Reply #3: I wouldn't go so far as to say that.

[varkam]

I am neither a good nor a bad person. I'm just a person, and there are things that I have done that have been bad and good. Like I said, I don't claim moral superiority over anyone else here.

I would much rather people vent on a message board as opposed to go out and actually commit crimes as well, but I don't think it is an either/or thing. I don't think, if they didn't post, that means that they go out and murder someone. But the purpose of this board is for discussion, and that's what I aim to do.

As far as the financial end of things is concerned, it ironically costs a good deal of money to execute someone (though I'm also anti-DP, but for other reasons). I think the bigger issue is that, so long as we agree that certain individuals need to be segregated from society because of the danger that they pose, or to reaffirm our own social norms, then we should pay to keep them incarcerated - otherwise we wouldn't have prisons.

For the remorseless, for those who will not change, I also think that life imprisonment is also more of a punishment than the DP. Also, it affords those who do have remorse and a desire to change to reform themselves and do some good to pay back society for the harm that they have caused.

I'm not blaming or accusing anyone, though. I do understand the reaction, but I do think that it is disheartening. If there is even one person that disagrees with such a course of action then, I think, it becomes definitionally something other than human nature (given that, ostensibly, it is a human who disagrees).

I could make the argument though that talking sadistically about what one might want to do could serve to normalize such activity in the minds of some who read it. In any event, I think the truth is probably more complicated than either you or I are making it.