Ban the sale of it. That’s it. You want to cultivate it yourself, no problem. Share it with friends and family, OK. Just no more industrialized tobacco.
There will be a black market. So what? The problem isn’t that people are using it. The problem is ubiquity. It’s readily available everywhere. A black market isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as selling it in every shop across the country.
Ooh, edgy.
Oh no! Anyway…
What basis do you have for presuming his incompetence?
The fact that he was unsupervised in public tells me he should be assumed to understand the concepts of right and wrong.
He doomed himself. I don’t owe him a thing. If I owe anyone anything, it is his victim, not him. If I do owe his victim, locking up his killer for the rest of his life would be my pathway toward redemption.
Timezones are already a step toward an arbitrary standard time for the purposes of making communication easier and not needing to change your watch just because you moved around. UTC everywhere would just be another larger step in that already established direction.
The next step is to stop talking about “Daylight Savings Time” and “Standard Time” and phrase these as UTC offsets.
The Eastern timezone uses UTC-5 over the winter. We use UTC-4 over the summer. In summer, if they used UTC-5, the sunrise in New York would be around 4AM. Which is way too early. New York should not be on UTC-5 in the summer. But there is no real problem with New York using UTC-4 year round.
Detroit, on the other hand, would have sunrise after 9AM in winter if they used UTC-4. Which is absurd; they cannot use UTC-4 year round. But, there is no real problem with them using UTC-5 year round.
The solution, then, is not to select permanent DST or Standard Time for the entire timezone. The solution is for the states (or localities) to each select which UTC offset makes sense for them, and the next time they are on that offset, they do not switch again.
I commented on it, but I never accepted your premise that saving lives counts toward redemption. The reason why is simple: Whatever future potential you envision this kid having, you must also give to the kid he killed. Balancing the number of potential future lives the murderer saves vs the same number of potential lives lost by killing his victim, this kid is always going to be one life short of redemption.
Edit:
Forgot to comment on this earlier:
Throw away the keys and you worsen the odds.
No, by locking him up forever, you greatly improve the odds that he won’t kill again. He is free to explore the development of his personality within the context of having his behavior directly supervised for the rest of his life.
Agreed. About the only way they could increase their objectivity would be by using the candidate’s own, recent words on the various topics.
Somehow, I think there would be far more outrage if they had done that…
They definitely don’t want those troops coming back home and talking about their time in the west.
In other words, he has a right to work towards redemption.
He can study necromancy for the rest of his life, and attempt to raise his victim from the grave. That’s his right. If he accomplishes it, we can talk about clemency.
His right to seek redemption isn’t being infringed upon by locking him up permanently. It is the permanence of the death he caused that is denying him redemption.
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You are not including the “cost” of recidivism.
If he kills again after you release him, you have to include that “cost” on top of everything you spent to try to bring him back into society. Even if you get the recidivism rate down to an extraordinary 1%, 1% of the value of an innocent life is worth more than the costs of caging a hundred murderers for the rest of their lives.
When you include the typical risks of recidivism, the cost of rehabilitation greatly exceeds that of permanent incarceration.
He might save a life that, in prison or dead, he could not have saved. He might save twenty, even a million.
Sure. He might save more lives than anyone who has ever existed. The chances of that happening are as good as winning the lottery, but hey, it could happen.
He might also take another life. Or twenty. Or a million. The chances of that are substantially higher: far more people lose the lottery than win anything at all.
The lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math. The best approach to playing the lottery is to lock up the money you would have used, and never let it out to buy a ticket.
Let’s stop using the terms “DST” and “standard time”. They really confuse the issue. The contiguous US uses UTC-4 (EDT) , UTC-5 (EST/CDT) UTC-6 (CST/MDT), UTC-7 (MST/PDT) and UTC-8 (PST) time zones. We aren’t all going to be using the same UTC offset for permanent time. We are all going to be adopting the UTC offset that makes sense for our region.
New England and Michigan are currently in the same time zone, which switches between UTC-4 and UTC-5. Year-round UTC-5 puts dawn before 4am in New York City during the summer. New England should absolutely not be on UTC-5 in the summer. They should be on UTC-4. On permanent UTC-4, New York dawns will always be between 5 and 8 AM.
Year-round UTC-4 puts dawn at 9am in Detroit during the winter. Detroit should absolutely not be in UTC-4 in the winter. On permanent UTC-5, Detroit dawns will always be between 5 and 8 AM.
New York should be on permanent UTC-4. Detroit should be on permanent UTC-5.
Its easier to illuminate a bedroom in the morning than the great outdoors in a ridiculously early evening.
The “other” in this case being the predator who deliberately and maliciously inserted his knife blade into a human body for the express purpose of destroying that human.
It’s not psychopathic behavior to decide that such a person constitutes a threat, and should be separated from society by any necessary means available.
The worst thing that can possibly happen is they reform their lives and some kid decides they are worthy of emulation.
No, the best thing they can do for society is remain locked up for the rest of their lives.
The point is that despite murder being a horrific crime, as a society, we have moved past defining people as singularly evil for all killings.
We have not, and we should never move “past” that position.
To the extent that they understand not to pull of shit like stabbing people, at least.
Your standards suck. Get some better ones.
My decision to give or withhold a second chance for this kid is irrelevant.
He can try as hard as he wants to dig redemption out of his victim’s grave, but it’s simply not possible. Unless you’re alleging this kid is some kind of necromancer, he is fundamentally incapable of redemption.
Save the pshrinks for kids who can be saved.
I suspect you misspoke. 4-year-olds require 24/7 supervision from a parent, guardian, or other caregiver in public or private. Failure to continuously supervise a 4-year-old you are responsible for is a chargeable offense.
It is about the capacity to understand right and wrong about a given act. Children much younger than 15 are expected to understand the general legal and moral implications of murder.
Untrue. I know he was subjected to numerous hearings and evaluations to determine his competency. He was found to not have sufficiently diminished capacity to excuse or mitigate his actions.