It's a bad feeling to read an article which you generally agree with, and which highlights important issues, until they come to their proposals. Then suddenly you realise that the person writing it is a fruitbat.
Seemed less crazy than a lot of folks advocating the current system. Probably more indicative of the problem at hand than anything else. When your opposing a position that's utterly batshit insane, being merely fruitbat level doesn't seem that bad
Emphasis not mine. This is just... urgh. The prison system is inhumane, so we should revert to a far more draconian measure.
I think th'fellow's point was that would be far
less draconian measures, from an overall perspective, than what's already occuring. A, "Yes, it would be worse in some ways, but the aggregate would improve," kind of thing.
Th'person also wasn't necessarily advocating that, just saying that
if going that far was what it took to fix (or at least screw up
less) the prison system, then that's how far people should be ready to go, because the current system is
worse. I can understand that position, though it's definitely a damn sight far from (even remotely) ideal.
EDIT: To put it in a numbers perspective, the guy's saying that if we're killing a few hundred (or even a few thousand) people each year and castrating a number of others, that's
better than having over
two hundred thousand people raped, many of them serially, in that same time frame. To say nothing of the millions ruined for life from the legacy of a felony charge.
E2, for clarity:
Utterly frakking horrific either way! I can understand holding the position, though.
The only way to sustainably curb the supply of guns is to reduce demand for guns, and the easiest way to do that would be to legalize narcotics.
There is... no explanation for this. None.
I think the guy was saying earlier (or perhaps later in the article) that the primary cause for the increase in gun demand was because of how drugs were being peddled (re: the kill-the-competition escalation issue). Presumably by removing the cause of gun demand (violence due to how criminalized narcotics are being sold), the demand would reduce. Probably a bit of strawman involved with that.
Surely he could use this comparison to advocate use of prison in fewer cases, and various other measures for less serious crimes rather than "Death penalty/castration or nothing"?
I think he, well,
was. It was a case of, "This is what happens when you stop throwing every damn body in prison, people!" The ramped up reaction to violent crimes was a separate point.
Abolishing prisons and releasing all the prisoners would amount to a deregulation of criminal punishment. It would mean letting the private sector determine how best to prevent ourselves from getting robbed. In high finance, the laissez-faire approach has proved to be a disaster; for petty crime, it would be a boon.
What the heck. Seriously, what. I prefer free market capitalists to... free world magicists? I'm not even sure what to call this.
Second admendment-ists, I think. His "liassez-faire approach" to criminal punishment would probably be "carry a gun and be ready to use it." Or maybe remove the restrictions on boobytrapping your home or something. Crap along those lines.
Vigilantism, in other words. Which... yeah. That's (more than) a bit crazy. Possibly better than the current system for significant amounts of the US population, but pretty damn far from ideal.
