Do you support the death penalty?

True. Let's act like animals. I don't think animals generally kill or imprison transgressors.

No it isn't. What 'recompense' or 'honour' is there in punishing someone? 'Oh I'm dead, but at least I've been 'recompensed' and 'honoured' through someone else being removed from society'. ???????????????

'Justice' is a religious concept. What does it have to do with socialist society?

So, by brutalising paedophiles in turn, we magically 'cure' children who've been abused? Really, you're talking terrible shit. I suggest that you change your name from 'Kindness' to 'Reactionary Arse' instead as that's what you're talking.

How about restitution? How about rehabilitation?

Why should the rest of support someone useless to society? Isn't it better to get them to work to try and improve the planet a bit? Prison is the second stupidest idea imaginable as a response to social transgression (no matter how severe). It only makes sense if someone is so dangerous (ie likely to do the same to someone else) that they need to be sequestered for the general safety of the rest of us.

I know I must come out as a bore, but again I have to protest the limited options.

That would be absurd. There is only one crime that can be logically punished with death: murder. Otherwise any other criminal (robber, rapist, arsonist) who legitimately feared being punished with death would be strongly tempted to resort to murder to conceal the first crime.

Or maybe there are two crimes that can be logically punished with death, the other being treason. But to support the death penalty in cases of treason requires being loyal to State first place, so it shouldn't apply to disloyal people such as revolutionary leftists...

So I can't vote for this option.

So we have limited the cases in which death penalty can be logically applied to only two (or one, in the case we aren't loyal defenders of the State). Now we would have to understand whether the death penalty really works in such cases. Does it? There are very few actual serial killers; most murderers do so in extreme cases, and don't posit a real danger of reincidence. But such people as serial killers are more likely mentally ill than anything else, so we would risk killing people for being ill, instead of as a punishment.

Further, there is the problem that the death penalty sends to society at large - and this is quite clearly that killing is (at least sometimes) OK. Now, unless the conditions for OKing killing are related to the State (it is OK for the State to kill people, it is not OK for individuals to do it), this would mean OKing the killing of people by other individual under at least some circumstances. Or, if it is the nature of the killer - the State, as opposed to individuals - this implies a level of sheer irrational worship of the State that cannot be held by anyone who fancy themselves as revolutionary leftists.

Then, of course, there is the unavoidabe issue of mistakenly sentencing innocents, in which case the execution of a death sentence would mean the absolute impossibility of redressing the wrong in any significant way.

So, again, I can't vote for this option.

But...

I cannot vote for this either, for I certainly can think of circumstances where executing people is absolutely unavoidable, even without proper trial. Such are the realities of war, civil war and revolution included. Sometimes it is impossible to be humanitarian without risking military defeat, and so it is impossible to hold such an absolute position as "under no circumstances".

So I am not voting. Can someone who voted please PM me the results of the poll up to now?

Luís Henrique

Kindness, (ironic name)

I think this is one of the issues which presents two problems with allowing the community to make loose interpretations of morality that don't follow the fundamental concepts of anarchism. The first problem is that over time the definitions tend to widen as people try to include more things in it in order to justify their hatred. Paedophilia is a good example of this. Active paedophilia -- that is, child molestation -- is, if not unforgivable, at least very, very difficult to justify. The problem is that many, many people like to extend the term -- which is explicitly the love of pre-pubescent children who physically incapable of engaging in sexual activity -- to include what is more correctly referred to as ephebophilia, which is the preference for those of late adolescence, who are fully capable of engaging in sexual activity.

Another example of this widening of definitions is that of "child". Correctly, it refers to pre-pubescents, but when adults desire to speak of paedophilia or when they wish to exert superiority over their youngers they like to extend the definition to include anyone up to the age of majority.

People use this widened definition to gloss over the fact that there is a huge difference in moral circumstance between molesting a pre-pubescent child and engaging in sexual activity with a young adult.

They do these things simply and for no other reason than the need to feel morally superior to others.

In an anarchist society, we need to respect the decision of others independent of their circumstances, and this includes respecting the opinions of the young. If a teenager says "I consented", we have to respect that. But if a child says that they consented, we know that this is impossible because their bodies are not adapted to sexual activity.

Ages of consent are arbitrary. If there was a scientific basis for them they would not vary from country to country. Saying that we can't trust that the teenager isn't hiding a coercive relationship is a moot point because people of all ages in abusive relationships hide them. In fact, age of consent makes it less likely that the abuse would be discovered because the abuser would be actively trying hide the very existence of the relationship if he knows that the relationship is, by the nature of age of consent laws, illegal.

I discuss this in greater depth here:
captainjackjohnson.tumblr.com/post/10284191179

The second problem is that, as we've demonstrated, having such a wide and fictional definition of paedophilia allows you to justify disproportionate punishments by glossing over the difference between raping a child and having sex with a "minor". It also demonstrated a lack of proportionality in that the equate child molestation to the death penalty. I also think it's fair to mention that by focussing on the "corruption of innocence" aspect, you are ignoring the much more important aspect which is the act of rape itself. Rape traumatises women, and men, to just the same extent that it does children. In all cases the raped are innocent victims and children don't deserve any special privilege that makes their case a more important one to fight than the case of protecting women from the same.

Back to the death penalty, although what the molester has done is wrong, they haven't demonstrated a lack of respect for life. What they have demonstrated is a lack of respect for self-ownership and bodily integrity by forcing themselves on another. In this respect I think the most proportional punishment would be imprisonment and forcing progressively larger and rougher objects up their urethra.

I'm sorry, but who are you to decide that? This isn't a matter of simple retribution. If you care about the victim, then your job should also to help the readjust to society, not simply punishing the criminal brutally. You're riding on the assertion that "they've been irrevocably damaged by the experience and deserve to be avenged". Then why don't we help them as well? What do they gain by having the aggressor killed, some brief reprieve?

This is why people put in regulations and try to change the conditions of society.

Sometimes, Luis, I feel we're very much on the same page.

But I don't care. It's obvious that anyone who voted for any of the 'pro-death' options is wrong, and anyone who voted 'no death' only did so as the least worst option.

We many times are.

I'm not sure that it is the least worst option, though.

Luís Henrique

I have to say I find it extremely weird how you call murderers and rapists "monsters" while at the same time opposing violence against capitalists. Capitalists cause far more pain, misery and death than street criminals... but you call them "beautiful human beings". What?

Only execute them if they have killed and show absolutely no remorse or repentance for what they did

No death penalty. Innocent people have been murdered as a result of it. Choosing to keep it in place will result in more innocent people being murdered. I would not want to be murdered for doing nothing wrong. Also, I think it'd be nice to be treated with mercy in the case of a failed revolution.

I support the death penalty in certain cases.

In revolutionary terror, yes. It is necessary to ensure the survival of the revolution.
But In times of peace, I'm generally against.
A fun fact:
Felix Dzerzhinsky was against the death penalty.

the death penalty, as an institution in society, is an abomination.

in the frame of the revolution, let's not kid ourselves. we will HAVE to execute people, whether on a field of battle or to prevent counterrevolution. this will be a necessary evil, and isn't something any of us should feel guilt over, so long as the act doesn't become something we revel in.

Yes. Under normal circumstances, premeditated murder is a pretty fair reason for the death penalty.

Huh, necessary evil. What kind of people would you be executing? Anyone deemed counterrevolutionary, a purge?

I agree. 'Yes, in certain circumstances' is probably the best option. Those circumstances being 'when necessary during the world civil war'.

But I suspect the general reading of that option is probably 'yes for certain crimes such as murder'.

Seriously? I mean, I know I don't often agree with you on political questions but really, what the fuck?

Socialist society is about liberation not becoming a new terror.

Under certain circumstances such as revolutionary war with the working classes not in power yet.

The death penalty is as much a tool of class oppression as their other penalties and use of the death penalty by the capitalist state should be opposed. It will be (and is) inherently class and race based oppression if used by the bourgeois state.

Only if It's death penalty supporters being executed

Hell no.

What do you mean, comrade? What does liberation or terror have to do with it? Liberation then, in your opinion, includes undue lenience towards scum that kidnap children, rape them and then slit their throats and then rape them again? Terror is justice for murder?