Hanging as capital punishment

I'd rather a guillotine or hanging with head popping off like Saddam. Done is done, want minimal pain and horror.
 
Beerina said:
I'd rather a guillotine or hanging with head popping off like Saddam. Done is done, want minimal pain and horror.
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That wasn't Saddam. It was his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti.
 
Pulvinar said:
Just pointing out the irrationality of it. Of course evolution has programmed us to fear death, and seeing others die in terror is likely what helps support that fear, rational or not.
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I'm not sure why that means we fear the memory of pain, and not the direct experience of it.
 
Beerina said:
I'd rather a guillotine or hanging with head popping off like Saddam. Done is done, want minimal pain and horror.
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No...not like Saddam. Saddam died Beautiful.

Eulogy for Saddam

By...Gary Brecher (a.k.a., The War nerd)

Edited by zooterkin: 
<SNIP>

Edited for rule 4. Text is available here
 
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P.J. Denyer said:
By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British hangman were very well trained, they would calibrate the drop distance based on the condemned's weight adjusted for their neck musculature from a secret observation in their cell.
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Here in the State of Washington, there was a case 20-odd years ago, at a time when the accused was allowed to chose lethal injection or hanging. The accused chose hanging. In the meantime, he spent all of his commisary funds on candy bars, winding up at 425 lb. He then appealed his sentence on the basis of being too fat to hang, because the tables which were supposed to be used by the hangman didn't go that high and his head would pop off. Cruel and unusal punishment. He won. But died on his own accord later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Rupe
 
mgidm86 said:
How is it irrational to not want to suffer great pain during death?

You said above that the memory of a painful death is the problem, but the reminder or memory of pain is not as bad as the pain itself, at least I don't think it is.

I mean if getting your head slowly hacked off hurts, but it's okay because you'll be dead in a minute, then what is the cut-off time? Is severe pain 3 hours before death also okay? A week? Rhetorical, I won't be back to this thread I'm sure ;)

I'm not so much concerned with the pain as I am with seeing it coming.
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The amount of time is a relevant factor, but assuming it's shorter than a few hours, the total amount of pain you could suffer during that time is a drop in a bucket compared to the total amount one would expect to suffer over the rest of their life (just typical pains). Yet most people don't think of ending their life immediately to avoid that.
 
phiwum said:
I'm not sure why that means we fear the memory of pain, and not the direct experience of it.
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If you get burnt touching a hot stove, you remember that pain and (quite rationally) now fear touching hot stoves. But if you were to always forget those hot-stove encounters, you couldn't develop a fear of them.

I fully expect that if you never remembered any pain in your life, you'd be fearless. And short lived, of course.
 
Mikemcc said:
Once I used to be a proponent of capital punishment. A documentary about Stefan Kisko convinced me that it is inherently wrong. You can't say sorry and recompense an innocent man if you've killed him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lesley_Molseed
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It was the execution of Timothy Mcveigh (the guy who bombed the Oklahoma FBI Bldg) that convinced me that execution was not only a great expense, but a moral hazard. I remember a lot of the relatives who had lost family members went to see the closed-circuit execution to...."get Closure" as they called it. What they really wanted was the satisfaction of revenge, They didn't get it.

I remember how some of those people came away frustrated and bitter that Mcveigh didn't beg for his life or do something cowardly - that he endured his execution bravely. This really shattered their misconceptions - thier personal narrative (their fantasy) of the type of man Mcveigh was. Their hopes of watching their fantasy bogeyman executed while begging and whining for mercy just didn't happen. You could feel the shock-wave of butthurt that emanated from Oklahoma City from a thousand miles away. It was group insanity. It was revenge turned rancid. Above all...it was freakin' ugly and unbecoming of a civilized society.
 
Pulvinar said:
If you get burnt touching a hot stove, you remember that pain and (quite rationally) now fear touching hot stoves. But if you were to always forget those hot-stove encounters, you couldn't develop a fear of them.

I fully expect that if you never remembered any pain in your life, you'd be fearless. And short lived, of course.
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I am having trouble following your argument.

It seems simple to me. If I must die, I would prefer less pain immediately prior to death than more pain, because I don't like to experience pain. I don't care whether the pain would "teach me a(n unusable) lesson" about avoiding pain. I already know that I prefer not to experience pain.

And I also know that, unless one believes in an afterlife, he has good reasons to regret his imminent death in most circumstances, because most of us expect that there are many enjoyable experiences which we would have, if we did not die soon, and we would like to have those experiences.

So, I don't know why you think that it's odd to prefer (1) not to die or (2) not to die painfully in particular. Both of those seem eminently rational to me. (NOTE: I don't need an evolutionary story to explain either of those judgments. Obviously, it's easy to see why evolution has made pain so unpleasant for us, but the mere unpleasantness is enough to prefer not to experience it, regardless of any evolutionary benefit or lack thereof in a particular case.)
 
Jules Galen said:
It was the execution of Timothy Mcveigh (the guy who bombed the Oklahoma FBI Bldg) that convinced me that execution was not only a great expense, but a moral hazard. I remember a lot of the relatives who had lost family members went to see the closed-circuit execution to...."get Closure" as they called it. What they really wanted was the satisfaction of revenge, They didn't get it.

I remember how some of those people came away frustrated and bitter that Mcveigh didn't beg for his life or do something cowardly - that he endured his execution bravely. This really shattered their misconceptions - thier personal narrative (their fantasy) of the type of man Mcveigh was. Their hopes of watching their fantasy bogeyman executed while begging and whining for mercy just didn't happen. You could feel the shock-wave of butthurt that emanated from Oklahoma City from a thousand miles away. It was group insanity. It was revenge turned rancid. Above all...it was freakin' ugly and unbecoming of a civilized society.
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I find the phrase "shock-wave of butthurt" remarkably insensitive when applied to relatives of the victims of a terrorist act. Maybe some of them did have a thirst for vengeance (I certainly remember no such thing), but so what? They suffered a substantial loss and sometimes people in grief react in regrettable ways.

I also rather doubt that many (if any) said anything about wishing he begged for his life. I think this is likely your own private fantasy that people act like that.

That said, I don't think that it's appropriate for family members of victims to be invited to witness the execution. I agree with the sentiment that it is too close to revenge-driven, even if I am appalled at your terminology and doubt the accuracy of your report.

ETA: Neither CNN nor the New York Times report anything like you describe. I would think that if anyone came away bitter that there was no begging for his life, that would be newsworthy. The closest I see is comments that he looked directly at the camera with a cruel look on his face, but that's really not the same thing.
 
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phiwum said:
I am having trouble following your argument.

It seems simple to me. If I must die, I would prefer less pain immediately prior to death than more pain, because I don't like to experience pain. I don't care whether the pain would "teach me a(n unusable) lesson" about avoiding pain. I already know that I prefer not to experience pain.
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I wouldn't expect you to care if the pain of death will teach you a lesson. It's the lessons you've already learned --the painful events you remember-- that cause your fear.

And I also know that, unless one believes in an afterlife, he has good reasons to regret his imminent death in most circumstances, because most of us expect that there are many enjoyable experiences which we would have, if we did not die soon, and we would like to have those experiences.
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A good reason, but unrelated to the pain involved.

So, I don't know why you think that it's odd to prefer (1) not to die or (2) not to die painfully in particular. Both of those seem eminently rational to me. (NOTE: I don't need an evolutionary story to explain either of those judgments. Obviously, it's easy to see why evolution has made pain so unpleasant for us, but the mere unpleasantness is enough to prefer not to experience it, regardless of any evolutionary benefit or lack thereof in a particular case.)
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I don't think it's odd to prefer either (in fact it's dead common!). It's just irrational to fear the pain of death more than all the other pain we put up with in our daily lives.
 
Pulvinar said:
I wouldn't expect you to care if the pain of death will teach you a lesson. It's the lessons you've already learned --the painful events you remember-- that cause your fear.
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How the heck is this relevant?

The fact is that pain is unpleasant, I know it's unpleasant and I don't want to experience it.

No one makes the error you suggested, namely, that they want to avoid painful death because the memory of that pain will be dreadful.


A good reason, but unrelated to the pain involved.



I don't think it's odd to prefer either (in fact it's dead common!). It's just irrational to fear the pain of death more than all the other pain we put up with in our daily lives.
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Who fears the pain of death more than all other pain we put up with?

We prefer to avoid death, in most cases, for good reason (because death takes away our opportunities for future experiences which we would have enjoyed).

We prefer to avoid pain, for obvious reasons.

Therefore, we have aversion to pain before death for two reasons (it's painful, and then you die).

I don't hear anyone saying that the pain prior to death is the worst thing in the world, or worse than all other pains. I think people really, really want to avoid death, and they also want to avoid pain, and for some reason you're trying to make that seem irrational, but I don't think it's working.
 
shemp said:
Real men don't spend months hiding in a hole.
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some people are only remembered for the bad things they did....this is not fair.


Even Hitler. People only talk of the bad things he did, we have to remember that the guy did kill Hitler.
 
The Fool said:
some people are only remembered for the bad things they did....this is not fair.


Even Hitler. People only talk of the bad things he did, we have to remember that the guy did kill Hitler.
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Justice for weird mustaches!

[emoji35]
 
shemp said:
Real men don't spend months hiding in a hole.
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If you buy everything the US Military says about it's operations....then so sad for you. The US Military tried to spin the narrative that Saddam was some kind of coward, but the indisputable video of his hanging proved otherwise. Saddam went down HAM!

Saddam's boyz went down HAM, too - with guns ablaze.

Wow...what a family of Psychopaths!

So say anything you want about Saddam (if ya' got to do it because it makes ya' feel better), but he wasn't a coward, and we got access to the video to prove it.



Please remember to put Not Safe For Work tags around any graphic content unsuitable for viewing where other people might see the screen, such as workplaces.
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