So you'd be all for putting Wall Street to death?

This man ended one life. How many lives have venture capital firms ended by encouraging cost cutting of safety measures, environmental degradation, or outright destruction of peoples' livelihoods or just outright fucking people over to create customers? We should probably put the entire board of directors of Nestle to death for crimes against humanity.

https://www.zmescience.com/science/nestle-company-pollution-children/

Of course, they have money and lawyers, so they'll walk free. This guy has neither, and was probably fucked over his entire life, so let's just murder him and pretend that he's not a product of a system that's fundamentally broken.

From "The Seven Samurai":

Kikuchiyo: What do you think of farmers? You think they're saints? Hah! They're foxy beasts! They say, "We've got no rice, we've no wheat. We've got nothing!" But they have! They have everything! Dig under the floors! Or search the barns! You'll find plenty! Beans, salt, rice, sake! Look in the valleys, they've got hidden warehouses! They pose as saints but are full of lies! If they smell a battle, they hunt the defeated! They're nothing but stingy, greedy, blubbering, foxy, and mean! God damn it all!

Kikuchiyo: But then who made them such beasts? You did! You samurai did it! You burn their villages! Destroy their farms! Steal their food! Force them to labour! Take their women! And kill them if they resist! So what should farmers do?

Let’s instead reread my post, specifically the part about opposing the death penalty as it is implemented in this country. Are there societies that impose it in any “just” fashion? I don’t know of any, but we’re certainly not among that hypothetical number. I see no inconsistency between favoring the abolition of capital punishment and acknowledging that there are individuals among us of whom one may fairly observe “He is vicious and dangerous, and if he stopped breathing overnight the sun would rise on a world in which the quotient of human goodness had, albeit quite a number of decimal places back, imperceptibly ticked up.”

This guy…was probably fucked over his entire life, so let's just murder him and pretend that he's not a product of a system that's fundamentally broken.

Sure, assuming the guy hadn’t been pickled in utero, then had he been kidnaped by gypsies and raised by old money in the Hamptons by adoptive parents who sent him to Choate and then Yale…well, he might today be doing cutting-edge research of the frontiers of microbiology. But you know, the gyppos fell down on the job, and Teaunte B wound up passing his formative years under sub-optimal conditions here in Oakland along with many of his contemporaries who will never murder anyone. I mean, boo-fucking-hoo that there aren’t enough ponies to go around and that the best horseflesh ends up in the stables of the privileged. Welcome to this planet. You’ll notice that the sky is usually some shade of blue here, and not paisley.

Yeah, the system’s broken and this violent clown is broken, and all the king’s horses, et cetera. Polluted water under the bridge, y’know? We can try to mend the system (until our own oxen look to be gored) and its casualties, but not all of the detritus is salvageable, and I’m not going to piously pretend that I imagine this unpleasant specimen will lend himself to reform.

Your swing away from the individual villain to the cruel captains of industry puts me in mind of a short online book review I came across recently, but that’s the subject for another post, another forum.

cordially,

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