Old Guy Thoughts: In my experience, intellectual
calculations of worthiness aren't intrinsically
valuable. What is harmful are those things
that turn out to be harmful. And that's it.
For our calculations of what is harmful - those
fail all the time.Don’t mind high oil prices, inflation and the debacle in Iran.
DO NOT LEARN FROM THE LAST 10 YEARS. Just stay in a constant state of distracted anxiety without realizing how you're being cynically manipulated.
I wonder what could possibly go wrong by setting the precedent for the state to execute people by firing squad on national news.
This is a natural evolution of technology.
How many people outraged at this have clicked out of a tab of streaming toilet cams? It's greater than zero I assure you.
Excuse me? What is this?
A paralyzed guy, sitting in a wheelchair, will be shot, slump over, die, blood will ooze from the wound, and then that's it.
His actions were murderous and atrocious, but there is no value in watching his life being extinguished in real time. Just because it is available to be seen doesn't mean it benefits us to see it.
I am afraid that many people will realize that too late and have to deal with the memory, if not the pangs of conscience, of having watched a snuff film.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...
do you think the administration does not have other targets for the firing squad who are not even criminals? I'll give you zero guesses
https://19thnews.org/2024/11/trump-liz-cheney-shot/
> “She’s (Liz Cheney) a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face,” he said.
this firing squad was not Hegseth's idea.
All executions should be public if not for transparency's sake.
Edit: OK, apparently I can’t make a prescriptive statement without getting piled on with people saying that’s not how it actually is. Noted.
The general public fucking loves watching executions. It used to be regular entertainment. They were massive events.
It was like going to the circus. You would bring your young children and goad them to cheer when the trap door opens.
Sating their bloodlust regularly will do nothing to undo their simple-mindedness.
We are barely literate and naked apes. We love violence.
The people who wanted to see this guy dying will thoroughly enjoy it, and teach their children to enjoy it. They will teach them that this is "Justice". They will feel fulfilled and heard and represented. They will literally feel safer, now that a "Bad guy" got solved just like in the movies and other stories.
Do you not realize how goddamned popular the torture porn of "24" was? Including to the Heritage Foundation which paid for the cast to come run a panel at one of their conventions? Including a supreme court justice who explicitly pointed at "24" as justification for allowing torture?
This isn't solely in conservative circles either. Right now you have lots of people who usually vote democrat showing that their only complaint about this administration's stupidity and crimes and crassness is that it isn't being used to oppress the specific rich people they want to watch die in agony.
Seriously though, you aren't the only person in this comment section taking this position, and I just cannot fathom how some of you missed this in every single part of history we know about. It wasn't subtle.
Executions used to be public because people love watching bad people die. You might not like it because of some Englightenment-era idea to the contrary, but it's an inescapably true facet of human nature. The only reason Britain and France stopped holding public executions is the crowds eventually started to get too rowdy and governments needed to move them indoors.
The moral-outrage excuse was invented afterwards.
You seem to be overly optimistic about the average person's moral compass. It's entirely driven by mob mentality and an authority figure.
> Hey Platforms: Your Violent Content Policies Are About To Meet The Pentagon’s Firing Squad
Unfortunately they blew their wad back in 2020.
Hegseth Wants Public to Watch First Firing Squad Execution Since WWII
Why bother spending a blog post speculating like this and picking away at the rules? The platforms will all air the execution for the same reason all the tech CEOs attended Trump's inauguration.
Apple's execs, for instance, definitely had enough monetary and social capital to basically just ignore Trump, and they haven't.
My guess is they'd all prefer to cooperate, but they know that if any of their competitors defect, then they're worse off for it. Plus, there are legal hurdles to direct cooperation among competitors.
We saw a show of uncoordinated unity after the Jan. 6 insurrection, but as soon as that unity showed signs of fraying, it became hard to sustain.
By your theory, couldn't (presumably other) shareholders sue over what Apple actually did? Like, maybe cowing to Trump has done damage to Apple's brand, in violation of fiduciary duty.
Even if that were a valid legal excuse (and it is not clear that it is), it doesn't hold up to moral scrutiny.
But realistically the reason they all bent the knee to Trump is probably not because they were cowards or because they wanted to protect their shareholders, but because they welcomed him being elected.
Partly because they knew it would kill off the anti-trust enforcement that was finally starting to gain steam with Lina Khan's FTC and partly because they are rich enough to play Trump's corruption game, where as long as you pay him off and linguistically publicly fellate him once in a while the world is your oyster.
(I don't like it but that doesn't make it false)