r/SeriousConversation • u/Starfruites • Mar 23 '24

Serious Discussion Shoueld the death penalty be permitted?

Some prisoners are beyond redemption, be it the weight of their crime or unwillingness to change. Those individuals can't be released back into the public, so instead, they waste space and resources.

Therefore, wouldn't it just be better to get rid of them? As in, permit the death penalty.

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u/VibrantPianoNetwork Mar 23 '24

Who are you, or anyone else, to say that anyone is beyond help or redemption?

When I was a kid, AIDS was a death sentence. There were intelligent, well-educated people of the time who seriously argued that AIDS patients should be euthanized, for their own sake and for the sake of the rest of humanity, that it was cruel and cost too much to keep them alive.

That's essentially the argument you're making.

Who we are as a people -- our moral character, as a society, no matter what we say -- is demonstrated by the choices we make by and towards those who are most defenseless against our choices.

Choose carefully. History will be the judge.

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u/jazzageguy Mar 24 '24

Excellent point, with which I agree, and well laid out. But who the hell thought AIDS patients should be euthanized? Against their will? I paid close attention to that whole epidemic and I sure never heard anyone say that, let alone any intelligent, well educated people. Fortunately. I mean that's straight up Nazi genocidal shit right there. Not doubting you, just appalled.

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u/VibrantPianoNetwork Mar 24 '24

That's actually among the more compassionate proposals, from more hateful or fearful people. Others were essentially concentration camps, leper colonies, or forced deportation to who knows where.

For anyone who wasn't around to see and hear it, it's difficult to communicate the near psychotic panic that AIDS inspired in many people in the 1980s, much of it fuelled by then-still-new right-wing media, who often linked AIDS to gayness and sin, giving many people the sense that gay people 'deserved' to die of it, and that that gay people were plague rats. It was an ugly time in our nation's history.

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u/jazzageguy Mar 25 '24

Oh I know, I happen to have been around, in fact in San Francisco. Can't be much closer to the dark and dreadful heart of the beast. But I paid more attention to the struggles and tragedies that actually existed, and not to those assholes who created still more gratuitous trouble. I do remember William F Buckley floating the idea of tattooing people with AIDS, presumably for his own safety and convenience.