60 points
  • Be an advanced, developed nation
  • Maintain the death penalty

Pick one.

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1 point
  • Be an advanced, developed nation

The south is not remotely an advanced, developed nation.

It’s like if you took Brussels, then glued the worst bits of Somalia to it.

We had to fight a war to get them to stop keeping black people as pets, and they just kept doing it anyway.

Hitler wrote of the south specifically as an inspiration for German genetic policies (Jim Crow) in Mein Kampf. Black GIs came home from killing nazis to be lynched from trees.

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-12 points

Capital punishment is a state level policy. The USA has almost 400 million people and has never been a monolith of culture, thought, beliefs, or values. Missouri is a shit state with shit policies.

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17 points
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  • The US federal government has the authority to, at any time, outlaw state-sanctioned murder across the country either via Supreme Court ruling or via constitutional amendment and tell states to kick rocks. It chooses not to do this. I don’t care that an amendment is “hard”; if it’s possible to do but it fails to do this, then it’s the federal government’s fault. The votes of about 355 legislators and the signature of Joe Biden 5 SCOTUS justices could end this today; it’s the stroke of a pen, and they simply don’t do it.
  • This case went before the SCOTUS requesting an emergency block, where it was voted against 6–3. The SCOTUS had the power to trivially prevent this and decided not to.
  • The majority of US states (27) as well as the federal government have state-sanctioned murder on the books as a legal criminal punishment. 12 states and the federal government have carried it out in the last 10 years.
  • This is incidental to your overall point, but the current US population is ~337 million; “almost” 400 million is doing so much lifting there.

Edit: I accidentally became so sleep-deprived that I forgot a constitutional amendment has a separate proposal and ratification process. The SCOTUS method would 100% work, though, and it hasn’t yet been banned at the federal level which is a simple majority of Congress and a presidential signature, so they do overall endorse it.

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4 points

You think the federal government can, with enough votes, create a Constitutional amendment? Back to government class with you:

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artV-1/ALDE_00000507/

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1 point
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The votes of about 355 legislators and the signature of Joe Biden could end this today; it’s the stroke of a pen, and they simply don’t do it.

And 269 of those legislators are Republicans, most of which are uncaring sociopathic individuals who were voted in by a party of spiteful, hateful, racist voters.

The best way to change that situation is to vote. Don’t bitch about it. Vote.

This case went before the SCOTUS requesting an emergency block, where it was voted against 6–3. The SCOTUS had the power to trivially prevent this and decided not to.

Wow… 6-3, I wonder where I’ve heard that split before? Oh, right, it’s the same SCOTUS split that has been going on ever since Trump put three immoral and corruptible judges unto the Supreme Court, voted in by Republicans in the Senate, who were in turn, voted in by Republicans.

The best way to change that situation is to vote. Don’t bitch about it. Vote.

The majority of US states (27) as well as the federal government have state-sanctioned murder on the books as a legal criminal punishment. 12 states and the federal government have carried it out in the last 10 years.

And most of those states are red states… you know, the states filled to the brim with Republicans.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

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6 points

Is the death penalty illegal at the federal level?

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2 points

No, it is not, and it was carried out under Trump.

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46 points
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Reading about it I am not completly convinced that he is innocent, but I think that there is 100% plausible reason to doubt that he is guilty. This should defintly be enough to stop an execution.

Edit: Maybe read the whole statement before getting a rage fit? I said he shouldn’t have been killed. I am also not moderate and (according to US standards) I am apparently not white as a muslim turkish person.

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11 points

It doesn’t matter if he did it or not, honestly. If the state can’t be 10000% certain the person they are about to murder is guilty of a heinous crime then it shouldn’t be possible to fucking murder them.

This isnt about innocence. This is about the state denying this Black Muslim man due process and constitutional protections.

And on that note, its impossible to prove guilt in these cases, which is why the death penalty needs to be abolished. Are you comfortable with the idea of bring executed for a crime because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time? Because I’m sure fucking not.

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1 point

Maybe you should have read my whole statement before writing this wall of text?

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2 points

they’re agreeing with you and taking it further, i’m pretty sure

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2 points

I’m agreeing with your conclusion but not with your reasoning.

You reason that since it looks like he might be innocent, he shouldn’t have been executed. Extrapolating from this yields that you also believe that if you felt he was definitely guilty, he should have been executed.

I’m saying that because this uncertainty exists at all as a concept the death penalty should be abolished. Its impossible to prove someone’s guilt 100% in these cases, therefore the death penalty is immoral. Not just in this case but in every case.

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11 points

I’m convinced he is innocent. If he was not they would have evidence instead of paid testimonies against him.

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6 points

That’s fine with a sentence of a couple years. But for how hard we’ve seen it become to commute a sentence, we need to be 100% sure for the death penalty.

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4 points

I basically said that it is not okay, maybe you should have read the second sentence as well. But even with a “sentence of a couple years”, guilt has to be profen, not innocence. If there is plausible doubt of guilt, there shouldn’t be a guilty sentence.

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1 point

Yeah, sorry it’s just worded weirdly and I didn’t get that you were referencing the reasonable doubt standard.

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-7 points
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43 points

Call me radical, but I don’t think any government should be killing people.

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0 points
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23 points

There are a lot of governments in the world that agree with you. Not the US government, not at all.

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-1 points
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22 points

For the record, the super majority of pro-life Christian, patriotic judges in SCOTUS voted against stopping this on a 6-3 ruling.

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1 point

Southern Christian.

Pro-life, but love guns and executing people while hating access to Healthcare for the poor.

Southern Christian love is the darkest kind of hate.

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-12 points
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18 points

This kind of thing makes me go into denial. I hate my country, but this absolutely cannot be real. It’s horrible clickbait, or propaganda supporting my existing beliefs about how inhumane it is here.

I struggle to imagine someone administering a needle for an innocent man to die, rather than quitting on the spot. I struggle to imagine someone certifying paperwork to appove this to happen. But I am entirely incapable of imagining the number of human cogs that would need to be similarly compliant for this to be followed through to completion. I am not interested in trying to imagine. This story is fiction because admitting otherwise will break what’s left of my sanity.

You can show me horrors and get me to admit and speak of them as reality, but you can’t get me to believe them.

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18 points

A stunning number of people in the links of that chain could’ve stopped it, and none of them cared to risk their employment over it.

I’ve seen it said that if you live in the US, you can ask yourself a question: “If you lived in Nazi Germany, what would you have done to oppose that state?”

The answer: You’re doing it right now. Nazi Germany’s leaders explicitly stated that its model of colonialism and expansionism in eastern europe, eugenics practices, and its racial state, were all based on the US model, which nearly successfully carried out everything Nazi Germany failed to do: eviction and genocide of its indigenous inhabitants, stealing a continent, and erecting a white-supremacist state on top of it.

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13 points
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The Innocence project is real and they do incredible work. They rarely take cases that don’t have new DNA evidence due to the difficulty in overturning a conviction. They could probably use your financial support.

–The site which we don’t speak of had a mainstream news article to this story monday night explaining that the state was already refusing to grant a stay of execution even with prosecuting attornies new doubts.

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6 points
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I’ve come to realize that a significant portion of people just think other people should die and that’s fair and they’re OK with being the ones to do it.

I saw an Instagram reel the other day of someone in the military describing the best way to decide who to kill and who not to as you storm a civilian building, plus the latest Behind the Bastards about Yarvin’s affect on JD Vance and their belief that violence / killing and enforced poverty / slavery is not only a necessary but desirable method of governmental change - not as a reaction to oppression but as administrative.

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3 points

someone in the military describing the best way to decide who to kill

Read a book by a Navy SEAL who was in Afghanistan. He said if they were wearing black Reeboks they were fighters, shoot to kill on sight.

I’m betting he was right! But Jesus, using that as a hard criteria to execute someone?!

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2 points
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I’ve come to realize that a significant portion of people just think other people should die and that’s fair and they’re OK with being the ones to do it.

It has always been this way. Particularly because there are people and groups who actively materially benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery and oppression of other people and groups within the social organization of our societies. The enforced poverty/slavery will never stop without sufficient and sufficiently organized, centralized, disciplined violence to overcome those who actively benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery by means of the same; and then maintaining that authority over the exploiters until their interest and strength are no more.

It’s the same reason why there’s never been a “peaceful bloodless decolonization.” Why would the colonizer ever willingly permit that? They would be, from a standpoint of their own material interest as a societal class, complete morons to do so and make such a willing choice. Which is why (and this is historically borne out) they must be not given a choice by an organized militant anti-colonial resistance. This is also why the “authoritarianism” criticism of the doctrine and practice of revolutionary groups like Castro’s revolutionaries or Lenin’s Bolsheviks is laughable; the liberal peanut gallery can only have that criticism because they succeeded and survived to be criticized; having overcome the oppressors who, in the event of the revolutionaries’ failure (historically borne out in how every failed revolution played out including the previous ones in those countries); would show the truth of themselves as 1000x more vicious, having honed that capability for 100x longer.

Look up any countries’ “Red Terror” in history, then look up their corresponding “White Terror.” You will see [wiki:NSFW images if you click on them]. Or read about any decolonization struggle. Like in Algeria, where every uprising that killed 10 Frenchmen resulted in a colonial reprisal with hundreds of butchered Algerians.

We live in a material reality with material interests which are enforced by people who will use your pacifism as a means to exploit you easier, and kill you easier if you even are seen as inconvenient or ‘in the way’ of those interests, let alone if you resist and struggle against them. And that argument has been happening since Marx and Engels’ time in the framework of materialism; and was exactly the realm of rationale behind the policy of terror with the Jacobins before that in the French Revolution; from which many later revolutionaries took lessons and learned from the mistakes and refined within their contemporary material conditions and circumstances.

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