It isn't about her.

Post #29,875 by mhuber 2/26/02 4:14:30 PM Reply	It isn't about her. Bloodlust is not a good thing. Not even if you call it "closure". I don't much care about her fate. A state that caters to bloodlust, on the other hand, is cause for concern. Killing prisoners does not improve safety, or reduce costs, or do anything except partly satisfy one particular sense of justice. Even there, it fails: can you honestly say that Little Timmy came anywhere near paying for his crime? If she is executed, there will be a crowd outside celebrating. There probably won't be anybody in the crowd who has more ties to the case than, perhaps, living in the same town. Most of them won't know the names of the children who died. None of them knew the names while they were alive. They will be there just to celebrate the death of a sick and tortured woman. That leaders of a great nation would play to that crowd and court their votes, rather than tell them to go home and hug their children or pray or just plain get a life, that bothers me far more than the question of whether this particular woman dies or is locked up. From the bits and pieces of the case I've heard, either way she is better off than she was before. ---- "You don't have to be right - just use bolded upper case" - annon.
Post #29,887 by screamer 2/26/02 4:42:24 PM Reply	Okay, I'm following a little more now... I was not going from the presumption that the "death penalty" was in question. (really). I was operating under the assumption that the death penalty is there, and if she is a prime example of when to apply it, then who is (other than little Timmy)... As I said in a previous post, I suffer from no delusion that the State (ours or any other that I know of) won't sacrifice individuals for the good of the state. It can be in the name of war, etc... The public executions used to be a picnic affair in most of the world and not that long ago in a historical context. Of course, they also used to burn folks that were heretics, lunatics, non-Chrisitian, non-Muslim, etc... and the feeling was, that it would deter the rest of society from feeling so free to publicly espouse their views. I can't help but think that there needs to be something "worse" than life in prison as an option for our legal system, it's just hard... Given a choice right now, I would prefer to die than to be locked up for life, so perhaps the life sentence is the worst...But that kind of flies in the face of being kinder or more humane, no? Just a few thoughts, Screamer "I'll tip my hat to the new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution, smile and grin at the change all around, pick up my guitar and play, just like yesterday..." P. Townshend "Nietzsche has an S in it" Celina Jones
Post #29,895 by mhuber 2/26/02 5:29:23 PM Reply	Close, but... It isn't about being nice to convicts. And there are situations where the death penalty makes sense. High-ranking gangsters in Columbia, for example, tend to find escape rather easy. Executing them serves a real purpose. Had the Ceaucescus been imprisoned rather than brutaly murdered, many would have been killed by those attempting to reinstate them. Ugly as it was, their execution served a real purpose. If we find ourselves in a situation where terrorists regularly hijack planes to demand the release of their conviced brethren, executions would serve a real purpose. But in those cases, the executions - even though they might be attended by bloodlust - would not be simply because killing people who piss you off in a big way feels good. What bothers me far more than the death of people who certainly deserve it (and I don't have enough of the facts to decide whether this woman is such) is the pleasure it gives others. That is a far more dangerous and moraly illicit pleasure than any drug. ---- "You don't have to be right - just use bolded upper case" - annon.
Post #29,907 by Ashton 2/26/02 6:28:10 PM Reply	Yes, the fact there are snuff films - shows where the species is stuck - currently. We don't do well with power either. A.
Post #29,928 by Another Scott 2/26/02 10:31:38 PM Reply	Cecil says "snuff films" are an urban legend. [link\|http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_258.html\|Here]. From 1993: This is the weirdest urban legend of all: that there are underground movies in which people are literally murdered on camera for purposes of entertainment. The question is not whether there are people sick enough to traffic in such things (in a world containing Jeffrey Dahmer and Geraldo Rivera, there probably are), but whether they actually do. All we can say is that in the nearly 30 years stories of snuff movies have been circulating, no genuine example has ever come to light. "The [snuff movie] rumor evidently originated in publicity circulated in 1970 by Alan Shakleton of Monarch Pictures, a low budget sado-porn movie distributor," Penn State folklorist Bill Ellis tells me. Shakleton "bought up a Latin-American Manson family ripoff titled Slaughter, had it subtitled, added a scene in which a woman was murdered (cut out of another film), then marketed the film under the title Snuff in New York City. Rumor has it that that he then incited women's groups to picket the film under the [erroneous] impression that the murder scene was an actual killing. Certainly the publicity Shakleton used implied that it was: `Made in South America Where Life Is Cheap.'" Every few years since then snuff movies have been back in the news, either because some nut is accused of trying to make one (never successfully) or the tabloids report some sensational claim, e.g., that the main centers for the snuff movie industry are London, Amsterdam, and Bangkok. But pornography experts for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies say they have never seen a genuine snuff film. [...] Cheers, Scott.
Post #30,109 by Ashton 2/28/02 12:33:08 AM Reply	'Simulated' will do: not much Isn't 'simulated' elsewhere..
Post #30,172 by boxley 2/28/02 1:01:40 PM Reply	snuff films are real if defined by movies depicting real life death, there is a whole series of them available in some video stores. Spliced footage of car wrecks, crime scenes and wars. thanx, bill "I'm selling a hammer," he says. "They can beat nails with it, or their dog." Richard Eaton spy software innovator
Post #30,185 by inthane-chan 2/28/02 2:51:31 PM Reply	Definintion of "snuff" AFAIK... ...is that the person was killed specifically for the purpose of making the film. "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

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