#one of Bruce's main trait is compassion the man has compassion for criminals that's why he doesn't kill

[littlefankingdom]

The "Good Soldier" plate was made by Alfred tho, not Bruce, and Bruce hates it. Can y'all STOP using this argument???

Also, Jason has been told MULTIPLE TIMES that Bruce sees him as his son, and not a soldier but just like Alfred says here, Jason refuses to acknowledge it. Jason seeing himself as nothing but just a soldier is HIS problem. It's a false narrative he created to hurt himself and he keeps repeating even tho it is false, and he was told multiple times it is.

(Batman and Robin Eternal and Robins are comics with example of that, as the storylines are literally the Robins misunderstanding that Bruce only views them as soldiers, only to be shown how sick it makes Bruce to think he could be making soldiers, and how much he cares about them all for who they are. Also, in Red Hood & Arsenal, Jason goes to the community center he used to hanged out at when he was homeless, a community center Bruce has poured money into since he has known Jason. There, he meets Bruce. Even as he is suffering from amnesia and not remembering anything about his life and loved ones, the part of him that loves and cares for Jason still exists enough for him to come work here, and Jason takes this as a sign that Bruce loves and cares for him as much as he does)

he said the thing HE SAID THE THING

[auntynationalsblog]

On The Death Penalty

20/03/2020. Four out of the five (six, we don’t know whether Ram Singh killed himself or was killed) convicts of the infamous Nirbhaya rape case were finally given the noose. However, if we take a closer look, we’d notice that they didn’t die in 2020. Their fate was sealed seven years ago when the public, the politicians and the media displayed an insatiable thirst for their blood, hence proving the regressive nature of the world’s largest democracy.  

Unlike the hanging of Yakub Memon or Afzal Guru, the hanging did not spark widespread outrage. Of course, one could propose multiple reasons for the same. Activists were already immersed in a movement against laws that were aimed at systemically exterminating the Indian Muslim population. Many of my liberal lads ideologically against capital punishment didn’t raise their voices either, claiming that the heinousness of the crime was “too much” for their conscience to stick to the liberal side of the death penalty debate. “Imagine what the mother went through”, they stated.

I cannot speak for the mother, or for anyone in the family, or for any of the victim’s friends and acquaintances. It is more than justified for them to demand justice in the form of the death. But I can speak for liberals, for those who have some shred of objectivity left (Tablighi Jamaat showed that many don’t). 

We hear a lot of scattered arguments from today’s conservatives on why the noose, or the needle, or the electric chair is not only justified, but also necessary. I want to tidy up their poorly phrased arguments in a manner that can be constructively used to articulate my own arguments. The two arguments most stressed upon by the proponents are that the death penalty is “just”, and that it ensures “the greater good of society”, by deterring potential criminals (utilitarianism or consequentialism in philosophical jargon). I’ll start by talking about what they call justice, which I call vengeance. On this note, please welcome, our dear old friend, the one and only Immanuel Kant. 

Kant’s argument on the death penalty, unlike his three Critiques and the Metaphysics of Morals, is pretty straightforward. He believes in strict equality (lex talionis in Latin jargon) in the magnitude of the crime and the magnitude of the punishment. Of course, it begs questions like, should a serial killer who murdered twenty-three people be injected twenty-three times and resuscitated after each injection, or should a terrorist be blown up to pieces as an “equal” punishment? What about a failed bombing attempt? How is the doctrine of strict equality going to punish liars and cheaters? 

The argument of strict equality, basically, is not strict at all (understandably). The conservative interpretation of lex talionis can be stated as follows: Any crime which involves taking a life, or permanently damaging the soul of a human being, or a crime which shakes the moral fabric of society, should be met by a punishment proportional to that crime, and that punishment can only be proportional if it is death. When the liberal asks why, the conservative replies that no human has the right to take a life. The obvious (and weak) liberal response is inquiring about the criminal’s right to life, to which the conservative will paraphrase classic liberals like Kant and Mill, who argued that any human who violates another human’s right to life relinquishes his own. They can also argue that while a human can’t take another human’s life (even a criminal’s), a state, or a Leviathan can, because one of the main purposes of the Leviathan is justice. 

So it boils down to me proving that the death penalty is not just.   

Let’s begin. 

There are two types of cases to make against the death penalty - that it is unjust in principle, or it just in principle but unjust in practice. The first set of arguments claim that it is morally wrong to take a criminal’s life, while the second set claims that while such actions can be morally condoned, the application of such a system of justice is unjust as it systematically targets certain groups of people, while completely ignoring certain other groups. I myself am a proponent of the first one. Defending the latter is relatively easier due to conclusive evidence, so I shall begin with the first one. 

French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his Two Laws of Penal Evolution argued that softening the standards of physical punishment is a sign of “progressive” societies. Such an argument should not surprise us at all since common sense has dictated most of us to call Saudi Arabia a “regressive” society due its refusal to abolish old-age methods of punishment like stoning, lashing and beheading. On the other hand, most first-world nations today, with the notable exception of the United States of America, have abolished the death penalty. India and China are not first-world yet, unlikely that India will ever be. Anyway, the idea that capital punishment does not belong to a progressive society is based on the liberal notion that the death penalty itself is not progressive at all, because it is immoral. 

Some of you might have watched Batman Begins. In his League of Shadows training, Ra’s Al Ghul asks Bruce to execute a murderer with a swipe of his sword. Bruce refuses, to which Ghul replies that his compassion is a trait that his enemies will not share. Bruce’s response might just be the greatest quote of the Dark Knight Trilogy, “that’s why it’s so important, it distinguishes us from them.” 

The point is that the death penalty brings us down to the moral level of the criminals. This is directly linked to Kant’s eye for an eye argument. If we take an eye for an eye, we respond to barbarity with barbarity. Hence, in our quest for “justice”, we become barbarians too, and justice loses its meaning and is replaced by revenge. Killing is responded to by killing, making everyone a murderer, and hence, immoral. 

The counter-argument is often the utilitarian/consequentialist one, that is, capital punishment would deter future crimes by instilling fear into would-be criminals, and therefore, even an immoral act like the death penalty has a morally acceptable outcome, that is, a safer society. But the utilitarians are rather funny in this debate, they’d be willing to hang an innocent man too if they had evidence that that particular miscarriage of justice would lead to a positive outcome in society (like fewer crimes), which is why it does not stand any chance against any deontological argument about the death penalty. 

But the most basic flaw in the utilitarian argument is the belief that the death penalty deters, it does not. Not only do statistics contradict the utilitarian claim, but with respect to India, think of the Ranga-Billa case. How many rapes have been prevented by sentencing Ranga and Billa to death? Proponents will say that even if the rape numbers did not go down post Ranga-Billa, numbers could have gone up, but the hanging did not allow rape numbers to spike. Such an argument is wishful thinking and mere speculation. 

The right to life is an inalienable right, god-given for believers, and a natural right for atheists. The only two ways this right can be snatched away is via God or via nature. It cannot be taken away by fellow humans, even if some fellow humans have entered into a contractual agreement with each other to form a Leviathan. Not to forget, it is irreversible, and thus the chances of a travesty of justice become much higher. A man being wrongfully imprisoned for a few years is nothing in contrast to man wrongfully given the electric chair. Please read about the case of Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully hanged in Britain for the murder of his wife and child, after which the death penalty was eventually abolished all over Britain. The actual murders were committed by the infamous serial killer John Christie, but that’s a different conversation. 

Some soft abolitionists argue that while the death penalty is morally just, its application in real life makes it an unjust practice. The simplest example to illustrate this in India’s case is Kuldeep Singh Sengar. This vile creature, along with his henchmen and relatives, raped a girl for over a month and murdered her father. Did he get the noose? He didn’t. Why? Powerful politician and an upper-caste Hindu? Most likely. That should illustrate the argument, that the death penalty is classist, casteist and racist. Forget intra-community violence, studies have shown that in the USA, blacks are much more likely to be executed for killing whites than whites who have killed blacks. This comes as a surprise to none, so why do the proponents keep their mouth shut about the explicitly discriminatory nature of the noose, the needle, and the chair?

Weak communities and minorities are easy targets. The truth is, the death penalty does not apply to white people, or the rich, or upper castes in India. Sajjan Kumar and Jagdish Tytler, notable Congress politicians who took part in the 1984 pogrom of the Sikhs, did not receive the noose. Kamal Nath was made Chief Minister. Babu Bajrangi and Maya Kodnani, convicted of committing unfathomable crimes in the 2002 pogrom against Muslims were sentenced to prison but are out on bail. The justice system is a joke. So do not put forward the case of the death penalty when its just application is unlikely in an unjust justice system. 

There are many other nuanced sociological arguments against capital punishment (like if poor people are more prone to crimes and hence capital punishment, is the state equally responsible for the crimes committed) that I shall not get into, due to the increasing length of this blog. But I’d like to end on a Kantian note. Kant proposed three basic necessities in his support of capital punishment. Proponents shout out the first one, but ignore the other two. They support Kant when he says that the magnitude of the punishment should be equal to the magnitude of the crime. However, they look the other way when he says that only the guilty should be punished, and all the guilty should be punished. Think about whether the last two are fairly applicable in today’s society. 

[angstandhappiness]

INTERESTING Love thjs

he said the thing HE SAID THE THING