Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
From: mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman)
Subject: Re: Expand the Death Penalty
Organization: Oracle Corporation
Distribution: talk.politics
Date: Sun, 16 Aug 1992 02:26:31 GMT
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              at Oracle Corporation.  The opinions expressed are those
              of the user and not necessarily those of Oracle.

In article <1992Aug11.195909.15678@eskimo.celestial.com> kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum) writes:
>In article <1992Aug7.143303.9095@oracle.us.oracle.com> mfriedma@uucp (Michael Friedman) writes:
>>In article <1992Aug6.194605.14210@eskimo.celestial.com> kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum) writes:
>>>In article <1992Aug4.182709.20573@noao.edu> lund@noao.edu (Rich Lund) writes:

>>>>The time has come to get tough with crime in the U.S.  The criminal must
>[...lawnOrder pissing and moaning deleted...]
>>>It would seem, then, that the thing you advocate is defeated from the start.
>>>If people feel that they have nothing to lose from desisting from the actions
>>>deemed inimical, then certainly death will be no deterrent to their
>>>actions.

>>Perhaps you misunderstood Rich.  Right now they have nothing to lose
>>because they aren't adequately punished.  If you really ream them then
>>they have something to lose.

>How do you know this?  

Well, it was pretty obviously what Rich was saying.  Only someone who
responded without bothering to really read the original would have
misunderstood what he was saying.

>Is this what restrains you?

Nope.  

>Have your previous experiences of receiving punishment for transgressions
>been successful, either from your preceptor's or your viewpoint?

Sure.  It taught me not to hit other kids, not to yell in class, not
to curse out other kids when adults were arround, etc.

PS.  What's a perceptor?

>Do you thereby advocate this from personal experience, or from a mental
>picture of what you personally would do if you had enough absolute power,
>i. e. imagining what makes you squirm (or what *made* you squirm), and then
>applying that to miscreants?  Or perhaps you are symbolically reenacting
>a retribution scenario against your punishers, a sort of passion
>play?

Sorry, but I'm not into that kind of self-analysis.  Sometimes I just
advocate things based on what  think will work without spending six
hours lying on a couch trying to decide whether I'm taking a position
because my mom scared me when I was two.

>Would you then pit your wits, ingenuity, empathy and imagination in a
>battle with the criminal's (possibly heightened, either by a life-history
>of pain, or artificially) pain threshold?

I have.  And when I left some of the sucker's teeth were lying on the
sidewalk.  

>Any way you cut it, it is easy to see how violence and abuse are propagated
>and reproduced.

Perhaps, but now we have to live with it and deal with it.  So how do
you deter a violent criminal?

>Rich said that the criminals were not intimidated by the law.  Why do you
>think this would change?  Premeditated murders still occur, despite the
>presence of the death penalty.

If you actaully bothered to read Rich's post before you responded (a
generally worthwhile procedure) you would see that he said they were
not intimidated by the law because the law does not punish them
consistently and firmly.  For example, in Newark, juvenile car thieves
are usually not punished even if they are caught.  They get brought
into the station, they get released, they rarely show up in court, and
if they do they get a warning or probation and are released.

Why do I think this would change if we were more severe?  Well, I went
to a New York City highschool (one of the best, but still a public
school) and a number of my classmates were (and are) criminals.  I got
to know some of them quite well and I think I understand them well
enough to make some predictions about how they would behave.  As far
as they were concerned the criminal justice system was a joke.  When
the got arrested they got yelled at, got released into their parents'
custody, got yelled at by their parents, and then they got to do
whatever got them in trouble again.  If they had to spend even a few
months in jail they would not have been nearly so blase.

As for pre-meditated murders, 

1.  Of course they still occur - there are no perfect solutions, and

2.  If we want to see an effect we need to apply the death penalty to
more than one out of every few hundred murders.

>[...here I speculate on the origins of violence and its chaotic behavior...]

>>I've always felt that pseudoscientific attempts to explain social
>>theories in terms of chaos, etc. are the hallmarks of the dishonest
>>fool who wishes to snow his opponent.

>Well, we aren't talking science here.  If we were, there probably be consensus
>and this discussion would not exist.  So, I was using scientific concepts
>to try and cast some light on a dimly lit, poorly understood area of human
>behavior.  

You were using scientific words.  The concepts were not retained.
Note for example the bit below about Julia sets.  It's a pretty
scientific word, but you yourself admit that the concept behind the
word has no relevance.

>>Particular questions to prove me wrong...

>>1.  Why Julia sets as opposed to any other chaotic system?

>Pick some other phenomena if you don't like Julia sets.
>I picked them because that was the picture that I imagined, as an
>anology.  I was aesthetically pleased by the fit of the analogy,
>hence it's appearance.

Esthetics are nice, but you had no scientific or mathematical basis.
Seems to support my view.

>>2.  Given that we can't run multiple experiments what makes you think
>>that there is a "sensitive dependence on initial conditions"?  Maybe
>>it's more like an attractor - small changes tend to have no effect on
>>the final result.

>Can't run multiple experiments?  What do you need to know?  There ought to
>be about 9874 box-car-loads of data floating around by now; the
>pseudo-sciences I mentioned above are all over 100 years old, and are all
>established academic tenure-track disciplines, are they not?  What have
>they been doing all this time, besides fabricating iron rice-bowls?

You haven't even defined the experiment you want to run.  And anyway,
what makes you think that there is a "sensitive dependence on initial
conditions"?

>"Sensitive dependence on initial conditions" refers to the seemingly
>micro-scaled triggering event (within the limits of our perceptions),
>the presence or absence of which results, via causality, in widely divergent
>outcomes.  Turbulence and micro-scale purturbations of the air by the
>wing-beats of a butterfly in Peking, eventually propagating and mutating,
>via a positive-feedback process, into a thunderstorm over Paris, for
>example.  Of course, hindsight isn't always too useful here.

Nice pretty words.  "Micro-scaled", "causality" I love them.  But
let's stick to the facts.  You were talking about sociological events,
not butterflies and thunderstorms.  What evidence to you have?

>Like an attractor?  Are you suggesting that criminal behavior is an
>attractor (strange, or simply gravitational, like a black hole)?

Behavior is obviously not an attractor.  Talking about attractors only
makes sense if we are talking about numbers.  So what numbers do you
want to talk about?  Crime rates?


>If the attraction to criminal behavior is of a more gravitational nature,
>one would expect a threshold to exist, perhaps analogous to the Schwartzchild
>radius, beyond which is the point of no return. 

More pseudo-scientific bullshit.

>[..."why feed worthless criminals" badinage deleted...]

>>So what?  If they commit crimes they forfeith their former rights as
>>productive members of society and if they don't appreciate being
>>treated harshly I'm not going to feel sorry for them.

>Does this mean that if they *do* appreciate being treated harshly (judging
>your imagination or ingenuity in limiting their spheres of action) that you
>*will* feel sorry for them?

No.


>>>You can't guarantee that the proliferation of rules won't get to the
>>>point where no individual can be sure that they haven't run afoul of some
>>>restraint with a capital penalty.  Indeed, the issue has been explored in
>>>some of the stories of the science fiction writer, Larry Niven.

>>You clearly didn't understand Niven's stories.  They were about organ
>>transplants and their effect on society - executing people for trivial
>>crimes because we need parts.  The crimes were always clear and well
>>defined (although often trivial) because the ordinary citizens who
>>voted in the people who passed these laws wanted to use parts, not be
>>parts.

>I'm puzzled by your statement that I didn't understand Niven's stories.
>A citizen who runs afoul of the law for a traffic violation was the
>protagonist of at least one Niven story, the name of which I forget.

Your paragraph above indicates that you think that in Niven's
stories the rules were so complicated that "no individual can be ure
that they haven't run afoul of some restraint with a capital penalty."
Well, that's not the way the stories went.  The guy who was going to
be executed for running a red light knew damned well he had broken the
law and he knew it when he did it.

Actually, I think your use of the story to illustrate a point that is
not supported by the story is bery similar to your use of
pseudo-scientific jargon to back up your arguments.

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