Enough to make one support the death penalty...

[MontagK505]

When you know men like this it's not an abstract thought. I worked with two South Asian men who were unapologetic about being sexist. One was my department manager for a time.

I was working in a small office with a female tech from another department. We became friendly and would chat as we worked. The manager and his buddy began teasing me about this. He used to laugh and say, "Why do you want to talk to a woman?" He genuinely thought it was embarrassing, talking to a woman co-worker the same way I would talk to a male co-worker, that I was humiliating myself.

I asked was he serious, I said I thought he was being ridiculous. He shook his head in disbelief. He said, "If there was a dog in the office, you'd carry on a conversation with it?"

I asked was he comparing women to dogs?

He got frustrated. He said, "Look, I like women but they're basically the same as an animal, as a chicken or cow or horse. They serve a purpose, that's all."

He thought I was the one out-of-step with reality. That was the way he was raised, the way he was taught. When you live in a society like that, most people just accept the societal norms, they don't question them or rebel against them.

I doubt lectures in a re-education camp would change this persons attitude. And it is an attitude that could easily lead to the kind of crimes in the OP.

 

[Trakar]

I like to show up after you have taken all the heat!

I think I get your point and simply tried to build off it. You laid a pretty nice foundation:

In every scenario where someone must die, and lets just admit that there are such scenarios, the death should be because other options were not sufficient, not because we want that person to die.

When we start to want people to die we really need to reconsider our own motives. And that is where I saw the parallels in thinking. How does the dehumanizing of these men compare to their dehumanizing of these girls? They are not the same, but they are not completely different either.

 

[MontagK505]

Addressing this is likely far more important than punishing these two men. Not that these men don't deserve to be punished, but I would let them off if we could change the culture that created them.

If pigs had wings they could fly. Seriously, that's the problem the culture has to change and I don't see that happening anytime soon. Read some of the attitudes toward giving women the right to vote in the 19th and 20th centuries and see how far we had to come. We still have KKK types in the US.

 

[Belz...]

There is a difference in that the victims were raped and killed because of their gender and social class, where the criminals are being judged based on their specific acts. They acted less than human and therefore they are perceived as being less than human.

I don't know. They acted pretty human to me.

 

[MontagK505]

I don't know. They acted pretty human to me.

The classification of behavior as human or sub-human is, of course, a matter of opinion based on what standards one holds.

 

[Belz...]

Indeed, but given how many humans acted that way in history, I find it odd to call such a behaviour sub-human or inhuman, even when one strongly disagrees with it. It's an emotional reaction, not a rational one.

 

[newyorkguy]

Addressing this is likely far more important than punishing these two men. Not that these men don't deserve to be punished, but I would let them off if we could change the culture that created them.

I had another experience with this issue. I worked with a Pakistani Muslim woman. She was a very nice person, we became friends and even dated briefly. She had left Pakistan due to a problem with this kind of cultural issue.

She was from a well-to-do family, her father is a civil engineer and apparently fairly prominent in Pakistan. She was in an arranged marriage; her husband was the oldest son of her father's best friend. Although she defended the concept of arranged marriages to me (at length) in her case it did not work out. Once married her husband became very remote and emotionally disconnected from her. He was also at times physically abusive. They had no children. She was miserable and determined not to spend her life in a barren relationship. She said her parents eventually came to support her desire to end the marriage. Her father interceded with the family of her husband and all agreed the marriage should be ended.

What happened was, some of her ex-husband's relatives -- one branch of his family -- were very devout Muslims. They were very angry about the divorce and felt the family had been disgraced by it. She said finally her father spoke to her and said he was becoming very worried that some of the family members might attempt to kill her. She said her ex-husband's family seemed split; some of them accepted the divorce while others did seem to feel their family's honor should be restored. That meant killing the ex-wife. She said even some of the female family members felt that way.

She said it finally got to the point where it seemed very prudent for her to leave. Her older sister had immigrated to Canada and was working as a medical doctor. My friend moved to Canada to live with her sister. Later they moved to New York which was how I met her.

She was fairly Westernized but she did have some ambivalence about honor killings. She felt they were wrong, absolutely, barbaric and out-dated. At the same time she knew many Pakistanis did not think in that way. That it was a custom that had been established over many centuries and to change their thinking you can't just condemn them out-of-hand. They have to be reeducated and it has to be within the context of Islamic law. She said that Westerners condemning the practice probably only serves to stiffen their resolve "not to be dictated to" by non-Muslims.

 

[trustbutverify]

She was fairly Westernized but she did have some ambivalence about honor killings. She felt they were wrong, absolutely, barbaric and out-dated. At the same time she knew many Pakistanis did not think in that way. That it was a custom that had been established over many centuries and to change their thinking you can't just condemn them out-of-hand. They have to be reeducated and it has to be within the context of Islamic law. She said that Westerners condemning the practice probably only serves to stiffen their resolve "not to be dictated to" by non-Muslims.

Yea.... I think I'll just continue condemning (out-of-hand )the ritual slaughter of innocent women to protect the "honor" of religious thugs, despite this finger wagging little story.

Come to think of it, I think I'll just keep on referring to miserable thugs who brutally gang rape and hang to death two little girls as "vile scumbags". Hopefully, they will decide to commit suicide to avoid the torture of a lifetime of guilt.

 

[Blue Mountain]

Yea.... I think I'll just continue condemning (out-of-hand )the ritual slaughter of innocent women to protect the "honor" of religious thugs, despite this finger wagging little story.

And while you're doing that, what will you be doing to prevent women from being the victims of honour killings in the future?

Come to think of it, I think I'll just keep on referring to miserable thugs who brutally gang rape and hang to death two little girls as "vile scumbags". Hopefully, they will decide to commit suicide to avoid the torture of a lifetime of guilt.

And while you're doing that, what will you be doing to prevent women from being the victims of gang rapes and murders in the future?

 

[MontagK505]

And while you're doing that, what will you be doing to prevent women from being the victims of honour killings in the future?


And while you're doing that, what will you be doing to prevent women from being the victims of gang rapes and murders in the future?

What would you suggest be done? Say nothing? Invade their country and force them to stop doing it? Arrange a series of seminars explaining how it's really, really, really mean of them to kill women (anybody) for reasons like this?

 

[newyorkguy]

...Arrange a series of seminars explaining how it's really, really, really mean of them to kill women...

Why would you say that, when in the incident described in the OP, the community rose up and demanded something be done, that the attackers be brought to justice. Chauvinistic attitudes towards women exist in many societies. Are we pretending these kinds of crimes DON'T happen in Western society?

What I see happening in places like India is, very few Indian men would condone rape or murder. Yet I think some would be fatalistic about it, feeling that -- given the nature of men -- these kinds of incidents are unavoidable. Where I think there is a real problem is the attitude of some of the police that, while regrettable, ruining a man's life over a violent sex crime is an overreaction. That given the low place in society women occupy -- especially low caste women -- the punishment is worse than the crime.

Western societies have had a problem with this too. When the male attacker occupies a higher place in society than does his victim, even police in western countries have been accused of failing to vigorously investigate and make arrests.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Why would you want to let people who gang rape and lynch kids off?

Where did you get the idea that I did?

 

[Roger Ramjets]

1. You advocate a totalitarian system far beyond 1984 and the NSA, and trust the government wholeheartedly not to abuse it. Bear in mind, this is the same government that considered it a good policy to make people watch their families get tortured, and the NSA already has issues with creepy stalkers.

Your paranoid distrust of authority is noted.

The fact is, we already have a system that is supposed to keep track of mentally unstable people who commit violent crimes - it's just too fragmented and inefficient to do the job properly.

2. Your system would absolve criminals of any responsibility because "they are mentally ill". This is another totalitarian aspect, because not only did the USSR consider dissidents "mentally ill", but it denies individual agency in anything.

The USSR labelled dissidents 'mentally ill' simply because they disagreed with the political system. To equate that with people who really are mentally ill and need treatment is a false equivalence at best.

The fact is, most criminals really do have mental problems that are causing their aberrant behavior.

The Criminal Mind

"One pioneering study in 2002 by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of Duke University genotyped over 1,000 individuals in a community in New Zealand and assessed their levels of antisocial behavior in adulthood. They found that a genotype conferring low levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), when combined with early child abuse, predisposed the individual to later antisocial behavior."

"as a child he suffered from poor nutrition, severe parental neglect, sustained physical and sexual abuse, early head injuries, learning disabilities, poor cognitive functioning and lead exposure. He also had a family history of mental illness. By the age of 18, Mr. Page had been referred for psychological treatment 19 times, but he had never once received treatment."​

3. Science when it is applied blindly to sociology never ends well. The result is The War on Drugs (New Jim Crow), Polygraphs, or Phrenology or the attitudes that led to the Tuskegee study.

You're kidding, right? The 'War on Drugs' was a purely political move designed to make it look like our politicians are being 'tough on crime' (a policy you seem to be in favor of). Polygraphs have little scientific basis, and Phrenology has been discredited as a scientific theory since the 1840s.

The Tuskegee study was an issue of medical ethics - to pin that on 'science' is totally unfair. Anyway it resulted in the National Research Act of 1974 to prevent such abuses, so unless you have something more recent...

4. You put pot smokers and speeders on the same level of murderers and rapists, which is a pretty bad precedent and lacks nuance.

I didn't say they were at the same level, but that their attitude is the same. Once you have decided that some laws don't apply to you, where does it end?

5. On the Death Penalty, I don't see how putting the likes of Ian Watkins or Jeffrey Dahmer on an electric chair is a sign that society had failed so much as "these are vile monsters who have forfeited their right to life because their crimes were so heinous".

This is the very attitude that continues to hold back progress on reducing violent crime. No matter how much you may think these 'vile monsters' deserve our wrath, the fact remains that by doing nothing to stop them we have failed their victims. Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted might make you feel better, but doesn't excuse you for leaving it open in the first place.

Perhaps you think that just having laws against rape and murder should be enough, and if anybody breaks them they deserve to die. But you must know that deterrence is not enough for some people, and therefore you know that your system allows innocent people to be raped and murdered. To avoid this moral dilemma we have two choices - execute people like Ian Watkins and Jeffrey Dahmer before they kill, or find some other way to stop them from becoming rapists and murderers. Either way, an essential ingredient is identifying these people before they rise to the status of 'vile monster'. If we can, we might not have to kill them. If we can't then we have failed.

Also, citations are needed for links between death penalty statutes and crime sprees.

LAW ENFORCEMENT AND THE DEATH PENALTY

"A study of the deterrence value of the death penalty focused on whether the death penalty deterred the murder of police officers. The researchers surveyed a thirteen year period of police homicides. The study concluded "...[P]olice do not appear to have been afforded an added measure of protection against homicide by capital punishment."​

"According to statistics from the latest FBI Uniform Crime Report, regions of the country that use the death penalty the least are the safest for police officers... The three leading states where law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 1998 were California, the state with the highest death row population; Texas, the state with the most executions since 1976; and Florida, the state that is third highest in executions and in death row population.​

The conclusion is obvious, criminals who already face the Death Penalty are more likely to commit murder in order to avoid capture. After all, what have they got to lose?

6. Lastly, evil is a choice. Look at Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy. And before you go "Muh Mental Health Services!", they were not sick in the sense that they were ill, but rabid dogs that should be put down.

Being fit for trial is not the same as being mentally well. Jeffrey Dahmer was diagnosed with Emotionally unstable personality disorder. Ted Bundy probably suffered from Antisocial personality disorder. Both of these are recognized mental illnesses that may be caused by brain chemistry imbalances. More importantly, they can be diagnosed without having to wait until the sufferer has raped or killed someone!

 

[asydhouse]

We could go on at some length on this situation.....

In India in particular, and in the entire region in general, women are often considered little more than property. Having a daughter is considered a burden on the family, since the only way to marry off the daughter is to grant a large dowry to the potential husband.

The numbers of murders of women in rural areas, where the husband kills his wife (normally by setting her on fire and claiming a "cooking accident") for same dowry are still very high.

If a woman survives her marriage but the husband rejects her, she is sent home in disgrace to be a further burden to the family... Now unmarriable.

Although the caste system has been illegal in India for many years, it's still very much in place throughout rural india. It's been noted that the victims in this particular crime were "Dalits"... the former "untouchables", and that an inordinately high percentage of rape victims are from these castes.
Where we might think of the perpetrators as sub-human, they in turn consider these lower-caste people to be literally so.
The sheer volume of sex crime in India is hard to credit, and the statistics are staggering. Even more so as the crimes are so often not reported and when reported dismissed by police with the same old excuses that were so popular here..
"She was actually a prostitute." "She was dressed enticingly." All of those.

In addition to the horrors of rape and other sex crimes, the woman who is victimized will be at considerable danger from her own family since she will have brought shame and dishonor upon the family.
"Honor killings" are still very much a part of the culture in the area as witness the recent horrific stoning incident (while police watched...) in neighboring Pakistan.

There are no easy answers for these problems. They are deeply a part of the culture in the entire region. As NPR's The World points out, there is a segment of these populations that are educated, civilized, progressive... Who are as shocked as we at this situation and want to eliminate it... But it's so deeply entrenched...

One more bit. The murder of these children may be an effect of the recent promises to crack down on sex crime. Whereas previously the girls may have just been left to tell their tale of woe to whoever... Now it may be seen as more profitable to murder the victim as well to eliminate the witness.

This.

Indian culture is sick, and the sickness is caste. On top of that there is the bs "spiritualism" that infects it from top to bottom. Then there is the corollary of scam artistry in any field you can imagine. Corruption in the sense of siphoning funds from public works to private profit is rife in the political sphere and considered a perk of public office, and that extends into every sphere of society.

Westerners have a deeply erroneous concept about India's supposed tradition of spiritual knowledge/practice which is the biggest scam of all, exported to the West by privileged Indian charlatans and gullible or simply deluded Westerners.

Girls being a burden on poor families, infanticide has resulted in a huge imbalance in numbers of the sexes, with far more boys than girls surviving. These young men know they will never have a woman. They also know they will never share in the vast wealth on display all around them. They are conformist in their bones, and it only takes one psychopath to stir up a gang for a deluded raid for sex, and followers will go along. The disposal of the used lower caste women after the "party" may well be seen as a necessity in the advent of the death penalty for such crimes. And in such a deeply corrupt culture, you may well expect to see scapegoats executed in place of the real perpetrators.

I wouldn't even expect the vast majority of the educated middle classes to be the saviours of their broken culture, since even as recently as the 90s I recall hearing that university students were demonstrating in the streets against the Dalits having a reserved number of places available for them to attend university.

Caste is the cancer at the core of Indian society. I know there are millions of lovely Indian people, rich and poor alike. But in a system like they have, and with many more millions in dire poverty than there are honestly prosperous and enlightened people, in a crowded country of 1.3 billion, it's hard to see how they will turn their ship around.

As ever, the youth are their only hope. Education, exposure to other value systems, opportunity to exist outside of the chains of their decayed culture, and the refusal of Westerners to collude in the false image of "spirituality" that hangs like a perfumed miasma around the corpse of their culture, are some of the necessities.

And yet, we on the outside can not wade in there and dictate that change. All we can do is to counter the false image in the West by exposing the hypocrisy to the naive tourists and "seekers" that go and spend money over there.

Stop making excuses for them, and stop colluding in their scams.

If you go there with your eyes open, you will see beyond the exotic veil to the disease. I came away horrified and exhausted, because despite the many delightful people I met and saw, the corruption and despair is plain to see. The inertia of the situation is heartbreaking, and overwhelming.

 

[a_unique_person]

One of the problems I have with this kind of thread is the way in which respondents launch into language like “scum” and “vermin”.

Please address the problem and not just hurl abuse: if your vocabulary is that limited please try to expand it. Verbal abuse adds nothing to the discussion except allows others to find reasons to ignore what you say.

This is a cultural problem, not just some occasional scum. This it's just one of the events we hear about.

 

[Polaris]

Not at all what I have said. Killing is always a bad outcome. I am not saying that allowing oneself to be killed is a good or moral choice. I am saying that any choice which results in a death is a bad choice and should be viewed and acknowledged as such. Just because one has several choices to make does not mean that any of them are good choices or options. The point is not to try and justify a bad choice as anything other than a regretful, bad choice.

Not really. There are many cases in which killing does (or would do) the world a huge service. Case in point: if someone had killed a certain 19 Arabs on Sept. 10, 2001, that would have been a fantastically good thing, full stop.

The "violence is always wrong argument never passed the sniff test for me. It's like if one guy starts wailing on another guy, running up to hold the latter's arms behind his back because if you let him go, there'll be twice as much fighting.

 

[newyorkguy]

Westerners have a deeply erroneous concept about India's supposed tradition of spiritual knowledge/practice which is the biggest scam of all...

I think that train left the station a long time ago.

Girls being a burden on poor families, infanticide has resulted in a huge imbalance in numbers of the sexes...

I don't think that's true across-the-board. In some rural Indian states, yes.

Census of 2011 revealed that the population ratio in India 2011 is 940 females per 1000 of males. Link

There are many cases in which killing does (or would do) the world a huge service. Case in point: if someone had killed a certain 19 Arabs on Sept. 10, 2001, that would have been a fantastically good thing, full stop...

But why only killing them? Why wouldn't arresting them on terrorism charges have sufficed?

 

[Dr. Keith]

But why only killing them? Why wouldn't arresting them on terrorism charges have sufficed?

Because humans like to label other humans as sub-human so they can treat them in ways humans have always treated other humans, but not consider themselves as base as other humans.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

Your paranoid distrust of authority is noted.

The fact is, we already have a system that is supposed to keep track of mentally unstable people who commit violent crimes - it's just too fragmented and inefficient to do the job properly.

I'd rather have the current system than a totalitarian surveillance state (which for the record, you have advocated), and how is it "paranoid" to distrust the government when they have openly considered the possibility of kidnapping someone and making them watch their family get tortured (you seriously think that they won't abuse that power?).

The USSR labelled dissidents 'mentally ill' simply because they disagreed with the political system. To equate that with people who really are mentally ill and need treatment is a false equivalence at best.

In your Minority Report/1984 system, it won't take much for the Powers That Be to declare someone "mentally ill"

The fact is, most criminals really do have mental problems that are causing their aberrant behavior.

The Criminal Mind

"One pioneering study in 2002 by Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of Duke University genotyped over 1,000 individuals in a community in New Zealand and assessed their levels of antisocial behavior in adulthood. They found that a genotype conferring low levels of the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), when combined with early child abuse, predisposed the individual to later antisocial behavior."

"as a child he suffered from poor nutrition, severe parental neglect, sustained physical and sexual abuse, early head injuries, learning disabilities, poor cognitive functioning and lead exposure. He also had a family history of mental illness. By the age of 18, Mr. Page had been referred for psychological treatment 19 times, but he had never once received treatment."​

Plural of anecdotes is not evidence.

You're kidding, right? The 'War on Drugs' was a purely political move designed to make it look like our politicians are being 'tough on crime' (a policy you seem to be in favor of). Polygraphs have little scientific basis, and Phrenology has been discredited as a scientific theory since the 1840s.

And yet they were considered "SCIENCE!" at the time.

I didn't say they were at the same level, but that their attitude is the same. Once you have decided that some laws don't apply to you, where does it end?

Slippery slope fallacy

This is the very attitude that continues to hold back progress on reducing violent crime. No matter how much you may think these 'vile monsters' deserve our wrath, the fact remains that by doing nothing to stop them we have failed their victims. Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted might make you feel better, but doesn't excuse you for leaving it open in the first place.

The problem is, unless you are going to have a totalitarian system which monitors everyone's movements (which is inherently oppressive and will lead to far bigger problems than violent crime), you will never find that door.

Perhaps you think that just having laws against rape and murder should be enough, and if anybody breaks them they deserve to die. But you must know that deterrence is not enough for some people, and therefore you know that your system allows innocent people to be raped and murdered. To avoid this moral dilemma we have two choices - execute people like Ian Watkins and Jeffrey Dahmer before they kill, or find some other way to stop them from becoming rapists and murderers. Either way, an essential ingredient is identifying these people before they rise to the status of 'vile monster'. If we can, we might not have to kill them. If we can't then we have failed.

Again, see above

LAW ENFORCEMENT AND THE DEATH PENALTY

"A study of the deterrence value of the death penalty focused on whether the death penalty deterred the murder of police officers. The researchers surveyed a thirteen year period of police homicides. The study concluded "...[P]olice do not appear to have been afforded an added measure of protection against homicide by capital punishment."​

"According to statistics from the latest FBI Uniform Crime Report, regions of the country that use the death penalty the least are the safest for police officers... The three leading states where law enforcement officers were feloniously killed in 1998 were California, the state with the highest death row population; Texas, the state with the most executions since 1976; and Florida, the state that is third highest in executions and in death row population.​

The conclusion is obvious, criminals who already face the Death Penalty are more likely to commit murder in order to avoid capture. After all, what have they got to lose?

So why don't most spree killers try to take down as many police officers as possible? By that standard, we shouldn't have prisons.

Being fit for trial is not the same as being mentally well. Jeffrey Dahmer was diagnosed with Emotionally unstable personality disorder. Ted Bundy probably suffered from Antisocial personality disorder. Both of these are recognized mental illnesses that may be caused by brain chemistry imbalances. More importantly, they can be diagnosed without having to wait until the sufferer has raped or killed someone!

If you are fit to stand trial, you are legally considered mentally well unless found not guilty by reason of insanity (serious disconnect with reality). You have to make a case as to why that should change

 

[Trakar]

...The "violence is always wrong argument never passed the sniff test for me. It's like if one guy starts wailing on another guy, running up to hold the latter's arms behind his back because if you let him go, there'll be twice as much fighting.

I have never said that violence is always wrong. What I did say is that killing other humans is always a bad option.

A less bad option is not a good option. Sometimes it is among the only options available to stop a worse option, but it is never a good option and should always be associated with regret and dissatisfaction.

Choosing a less bad option is better than going with worse options, but that still does not make the less bad option a good option. Likewise, one should still regret bad options otherwise they tend to confuse "good" and "less bad" choices in the future.