This is an actual thing that right wingers believe: That if the government just starts mass executing people and doesn’t stop, everything will be fine. Better than ever, even.
If you break this down, it’s quite a doozy. They are implying/claiming something like:
leftists control all governments and legal systems
Not a good start, obviously untrue, but that’s one of the premises their post is operating on.
zero downsides to executing violent criminals
To be a criminal just means breaking the laws of a particular governmental entity that enforces laws and then you are only a criminal in the context of that government (or governments, if it breaks the laws of more than one).
To be a violent criminal vaguely just means you break the law and use violence in the process of breaking the law, whether to commit a violent crime or to resist arrest through violence. (Though the particulars of what “violent criminal” means legally may vary.)
So in vaguery of practice, “executing” a “violent criminal” could just mean murdering (without trial) someone who is resisting arrest and then calling their resistance violence after the fact. The end result of which is, if you don’t like the prevailing laws and oppose them, you could face being gunned down without a trial.
The person saying this, however, says it won’t happen because
leftists control all governments and legal systems
So it is implied they oppose every government and legal system in the world (what they claim it is), making them akin to a criminal by their own sense of priorities. And so if said governments were to arrest them and they resisted, I suppose they would want that government to gun them down as a “violent criminal”?
I’m sure they think they aren’t a criminal or violent, but this is effectively where their reasoning takes them. Some people (usually rightists, it seems) are very confused about what criminal even means, whether on purpose or on accident. Criminality has more to do with the structure and interests of a base of power than it has anything to do with morality or ethics, inherently. Laws are morally agnostic, in the sense that they can have to do with what is moral or ethical, but they don’t necessarily. Furthermore, some laws are incredibly immoral and unethical to some people, and are ethical and acceptable to others.
Violence is one that’s more commonly agreed on, but more in the abstract than in practice. In practice, what defines something as unjustified violence vs. justified violence gets muddied fast by the structure and interests of the predominant base of power. For example, a US court will happily lock away a black person accused of doing violence to another person, while letting a (usually white person) who heads up mass violence against another country do whatever they want and even rehabilitate their image through talk show circuits. It is an infantile level of analysis (which is insulting to infants, tbh, at least they are too young to know better) to look at the world merely as crime and punishment for crime, and go no further.
Far more analysis than this deserved
Yeah, what a waste of perfectly good dialectical materialism =P
Given the topic, it seems like he wants legal extra-judicial executions, rather than the government (who is, after all, controlled by leftists) doing anything.
Extrajudicial murder normally makes you a violent criminal, so clearly to him a violent criminal isn’t just someone that commits a violent crime, or a matter that should be determined by law. Like a lot of right-wingers, he seems to view being a criminal is an immutable characteristic (often race associated, like in the case that started that discussion) that represents your depravity and immorality, and being violent is just the worst of that sort. You’re a violent criminal not because of the law, but because it’s just who you are (and therefore something no rehabilitation or mental health help could solve).
Precisely. “Kill the criminals” “What’s a criminal” “Whatever I say it is”
So in vaguery of practice, “executing” a “violent criminal” could just mean murdering (without trial) someone who is resisting arrest and then calling their resistance violence after the fact. The end result of which is, if you don’t like the prevailing laws and oppose them, you could face being gunned down without a trial.
When the definition of “violence” could mean anything from an armed robbery to throwing your phone on the ground or raising your voice, this is pretty clearly just a “Kill all the [x] people” fantasy. Guarantee this guy isn’t expecting most of the executions to be white men.
The British Empire had like a hundred different capital crimes at one point. It did not prevent all crime, and in fact crime was much more rampant then than it is now.
In fact the main thing that making every crime a capital crime does is incentivize criminals to murder all witnesses.
And most of those capital crimes had to do with the accused being poor.
They truly think the government won’t turn on them. It’s laughable. Literally every bit of media shows the bad guy feeding his most loyal henchmen to the sharks to save his own skin and they still don’t get it.
Putting aside how this would never work in a million years, the naivety of believing that you or your loved ones wouldn’t be ranked among the undesirables sooner or later is insane to me.
It’s the bullshit Death Note line about the random deaths lowering crime by 90% or whatever. Meanwhile, we know that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to crime.
For being such a smart kid, Light was really dumb. He should have realized early on that the only thing he would accomplish by killing publicly-listed criminals was to make himself an executioner for the state, which could easily censor whichever criminals it wanted to protect and only publish those it didn’t care about. And if other groups sprang up and started publishing lists of criminals that the state was trying to censor, then he would only be making himself an executioner for a random group that he didn’t know anything about, which could just as easily put names on their list for any arbitrary reason they wanted.
Say it with me: Increased punishment does not increase deterrence, there are many peer-reviewed studies and stats that bear this out
Ah. the ol “things will be great once we get rid of all the undesirables”
why would people rather kill people than rehabilitate them??
The reactionary take is that rehabilitation is pointless because some people are just plain (genetically inferior|not among God’s Elect)
Because of the violence inherent in the country, and also because the state rehabilitating people means their tax dollars going toward helping people.
What is executing criminals was a violent crime? Checkmate death penalty
True, society improved massively in the USSR and China once Stalin and Mao put people like that to the wall. The bluesky nerd mixed up who the violent criminals are.
this person watched too much death note…
