Thomas Wictor

I love when people blow their own foolishness right out of the sky. Self-negation, as opposed to Stephen Jay’s Self Avoiding Random Walk. Stephen is the only super-technical player whose chops never distract from the song.

Anyway, read the short article, titled “Richard Dawkins defends ‘mild pedophilia,’ says it does not cause ‘lasting harm.'”

Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.

S’allright. I’ll condemn them for you:

The racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was wrong. How do we know that? Because it wasn’t universal. People of the era recognized it as wrong. Caning and “mild pedophilia” was wrong and recognized as such at the time. Pedophilia is one of the few things that you can say is objectively wrong. It’s never right. Why would I have to say this, especially to an academic?

Now go back to the article and click the photo. Ta-da!

Dear World:

Please ignore everything I say from now on.

Love,
Richard.

How has society benefited from the notion that we can’t judge or condemn? Besides, the people who claim to not judge or condemn do it all the time. They just don’t judge or condemn people who agree with them politically or religiously or who share some tribal connection with them.

In The Dirty Dozen, Lee Marvin is discussing execution by hanging with Ernest Borgnine.

“That’s no way to go,” Marvin says.

Borgnine laughs. “Oh, the hell you say, Major. Why, I know a lot of people who should go exactly that way.”

And it’s true. There are lots of people who should be hanged by the neck until they’re dead. What’s the harm in saying so? You can still oppose capital punishment if you want, but why is it a problem to admit that some people deserve to be hanged? I can understand you believing that a civilized society shouldn’t execute people. What I don’t understand is claiming that nobody deserves to be hanged.

Doesn’t Anders Breivik deserve to be hanged for murdering seventy-seven people, mostly children and teenagers? He describes himself as a nice person, and his mass slaughter was “motivated by goodness, not evil.” He’s a vain narcissist who plagiarized his stupid “manifesto,” and his act of terrorism was guaranteed to produce a result exactly the opposite of the one he claims to have wanted. The chances of Norway stopping its embrace of multiculturalism after this atrocity were zero. He knew that. What motivated him was fame, that’s all.

But the Norwegians have made a point of claiming they’re better than he is by not only sparing his life but giving him an absurdly light sentence. Doesn’t that pretty much indicate that they don’t value the lives of his victims? It seems to me that moral preening is more important to them, along with patting themselves on the back for being so enlightened. What societal good is served when the justice system is designed to barely inconvenience people who commit horrific crimes, are unrepentant, and say they’ll do it again?

I won’t post it here, but someone has made an animated GIF of Saddam Hussein being hanged, and they rigged it to make him look like his was jumping on a trampoline. The night he was hanged, someone posted a comment on a blog that consisted only of this non-graphic photo that has nothing to do with Saddam’s execution, pain, death, or anything unpleasant. I have to admit that I laughed at both the GIF and the photo.

If you showed me images of teenaged Iranian girls being hanged, I wouldn’t laugh. I wouldn’t even look at them. Context is everything.

Some people deserve to be hanged, and some people deserve to be judged and condemned.

Why is saying that a bad thing?