How Facebook Will Probably Manipulate the Next US Election

It's a well accepted fact that money heavily influences US politics, with the candidate who spends the most money usually winning the presidential election. And it's expected that the 2016 US presidential election will involve the most campaign spending in history. But what is often overlooked is that it's not money in itself that wins elections. You can't directly buy votes. So why does the correlation exist?

Money buys attention. At the end of the day, every voter can vote for whomever they want, but campaign spending determines how much they get saturated with information and propaganda for various candidates. Money makes a candidate a household name, pays for billboards and banners, buys attack ads to discredit candidates, and so on. Money doesn't buy elections, it's just a means to influence what voters know, which then affects how they vote.

News media has known this for years, of course, where most readers/viewers understand the political leanings of their source, and aren't surprised to see biased reporting. But what happens when people think they're getting unfiltered information? What if you can make people think they're getting a balanced view, and that view gives the distinct impression that one candidate is better than the others?

This is where social media is the big game in town. People don't think of their Facebook news feed, their Twitter feed, or their Google searches as being politically biased, or the tools of a private company to manipulate what they see and therefore influence what they think. They tend to think of these as neutral sources, possibly biased towards showing them things that are likely to keep them clicking, or advertising for things that they are likely to want. But they don't think of social media companies as manipulating what they think and feel and understand about the world.

With the amount of time people spend on social media now, it would be pretty bad if those privately held profit-driven companies were to take advantage of their completely legal power to manipulate what they show their users, right?

Various surveys have made clear the increasing role Facebook is playing as a news source for many people. More and more people are relying on the news articles shared by friends and the "related stories" links there as a main source of news. So if the items that appeared in their feeds were filtered in order to favour articles that are positive to some candidate or party and negative to others, then these people would be having their opinions manipulated to some degree, and would end up more likely to vote a certain way.

We also know that Facebook is very politically active, spending around $10 million a year in lobbying. This means that the company clearly has an interest in certain political outcomes, and cares enough to be willing to devote time and money to get their way.

One more important piece of the puzzle, we also know that Facebook has both the means and the willingness to manipulate people's news feeds, and can do so secretly if it wants. We know of one secret experiment they did, where they manipulated hundreds of thousands of user's feeds in order to see if they could change their emotional states. They were able to do this in secret and we only know about it because they disclosed it. This means that they probably have done other experiments that they haven't disclosed, but more importantly, it proves that they can secretly do this manipulation if they want to.

And finally, and probably most importantly, none of this is illegal. Facebook has no obligation to be fair, neutral or unbiased in their filtering of what they present to people.

So, when you put all this together, Facebook has the means to secretly manipulate the news that millions of US citizens see every day, and they have political interests that are important enough to them to be worth spending millions of dollars on. Further, they have demonstrated a willingness to do this kind of secret manipulation of their users.

The only real reason to believe that Facebook won't try to manipulate the next US election is if they think it is likely that knowledge will be leaked, and if it is, that it would have greater long term repercussions to the company than not doing it would. Given how deeply entrenched Facebook is in the social media ecosystem, and also given that they could, of course, also limit how much people found out about it if it leaked, I don't think it's that crazy to suspect that they'll do it.

In summary:

• Election results are influenced by the news and information that voters are exposed to
• People are getting a large proportion of their news from Facebook
• Facebook has political interests and already spends time/money on lobbying
• Facebook can manipulate what news and information users see
• Facebook has previously demonstrated the ability and willingness to manipulate user's news feeds, and was able to do it secretly
• There is nothing illegal about Facebook doing this
• The only real reason for them not to do it is if they think the general public might find out and the bad press will hurt them more in the long run than the gain

Now, I've been focusing specifically on Facebook and one particular event here, but most of the arguments apply to other social media companies and other kinds of manipulation. We really do need to be aware of just how much these companies are integrated into our lives and have the ability to control aspects of our knowledge. These are profit-driven companies whose primary purpose is to serve their customers and shareholders, and we're the product. We should not make the mistake of assuming that they have the greater interests of us or society at large as a main priority. They might, of course, but they're corporations. Generating profit is what they're legally obligated to do, and we need to remember that.

Violence and Who Framed Roger Rabbit

I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit the other night, for the first time since I was a kid. For a movie made in 1988, I was happy to see that it held up quite well. The high productions values and attention to detail clearly paid off, and it was interesting to watch now that I'm at an age where I can relate to the adult characters more. Overall it's still quite an enjoyable movie.

What was different for me this time, though, was the violence. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm as happy watching a good action sequence as the next guy, so that's not my problem. What stood out for me was the casual use of violence, and violence as being funny in its own right. That is, the idea that seeing someone get hurt is funny in itself.

We're all familiar with the old cartoons that this movie is paying homage to, and the fact that they use violence for humour. We've all seen the Coyote get hurt in elaborate ways while trying to catch the Roadrunner. The fact that he is never permanently injured allows us to laugh at his misfortune. Or slapstick like The Three Stooges, where the casual violence the characters aim at each other is funny because they don't actually get hurt.

Or at least, that's certainly how it was always viewed.

But when I was watching the opening cartoon of Roger Rabbit, I didn't laugh once. It was literally entirely about Roger Rabbit trying to save a baby from being injured, and himself getting constantly hurt in the process. The humour was completely based around the inventive ways the writers came up with for him to be hurt. Now, he never gets injured, even when a refrigerator falls on his head, but he clearly gets hurt. And that in itself is supposed to be funny.

I feel like an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, but I didn't find it funny at all. Now, I wasn't morally outraged or anything, but I wasn't enjoying it either. I was thinking, "Oh, well, this is aimed at kids and kids aren't exactly able to get sophisticated humor, so slapstick and fart jokes tend to be the bulk of the humour they get."

But this also isn't true. Warner Brothers cartoons have certainly been enjoyed by adults over the decades. The Three Stooges was certainly intended for adults to enjoy. And, hell, adults enjoy watching shit like Funniest Home Videos. Clearly the enjoyment of seeing people hurt but not permanently injured has never been limited to children.

What I'm wondering is whether or not we're changing as a culture. Diana felt the same as me watching the movie, so I know I'm at least not alone. And neither of us are pussies who hate seeing violence in TV shows and movies. But it certainly seems to be the case that violence just for the sake of violence isn't funny to us.

And this wasn't just limited to the opening cartoon in Roger Rabbit. Throughout the movie, there was a general level of slapstick violence, with Bob Hoskins' character quite often hitting and physically manhandling Roger Rabbit, and it clearly being intended to be funny and lighthearted. Now, I know it probably sounds like I'm overanalysing and sounding like a stodgy old man, but it felt to me like someone needed to sit Hoskins' character down and say, "Now, now, Detective Valiant, you need to use your words. We don't hit each other here. I want you to sit in the corner and think about how you should treat your classmates."

I would certainly like to think that we're just a small part of a more general social trend in not finding violence funny for its own sake, while still being able to appreciate well crafted humour that happens to involve violence. People getting hurt should generally not be funny to us, it's the very opposite of empathy. We don't need to become overly sensitive and politically correct, but just like most decent people these days don't take pleasure in seeing a bull being killed in a ring, two dogs fighting each other, or a TV character shaking his fist at his wife and saying, "One of these days...POW! Right in the kisser!", it would be nice if we started to move away from laughing when a person gets hit in the face with a frying pan or kicked in the balls too.

Why the Dalai Lama's Teachings Probably Shouldn't Be Taken Too Seriously

I often see quotes from the Dalai Lama on social media and in various places, and I get the sense that many people consider his teachings to be inspirational. Certainly, messages about love, kindness, forgiveness and so on are generally good things, and I'm not going to criticize that. The point I want to raise here, though, is that to western audiences, a lot of these aspects of the Dalai Lama's beliefs get presented and people take inspiration from them, but I notice that his other beliefs, the stuff about karma and reincarnation, tend to be downplayed somewhat.

This isn't at all surprising. To a largely Christian audience and a strongly Christian influenced culture, karma and reincarnation isn't going to resonate very well, while concepts like love and forgiveness are much more universal and things that more or less everyone aspires to. But what worries me is that people end up taking just a subset of his beliefs and as a result, elevating him to a position of respect and reverence that he doesn't really deserve.

Don't get me wrong, he's not a bad person and certainly if more people in the world were like him (in some ways, at least), the world would almost certainly be a better place. But if you want real answers to peace and love in this world, he's not the guy for the job. Take his quotes as your feelgood morning buzz if you want, but don't make the mistake of thinking that he preaches a path worth following.

Okay, what the hell am I talking about? What's so bad about the Dalai Lama?

Well, nothing, really. At least nothing that isn't also bad about other Buddhists, other Christians, and in general, most religious people.

The problem is the karma and reincarnation.

While you might read wonderful quotes about being full of love, the Dalai Lama's belief system is based around karmic justice, the idea that good deeds are eventually rewarded and bad deeds are eventually punished. Because we can empirically see that this kind of karmic justice generally doesn't happen in our lifetimes (sometimes people "get what's coming to them"; plenty of times they thrive their whole lives just fine), this concept is usually also tied together with reincarnation. So if karma doesn't get the bad guy in this life, don't worry, it will get him in the next.

This kind of belief system is obviously more or less impervious to proof. The Dalai Lama loves to make statements that make him appear scientifically minded, such as that he would readily give up his belief in reincarnation if science could prove it false. Now, of course, this isn't how science works, the burden of proof is on him to show that a fantastic concept like reincarnation is real, and it's basically impossible to disprove a vague supernatural claim like reincarnation, especially when no one even agrees on what it really means (different schools of Buddhism all have different ideas on what gets reincarnated and what does not; do you keep your memories, some vague concept of soul, etc). Given that his position as Dalai Lama itself requires reincarnation to be true, it's hardly surprising that he would cling to it, though I don't know if his stance on science having the burden to disprove it is one of ignorance of the scientific method, or a deliberate attempt to appear reasonable and open to change while really believing nothing of the sort.

So the point here is, just like other religions such as Christianity that comfort people by telling them that the good will be rewarded in heaven while the bad will be punished in hell, the Dalai Lama's teachings on love and kindness are also based on his belief that justice will be served eventually, in this life or the next. He has made it quite clear that he sees this kind of karmic justice necessary for a fair and just world, and he clearly believes it to be true.

The Dalai Lama can afford to love and forgive because he believes justice will come to everyone eventually anyway.

Where does this leave us? You don't really forgive someone if you're counting on them getting karmic justice eventually. You're not showing compassion if that compassion relies on a trust that some supernatural justice will eventually sort things out. If you want to believe in that kind of justice to help make sense of the world, then great, pick Buddhism, pick Christianity, pick any of the religions that give you this promise. Just don't be fooled into thinking that the Dalai Lama is preaching something different.

Now, on the other hand, if you can hear his teachings, and take away from that a genuine ability to love, to forgive, to show kindness, and to not want those who harm you to be harmed in return, then guess what? You're a better person than he is. Don't try to learn from him, because he should be trying to learn from you.

Rethinking the theme of Terminator 2

Not so much thumbs up

I went back and rewatched the previous Terminator movies with the recent release of Terminator Genesys, and while I still very much enjoyed the first one, I found myself not enjoying Terminator 2 as much as I had when I was younger. I think there is still a lot of great stuff in this movie, don't get me wrong, but this time around I found the theme annoyed me. I'm hoping that this post will get across what it was that was bugging me about it.

Main Theme

One of the key messages of the movie is the idea that "the future is not set. There is no fate but that which we make for ourselves". This is fine and not what bugged me. It was the greater theme of learning the value of human life. My issue isn't with the theme itself, but with how poorly the movie actually handles it. There are two main plot points that support this theme:

1. The Terminator learning the value of human life
2. Sarah Connor not killing Miles Dyson and instead choosing a non-lethal approach to taking down Cyberdyne

Neither of these really ends up doing much service to the theme, so let's go over them and I'll try to explain why.

I Know Now Why You Cry

Let's start at the very end. The final line of the movie is:

Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.

This is a nice feelgood line to end the movie on, and it sounds meaningful. We're meant to leave the movie thinking, "yeah, if a lousy machine can figure out the value of human life, why can't we damn humans do it?"

The problem, of course, is that no machine has actually learned the value of human life. A machine in a movie learned it because that's what the script said. But you can't take a profound fictional event and use it as a premise for a logical argument about the real world. You don't base your opinion on human beings on what a fictional robot did in some movie! This is a clever line that feels profound, but it really says nothing.

Now, going through the movie, we see the Terminator go from not knowing why he can't kill humans to apparently valuing human life. We even have the funny exchange where John Connor keeps telling him that he can't kill humans, and he just keeps asking, "why?". The best John Connor can come up with is, "because you just can't. Trust me on this."

John Connor is just a child in the movie, so we shouldn't expect any kind of profound philosophical argument from him. But if the Terminator's arc in the movie is going to be eventually valuing human life, then we need things to happen in the movie to justify that. And as far as I can see, that isn't the case. The movie progresses and as far as we can tell, the Terminator is avoiding killing people because John Connor ordered him not to. But then suddenly, at the end, he apparently now understands why people cry, and values human life.

The movie did no work to get to that point. It just kind of asserts it because it needs it for story closure. There is no good reason for the Terminator to now value human life, other than if he just somehow 'figured it out' from out of nowhere. And if a movie is all about learning the value of human life but can't actually articulate in any real way why human life is valuable, then it more or less fails.

I Almost Did It

The previous issue was a bit nitpicky, but this one I think is the main problem. This is the part where Sarah Connor goes to kill Miles Dyson, but in the end, they decide to take a non-lethal approach to stopping Cyberdyne. We get the scene with her sobbing on the floor as John Connor and the Terminator run in, and she says, "I almost did it". First thing is first, though. The real reason Miles Dyson is still alive at this point is not because Sarah Connor couldn't pull the trigger. It's because of luck and Sarah Connor being a fucking terrible shot.

Sarah Connor absolutely pulls the trigger to kill Miles Dyson. But he moves at the last moment when a radio controlled car hits his foot. This is pure luck and by all rights Dyson should be straight up dead at this point.

She then goes on to pour 60 rounds of assault rifle ammunition into the desk he's hiding behind, but his desk must be stacked full of bricks or something because none of them penetrate and kill him.

This still isn't enough. She then heads to the room he's in and fires at him with a pistol, eventually hitting him once in the shoulder. It's only after all of these lousy shots that she eventually has to confront him and his family and then, finally, she's unable to shoot him in the face at point blank range while his wife and child look on.

Hardly 'pat yourself on the back' moral integrity here, and Miles Dyson really should be dead and the movie basically over at this point. Ironically, Sarah Connor would have far more moral integrity if she actually followed through with shooting him at this point, because otherwise it means that she had no problem killing him with an assault rifle from 50 meters away, but not while looking at his face.

But at this point, we're meant to think that what has happened is that she 'came to her senses' and realized what she was doing was wrong. The alternative, not so feelgood answer, though, might be that she was right in the first place, but lost the nerve to make a difficult moral choice once she could no longer stay emotionally distant from it.

Sacrifice

So the issue here is whether or not killing Miles Dyson in order to stop Skynet being created would be a morally acceptable thing to do. The movie tries to argue that it wouldn't be. Now, obviously, if you can solve a problem without taking lives that's always going to be preferable. In this case, we're talking about trading one person's life for the lives of billions of people. It's possible that you may be able to do it non-lethally, and in the movie they find a way, but at a much greater risk of failure, particularly with a T1000 chasing them.

It's a question of whether preserving that one life is worth all the extra risk of trying to find a non-lethal approach. One thing that might seem significant here is that fact that we're talking about killing a person who hasn't actually done anything yet, which makes it seem like some kind of thought crime. But that's where this moral problem differs from anything we ever actually encounter in real life, so we need to be careful. The movie has the unique situation of having precise knowledge from the future of what is going to happen. And this makes it less killing a person for what they might do, and makes it closer to killing them for what they have done. This doesn't ever happen in the real world so we're not built to think well about this kind of situation.

The fact that Miles Dyson isn't intentionally trying to wipe out the human race makes this feel different to than if he was doing it intentionally, but that doesn't change the need to stop him. It means we shouldn't kill him because he 'deserves it', but it doesn't change the fact that killing him in order to stop him might not be unreasonable. Given how large the stakes are, this might be the unfortunate but pragmatic best move given the circumstances.

Consider that, right now, the US has an ongoing drone bombing campaign across several countries in the Middle East, where thousands of people have been killed. Thousands of innocent civilians are knowingly killed as part of this, and not much effort is made to avoid that. Drone attacks aren't aborted if there's any chance that an innocent person might die. Far from it.

And people seem to be mostly okay with that. I mean, people kind of don't like it, but no one seems to be kicking up a fuss or petitioning their representatives. The news media barely talks about it. Most people are happy to not be reminded of it, and to not think about it.

But really, if you're not losing sleep over thousands of innocent people being killing on an ongoing basis, in some dubious, poorly defined war on terror, on what ground can you really be against killing one single person who will guaranteed cause the deaths of several billion people. By what we're currently morally accepting, a drone should be able to bomb Miles Dyson's house and kill him and his entire family and we should just call it collateral damage.

Now, since I don't think the US drone bombing is morally acceptable I can't exactly use that as an argument for killing Miles Dyson. However, my point is more that we accept deaths for the greater good all the time, and when it saves lives we usually consider it a good thing. If one death saved billions of lives, would we really be morally torn about it?

The problem with Terminator 2 is that it avoided the actually morally difficult choice of having to do one bad thing in order to avoid a much worse thing. Making a tough choice, and then living with the guilt of that, that can actually be a noble act. Deciding that you can never take a life under any circumstances, and then muddling through a plan that hopefully will stop the deaths of billions of people if you get lucky, that's actually not so noble after all.

Towards True Marriage Equality

Like most progressive people, I'm in favour of a legal redefinition of marriage to make it fairer and more equal for as many people as possible. If for no other reason than the various legal perks and advantages that are given to married people in many countries, I think this is an issue that needs to be taken seriously.

What I want to talk about here is what a fair definition of marriage should be, and ask whether we as a society are actually ready to accept the repercussions of that definition. I see a lot of pro-gay-marriage people happily insult non-progressives as bigoted and homophobic, which is often quite justified, but I also see these same people displaying the bigoted behavior they condemn to other underrepresented minorities, without even appearing to realize that they're being the exact same kind of bigot that they rail against. Let me explain, and you can then decide if I'm full of crap or not!

Definition

The traditional definition of marriage is generally something of the form:

The legally or formally recognized union of a man and a woman as partners in a relationship.

The progressive definition I would argue for is something like this:

The legally or formally recognized union of consenting adults as partners in a relationship.

Think about this and decide if you agree that this is a reasonable definition. In arguments about marriage equality, progressives will typically focus on limiting marriage to being between a man and a woman as being unreasonably restrictive, and argue that any consenting adults should be able to form a legal union if they wish. I agree with this general principle, but it's important that we look at the cases that it does and doesn't cover, and see if we agree that we're on the right track.

What Marriage Wouldn't Cover

Opponents of gay marriage often bring up various cases and argue that redefining marriage will result in some kind of ridiculous slippery slope to absurdity, so let's look at those cases and see how they are handled by our progressive definition:

Marrying children.

Requiring marriage to be between consenting adults is important in order to exclude claims that someone would be able to marry a child. A child isn't sufficiently mentally developed to enter into a union of this kind, so this seems to be a reasonable restriction. And obviously marrying children isn't possible with our progressive definition, so this argument is invalid.

Marrying animals.

Another popular claim is that redefining marriage will result in bestiality and people wanting to marry their pets or other animals. Now, we can be explicit and say consenting adult humans if we really want to be pedantic, since that is our intention here, but the fact that animals do not have the ability to consent to marriage should already cover this.

Marrying inanimate objects.

Following on from the previous one, no one would be able to marry their car or their favourite sex doll or any other object, since like with animals, inanimate objects cannot consent to anything. 

What Marriage Would Cover

This is where things will get interesting for progressives. Remember again that if you want to argue that marriage should be between consenting adults in order to argue in favour of gay marriage, you need to accept the implications of this redefinition, or be guilty of hypocrisy.

Incestuous marriages.

If two consenting adults want to marry and they happen to be related to each other, what reasonable objection can we give to this? Whether it's two brothers, a brother and sister, a father and daughter, two cousins, or any other combination, they're consenting adults, and what justification do we have for stopping them?

Some people will just jump straight to the "incest is gross" line of reasoning and not even go any further than that. And this is understandable, since there is a strong inbuilt aversion in most humans to avoid sexual attraction to relatives, for good evolutionary reasons. But we're not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. The question is, if for whatever reason two related people are sexually attracted to each other and want to get married, do we have a reasonable objection to it?

We really need to keep in mind the principle that "just because I don't like something isn't good enough reason to stop others from doing that thing". This is one of the exact arguments that homophobic people use against gay marriage. Because they think homosexuality is disgusting, that should be enforced on everyone.

One argument that usually comes up with incestuous marriage is the one about higher risk of deformed children. This is undoubtedly a reality, but consider why this isn't an effective argument:

• Related couples can have children without being married. Marriage isn't some kind of license that people require before they can procreate, so limiting it in this case makes no sense.
• Marriage does not necessarily involve children. This is an argument that is often leveled against gay marriage, and the same answer applies. A couple can marry without having children, or they can adopt children if they want. It's important that an incestuous couple is aware of the risks, but that's not a reason to forbid marriage.

Polygamy and polyandry.

Do we have a good reason for limiting marriage to being specifically between two people? This is certainly what most people want, but just like gay or incestuous marriage, if multiple consenting adults want to have this kind of union, is there any good reason not to allow it?

I think the biggest legitimate concern would be if people abused this kind of marriage as a legal loophole, say by some cult having all members marry to take advantage of spousal property ownership transfer laws, or the board of directors of a corporation all marrying to take advantage of laws that protect a person from having speak against their spouse in a criminal case (where these laws exist).

But assuming we can deal with those legal issues, is there any reasonable moral objection that we can give? I can't see a good reason to limit marriage in this way, just like I can't see good reason to limit it to being between a man and a woman.

We should also be aware that there are two different cases here: A group of more than two people all being married to each other; and a person being married multiple times simultaneously, but those partners not being married to each other. I think both are legitimate cases.

Again, we need to remember the point that just because we don't like something or want to do something, that's not a good enough reason to deny it to others who do want that thing. There might be other reasons that could apply, but this isn't one in itself.

Equality

It's easy to think that laws should be based around what the majority wants, and ignore minorities. To some degree this is fair, since it's unlikely that you can make laws that will satisfy every member of society, so when you have to choose, going with what the majority wants is often the best trade off. Hell, that's what elections are!

But we do need to reconsider laws when we find that some minority is being unfairly treated and we don't have a sufficient justification for it. This has been the case for LGBT rights. Minorities generally can't get enough political will behind their agendas without some of the majority getting on board, and so as more people have decided that we can accommodate LGBT people in various ways without unreasonably affecting the majority, the momentum has gathered enough to bring about change.

As that change happens, we need to stay aware of other minorities that we can help in the process, and not treat them the exact same way the majority has treated the minority group we are focused on. It's far too easy for most people to dismiss people who are in incestuous or polygamous relationships as 'weirdos' or 'freaks' or 'abominations in the eyes of god' or other uncharitable things, but it's important to remember that they are consenting adults who aren't hurting anyone, and these are the exact labels that LGBT people have been fighting for years. We shouldn't just push the intolerance down onto the next minority group and consider it a victory.

If we really do care about marriage equality, and really do think that consenting adults should be free to marry, then we need to also accept all of the people that this redefinition affects, or we're just as bigoted as the homophobes and other non-progressives.

In (Partial) Defense of the Death Penalty

With the recent sentence of the death penalty being given to Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it seems like an appropriate time to discuss some of the issues surrounding the death penalty.

To get started, let me state where I stand on the issue. I generally support the death penalty in theory, but oppose it in practice. My opposition mainly is due to two issues:

• Trusting the legal system to not sentence innocent people to death
• Humane methods of imposing the death penalty

To be clear, I don't support the death penalty as a method of retributive justice. I am generally against forms of justice that involve making people suffer. This is a big reason why I support the death penalty in the first place. I think it is far crueler to lock a person up for life with no hope of freedom in an environment that forces them to develop the worst aspects of themselves in order to survive, than to humanely put them down.

I understand that when people do bad things, there is often a very strong desire by the victims, families of the victims, and often the public in general to see that person suffer as part of justice, but I don't think this is an impulse we should embrace, but rather this is the ugly part of us that makes us more like the person we are trying to punish, and the one we should work to move away from.

I see our system of imprisoning and punishing people to serve three useful purposes:

• Stopping dangerous people from having the opportunity to offend again
• Providing a deterrent to those who might be considering committing a crime
• Rehabilitating the offender if possible

Making the offender suffer should not be on that list, no matter how good it might make other people feel. I'm sure you've heard when some rapist or child molester is sent to prison, people say things like, "Good, now I hope he gets raped in prison". Maybe you've even said and thought this yourself. Stop and think about what a horrible thing this is to wish on any human being. And also stop and think about how often innocent people get sent to prison. So you're ultimately hoping for a system that subjects innocent people to that kind of suffering on top of falsely imprisoning them. Everyone should wish for a safe prison environment where offenders can serve their time without fear of being raped or killed, if for no other reason than for the sake of all the innocent people who end up in there. You can't pick and choose, hoping that only the actually guilty people are made to suffer.

Objections

So let's talk about some of the common objections to the death penalty, and why I don't think they're sufficient.

Putting someone to death is cruel.

Certainly, it can be cruel if done in a cruel way. I don't at all advocate for barbaric execution methods like the electric chair. But given the existence of drugs used for peaceful euthanasia in countries like the Netherlands, if you can't put someone to death humanely by lethal injection then you're simply doing it wrong.

Putting someone to death is not cruel enough.

The flipside of the previous objection, this is where people feel like the death penalty lets an offender off easy, essentially by not forcing them to stew for years and think about what they've done. There are a few issues here.

One, if the offender is a psychopath, they will probably never end up feeling remorse for what they did, no matter how long they're imprisoned. At best, they'll feel bad that they got caught.

Two, this argument really doesn't make sense to me coming from any religious person who believes in an afterlife. Surely, you feel that he's going to get adequately punished by your god after he dies, right?

Three, as I've stated above, I don't think the desire to make an offender suffer is one we should be promoting. If an offender is unlikely to be able to be rehabilitated into a trustworthy member of society, then putting them down is, in my opinion, the most humane thing you can do. And everyone else will have to accept that making the offender suffer is not going to undo the damage, and they're going to have to find more constructive ways to work through their grief and loss. Enjoying the suffering of others is never a path to long term psychological wellbeing.

Putting someone to death makes us just as bad as them.

Obviously, putting someone to death as punishment is not at all the same thing as, say, a murderer killing a bunch of innocent people. Equating these things makes as much sense as equating killing in self defense and murder. Just because a death is involved does not make them morally the same thing.

Consider a different example: have you ever heard anyone say that we shouldn't put kidnappers in prison because that would make us just as bad as them? We imprison a kidnapper against his will even though that's what he did to someone else, because it's not at all the same thing. Similarities between the crime and the punishment are just that, similarities, and they don't necessarily equate the two things morally.

Death is what he wants, and so we shouldn't give it to him.

This is one of the arguments that has come up in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case. The idea that he wants to be a martyr, that he wants to go to heaven and get his 72 virgins or whatever, so we shouldn't give it to him.

Firstly, if you're not a Muslim yourself, this argument makes no sense, since you, by definition, do not believe he has the reward waiting for him that he thinks he has, so what better punishment than giving him the rude awakening? The longer he lives, the longer he gets to enjoy the thought of all the rewards that he thinks are waiting for him.

But probably more importantly, who cares what he wants? Again, the object isn't retribution and suffering. You keep him from harming others, you send a deterrence message to other would-be criminals, and if you can't reasonably expect to ever rehabilitate and release him, you humanely put him down. But fucking with him based on what he wants shouldn't be part of the program, because we should strive to be better than that.

My Objections

So, as I mentioned at the beginning, I have my own objections to the death penalty in practice. There have been far too many innocent people put on death row in the US to be able to support the death penalty with the justice system as it currently is there (and I'm sure the same is true in other countries), except in the rare cases where the guilt of the person is really not up for debate. This is the case with someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, where no one, as far as I'm aware, has ever argued that he is innocent. If this was the kind of certainty bar that was used in all death penalty cases then I would be willing to reconsider that stance.

And the other one is the apparent difficulty in humanely putting criminals to death. I don't know if this is due to incompetence, or a secret desire to actually make these people suffer, but it seems ridiculous that this should be an issue. And yet it is, and so I wouldn't support the death penalty unless that was sorted out.

My Reasons for Support

So why do I support the death penalty in theory? Well, in general I think our criminal justice system should be more focused on rehabilitation, and I think society would be a far better place if that was taken more seriously. In practice, it seems that going to prison tends to do the opposite of rehabilitate, and when combined with limiting a person's options for getting law abiding employment after they are released, tends to send people down a negative life spiral rather than give them a genuine chance to make amends and start again, even if they really do feel remorse and want to do that.

But for some people, even with a perfect system of rehabilitation, this will simply never work for them. Whether due to mental illness like psychopathy; a mental state that is so damaged by bad life experience that it really can't be repaired; the need for a strong enough deterrent for some crimes so it is understood that if you commit them you will never be set free; or due to crimes so heinous that the general public would simply never feel safe if they were set free; humanely putting that person down is not an act of vengeance or cruelty, but the opposite: a pragmatic choice and an act of decency when a perfect solution doesn't exist.

Is Western Culture Oversensitive to Hitler?

Hitler Chic In Thailand - Photo credit: Tibor Krausz / CNNGO

"Hang on", I hear you saying. "Are you about to defend Hitler?"

No, rest assured that this is not a post defending Hitler or the Nazis, or any kind of anti-Semitic statement. What I do want to discuss though, is how much we should expect other cultures to share our own sensitivities, how much we can be unaware of our own insensitivities to other cultures, and how we can deal with cultural offense in an increasingly globally connected world.

So, a recent episode of the excellent Last Week Tonight with John Oliver had a segment on the growing trend in Thailand of 'Hitler Chic', the use of Hitler and Nazi imagery for humour:

For once, this is something that I kind of disagree with John Oliver about, so I thought it would be worth discussing.

Caricature

So, the obvious issue is that many people in western culture feel that using Hitler imagery for humour or fun trivializes the horrible things that he was responsible for. There is likely some truth to this, but we also need to recognize the massive degree to which Hitler and the Nazis have become the go-to example of evil in our culture. So many discussions involving politics, slippery slopes, and in fact just about anything, end up with someone playing the Hitler or Nazi card at some point. Now, this can be totally fair, as often a discussion can be clarified by taking it to an extreme to show where a line of reasoning may lead, but with Hitler this has become so overdone, so much the only reference most people seem to share, that we have even coined a term for it, Godwin's Law:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1"

Basically, western culture seems to have so few common references to draw on where people can be confident that others will get what they mean, that we've practically turned Hitler into a caricature of evil, and we're on the verge (if not already crossed over) of no longer being able to reasonably include a reference to him in a serious discussion.

No Paucity of Examples

Now of course, a persuasive leader who started a world war and committed arguably the largest act of genocide in human history is not someone to take lightly, but it's not as if we're lacking in other examples. What is problematic with western culture is how little most people (and I include myself here) are aware of other examples, when there is no shortage.

One of the examples of genocide I tend to use is the horrific genocide in Rwanda of the Tutsis by the Hutus. Here is a genocide of up to 1 million people that took place only 20 years ago, yet most westerners probably know next to nothing about it. It's a fantastic example of how normal people can literally turn against their neighbours and kill them, and it even includes the church and religion playing a big part in provoking it.

Or take Holodomor, the "hunger extermination" of Ukranians in 1932-3 that killed between 2.5 and 7.5 million people, on the same scale as the Holocaust.

If you want horrible dictators, how about Pol Pot, responsible for millions of deaths in Cambodia, as just one of many, many examples.

Or what about Hirohito or Tojo and all of the horrible deaths they were responsible for before and during World War 2? There is no Godwin's Law for them.

Perspective

If our view of Hitler and Nazis was kept in perspective, we would use them as examples and be sensitive to them in roughly relative proportion to other events and people in recent history. But we don't do that, and that should be a sign to us that maybe we're oversensitive to one thing and far too ignorant on many, many others.

And so, we find other cultures that, for whatever reason, don't hold the same level of sensitivity about something as we do, and we insist that they should change? Like it or not, Hitler and the Nazis generated some very striking imagery, and so it shouldn't be surprising that it would get appropriated in places that aren't as sensitive to it, such as Thailand. Why not?

We do it ourselves all the time too. How familiar and iconic is this Che Guevara image?

Photo credit: Alberto Korda - Museo Che Guevara, Havana Cuba

It has appeared on t-shirts, in art, and in so many locations with most people not even knowing or caring if anyone would be offended by its use. It's striking and not offensive to the people using it, so they use it.

Or, since we're talking about Thailand, consider the use of Yantra tattoos, which many westerners get because they look cool, despite that it's often offensive to Thai people for religious reasons.

Sak Yant Tattoo performed in Thailand - Photo credit: Ryaninuk

The Past, the Future

Different cultures are sensitive to different things and to different degrees, that's normal. Generally, over time, that sensitivity diminishes and what was once offensive or taboo becomes a piece of pop culture. In Thailand, a Hitler Teletubby shirt is funny, but for most westerners, it's not. But we should remember, that in the west we can open a Viking themed restaurant, for example, with no one being offended in the least, but this wasn't always the case either.

We live in an increasingly globally connected world where there is much common ground, but we're going to keep coming across differences between cultures. Some of those will be considered interesting and welcomed by other cultures. Some of them will be a sensitivity that won't be shared. I would never argue that being sensitive to another culture is likely to be a bad thing, but ironically, that also means being sensitive to the fact that they might not feel the same way about something that you're sensitive to, and not requiring them to share your point of view.

We can only shield ourselves from these cultural differences to a limited degree, and that is going to keep reducing over time. So we need to accept that either we push everyone in the world towards a lowest common denominator where no one does or says anything that could offend any other culture, or we accept that these differences are going to exist and that it's okay. The past tells us that historical things that we're sensitive to now, we won't be at some point in the future, it's just a question of how soon. So we shouldn't hold it against other cultures because they got there sooner than we did.