i’m sure everyone can be normal about this post yes?
transcript:
a tumblr post:
autistichalsin posts:
Some of you are literally watching the right wing continuously try to expand the definition of “pedophilia” to include “existing around a child while queer,” and then agreeing with them when they say pedophiles deserve to be summarily executed.
Not only does this place innocent people in danger of political executions, it also puts children in danger, as most children who are sexually abused have this done by someone close to them, and feelings that they would be responsible for the death of their abuser if they reported leads to lower rates of reporting. It also leads to higher rates of abusers murdering their victims when they’re found out because the punishment will be the same anyway.
Part of being on the left is realizing that it’s better to let 100 guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one. Another part of being on the left is realizing that one’s life is never something others have the right to take away- even the most evil people alive. Yes, that includes mass murderers and rapists and pedophiles. Once you make one group acceptable to kill, you give others a vested interest in defining groups they have prejudice against into that group.
You have to start dealing with the fact that no crime makes one’s life forfeit. Not even the worst most depraved and sadistic acts. The worst people alive have rights, and if you can’t accept that they deserve them, at least try to accept that it is to your benefit that they retain rights no matter what they’re accused of. And if you can’t do even that, well… you just might be the kind of person who would cut off your nose to spite your face.
If you want to protect victims, if you want to protect minority groups, you have to realize that sex crimes, or any crimes at all, do not deserve the death penalty. Period.
brettdoesdiscourse replies:
When a certain kind of person “deserves” to die, bigots will make sure marginalized groups all are that kind of person.
little-gay-dowitcher replies:
My former neighbors were the “kill all pedos” type. They were also incredibly transphobic. And I was visibly queer. So guess who got stalked, harassed and threatened all throughout the brief period of time they babysat for their friend?
Stop enabling fascists. They’ve already proven they’re willing to attack minorities for no reason. Don’t give them a chance to excuse it.
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least.”
- Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring
Smartest dude around, that gandalf.
“Hold you your hand, Frodo. It’s quite cool.”
- Gandalf, The Fellowship of the Ring
While it’s a great quote, I’ll add an amendment:
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death or to let live in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
Live and let live works, but only if the other also does so. When one does not allow you to live as you want, because what they do harms you, then that ends there.
I’d say that lethal force is rational when used as proportional self-defence. Or, in the words of Malcolm Reynolds, “if someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back.”
I think the Gandalf quote, however, is specifically referring to death as a punishment for “just” being a thoroughly contemptible, evil and heinous person.
I’m aware of the quote being for that reference. But I wanted to extend the quote to be more applicable to general life.
Of course lethal force is rational as proportional self-defence, hence why I specified the ‘not too eager to let live’. Because while mercy and kindness are a Good, it is no good if that comes at the cost of your survival as eg. a minority. You gotta reason with most, but you gotta punch a fascist.
I would still classify what you’re describing as proportional self defence, since punching a fascist is always self defence haha 😄
The only times when it’s ok to take a life is when there are NO other options.
Ruthless capitalists can cause more death and suffering than any serial killer or mass shooter. In many ways, they’re a group so driven by calculating costs and benefits that the threat of death would be more effective as a deterrent than for anyone else.
However, even these people don’t deserve to die if you can simply prevent them from holding that power instead. All that matters is that they can’t do more harm. Unless they insist on defending their wealth like scarface, just prevent them from being that powerful ever again.
TotallynotJessica is TotallynotWrong. The value of a person’s life is immeasurable. If we first accept that statement as bedrock fact, then proceed logically from that starting point, better ways of relating to those around us naturally emerge.
It’s also important to prevent needing to kill people in the first place. If you can lessen the desire for crime by ensuring everyone has enough, police will become less necessary. If you can convince someone to stop doing something bad, you shouldn’t need to kill them.
I had an argument with someone online recently where I advocated for removal of national boarders and they came back with, “what about bad people” to which I responded, who are the bad people? And if I consider you a bad person would you be alright being kicked out of your country and not allowed to return. We spoke for about 3 hours and my whole argument was that if he considered rapists (they said rapists and murderers were bad people) fit to be prevented from entering his country would they willingly leave if their wife accused them of rape.
They just couldn’t allow themselves to follow through with the thought, it simply stopped with, “I’m a good person” and even when asked if they received consent before sexual acts they said,“no, but I’m not a rapist, I’m a good person”
They love laws like this, because in their minds, they could 100% NEVER be applied to them.
conservatism consists of exactly one proposition etc. etc.
I feel like pedophilia (along with zoophilia and possibly even coprophilia) is a mental disorder and should be studied so it can be properly treated.
I wish all pedophiles a very therapy
Except those who have acted on their desires. They are monsters
And here we go…
The “pedophile” thing has always been a front for conservatives to wedge in, from what I’ve seen. They saw a real problem and then, as they always do, fearmongered and inflated it way out of proportion to reality, then started to expand the definition.
I’m old enough to remember when pedophile actually meant people trying to engage in sex with children. As in, actual children. The definition began expanding to older and older people, and expanding into fiction, fictional characters, and more.
They also started getting weird about any men being near children. I am also old enough to remember when fathers, uncles, and generally men, could be in public with kids without a woman around and without being looked at with suspicion. These days we hear countless stories of men stalked, harassed, and threatened when they’re out with kids they have every right to be with.
And that’s just the stuff that affects everyone, not just minorities and marginalized people. How the left ever got on board with this pedophile panic I don’t understand, considering conservatives have been equating LGBT with molestation and pedophilia as long as I can recall. Anyone who didn’t see this coming from the beginning is a blind fool.
I think it was the Catholic Church thing. A real case of pedophilia committed by figures generally considered conservative and right wing, which the left rightfully jumped on attacking…but then kept going when conservatives egged them on further instead of stopping. People got tricked into going nuts on it cause the right was all ‘well if that’s bad then you must condemn this…and this…and this…and this…’ with each step being something less and less real, less egregious, less of a true problem. But they’re good at stoking hate, and once the hate was kindled in people it took less and less to spread it just slightly further each time, until now we have people ostensibly on the left calling for censorship of completely fictional works and punishment of people who produce or consume them, despite no actual harm to any actual people being involved.
And that’s exactly the level of unthinking hate they want, for people to not stop and consider whether any actual harm is being caused, just condemn and punish and don’t argue or dispute the severity of what you’re calling for. Just hate, just view them as monsters, deserving of death. Even as the definition keeps expanding.
After all, what group is othered and made the enemy doesn’t matter that much to them, only that some group is hated to the point of an unexamined desire for violence and death. They can work with that, after all.
The “pedophile” thing has always been a front for conservatives to wedge in, from what I’ve seen.
It’s a two-edged sword.
On the one side, you have a crusade among evangelicals and social conservatives aimed at civil rights organizers, liberal egalitarians, and progressives trying to provide relief to abused members of the LGBTQ community. These efforts are intended to re-stigmatize any kind of sex that isn’t within the bounds of Christian dogmatism and any kind of gender expression that isn’t purely cis-hetero-norminative.
On the other side, you have real pedophile freaks. Your Epsteins. Your Diddys. Your Catholic Priests. Your Falwell Jr / Ted Haggard / Mark Foley / Dennis Hastert / Bill Clinton / Donald Trump / Jerry Sandusky / Jimmy Savile / Vince McMahon sexual predators. These people benefit immensely when “rapist” and “pedophile” are accusations that are entirely politicized, because they can be dismissed just as easily.
After all, what group is othered and made the enemy doesn’t matter that much to them, only that some group is hated to the point of an unexamined desire for violence and death.
The group matters, at least in so far as its “their team” versus “our team”. Focusing on religious, racial, and gender minorities plays into the white christian nationalism that says anyone outside your orthodoxy is evil. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen otherwise normal and rational liberals leap onto the “Muhammad was a pedophile! He had sex with a nine year old!” to justify their bigotry towards Muslims (especially darker skinned Muslims from Pakistan or West Africa). The Republican rallying cry of “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York flipped a few House races and state seats in 2010.
You see the same shit being played in Texas, with the concern trolling over Collin Allred’s lukewarm support for transgender military officers. It got so bad Allred had to issue a formal statement against boys playing in “girl sports”. That Allred is a black man running in a state with a storied streak of white nationalism has produced its own headwinds. But the state’s conservative leadership and its legions of law enforcement officials never seem to get in the way of the state’s strip clubs, brothels, and human trafficking rings, despite them practically being paraded down major highways leading between every suburb and major city center.
As soon as Elon Musk went red, all the conservatives muttering about his horny ass out-takes vanished right along their complaints about limosine liberals when Donald Trump took the nomination. It’s all kabuki. People (in power, at least) don’t seem to really care about this shit save as a slander against one another.
Once you make one group acceptable to kill, you give others a vested interest in defining groups they have prejudice against into that group.
So… they’re going to make us all billionaires?
I agree with a lot of points the post is making, but there is also one group in particular, that isn’t only responsible for turning society against each other, literally dragging us back in to fascism, but is waaaaay above the law and would always remain that way until the system that put that law in place and enforces it is abolished, which is a complete impossibility without using force.
Do I think all billionaires should die? Not necessarily, but I do think they should cease to exist as billionaires.
Do I think any billionaire would, at first, just give up their money and power and just agree to be like the rest of us? Not a fucking chance.
So yeah, while prison isn’t a real threat to them, and they have all the power, and adamant refusal to give it up, I see them as a group it is acceptable to kill, because they see us all as acceptable to kill (and they actively are).
You simply can’t compare a random citizen, however harmful to the people around them, to the handful of people who literally control the entire world economy, and all of the abuse and destruction it brings with it, killing millions annually (via artificial scarcity and other methods of deliberately depriving people access to food, water, shelter, and medicine for preventable disease, not to mention other exploitation like slavery or starvation wages, child labour, as well as the patriarchy, queerphobia, and so on which encourage gendered violence and the kind of murder OP is talking about).
Part of being on the left is considering systemic power structures, and understanding that they can not be addressed in the same way an individual offender is.
And for the record: I don’t believe in the death penalty and I don’t think paedophiles, rapists, and murderers should be executed, because as opposed to billionaires, they can be removed from society in different ways, because they don’t own it.
How did that go for the objectively non-bourgeoisie who got caught up in Stalin’s / Lenin’s / Mao’s anti-bourgeois campaigns?
Even Mao acknowledged innocent people got executed during his “counter-revolutionary” and land reform campaigns. And the number of prisoners Kruschev released from the Gulags would have been impossible if most of them were actually as harmful to Russia as they were accused of being.
Once the guillotines come out, everyone is calling everyone else bourgeois.
I gave a very narrow group, feel free to create your slippery slope strawman elsewhere.
You think you gave a narrow group. But my point is that “narrow groups” get very broad very quickly when heads start rolling.
we have people right now accusing anyone with a middle class income of being who they’re talking about when they say eat the rich. who genuinely believe that the fact that poverty exists means that anyone who isn’t in it is the borgeoise. you’re an idiot if you think those people won’t come out of the woodwork when people actually start killing billionaires.
You guys have an opportunity for good, honest discussion if you can both avoid behaviors like seeking refuge by invoking logical fallacies as if they’re eldritch wards of protection and viewing conversations that take place between parties who disagree as contests that must be won.
I find the replies to you funny because we know exactly who you’re talking about, there’s 3,194 of them worldwide.
Exactly.
People not being able to tell the difference between tankie rhetoric (“put all of the bourgeoisie up against the wall and everyone I disagree with in the gulag!!12”) or even plain old anti-communist propaganda, and actual leftist views is for them to figure out with themselves. I said what I said, and I mean it as I said it (including saying that I don’t even think it’s necessary to kill all billionaires, never mind anyone bellow them, which they conveniently ignore).
So… they’re going to make us all billionaires?
YES. THEY WILL. You will not have a billion dollars, but they will make you a billionaire!
I’m okay with fascists and other repeat offender threats to the planet being thrown in a prison forever. They don’t have to die and no one has the right to determine whose life is forfeit and whose isn’t. But if they repeatedly endanger the lives of others, including animals, they need to be away from society.
Texas is set to execute yet another person and Missouri executed an innocent man despite the DA’s objection and new evidence.
The death penalty is acceptable for people like Netanyahu.
I’m okay with fascists and other repeat offender threats to the planet being thrown in a prison forever. They don’t have to die and no one has the right to determine whose life is forfeit and whose isn’t. But if they repeatedly endanger the lives of others, including animals, they need to be away from society.
Finally, a leftist who actually understands that wanting to build a society free from state-sponsored violence means that state-sponsored execution is bad no matter what and it’s not just a question of how bad the crime wa–
The death penalty is acceptable for people like Netanyahu.
–oh.
I think we can make an exception for people that have carried out, or are actively carrying out, a genocide. Same would go for Hitler if he wasn’t a coward that did it himself.
What part of “no one has the right to decide whose life is forfeit and whose isn’t” didn’t you internalize when you said it the first time?
Let him spend the rest of his life in supermax, sure. Make sure he never sees the sun again. Make sure the only people he sees for the rest of his life are people who know what he did. But as for executing him, you are literally the person in the post. What counts as carrying out a genocide? Are soldiers doing that if they’re told by their commanding officers they’ll be executed themselves if they don’t? How about workers who take a bribe to divert aid trucks to somewhere, unbeknownst to the worker, they’ll get raided? Heck, what counts as a genocide? Forcibly relocating native Canadians in order to build a natural gas pipeline across their ancestral home is unequivocally bad, but is it genocide? Thought Slime seems to think so. Should we guillotine Justin Trudeau?
I’d take rotting in prison forever. That’s acceptable.
Then why’d you say you wanted to kill him? Either you believe in the death penalty or you don’t.
I don’t believe in the death penalty but I also won’t cry over the death of a fascist carrying out genocide. If he dies a lonely death in a cell, that’s still the same outcome, even if power is a vacuum. It was also a late edit in jest, but I also hope he bites it asap.
To give you a more adult answer, it would be absolutely insane to allow anyone the power to decide whose life is forfeit and whose isn’t. We’ve witnessed that slippery slope before with the death penalty in Texas and Missouri. If we allow that kind of thing to continue or go unchecked, where does it end? How long before someone decides that something else justifies it and where does that power cease to continue expanding? What about rank when it comes to war crimes like you mentioned earlier? It’s easy to say “fuck that guy, they deserve a slow death,” but if society put that into practice, it would be chaos and would set a terrible precedent. Executions are a definitive characteristic of any authoritarian regime.
There are also special cases where a cop or a soldier goes off script and summarily executes someone unarmed. Do they deserve death because of their carelessness for the life of another? I know if the person killed was a friend or family member, I’d hope for the culprit’s death, but I’d never feel like I should be allowed to decide that.
This kind of thing can lead to a very deep dark hole where society blackens and removes all humanity, and leftist movements exist to preserve life.
This is probably one of the more tragic results of the mess we’re in right now and there is no good solution. Not killing anyone would be ideal, but not enough people feel that way or we wouldn’t be killing each other as much as we do.
You can’t change a bigots heart unless they want to change. You could kill them, but what difference would there be between you and a bigot at that point? These kinds of problems take generations to sort out, which is unfortunate for all the dead southern queer people who will be murdered legally in the years to come.
So what should we do with them?
Provide options for psychological therapy for the ones who have not offended.
Incarcerate the ones who have offended and provide options for psychological therapy for them until they are safe to go back out into public.
I’d add in full sterilization so that if any gene in their body had any purpose or cause in them being a pedophile, it is denied re-entry into the gene pool forever.
Mmm, “eugenics but actually it’s good because we’re applying it to People With Bad Characteristics”
Don’t forget the whole issue of the “(non sexual) drag acts are pedophilia” “being gay/trans/etc is child grooming” “Kissing someone of the same gender in a public space should be illegal” arguments that would allow conservatives to sterilize/chemically castrate anybody lgbtq or gender non-conforming due to the whole “Think of the children!!!” moral panic.
Hell this almost happened in Florida when they passed the bill that allowed forced chemical castration of people convicted of sexual battery, as well as that anti drag show bill which punished drag show performers with sexual misdemeanor charges, but also had a proposed amendment to change that to a sexual battery charge.
I mean
fucking kids, man.
You wanna draw a line, you grab the chalk.
There are many people eager to draw the pedophilia line at queer people existing in public.
Automatically killing all pedophiles tells pedophiles to murder their victims as the punishment for murder can be less than the penalty for pedophilia.
Would you rather a child be sexually assaulted and survive or for a child to be sexually assaulted and then murdered?
That’s the decision you’re making when you vote for summary execution of pedophiles.
Probably humane quarantine and rehabilitation, whether they are ever released or not. “Make the problem happen less” is better than “fuck his shit up for crossing a line”.
The line we’re talking about here is raping children. There’s no “rehabilitating” that. If they could control themselves they wouldn’t have done it the first time, unless they’re completely evil in which case, also fuck them.
whether they are ever released or not
This is the most important line. They might not ever be able to be rehabilitated. Maybe there’s something broken in them that can be fixed with therapy. Maybe there isn’t, and they never can be released without significant danger of reoffending. Either way, it isn’t our place to execute anyone for their crimes. If there is a crime, there will be innocent people convicted of it, and if there is a death penalty, there will be innocent people that receive it. The entire point of the post is that the definition of “pedo” continues to be expanded, until it’s really just being used as an ever expanding label to apply to political out-groups.
Where you draw the line may be different from where others draw the line, but no matter where you draw the line, some innocent person is dying, and maybe someone that committed no crime but being marginalized. As the post said, conservatives have been trying to expand the definition of pedophile to include queer people for decades, and ramping up the violent rhetoric as well. The more we advocate for violence against those we consider deserving, even if their crime is heinous, the more we assist those trying to expand the definition in their attempt to wield that hatred as a weapon against their chosen targets.
In summary, if you’re okay with the death penalty for pedophiles, then you’re okay with innocent people that were convicted wrongfully being executed too, and maybe for political reasons if the right gets their way.
Help them get better.
Disagree, lots of stuff can void your right to life. The issue with killing people, even those who deserve it, is that Innocents can be caught up in that.
this comment has a lot of “blatant, sweeping misandry is bad, but only because it inadvertently harms transmasc people” energy
Cmon being leftist doesn’t mean you open yourself up to abuse and manipulation at the hands of socios or psychos. There shouldn’t be sympathy or empathy for anyone who deliberately hurts other people. Can we rehabilitate them or punish them, yes. Should we “let 100 guilty go free” or some bs, hell no. Be real, this is how nice people end up getting fucked over by cult leaders
The broad argument fails, for the same reason as ‘banning Nazis makes you as bad as the Nazis.’
Bad faith only works because it resembles good faith. It’s an irrational abuse of a decent argument. That abuse does not disprove the argument. If we avoid things just because some asshole can abuse them, we are paralyzed, because there is absolutely nothing that assholes cannot abuse.
Maximizing everyone’s freedom and dignity means having some restrictions.
Maximizing who survives means some violent bastards get got.
I don’t think the argument does fail. OP is not arguing against killing in the heat of the moment in self-defence or whatever. OP is arguing specifically about executions after the fact. The only way “maximizing who survives” would be relevant is if you believe capital punishment is a deterrent, and that is arguable.
Vigilante violence is the initial example. The death penalty, as a state function, only comes up incidentally.
The broad argument is what’s echoed in the replies: ‘we can’t do [blank] for good reasons, because what if they do it for bad reasons.’ As if doing anything to fascists, which fascists want done to all non-fascists, is double-reverse-secretly “enabling fascists.” But even those replies point out - they’re already fucking doing it. “They’re willing to attack minorities for no reason.”
Fascists will always MAKE an excuse. Usually, whichever one seems popular, especially the ones about stopping them in particular. They’ll pick two opposite excuses in the same sentence. Their shameless lying doesn’t disprove the rhetoric they stole. This is as true when it’s accusations of making shit up, as when it’s suggestions of bringing a brick to a rally.
Fascists will always MAKE an excuse.
Obviously. But whether or not leftists support killing people who have done the thing the fascists accuse the minorities of doing/being is whether or not the fascists will be able to kill those minoritites with leftists cheering them on.
Nnnnnope. Being against something real doesn’t suddenly transfer to whatever some asshole claims is the same thing. You can in fact be mad about child molesters, and not accidentally find yourself mad about trans people.
As a clear example of failed redirection: fascists screaming that leftists are “the real fascists.” Unsurprisingly, this does not convince many leftists. They’re still ardently against actual fascists… even the morons screaming “let’s kill those fascists!” and pointing somewhere the fuck else.
You have to start dealing with the fact that no crime makes one’s life forfeit
What about fascists? Shouldn’t their lives be forfeit? :3
Who decides which “fascists” deserve to die in this scenario? Are you specifically targeting actual self proclaimed fascist world leaders, or just anyone you disagree with who you feel “seems like a fascist”?
For your scenario to work you would have to elect someone who could dictate who deserves to die. That would be giving this “dictator” full unquestioned power over life and death… You see how quickly this all falls apart right?
I meant this somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Like you say, there is no valid scenario in which someone/a government could cast judgement on who is/isn’t a fascist. However those on the far-right who insist on eroding democracy are blind to reason and are beyond saving. Say a civil war were to arise, those who self-align themselves with the fascists I believe would then be fair game for destruction.
As long as I and only I get to define that term, yes.
The death penalty should be reserved for people who absolutely will continue to commit great crimes (e.g. murder) even after they’re imprisoned. Example: A crime boss that issues orders to have people murdered via visits from their lawyer.
Someone like that–even from within prison–has too much of a negative impact on society to be allowed to live. You can’t take away their basic rights (like the right to a lawyer) so the most humane thing to do would be to end them as peacefully as possible. Otherwise you’re going to allow them to continue committing crimes, racking up victims, and degrading society as a whole.
A convicted pedophile rapist will be incapable of committing that same sort of crime as long as they are imprisoned. Hence it’s not necessary to execute them.
Literally illiterate.
Sure, the text states ‘no crime makes one’s life forfeit’, and I read that quite clearly, but I’m proposing an exception to this rule when it comes to fascists ^.~ It’s a little joke
The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi
