.
The goal of law enforcement and justice systems must be to minimize crime. By crime I mean real crimes with real victims; not violating any of an endless. constantly changing plethora of laws and regulations no one can reasonably be expected to understand, memorize, know if or how they violated, etc.
Whatever drastically reduces the overall amount of instances and severity of real crimes and real victims, and leads to reducing it over time, is overall more humane than alternatives, even if it includes some unjust executions and punishments of any other sort allowed. Far more injustice and inhumanity results from error in the other direction!
Types of criminal punishment discussed other than incarceration create much less need for sentence administration staff and contractors and anyone else making a living or profit off the process, so incarceration seems to me least optimal overall.
This is getting painfully long again.
…
I don’t know why I didn’t think of the Russian name. The obvious is often overlooked. I’ll have to look up the Spanish queen.
You are correct about the Ukrainian dialect. It’s status as a language, much as an ethnic group or nation, is contrived propaganda, created to attack, divide and conquer us.
I’d prefer we keep everything in English. It’s more respectful to anyone else who may wish to read and jump in at any time. If you ever have any part you’d more easily express in Russian, neither of us would particularly mind, but it doesn’t sound like that would be the case. Hopefully you’ll agree Vera and I are fluent in English; it’s the most well understood language we all share, or could presume anyone else here to share.
Vera, like me, has lived and worked in the UK and US, and additionally she was a US Citizen for decades, while I’ve maintained many business and personal contacts, through all communication methods and in person, in or from those countries since the 1980s. Some people here have said my English sucks, but I have too many separate opinions to the contrary over the years to believe them.
Rather, I edit poorly, leave in too many typos, errors of grammar, ramble, go off on tangents, etc, in any language.
I think I’d prefer to continue to reply in English even if you decide to practice your Russian in reply to me.
Anyway, let me at least attempt to post the opus before tackling the c.c, keeping in mind it’s not at all finished, but may never be at this rate.
Nunya,
Thank you for clarifying that the electric chair suggestion was hyperbolic. I missed the pun, and it’s much funnier now.
I think my friend Vera took the suggestion as possibly serious, as I did, since we’re both big advocates of making the death penalty far more common by multiple orders of magnitude (fewer orders if the deterent is highly effective as we expect – perhaps even as rare or even more rare than it is currently one day, but I don’t expect to get there quickly, if at all).
I suppose a better way to put it is that death should be a far more common criminal penalty than the current model of incarceration, which has been a massive failure in deterring crime, reforming people (if it does, it’s generally in the direction of being far more dangerous and destructive criminals when they come out than when they went in) or anything else positive.
The vast majority of convicts who get released or serve out their sentence end up back in prison, many multiple times, and for many it doesn’t take very long. Since criminals generate many additional victims for each time they get caught and convicted, how many victims does the current system of incarceration as the primary system of dealing with criminals end up resulting in?
We are all victims to varying extents of the ripple effect their crimes have on society. I can expand on this later if you wish. The extent of this is not nearly appreciated enough by most people, who don’t come close to appreciating how much it costs us in how many direct and indirect ways.
The observable fact is that many criminals are not very scared of going to prison, or of going to prison again (and again and again). For many, it is their retirement plan. Some are quite honest in admitting they commit crimes which have a very high chance of being caught and drawing a long sentence – nonviolent bank robbery with a note and no weapon, for instance – on purpose to be incarcerated.
They feel at home there, they miss the structure and their friends and networks of fellow criminals, their basic needs are guaranteed to be taken care of (unlike outside prison, where that can be a constant struggle, particularly with a criminal history, criminal temperament, few noncriminal skills, substance and other addictions, etc).
The very things you think deters any sane criminals – sexual violence and assault, physical assault, sexual extortion, etc – are actually a draw for some. After all, for each victimization, there is a victimiser as well, and they appreciate having their victims delivered to them and unable to escape, and a system they know quite well how to navigate in order to habitually get away with such crimes and many others while incarcerated.
The victims might underestimate the extent of how often these things happen in prison. Or they may underestimate their chances of being the victims rather than the victimizers. That’s on top of other strategies to be on the side of that they would rather be on, such as joining prison gangs, being of some value higher than whatever they’re worth as rapemeat and prostitute-slaves, etc.
They might act as foot soldiers of prison gang leaders to carry out violent assaults and murders, or arrange facilitating various ways to help get various forms of contraband into prisons, conive myriad schemes to generate and direct profit into prison books or outside accounts, etc, etc. Far from being rare, most criminal activity outside prisons is directed by prisoners in one way or another, and prisoners doing life sentences are generally at the top of those hierarchies.
You say only the criminally insane would wish to be in prison. No, for some it’s quite rational – look up institutionalized – but…
Many people in prisons, yours and ours, are in fact criminally insane. There’s no good solution other than the one normally used for equally badly behaved animals of other species for what to do with such people.
What are the alternatives? Vera listed some, which I also think should be brought back as common forms of criminal punishment and deterence. However, with many criminals, being alive and unconfined anywhere is an excessive risk and cost to Noncriminal victims.
So, where can they be confined?
Lunatic asylums rarely have sufficient security to adequately prevent escapes or attacks on other inmates or staff, especially if the inmates are also allowed to work to offset the costs of their housing, feeding, medication, etc., and because being continuously held in isolation and idle is the worst possible thing for mental health, even among people with unusually good mental health for the incarcerated to begin with, and worse yet for the personality types most likely to experience incarceration.
If anything is maximally cruel to the typical criminally insane person, it’s to be kept alive for a long time, idle and socially isolated. Keeping them around other potential victims, on the other hand, may be pretty nice for them, but not so nice to those being welcomed to the mental asylum or penal colony in such fashion or on the lower end of the convict or lunatic social pecking order and thus habitually subjected to every type of abuse criminally insane individuals can think of.
Those younger/weaker/less violent criminals may have never done anything nearly that bad to others at that point in their lives, and if it’s mental asylum patients instead, they may have done nothing wrong at all.
Even if it’s just the criminally insane in perfect isolation from anyone else, some are worse than others, and will develop a violence hierarchy somehow. And many of them can mask themselves for periods of time as less dangerous types, so such perfect isolation is not practically possible. At least some of their victims have in fact done the same many times to others, although in most cases not convicted of it.
Both the victims and perpetrators in prisons oftentimes began to experience habitual sexual abuse, habitual physical violence, habitual psychological abuse, and even habitual sexual violence as children.
Many get used to offering up situational/survival/extorted/blackmailed sex at a very young age. Many start to perpetuate all the abuse types as children as well, particularly against other children and animals.
Many start to experience periods of institutional confinement as children, which normalizes it for them sooner or later – in quite a few cases, the secure housing and other survival necessities, organised chores, regimented schedule, constant socializing etc, even the various forms of punishment they get used to, are normal, and life outside is less so, or less and less so each time they’re released.
Not only that, but the outside world has changed a great deal, in ways they often don’t appreciate enough until released. They don’t fit in where they used to, many new things and ways of doing things seem alien to them – they have a need, consciously or subconsciously, to go back home before too long – back home to the “penitentiary” – a laughable name these days.
I’m not a fan of excessive cruelty for its own sake or as a form of noncorrective punishment or retribution, but, even far more importantly to me, it victimizes taxpayers to keep them alive in such conditions.
It also victimizes and revictimizes victims – the surviving victims of their crimes or surviving friends, family, neighbors, etc, who must live with the fact that this person is alive, will or might one day escape or get released, can exact revenge and commit more crimes through directing, paying, or extorting others on the outside, can extort them, etc; as discussed, other prisoners, prison staff and contractors, victims of their ongoing schemes outside prison, prison visitors, even their own lawyers.
I don’t think it’s entirely true that one would have to be clinically insane to prefer being incarcerated. For starters,there are two sides to the prison rape coin: for every victim,there’s at least one perpetrator. For the perpetrators, it’s not a terrible deal. They may or may not prefer an opposite sex victim, or they may not care.
In any case, they will make do with what they can get. Letting them loose on society would merely cause their habitual rape, habitual sex extortion, and habitual victims be someone besides fellow convicts. I think it’s far more humane to everyone else to put such people out of all other people’s misery, and I suppose I’m abnormal in our insane modern world in caring about being humane to taxpayers, surviving victims, surviving family members, potential victims, crime impacted communities, fellow convict victims of worse criminals, etc, than I am about being maximally humane to the absolute worst criminal convicts, which is the perverse incentive structure of soft on crime policies.
Unfortunately, our politicians and justice systems consider the death penalty to be more inhumane than incarceration. They should, even if being humane to perpetrators is more important to them than justice to and safety of victims, surviving family of victims, residents of high crime areas, potential victims anywhere, minor criminals who find themselves locked up with and targeted for sexual violence and other abuse by worse criminals, law enforcement and institutional staff, etc, etc, at least give convicts the option of being executed over being incarcerated. Would that at least not be more humane?
I tend to think, apparently like you, that if given the choice, I’d take a relatively quick and relatively not bad (when compared to the way many people, especially those who end up with prison sentences, otherwise end up dying) death over being subjected to sexual and other violence, including repeated forced or extorted sodomy and the prison equivalent of habitual domestic violence, or joining a prison gang so I can do those things to others as opposed to having them done to me, or both.
And I would then prefer to have them get on with it instead of dragging things out with some execution date down the road or bothering with appeals etc. Yes, even if I was innocent.
I wouldn’t want to be victimized by criminals, who would quickly sniff out that I’m unlike them. They’re physically stronger. They are more vicious and underhanded. They are far more ruthless, etc. Competing on their terms doesn’t seem plausible. If not all my assets were confiscated or frozen, they could extort me. But that might not take long – you give them a little, they demand more, until there’s nothing left in short enough order.
How would I generate enough continuing income to make paying them off viable? My legal businesses would suffer from my physical unavailability, and I’d have limited ability to direct things adequately through limited legal and illegal communication methods, the latter highly unreliable given propensity to be confiscated as contraband.
My time availability might also be unpredictable, for instance if the contraband devices were discovered and I’d be cut off from both legal and illegal communication for a period of time as administrative punishment. I might be forced to liquidate everything, resulting in very limited shelf life for paying them off as a means to save my ass.
I’m uninterested in participating in their criminal schemes and helping them victimize more people. I’d probably have some skills that could help them with those, particularly given criminal tutelage, but I’m a very latecomer to their games if I broke my ethics so egregiously – thus, quite likely the sacrificial pawn to reduce their sentences, avoid them being extended, get more privileges, etc. This doesn’t sound very promising as a means of avoiding sodomic slavery either.
It’s unlikely that physical violence would be my solution. I’m not going to beat up a muscle bound, heavily scarred and tattooed, underhanded, vicious, violent thug with extreme anger management and likely mental health issues, drug addiction, a horribly violent upbringing, and a lifetime of continuing education and practice in physical violence who’s a third or half my age. He’s going to beat me up.
At best, I might get the drop on him and stab him to death. That obviously has negative consequences, even if I were to twist myself into believing it justified under the circumstances. Regardless, his buddies will be right there, and mine would be far away.
What else would I offer? Helping them with filling out various letters, legal forms, and things of that nature, perhaps. I’m not sure that would be enough. These people are scum, and know how to get everything they can out of you. They can extort or beat or rape information out, then leverage that.
They can threaten my family, friends and neighbors with harm in order to get whatever they want, then have their associates outside visit all those people and extort them as well. They can extort and threaten them into being their slaves, too, and then extort and threaten me into some idiotic involvement in their schemes, whereupon I become the sacrificial pawn as mentioned earlier, and/or make me a prostituted sex slave to them and their kind, while doing the same to everyone they got to outside thanks to me.
The fact that I can think of all these scenarios, not even being a criminal, means people who are career criminals can certainly think of them, get together with each other in their closely shared living and working environment, communicate with their friends outside through their legal and illegal communication methods, and over time figure out how to get all or a lot of that to happen.
It’s just not plausible that I’ll outsmart lifelong criminals, criminal networks, prison gangs, and people who grew up and spent the bulk of their lives in such places when it comes to playing by their rules. I’m neither willing nor capable of living that life, much less being better at it then they are.
This is even despite having, in a sense, grown up in prison myself. But only in the sense that the USSR was one giant prison. Obviously, it had many higher security units, like any big prison. But, I’ve been out of prison, living a very different life, for entirely too long to be successful in a penal colony today, in the way the convicts measure it.
So, state, kill me, quickly. What other options? Suicide is an eternity life sentence in hell. Solitary confinement is hell on earth. So is life as a noncriminal in a penal colony.
I suppose I’m wrong here. If I have the choice of prison and appeals instead, choosing the death penalty is still essentially suicide, albeit assisted. Explicitly making that choice will not save me from eternal damnation.
In such a case, it would be far more just and humane to me, the wrongly convicted man, to give me one and only one option, and carry it out quickly, without any appeals or schedule delays: death penalty. In that case, I have not chosen to die; I was wrongfully killed, but for the greater good of others.
We all have to die sooner or later, and many deaths leave zero time to make any arrangements, or are preceded by horrible physical and mental torture, illness, decline, etc, etc. Many deaths are random and meaningless, slow and painful, etc, etc. Being wrongfully executed for greater social good is far from the worst way to die. But please, administer the sentence expeditiously.
I imagine the waiting is much worse than when the time, place and manner are certain and imminent, and am quite sure that would be the case for me in such a situation. If they did drag it out, prayer would become an increasingly exclusive focus, and none of it would be for any stay or delay of execution.
I’ve never been very scared of death, although I’ve never sought it either – but the eventuality and chances are a normal thing to me. Unlike many fellow conscripts, I didn’t need to drink alcohol excessively or even habitually every day, even in small amounts, to mentally handle the stress of possible imminent death.
I certainly drank, and sometimes more than I should have, but very, very rarely to any severe stupor, loss of memory, loss of bodily function control, more than casual slurring and stumbling, passing out, or other symptoms of not knowing or caring about one’s alcohol tolerance limits. I’ve never experienced shaking, hallucinations, or other such alcohol withdrawal symptoms or require a maintainence drink to avoid them.
Such things were quite common in our unit in Afghanistan, as was illegal drug use, which I never even tried or felt tempted to. I accepted that death was a very real possibility, at some times more than others, prayed, and did my job reasonably well, or at least well enough to avoid reprimand.
I was much more scared of the also real possibilities of severe bodily injury or capture by the enemy – it was all too obvious what they habitually do to their women, children, and domesticated animals. We weren’t very nice to the ones we captured either, but they were significantly worse than us by comparison.
I personally never committed any war crimes, unless you count not reporting the ones I witnessed; any jihadi who would refuse to take part in theirs would no doubt be considered a deviant and traitor by their perverse standards, and treated accordingly. I trust it’s clear enough what that would entail.
The consequences for me, then a slave of the communist borg, would have been quite similar had I reported the crimes of others. Given that the Soviet Union routinely covered up crimes – war crimes by my fellow Red Army slave soldiers naturally among those – its far more likely that the war criminals would have faced no consequences had I reported them, or I would have faced worse consequences for my squealing than they would have for such lovely actions as killing, torturing, disfiguring, maiming, and severely beating captured Jihadis, as well as raping and doing all those other things to their captured women.
For those very unfortunate ladies, the killing, when they weren’t cruelly left alive, was the only novel part. They had been through all the other parts of that all their lives, multiple times over, ever since they were children. When my scumbag comrades killed them, those truly were mercy killings.
Nevertheless, I had both a legal and ethical duty to report these criminals. I failed in those duties, choosing self preservation over honor and justice. Like everyone else who didn’t participate but was aware of what all was happening, I failed in those duties. Their failure to blow the whistle isn’t an excuse for mine.
It’s not that we, as a country, had any lack of laws; it’s that we had a criminal government which made a farce and mockery of its own laws, and intentionally so. As a means to cruelly condition its slaves – everyone, the people at the top certainly being no exception – to play their part in its cruel machinery of universal oppression and mutual victimization. As a means to put everyone into impossible dilemmas continuously and teach them that there is no justice. To accept and adopt the unofficial criminal law and criminal code of ethics which was the real national law which hid behind the mask of the official laws. To take their place not only in the fatally inefficient soviet economic order, but also in the relatively more efficient illegal economy which provided just enough lubricant and juice to the creaking engine of the Marxist economy to keep us from far worse consequences like our parents and grandparents lived through, if not even worse than that. To keep the failed soviet state on life support by illegal means. The soviet prison was run by criminals – criminal inmates (ordinary citizens), criminal inmate gangs, corrupt and criminal guards, all the way to the top.
It offered us the same benefits and detriments, for the most part, that prisons offer inmates – guaranteed work and basic necessities, security from the consequences of laziness, bad attitudes, perpetually stealing anything not nailed down and many things which were at every workplace, chronic drunkenness, and every other reason employees get fired or do better to avoid being fired in saner countries. Order, structure, punishments, routines. In exchange for freedom, civil liberties, privacy, ethics, a chance to excel through hard work and competition.
Ever since this criminal system collapsed, we’ve had numerous recidivists calling to bring it back. I don’t know how trustworthy they are, but at least some studies indicate it may be more of us than not. To be fair, our transition to capitalism was far from smooth or optimal. Nowadays, it’s either old people who only want to remember the good parts, or everyone else who were children or not yet born then, and are being fed idealized propaganda about the past.
But fundamentally, it’s the same as prison recidivism. They mainly just want three hots and a cot, some booze or heroin to numb them out, any kind of holes into which they can insert their penis or vice versa, guaranteed job security, guaranteed retirement, not having to work hard, etc – in return, they are quite willing to trade away all the freedoms and opportunities they feel no need for, and resent anyone else having out of envy and spite. Quality, variety , choices etc, these are what they sacrifice. Crabs in a bucket writ large.
Their presence among us – the criminally insane yet completely logical in a perverse way – Soviet prison state recidivists – both offends me profoundly and is completely understandable, logical, and unsurprising at the same time. I don’t know how to describe it well. I escaped a life sentence I was born with by the grace of God, and made a great life for me and my family which not one person in the USSR could have possibly had.
We have so many things now that didn’t exist then. I’m still amazed with wonder every day at this bounty. And these idiots want to go back to prison, put me, my kids and grandkids, and everyone else back in that prison for life. And yet, I understand them implicitly and completely. Their screwed up perspective does not need to be explained to me. I already understand fully. A few different choices in life, and I may have been one of them.
The concept of institutionalized personality is more than academic to me – I’ve studied the scholarship, but also have enough personal background to grok the recidivist mindset. Thank God I found a better path in life and did not go down that one, but it gives me much better insight into those who did and do.
Since then?
I’ve faced the nontrivial possibility of imminent or fairly short term death from disease a handful of times, and was never too much of a crybaby about it. Prayer and the practical details of making business arrangements for the eventuality, visits from friends and family, religious studies and counseling – they got me through it, and God spared me from His death penalty each time, although I know with certainty the sentence will eventually be carried out – only not when.
It’s just that I get to live somewhere incalculably better than a Penal colony or the prison nation I was born in while I await my eventual execution. Much as with war, with disease, and now, with onsetting old age, I fear crippling and debilitating mental and physical decline much more than death.
With death, I am more concerned for my family than me. I trust in the Lord’s mercy for my sins, and if I am found guilty and get what those sins deserve, I can’t claim to be innocent. If I am sentenced only to time already served, I will be overfilled with joy and wonder at God’s unfathomable compassion.
In any case, back in my fictional cell awaiting execution at dawn, I’ve come to peace with the perverse justice. While I was wrongly convicted of the heinous crime for which I will lose my life, I got away with not reporting war crimes I witnessed over 40 years ago.
Not reporting legally and ethically made me complicit. The perpetrators legally and ethically qualified for the death penalty. My complicity qualifies me as well. The sentence is correct after all – I’m merely being executed for the wrong crime, much belatedly.
We have all done things which qualify. How many women have I raped? Well, lust is the same as fornication and adultery. By that standard, not only did I make a lifelong mockery of my marriage vows, but I never asked for consent before undressing thousands – could it be over a million yet? – women with my eyes in my head.
Certainly, they couldn’t have all wanted me to. I did it anyway, not caring the least bit about what they wanted, only what I wanted to do to them, which I then proceeded to do, giving them no mercy or reprieve. I enjoyed the screaming, not knowing or caring whether it was from pleasure, pain, horror, or some strange mix.
I committed all these horrible crimes only in my mind, but that doesn’t matter. At the very least, some of them must have known or guessed what I was thinking, and at least some of them must have wanted me to stop, but I always finished sooner or later. I mentally hit pause, did something else in my head until they were somewhere else, then watched the rest of the clandestine video.
Even that may be whitewashing my memory. I was worse when I was younger, especially when I was single. I probably never hit pause. Or at least far less consistently. If ever. The memories have long since faded and become hazy and inexact. What I remember is probably falsified to paint me in a much better light than I deserve. Comparing memories with photographs, I wasn’t nearly as good looking back then as I remember. It’s thus likely that I didn’t inspire nearly as many equally pornographic thoughts in their heads as I deluded myself to believe.
A smile, wave and hello from a girl was all it would take to firmly believe she was throwing herself at me like a wanton woman and begging me to do all those things I had so much mental practice doing. Years later, that memory might have turned to us groping each other in real life, when it may have just been a hug and peck on the cheek, if even that. Half a century later, meeting each other as grandparents, she might chide me that she knew nothing of such things at that age, and is shocked that I thought otherwise.