Best-Of Advice

On politics and punishment

Despite my numerous far-left political tendencies (I am a registered Democratic Socialist), I still think public hanging should be reinstated as a method of the death penalty.Does this make me nothing more than a chicken-shit centrist, or am I just overthinking?

A desire to reinstate public hanging doesn’t push you toward the political center. It pushes you back around toward the fringes where wingnut ideologies start to blend into a hazy purple of both far-left and far-right lunacy. In other words, you don’t sound like a chicken-shit centrist. You sound like a fucking fascist.

Democratic Socialism is all well and good, but not when coupled with a state powerful enough to perform barbaric death rituals as punishment for crimes. Government should exist to regulate, not punish.

As the systemic extension of the will of the people, government’s role should be broad, but its power should only extend as far as its benevolence. The death penalty is the institutionalized representation of the most abhorrent and inferior aspects of our human nature.

We are never lower as a people than when we allow the state to take murderous revenge on our behalf.

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