Commenter Archive

But isn’t that only if Lewinsky lodged a complaint? If I understand Tod correctly, she never pursued any action against him.

Yeah, that's the part that Tod seems to keep ignoring.

And he also seems to be making a lot of assumptions as to how Lewinsky regarded the relationship that Lewinsky's actual words dispute.

Likewise, what has Lewinsky said about being transferred?

And there's an awful lot of claims that Hillary attacked Lewinsky in ways that I simply don't remember at all. Perhaps that happened, but, uh, can we have some cites about that? I mean, I know she said that she thought Lewinsky was lying, before it became clear she wasn't, but it's a strange interpretation to make that out to be anything other than a wife in denial that her husband had an affair.

Uh, no, I want Lando there for *diversity*, considering there are no other legacy black characters. And considering he's a fairly good friend of Hans, it really wouldn't seem that odd for any hypothetical kids of his to be running around with the Solo kids.

Or at the very least promote Lando to same amount of screen time as the three original characters. (Which I assume is not going to be that much.)

He's an actual *existing* non-white character, played by an actor who, now that I've looked him up, is providing the voice of Lando in 'Star Wars Rebels' (a cartoon set before A New Hope) *right now*, so he clearly is willing to play the role.

Throw him in there right next to Hans and Chewy, tada. Or put him and Chewie flying around in the Falcon while Han is staying at home with Leia. And if there's room for another young character besides the four kids of three original characters, make it his kid. (Checking, it turns out he's actually married with a kid in the books, although that happened a lot later than everyone else, so obviously a change would be required there. And it's worth pointing out that the four kids are all related to each other, so, uh, a love interest would not go amiss.)

It's an incredibly obvious way to get diversity, right there, requiring no real work at all.

If I was arguing for fan service, I'd be demanding Wedge or Ackbar or whoever. And demanding fan service in a Star Wars movie is rather like demanding there be water in a swimming pool...I'm pretty sure the entire movie is going to be constant fan service. Hell, the prequels had it all over the place even when it made very little sense....we're lucky we didn't get a five year old Han Solo showing up in the last prequel for no reason.

@kim
It's not even 'male privilege'. It's the rather delusional idea that workers have any negotiating power at all at this point.

And it's also the rather delusional idea that people work at 'firms' that run around judging people for how well their work is, like everyone is working for a law firm or something.

In the actual world, most people work at places that promote people either completely randomly based on how much the boss likes someone, or based on some sort of fixed system. And incompetent people get fired.

And most gender discrimination lawsuits are not based on promotion. They are still, in this day and age, based on paying people with identical job duties and performances differences in salary based on gender. Which in Brandon's world apparently doesn't exist, despite the Lilly Ledbetter case being in very recent memory.

But I'm sure the sole female area manager just happened to be 14% worse at her job than the next lowest performing of the fifteen male area managers, though.

@brandon-berg
Your premise is only makes any sense if you don't look at what the Paycheck Fairness Act actually did. It did three things:

1) It made it law that employers could not demand employees not discuss wages. You know, so they learn how much others are paid, the exact thing people need to know in order to negotiate. (Please note this was already an employment regulation, this just turned it into actual law.)

2) Prohibited retaliation against employees who raised concerns about gender equality. (In basically the same way that dozens of other things are not legal to retaliate against employees for.)

3) Required things that employers actually stated they were discriminating on the basis of were actually relevant to the job. I.e., if an employer, when sued for not hiring women to a position, said that the reason they weren't hiring women for that is that the job required the ability to lift 70 pounds, they'd been required to explain exactly *how* the job required lifting that much, and showed they actually tested employees for that. They couldn't just handwave the discrimination by inventing a job requirement that 'just happened' to mean no women were hired, or job rating that 'just happened' to mean no women were promoted.

That's what it going to do, regulationwise. (It also did some random data-driven things like creating studies and surveys and stuff, which, if there actually is no real discrimination, people should be happy about. And created random some programs, like awards for paycheck equality and some training classes in negotiation for women. But those aren't regulations of businesses.)

Which of these, exactly, would you have an issue with? Which of these, exactly, would result in added pointless lawsuits?

Given that, I think it’s quite likely that the costs of false positives and defensive management outweigh the costs of actual discrimination.

When the fuck did we start determining that wronged people couldn't get justice because the system is is a net drain? Of *course* people having to fight to get justice is a net drain. It would be a net drain even if every lawsuit was 100% justified. There's no actual way it could be otherwise.

Or rather, when the fuck did we start determining that wronged people couldn't get justice because you make a totally unsourced and speculative idea the system is a net drain?

The entire concept you're trying to promote is completely and utterly insane, even if you had some sort of evidence towards it, which you have none at all.

And, of course...if women really are only getting paid 5% less...that's 670 billion dollars they are being shortchanged, based on total US income of 13 trillion. (And that's just their paycheck for their job, it doesn't count lost promotions.) Are you really asserting that gender discrimination laws cost the US that much to enforce?

Of course not, the cost of all ligation in the US is only about 250 billion total.

Speaking of Lando, where *is* Billy Dee Williams? Why isn't he on the cast list of the movie?

Last I read he was willing, and, hell, technically of all the cast he's played his role most recently. (In The Lego Movie, that was him doing Lando's voice.)

I mean, I know the movie is probably going to be centered around the kids, but surely they can throw in a visit from Uncle Lando, Han's disreputable friend. Hell, have Han lose the Millennium Falcon back to him, have the cast run off with his ship.

Or, since we're not following book continuity 'exactly', apparently, whatever that means, give him a wife and kid. (If only so that the entire young cast doesn't have force powers. You're not really supposed to have a Star Wars movie where *everyone* is a Jedi.)

Robin's the wrong example. Robin, in How I Met Your Mother, got a large part of her backstory from being stereotypical Canadian. Same problem with Marshall. He also needed to be from a specific place, as he also was a rather stereotypical Minnesotan. (Or, rather, a lot of the jokes about them came from being from that place, although they both were complicated characters.)

I guess you could have had a non-white actor in those roles, though. Would have made things more complicated. (Also, it would have made it clear that Robin wasn't 'The Mother' in the first episode, but, OTOH, considering they explained that at the very end of the first episode, that was not really much of a spoiler. Although they could have kept that surprise simply by not showing the kids until the end.)

However, that leaves three cast members that could have been a different ethnicity or race. Lily, for example, grew up in New York City. She was a quintessential New Yorker, so could easily be black or Latina.

Barney was also a New Yorker, and in fact had a black brother. (OTOH, I'm not sure how well Barney would have worked with anyone besides NPH playing him. Or how the implications would have played out if someone as fundamentally creepy and selfish as Barney actually was, was the sole non-white actor.)

And, perhaps just as importantly, there wasn't any real reason not to make Ted non-white. Although a non-white lead? Heck no.

But Lily...as much as I think Alyson Hannigan was completely perfect for that role, there's no reason that it couldn't have been played by someone who would make the cast actually represent the makeup of New York City.

@brandon-berg
The right not to have to justify their management practices in court, at great expense, just because a woman afflicted by Dunning-Kruger decided that her mediocre performance review was just a cover story for failing to promote her because she was a woman, or because an enterprising lawyer decided to roll the dice and file a class action lawsuit based on unequal outcomes.

Ah, yes, the right, where lawsuits are always unjust. (Lawsuits, of course, being the sole remaining method to keep powerful entities from abusing everyone else.)

Tell us, are you asserting that discrimination on the basis of gender literally does not happen? Not on average, because woman can't sue 'on average', that's not how lawsuits work. Are you saying it literally does not happen? Are you saying that there are no examples of it?

If it does happen, are you asserting that women should have no recourse? Not even the courts?

I'm interested in how this all works out in your head.

@jim-heffman
Which is a great idea but won’t really fly when the privacy fetishists rule the public conversation.

You are 100% correct. It seems like every time I propose this, people are horrified that someone would be tracked via GPS instead of being in prison. (Which as we all know has near-total privacy.)

I'm actually a little amazed no one showed up to complain this time.

The entire solution to crime is to slowly take away privacy and allowable range of movement. Whatever is the least restrictive that can assure us they're not committing the crimes again.(1)

A range from just 'Wear a GPS, we'll check if crimes happen near you and you'll be our first suspect' to 'You are only allow to be at your house, your job, and other specifically authorized locations' to 'You have to live in this little criminal village with cameras everywhere.'. Which we need, all of them both more humane and cheaper, and better at reducing repeat offenders. It's hard to actually come up with an objection, and yet people insanely fixate on private.

Of course, there actually is one downside. Victimless crimes are extremely hard to stop this way, so we'd end up looking insane when we take a car thief and send them out the door with just a GPS monitor (Because people complain when cars get stolen, so we can check if they did it.), but need to lock up a drug dealer in a criminal village with monitoring. (Because people do not complain when they buy drugs.)

Of course, we already do sorta look insane for those relative punishments, so, eh, whatever.

1) And if they do keep committing crimes, I have to suggest we should either treat this as an actual need. I.e, if they're stealing to buy heroin, just give them some damn heroin. It's cheaper and better for society to not have them running around committing crimes to get it. Or their criminal tendencies are some sort of psychological problem and give them help. I.e, if people keep assaulting others for no obvious reason, they're not going to learn otherwise by locking them up. We need to lock them up for safety, sure, but we should actually try to fix them.

But I know some people will disagree with that, and that's rather separate from this monitoring thing. If we leave criminals in society and just make sure they don't commit any more crimes, almost all criminals will...stop committing crimes. And the problems of the rest, the ones who keep doing so despite the fact we're actively watching them and they know they'll be caught...those problems will becomes rather obvious over time.

I always found it really odd the phrase was 'Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors'.

Okay, yes, obviously the president should be removed from office if he commits treason. Duh.

But bribery? Why does bribery need to be listed, and who, exactly, would the president be bribing?

Or do they mean if he is bribed? Which is not actually the crime of 'bribery' in the modern world, but maybe that's what it's supposed to mean.

Seriously, bribery is the crime listed there? Not, I don't know, murder?

Of course, there's an outright screwup in the entire process, talking about the Senate: 'When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.'

But technically, *any* officer holder can be impeached...include the vice president. Guess who the president of the Senate actually is? Guess who could decide to preside over his own conviction trial? Whoops. That probably should have been 'When the President or the Vice President...'

I don't think any VP actually has been impeached, though. Anyone *except* the president can be charged with a crime without impeachment...the only other people who have been impeached are, I think, some Federal judges.

As far as I know, she has never even alleged that he pressured her to have sex, much less forced her. Am I wrong about that?

You remember the same as me. I've been racking my brain for any assertions of that. As far as I can tell, there's never been allegations he abused his power that way.

In fact, the lack of him doing that is the reason the Paula Jones suit was dismissed at the start. She could not show any damages from what she asserted Clinton did. (She says he exposed himself to her while he was governor, and propositioned her, but she could not come up with any harm, or even any threatened harm, that had come to her as a result of turning him down.)

Lewinsky just wrote a book and went on the interview circuit, and she's made it very clear, at least in the interviews (I admittedly have not read the book) that the problem she has the way the media and politicians acted during all this.(1)

The worse thing she'll say about the relationship is that Bill 'took advantage of her', but by that I suspect she means: If I had been less naive, I would have realized the dangers of starting an affair with the president. And Bill let me walk right into it, despite him certainly knowing.

1) It's interesting to note that she doesn't even have a real problem with Hillary's insults of her, except she points out that Hillary seems to be blaming Hillary and Monica for the affair, and the person she should actually be blaming is Bill.

Talk about weird lines. I expected Gohmert to pull out the money from his wallet and set it on fire.

Maybe he's not aware it's carbon based. But while a lot of people are unaware that money is cotton, not paper, most people should realize that both those are carbon-based, as, duh, they come from living things.

Gohmert, however, actually is one of the few congressmen without an IQ. Yes, he has no IQ at all.

@saul-degraw
1. What do you about repeat offenders and the truly incorrigible?

I am rather dubious there would be repeat offenders if the result of every robbery was, within the day, the police show up and take back the stuff you stole, and give you a fine. But see my followup.

2. How about people who commit severe financial crimes like the infomercial guy who was just sentenced to ten years and Bernie Madoff?

What do you mean? Are you asking how we'd vary levels of punishment? Or are you asking if we'd be able to stop them again?

3. People who commit violent crimes?

See my followup, and that also applies to people who simply do not stop committing crimes even while monitored. We should not only monitor them, but restrict their movements to a specifically monitored area, like a town built for such purposes.

And, of course, if they *still* commit crimes (Or try to escape), yes, lock them up.

Oh, and as for other crimes, one that would be hard to detect even with tracking in the real world, there's still no reason to have 'prisons'...have a community somewhere out of the way, with limited access. Cameras everywhere, everyone gets a tracking anklet too.

All crimes that happen there are *methodically* tracked down, none of this prison rape and violence bullshit . And, yet, would not actually need that many guards.

There would be jobs available there to help maintain the place, and possibly other jobs too, but none of this nonsensical 'We shall rent private companies prisoners at four cents an hour'.

It could cost approximately a zillion dollars less than operating prisons, which somehow average 30,000 a year per prisoner.

Try this: Radically reduce the number of crimes for which prison is the punishment. Implement many more fines, including a means-tested component to prevent class-based inequities.

How about we restrict people's liberties *without* prison? We have perfectly functional tracking systems.

Someone steals a car, we slap a tracking anklet on them for five years. Any cars go missing in the future, we check the location against the database of people who stole cars.

Bam, there's basically a solution to all property crimes, right there. We could stop all repeat offenders, right there. Stop throwing them in prison so they can make connections, just give them a tracking cuff for the same amount of time, and say 'You try that again, we'll just come and arrest you'.

Prisons are a relic from a time when *we didn't have the power to monitor what people were doing*, so we had to throw them in a hole so we *could* keep track of them. That is the *purpose* of prisons, that is the entire reason they exist.

As we, as society, *can* start monitoring people, we don't need prisons. Period. It's not actually debatable anymore. It's like attempting to operate the damn Pony Express, and will continue to get stupider and stupider.

We need like five prisons, in the entire country, for those violent idiots that repeatedly hurt people *despite* being monitored.

(Cue idiots complaining about monitoring people in three...two...one...)

It's also worth mentioning that these 'rights' are something only *twelve-states* have.

Requiring all parties to get consent for recording is not some bedrock principle of the US, and in actual fact appears to be more an *anti*-right, something that is more often than not used to keep people from revealing harm done to them or other people. It keeps people from recording law enforcement abuses, it keeps people from recording sexual harassment, it keeps people from recording extortion, etc, etc. There is very little actual benefit to it, all it does is make it harder to prove wrongdoing.(1)

And, in an purely logical sense, there's no reason to allow people to *repeat* conversations that happen in private (And no one suggesting we bar that.) and not let them *record* said conversation. Recording a conversation is actually *better* for society, it results in less falsehoods.

All-party consent laws are just *stupid*.

I'm not saying this is a valid reason to break the law, but this isn't an issue of 'rights'.

1) And people who are going to record people to *commit* wrongdoing, like commit blackmail with it or forge someone's voice or whatever, *already don't follow the law*.

@michael-cain
Not to downplay any of the racist aspects, but couldn’t some of the Republican and movement conservative reaction be credited to their knee-jerk “defend the employer” mindset?

I suspect that played a roll, also. Not just “defend the employer”, but the actual possibility of NBA players just walking off. Aka, a strike. *plays dramatic chord*

And there's Tod Kelly's possibility, of knee-jerk defense of anyone the left doesn't like.

It really was a stupid trifecta: Democrats are criticizing an old rich white guy. They say he was being racist. His employees have threatened to walk off.

And they leap in saying 'I'll save you!'

They forgot to actually check, at any point, whether this guy was *at all* sympathetic. Or whether what he said was so *clearly* racist that there's no way to pretend he wasn't, and in fact everyone already *knew* he was openly racist. Or whether the 'employees' were, in fact, fricking famous basketball players that people love.

@chris
The best thing that could possibly happen, on a political level, for members of minority groups in the U.S., is for the Republicans to get their act together

That sentence could basically have ended right there. In fact, you can remove ', for members of minority groups in the U.S.' from that.

I actually find it incredibly annoying how seriously right-wing nonsense has screwed up the left in this country. 80% of them are running so far to the right they shouldn't even count as moderates, and all any of them has to do is not do or say stupid things. (The ones that can still get elected, that is. Most can't, thanks to gerrymandering.)

The left is the embers of a party. Tiny little flickers somewhere of life, occasionally sparks show up, but they have trouble making it past *the left*. And of course they can't push the policies past the right, but, dammit, it should be 'The left has a lot of good ideas and runs into right stupidity, so vote for them.', not 'The left doesn't propose mandatory vaginal ultrasounds, so vote for them.', which is, incidentally, a bar set *so* impossibly low that it's astonishing the right appears to have missed it.

In the war of ideas, it's like we're in a footrace, and the left is old and very slow and has been living off fast food...and the right is entering actual corpses. Just sorta tossing them out there at the start, seeing if any of them will roll to the finish line. 'Winning' in that scenernio does not actually require new ideas, it just literally requires not being dead and rotting.

The left needs an actual opposition party. Having an actual opposition party, *even if the left wasn't currently in charge*, would be better for the left than this nonsense of having to fight the decaying corpse of the right.

@veronica-dire
Compare this to the horror that you are going to die, that the state is going to kill you, and that you have no hope. I don’t care how fast the guillotine is; they still must lead you to the room.

Oh, I'm not, in any way, saying we should have the death penalty. It makes absolutely no sense at all on any possible grounds. It's hard to think of even *hypothetical* grounds in which it makes sense...what, is the Joker going to break of jail again?(1)

I'm just pointing out our hypocritical bullshit within that. That we insist on using long, drawn-out, error-prone, complicated methods of killing people, when there is a method that is better by *every* objective grounds, but we don't want to use it because it looks bad. Aka, it makes us aware we're *actually killing people*.

1) Hell, I'm actually opposed to *prisons*. We have the technology now that we could simply build a little town somewhere out of the way, give everyone ankle trackers and put up cameras, and let 90% of prisoners basically go about a normal-ish life *while* keeping them from harming others. (And that's the maybe 25% of people that should actually be in jail that are currently there.) You should only get locked in a cell if you demonstrate you can't be trusted to be around anyone, even with monitoring.

@glyph
As we reach a point where our every act and word is recorded, so that theoretically at least no one ever need get away with anything, sure, we are all living in a fishbowl with no privacy. But at least we could make punishments more lenient (IIRC deterrence is often best achieved by swift/certain punishment, rather than harsh).

I once read a sci-fi story once where we had invented the 'see back to any point in time' technology, so absolutely no one could get away with any crime.

As a result, people started committing all sorts of little petty crimes out of, apparently, spite. Or basic rebellion. Sorta 'I spit in the face of the law'. Vandalization of public property, public nudity, jaywalking, etc.

I forget how it goes, but I think they eventually end up legalizing a lot of stuff, or maybe just giving it a fine, especially as a lot of the *purpose* behind crime was gone. E.g., if you can't *get away* with theft, and have to give the money back immediately plus 10%, there's absolutely no point in stealing. And it's literally impossible to kidnap anyone, because the second they realize someone is missing, they can just find where they were last, and track forward. Etc, etc.

I've actually forgotten the plot of the story, though.

@sierra-nevada
In the end I usually throw up my hands and oppose capital punishment on the grounds that our criminal justice system is hideously biased racially and against the poor.

Or to put my objection to this another way:

It is *hypothetically* possible to argue for the abstract idea of eugenics, based firmly a moral grounding. You can make an argument that people with specific genetic defects should probably not reproduce, as that causes actual measurable harm to their children, and in an ideal world we'd try to slowly remove specific genes from the population. So some sort of voluntary program of letting people with specific problems get free vasectomies or tubal ligation and putting them at the front of the line for adoption might, *in theory*, be a good idea for society.

However, it is not actually possible to argue for this in the real world due to our bad experiences with eugenics.

It's pretty much the same with the death penalty, in my mind. You can argue it *can* be necessary punishment of the last resort, for some reason, and I personally think that's wrong, but it's a *possible* argument.

But it's an argument that only works in some world besides this one, or at least some nation besides this one.

@sierra-nevada
Lewis goes on to say that success in “curing” a criminal or in “deterring crime” are barbarous because there is no limit to the State’s interest. Hideous and torturous cures can be justified because they “work.” Deterrrence is even more horrible because to satisfy the State’s goal we don’t even need to convict the right person, and the more we make them suffer, the better the deterrent effect is.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with the objection to 'curing'. If the state is in the business of justifying hideous and torturous things solely because they 'work', we're already pretty much screwed. *cough*waterboarding*cough*

The problem would be a government that thinks 'the ends justify the means', not those particular ends. The particular ends of 'convincing criminals not to commit crime' are fine.

Of course, we've never actually attempted to 'cure' criminals at all, so the point is rather moot. The one place we really try that are drug users, which ironically are one of the few types of criminals we don't need to 'cure'. (If we just give them drugs, and let them use them freely, they'd probably *stop bothering us*.)

You could probably 'cure' a good portion of property criminals by simply making them less poor, by giving them money. Good luck with convincing society to do that.

However, Lewis completely right about deterrence. Not only does because aiming for that means our 'justice system' does not actually have to be 'just', but it because people do not actually make rational decisions in that manner.

People do not correctly assess risks. Period. End of story.

In the end I usually throw up my hands and oppose capital punishment on the grounds that our criminal justice system is hideously biased racially and against the poor.

Yeah, frankly, that should basically stop *everyone*. Just full stop, right on that single fact.

We can argue if we want to kill people *after* that bit of nonsense gets fixed, but until then, there's no way in hell *anyone* can ethically support the death penalty.

@murali
The failure to find more humane ways of killing those who need to be killed even after 10 000 years of practice of finding different ways to kill one another reveals a deep failure of imagination and more than a little incompetence.

I'm entirely serious when I assert that a properly-operated guillotine *is* the most humane way of dying. I'm not trying to make some sort of joke there. The only better method would be some sort of disintegration ray aimed at the head.

We're talking about no pain at all (I'm not kidding, you sever things cleanly enough, and there's no pain. We know this is how it works for every body part besides the head, so presumably that's how it works for the head.), and literally less than ten seconds from start to end of the process.

Hell, the *needle* for a lethal injection is more painful than a guillotine, much less having to lie there for a minute and *hoping* you slip into unconsciousness before the next phase starts, as *didn't* happen with this poor guy.

@saul-degraw
I agree with both of you and it is really interesting that we use lethal injection because it is so aesthetic from the viewpoint of everyone but the person being executed.

We've deliberately spent a lot of time and effort not only making it aesthetic, but as far removed as possible. We don't hook up a normal IV, like we would for anyone getting any other kind of medication. No, we hook them up to a complicated machine with a single button, and then all we have to do is...push a button.

We have devices that are *hundreds* of years old that kill cleaner and faster and less painfully. (1) Instead, we get a Rube Goldburg of a killing, because we do not want to admit that's what we're doing.

1) And if we actually updated guillotines, they'd be even be objectively better. No reason not to offer, for example, some sort of lidocaine neck-wrapping beforehand, just in case there *is* some sort of pain possibly. Or let them take sleeping pills if they want and not be awake. We could even move the blade faster than gravity.

No. There are accounts like that. But those accounts are idiotic.

Cutting off the blood flow to the brain, as in a choke-hold, causes unconsciousness in about ten seconds, period. There's no way anything could be happening after that. And by 'cutting off', I mean 'blocking'...actually having blood *drain* from the brain would cause unconsciousness even faster.

The actual eyewitness accounts of actual scientists observing beheadings reported somewhere between two to five seconds of blinking, which nicely lines up with what medical science says should be happening.

And, yes, technically, their brain is 'alive' a lot longer than that...but so is basically *everyone* who dies. That's how brains work. People lose their heartbeat, they pass out from lack of oxygen, and their brain slowly dies.

Is there any evidence that this is actually true?

No.

There *might* be a few murders that are deterred by the punishment, but those are all premeditated and long-planned murders, usually for profit. Killing someone for their inheritance, via poison, or whatever. In other words, exactly the sort of murders that *don't* get the death penalty.

The types of murders that get the death penalty tend to be the 'brutal ones', done out of sheer lust for violence or by strung-out druggies or by serial killers. None of whom are operating by 'logic', or get deterred by anything.

And now that I've said that, I'm not sure how many of the *first* type of murders are deterred by anything, either. People do not actually make decisions by weighing hypothetical consequences against odds of reaching that result. We all like to imagine that's how it works, but it's *not*. People are *really* *really* bad at weighing odds and making the 'best' choice for themselves.

A person, in their head, only has the vaguest idea of how likely they are to be caught, and on top of that only the vaguest idea of how much punishment they'd get, and *even if they knew those things exactly*, still would not make decisions as if those numbers meant anything. People are irrational idiots.

Tomorrow, we could make every single murder result in the death penalty, or make every single murder only half the time in prison, and the total amount of murders would probably only move by 5% in one direction or the other.

The most humane ways to kill a person are the old-fashioned ways of the guillotine and hanging. We don’t use them anymore because they are very gruesome and leave no illusions.

Indeed. While hangings *can* screw up, there's basically no way to botch the guillotine, at least not if you test it right before using it.

And while there's an interesting question of exactly how many seconds someone can remain *conscious* after beheading, there's no logical reason they'd be in any pain whatsoever. We can't ask the beheaded people, but we know severing other parts of the body with a razor sharp cut does not hurt immediately. (As long as we catch the head, I guess, and don't let it thud to the floor, which they could theoretically experience.)

So we have a completely 100% efficient, full-proof, and humane method of killing people. As instantaneous as death can possibly be, no pain, completely unable to leave them in some sort of injured-but-living state, requires no medical personal or drugs that companies won't supply anymore, etc, etc.

And we don't use it, as you say, because it looks too gruesome and we'd like to retain our illusions.

I think it would be interesting for someone on death row to sue to be executed in that manner.

@mad-rocket-scientist
I have a better idea, how about we remember that we live in a supposed free society, and until such a time as an individual (or group) does something clearly illegal, we leave them the f%*@ alone. If they have done something illegal, then follow them & arrest them when it can be done so quietly.

As I very clearly said, almost every single one of these idiots is breaking the law in a fairly major way.

For the most obvious example, threatening to assault a law enforcement officer is, tada, illegal. Likewise, it is illegal to carry a handgun while drinking alcohol. Trespass? Likewise illegal.

And that's just the stuff they're doing *there*.

And as I keep pointing out, and absolutely no one seems to want to address, these aren't *random* idiots showing up. These are *secessionist* idiots. A group of people who break laws *in general*.

Half of them probably didn't have license plates on their cars, or valid driver's licenses, or pay Federal income tax.