Good thing we (the US) lost the war, or this lady would probably have her own team of lobbyists running their country.
The death penalty is always wrong.
Murder is not a punishment and once you’ve stripped her of her ill-got gains there is no longer any reason to kill her.
I hear you but if I’m honest, and tomorrow America announced it was going to execute every billionaire, I’m not going to put up too much of a protest.
Take the money, sure. Then they’re no longer billionaires and there’s no need to kill them.
In other words, you don’t murder disarmed prisoners of war.
During class war they are the enemy and deserve what comes to them. If taken alive and their weapon of war removed, they don’t need to be dealt with the same way.
Once they are no longer a threat you can work on rehabilitation and restitution.
The way these people affect so many lives negatively with their fraud is much worse than a person committing murder.
The literal misery they cause to so many people for their own benefit without a fucking iota of shame and their sociopathic behavior is enough to consider eliminating them from society.
The way these people affect so many lives negatively with their fraud is much worse than a person committing murder.
Irrespective how is two bad things better than one bad thing? I would think fewer bad things would be net better.
The literal misery they cause to so many people for their own benefit without a fucking iota of shame and their sociopathic behavior is enough to consider eliminating them from society.
You speak of “sociopathic behavior” while advocating state murder. 🤨
I know. It sounds fucked. But these people are a cancer on society. There’s very little that can be done to reform these people. And the problem is that capitalism rewards this kind of behaviour.
These people currently are ruling the world. If they aren’t the head of some large company, there the head of a government. Because of their large wealth, they have a huge influence on the policies. They’re basically dictating the laws that are governing them. It’s like playing Monopoly with your own made up rules.
You can’t stop those people any other way. The French understood this. When the price of food was out of reach, heads started to roll. Literally. Nowadays the people can’t be violent anymore. Heck, the mere act of peacefully protesting is met with police violence and oppression. How the fuck are we supposed to get the message across when those people have their own militia protecting them and their interests?
I disagree. I don’t subscribe to a world view where every life is sacred. Society has a right to protect itself from persons that will always endanger other people and that includes killing them. However, it has been quite clear that we cannot guarantee that no innocent people are killed. And that’s why I’m OK with the death penalty only in principle, not in practice.
persons that will always endanger other people and that includes killing them.
You cannot know that, and if you have the ability to strap someone down and end their life, you have no need to do so since you clearly have complete control over their person.
I’m OK with the death penalty only in principle
You shouldn’t be. States qua arbiters of justice should not intentionally kill people under their control.
This is a discussion about personal morals. Some people think it’s OK to execute some criminals, others are completely opposed to that idea. There is no objective right or wrong here.
For you your arguments might be compelling, but they don’t convince me. I can have complete control over someone and still decide to kill them because I don’t want to bother with locking them up, for example. And who says a society should not kill? That’s not even an argument, just an opinion.
you don’t keep that control over billionaires.their money has too much loyalty.
so they need to be killed. I do agree that the state shouldn’t be making the decision, but Vietnam is weird and still at least dresses up as communist.
While I agree in principle I tend to think there are still unforgivable crimes and irredeemable people out there.
While I agree in principle I tend to think there are still unforgivable crimes and irredeemable people out there.
Then you don’t agree.
I wasn’t aware crime was about forgiveness.
I thought in-so-far as societies implemented systems of justice, their purpose was restitution and rehabilitiation.
No one gains anything from a person—irrespective their prior actions—being murdered and we all lose a bit of our soul each time a state execution is allowed to take place.
I really expected better from Vietnam, whose “quarantine at gunpoint” public health policies I heartily endorse.
then you don’t agree
Allow me some cognitive dissonance because I really don’t know what society should do about psychopaths, predators, or cases like those execs who put melamine into milk to spoof the protein metrics, leading to the horrible deaths of a large number of babies.
Holding them indefinitely is a useless drain on the state, killing them leads to the inevitability of innocent people dying.
If child predators get executed, I don’t lose “a bit of my soul”, I gain more confidence that the world is now a better place.
While celebrating a billionaire getting their just desserts is always fun, not really sure that this is a reflection of the decency of the Vietnamese government.
Since there’s no rational hope of addressing the other 3k or so billionaire parasites on Earth without building a really big Titanic wreckage tour sub and making little paths of stock certificates leading to it like reese’s pieces in ET, I’ll take whatever incidental vicarious revenge against humanity’s oppressors I can get.
I mean, celebrate the revenge, for sure. Just don’t mistake it for decency. Vietnam is about as corrupt as India.
We’re no less corrupt in the US, merely more expensive.
Our cheats just hire lobbyists to make their corrupt practices legal, shout out to Citizens United, and/or hire enough lawyers to make the consequences meaningless, like fining a company that makes billions a year thousands for profitable criminal activity.
Our “solution” to corruption is simply to make it legal for the right price. Donald Trump should have lost his empire and gone to jail for his business practices long before he was a game show host, let alone POTUS, but he learned and inherited enough from daddy to understand how to wield American style corruption, and he’s still free.
Since when is it leftist to support the death penalty, let alone take glee in it. This is like the boomer FB shit
I’m against the death penalty in general, but I also acknowledge that in terms of tangible damage to humanity, any billionaire walking the Earth makes any serial killer who has ever walked the Earth seem positively quaint by scale.
I also recognize that we are living under class occupation. The owner class handily won the class war by convincing most of the developed world not to fight it half a century ago.
The peasants don’t have the luxury of taking prisoners. We are the losers of a war, in spite of the fact that many have come to worship their occupying oppressors.
Keeping the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes is a peacetime luxury for those in charge, and unless you’re holding a reprehensible amount of capital, that isn’t us. You might believe we are in peacetime, but if we refuse to stop them, and it looks that way, they will force our shared, communal habitat to stop us all through their insatiable, sociopathic avarice.
We love to think we’re not, but we’re still subjects wholly dependant on this world, even the owners activily attacking us and it simultaneously.
The French revolution shows that the guilotines don’t necessarily stop when the aristocrats are all dead. I’m not enthusiastic about mob justice
Yeah, I know a lot of Republicans that claim the left is only on their “high horse” when it suits them. I still don’t believe that, but this thread really helps me understand where they got this notion of duplicity. Not a good look. SMH
The peasants don’t have the luxury of taking prisoners.
I mean, why not? POWs have their own self-evident advantages, as we’ve seen taking place in palestine right now. Hostages are a pretty good thing to have if you want to create a long term negotiating strategy with other people.
But also, if you get rid of the billioinaire’s billions, then you get rid of the billionaire. Now you just have a 'naire. Maybe a thousandaire, or something. Like, all the rich people that fled from cuba to florida didn’t really end up doing a whole lot with their lives except being mad and super bitter about the fact that they weren’t able to keep participating in a fascist government that oppressed the people. Most of them were petite bourgeois anyways. It’s the ones that refused to leave that you end up murdering by way of this being the only thing that can force them to leave.
None of that is really similar to this situation at all, even, this is just an independent government killing someone that realistically could have no recourse if they were just completely stripped of their money and sent off to go fuck around in some other country. It’s also, to me, kind of an illustration of the divide that you conceive of prison as a “way to keep the most destructive humans locked away and well fed until they die of natural causes”. There’s, ideally, a greater purpose to prison beyond that. You’re justifying this by conceiving of this as like, a “war”, an extreme war, a life or death war, oooh it’s a war, wartime wartime wartime, but then, the police do the same thing when they justify shooting some guy on the street.
I dunno, this strikes me as a lot of nice sounding guilt-assuaging talk, as good rhetoric, but you haven’t really given me any logical argumentation to chew on here, as to why this would be good or why this had to be done, really.
I mean, why not?
Because with the apparent exception of Vietnam, billionaires run the show in the society they live in. They use their capital, which is just an expression of power, to change laws, buy courts, shift responsibility to their corporate entities that receive a cute lil meaningless fine that costs less than the profit of the crime instead of prison time, and here in the US they even literally OWN and PROFIT off many of our prisons. That’s the primary reason billionaires shouldn’t exist, because it’s close to impossible to put a check on such insane levels of power, which again, at those quantities, is what capital becomes, raw power. You can’t have a functioning representative democracy where people can grow so wealthy that their power over society extends beyond their single vote.
Most of the peasants in the world are subject to their respective judicial systems and prison systems largely configured to protect PROPERTY rights over human rights by design of those they work for, and guess who that is?
There are beautiful exceptions, the Nordic nations come to mind, but sadly my country, the US, has been spreading its greed disease for decades. We toppled south American rigimes daring to make something better to keep their markets open for our capitalists to rape using our military industrial complex, and we’ve been converting Europe with our greed disease a little at a time(YOU can live larger than you’ve ever dreamed, foreign legislator, just betray your countrymen for our profit!), the UK has fallen to it, the French are fighting it but losing, etc.
The term “leftist” is too broad and “death penalty” too loosely defined.
Auth-leftists definitely support the death penalty, as in a powerful state should have authority to kill.
Anarchists don’t think there should be a state therefore there is no body authorized to kill. If someone must die, it would be at the hands of an individual or an ad-hoc grouping and be called “self-defense”.
Thinking things can change without the 0.1% being killed at all is a liberal idea.
billionaires aren’t people. their existence requires a river of blood, and they all deserve death, regardless of the states opinion.
I think its good to remind them they can be killed. I think they forget.
Is someone with $900 million a person without a river of blood to their name?
The idea (or my opinion at least) is we start at the top, working our way down the high score list. After the first few, hopefully the rest come to their senses and voluntarily stop being scum.
People are extremely bitter that rich people exist, and openly would call for their deaths, regardless of however much their lives would actually improve, were they to die, or however much their oppression might continue under a more conventional arrangement, or a less, sort of, offensive level of wealth inequality. People do find it offensive, basically, they find it ostentatious, and what’s more commonly called for, to be put to death, than ostentatiousness? Than the offense of sensibilities?
I dunno. You get a lot of hard talk from supposed leftists who understand nothing of the kind of core principles at play, but none of them will realistically do anything, they’re just floating by and passively regurgitating whatever they consume in the spectacle. They lack the empathy to commit real violence or change, I think.
They lack the empathy to commit real violence
The poor aren’t strong enough to kill. That’s why I have to. New Batman villain was just created.
Interesting if you read about it, while many were found guilty I think only a woman is being sentences to death while many men are just getting a decade in prison for their involvement in it.
If she was the ringleader, sure… I guess (not that it makes the state’s murdering of folks alright). But odd that she gets death while all the men don’t even get 20 in jail.
Or is it the state just protecting and strengthening itself while using language to pretend it is on the side of the people?
The state will never execute, or legislate, our way to a better society.
youre not wrong, but sometimes they kill a billionaire to look good, and that doesn’t take us to a worse society.
like how the USSR drastically raised standards of living for the working class in the american empire just by existing. they didn’t mean to. they didn’t care. it was just a side effect of their dick waving.
I don’t think we should have billionaires but celebrating state sponsored murder is fucking gross
