- The Nebraska vote — passed by a coalition of Republicans, Democrats and independents, many newly elected — is an acknowledgment by reasonable people of all political ideologies that capital punishment is an abhorrent and indefensible practice. If that realization can happen in the deep-red heart of America, it can happen anywhere.
Hi King -- I thought someone would have posted it, so I did a search first. However, I searched the #nytimes.com - If I had searched #nebraska, I would have seen your post and shared it. So it's me that's doing it wrong, not you. Having said that, now I know that for interesting progressive news, #rollingstone.com might be the place to look. Also, few circle dots does not mean that people didn't see and read the post.
I'm honestly not too beat up about the dots, it was just a weird moment. Like tng said, it could've just been chance--I might have posted it at a weird time, or something along the lines of that! Thanks for the reply, though. If it counts, I never expected foul play or anything like that at all!
I missed your post. Could be I wasn't online when your post was in my feed, I follow you both. That said, I go out of my way to see lil's posts because if I could SUPER follow someone on Hubski, it would be lil. No offense everyone else.
Following people is a problem here as far as I can see. In theory it's a reputation system but everyone is basically a stranger here but if you have more followers you're granted more weight. It really just makes the whole site more insular as people who've been here longer have more of a posse. If I agree with a complete idiot about one valid point on a website his opinion shouldn't be counter weighted by his general grumblings that women are inferior emotional beings. A degree of anonymity is better on the internet than everything you say being tied to a "Person" who isn't real. Everyone has something to contribute and that's what the internet is good at, just not this part of it. That's my honest opinion on this experiment without a solution. I don't like agreeing with people I'd otherwise write off as idiots but I also don't like writing off people you seem to like who are obviously naive 20 somethings who won't shut up on this website. But that is the reality I'm presented with when it's based entirely on a username system of prestige.
It's probably an artifact of the website being small. I don't have a solution but I'll probably switch to global more often or as a default. This does nothing for comments though. It's kind of an entrenched culture at this point that this website is a community and it's better for that. When it's really like 12 users or whatever who think they know each other and that's no way to grow a site. I've really not been around that long but there's like a core group that I have no interest in being a part of but dominates discussion and can tilt it towards one side when a member is seen to be affronted. If there's a conflict it's going to come down to who has more followers and I've been on the short side maybe 2-3 times. You can strive for a community atmosphere but the reality is that this is a collection of strangers with an open invitation for more strangers to join, and that invitation is the metric for success but it seems very stagnant to me at the moment as something of an outsider
As for my example above, I could do the same thing on most any site. Meaning, when I'm away from the site for a bit, I'll go directly to lil's profile to see if she has posted anything. I like her content. Right now it may seem as you mention but I think it will scale. If there were 100k users on the site, there would be many communities within the site. It's much more akin architecturally to Twitter than it is reddit.
Here's the problem with lethal injection from my perspective: it tries to obscure the nature of the act of killing. Choosing to kill someone out of retribution is a violent choice, no matter how peaceful we want it to appear. The fact that that execution was botched, and the man suffered is terrible for him, but it puts the debate back in the place of whether lethal injection is peaceful or painful. I think that's the wrong debate. The debate we should be having is whether the government should have the power to decide who lives and who dies. Put in those terms, I don't even think a lot of conservatives would look very kindly on it. But, if we're going to have executions, I think they should be bloody massacres, firing squad, public hanging, etc. It's obviously a shameful thing to kill someone. If it weren't, we would always be trying to hide, make it seem less violent, and so on. People who want to kill should have to face the reality of the killing. I go back and forth on whether I think the death penalty is immoral. I really don't know. I do know that I could never vote to kill someone, were I a juror. I voted to put a kid in jail for (probably) life, and that was hard enough, even though it was obvious he was guilty. After that, I'm sure that I would never vote to kill anyone. I couldn't live with that on my conscience, whether the person deserved it or not.
As for capital punishment, I'm against it. If nothing else, because of human fallibility. I remember when you were on that jury. That's a heavy responsibility. Didn't you make a post about your jury experience?People who want to kill should have to face the reality of the killing.
I suppose this topic dovetails with people's assertion that if you are going to eat meat, you should have to kill the animal you're going to eat. If you are going to be a proponent of something violent, you should see the violence first hand.
No. I intended to, but for various reasons that I'll not go into, I didn't feel like doing much of anything at that time. By the time I dug myself out of that temporary funk I couldn't really remember all that I wanted to say. Here are some hastily thrown together details. All in all, being on a murder jury was pretty surreal. Thankfully, MI abandoned the death penalty back in 1847 (according to Wikipedia, it was the first English speaking jurisdiction to do so), so I didn't have to wrestle with that choice. Were it an option, I assume the prosecution would have requested it. The guy on trial killed a disable man for his SSI money, the check for which he had just cashed at a liquor store. There were two defendants, actually. They were being tried separately by two juries at the same time. There was one piece of testimony that was inadmissible for us to hear, but not for the other defendant's jury. So for those 15 minutes, we stepped out of the court. Otherwise, it was two simultaneous trials. Our kid was 23. The other was 17. 17. It was an interesting experience seeing the legal system from the inside out, at least hearing arguments was interesting. Most of the 7 or 8 days were spent in isolation rooms, which was torture. I don't mind being in isolation, because I can read until my eyeballs bleed, and I'm all the happier for it. The other 13 jurors...not so much. All they did was complain about how bored they were. That was the worst part. I have a very short fuse with complainers. For most of 7 days (arguments were only 1-3 hours per day), I was forced into a small conference room with 13 strangers who incessantly bitched about how there's nothing to do. One girl brought a magazine a couple days, but other than that, not a soul brought reading materials (and any devices were strictly forbidden). I couldn't believe it. I was convinced enough that these people were big enough morons that I essentially appointed myself foreman, not being able to abide any of them running a meeting. I knew the kid was guilty. Everyone else knew the kid was guilty. But still, I made us run through every possible scenario in which we could think of a reasonable doubt about his guilt. It took about 12 hours of deliberation. In the end, there was no other choice. The kid didn't flinch when the verdict was read. The most interesting part was after the trial was over, both the prosecution and defense invited us for interviews to determine what they did well and what they did poorly. It was very enlightening, because at that time, the prosecutor was able to fill us in on all the details that weren't admissible, including a cell phone video of the kids waving guns around and doing drugs. Apparently, since it couldn't be determined if any was the gun used in the crime, the video would be considered "prejudicial". Also, there were two eye witnesses whom the prosecution called. Neither provided any informative details to the jury, and each denied saying that they said the things that the police had written in their report that they said (which, apparently were repeated in subsequent pre-trial interviews with the prosecutor), much to the dismay of the prosecutor. As it turns out, on the day they were called, the whole rest of the gang with whom the defendants were affiliated packed the court gallery to intimidate the guys. It made sense, because the one guys looked scared out of his mind and the other almost didn't say a word. The prosecutor informed us that this gang's MO was basically to rob disabled people and the elderly of their government checks. Of course you hear about murders when you live in the ghetto (or anywhere if you turn on the news), and you hear the gunshots from time to time, but it's different to be faced with the accused and the details of their crime. How much money can an SSI check be made out for? $500? $1000? I have no idea. Apparently, there are areas in the US where that is a sum worth the life of a father of 5. Hard to comprehend, really, that such places exist not more than a few miles from civilization. These guys had to go; I'm glad they're in jail. But still, my heart broke a little bit having to have a hand in their fate. I felt (and still feel) no sense of pride or accomplishment, only sadness for everyone involved.Didn't you make a post about your jury experience?
I'm glad that Nebraska made this decision, but I think this "article" is weird.On May 20, Ms. Orozco, a seven-year veteran of the Omaha force, was part of a gang unit serving an arrest warrant on a man named Marcus Wheeler. Instead of surrendering, Mr. Wheeler shot at the officers, who fired back. He was killed in the shootout, as was Ms. Orozco, who was scheduled to go on maternity leave the following day to care for her 3-month-old daughter, who had been born prematurely and was going home from the hospital.
- This is an odd paragraph in association with this news. 1. Her assailant was killed. How could he have faced the death penalty?
The lede to this article makes me want to focus on maternity leave in the US, not capital punishment. 2. Why is this woman working after giving birth to a premature child only 3 months prior?
Yeah, that struck me as weird too. I understand the first point you mention from the NYT. The editorial writer is arguing that aside from the fact that Wheeler was killed, people who see the death penalty as revenge would say -- this guy deserves it. As for mat leave after the baby gets out of the hospital - I hope there were volunteers cuddling and holding the premature baby. They need contact as much as any infant.