KILL! - pt. 1

KILL!
by Dave Munger

"Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order."
- George Will

I began life, with a child's natural conservatism and love of justice, as a strong advocate of the death penalty for murderers. Later I was convinced that there was always a better way; that there was too much risk of killing innocents, and that no matter how much someone deserved to die, we could find some use for them that could help pay back their debt to society. Still later, the repellent character of those who vocally oppose the death penalty pushed me into an anti-anti-capital punishment position. Now I find that I sincerely want large numbers of people executed by the state in my name, but not for the most part those people who are actually eligible for death.

As an issue in this year's presidential election, capital punishment is completely bogus. A state's governor has the duty to pardon convicts in special circumstances, such as probable innocence. W does not have the lawful authority to simply halt all executions on the grounds that his current employers, the voters of Texas, are wrong. Children of the Corn they may be, these non-coastal subhumans who dare to presume upon the rights of citizenship in Tom Brokaw's nation, but their will is law in their own state.

A governor may refuse to authorize any executions on such grounds, but that is really an act of civil disobedience (and not a properly Ghandiesque one either) as it involves 1. Refusal to do the job for which one is accepting pay, 2. Violation of an oath, and 3. Failure to be beaten and arrested as any self-respecting Thoreouite would insist upon. "Vote for Al because you disagree with the laws of the state of Texas, which W theoretically could obstruct" is an argument that is weak to the point of absurdity.

The alleged racism of capital punishment is an artificial problem constructed for political purposes. The racial profiling controversy is another example of the same sort of fabricated grievance. A person harmed specifically because of their ethnicity is the kind of problem the civil rights movement was founded to combat. The use of the term "racism" implicitly refers to this sort of problem. The degenerate remnants of this movement, threatened by it's success, have invented a new kind of racism to justify the money they get paid to perpetrate slanderously greasy MLK imitations. Any problem, the existence of which can only be established statistically, is a virtual non-problem.

Being killed because you are black is an urgent problem for the society this injustice takes place in; being killed because you have been proven guilty of murder when you would hypothetically be slightly less likely to face death if you were white is a much less severe problem. The logical solution to this problem is to kill MORE people, not less. The absurdity of the condemnation of racial profiling, on the other hand, is demonstrated by the fact that refusal to take demographics into account would force police to assume that elderly Chinese women are just as likely to commit serious crimes as anyone else.

As a single, male, adolescent-looking Gentile, I am part of one of the groups that police must logically assume are more likely to commit crimes. OK, that last sentence may have just been a good-natured jab at Eileen Ciesla, but seriously, as long as there are cops, they must, by definition, hassle people. Must the hassling be completely random? If they spend ANY of their (that is, my) time frisking rabbis, then I want my money back. The belief that the death penalty and racial profiling are racist are both based on statistics rather than actual problems; on averages, rather than actual people. It's like demanding that when a coin is tossed one hundred times, it must land heads up EXACTLY fifty times.

In next fortnight's installment: My personal, uncharacteristically ambiguous opinion of the matter. Also, I will identify those who must die.