IOZ responding to a ridiculous comment, the gist of which you can probably gather:
Lol executions lower the crime rate? Where? When? Also what is a crime? Also "animalistic"? What are you a fucking park ranger? You see a lot of cows murdering other cows?The Other Elizabeff, of Elizabitchez:
'NO.' The most useful word anyone will ever learn. When you learn a foreign language learn NO first and leave yes for the advanced course.
And two not-so-funnies:
checarina at Shakesville of all places, in an uneven but sometimes great post on the unequal attention paid to the near-simultaneous executions of Troy Davis and Lawrence Russell Brewer:
It should go without saying—though perhaps it doesn't—that I oppose Brewer's execution and find no joy in his death. I find it difficult to feel a great deal of sorrow about his death, but I interpret this as a failure of empathy on my part, not as any proof that he deserved to die.And Abonilox, on death. I would quote an excerpt, but I would want to quote the whole thing, so just read it instead.
6 comments:
Moo-dur was the case that they gave me.
Sorry.
YOU SHOULD BE
In killing Brewer, we performed a sort of grandiose moral feat: we managed to sink to his level. As he was dying, we shook hands with him in his world. No empathy, it is all too true, for this blighted man; and yet sadness as well as disgust about his death.
Society puts on its Sunday-best clothes when it executes. For those involved in the deed, no gloating or leering like some of the folks outside. That would be coarse. Do they hate him, this man they are killing? Why no, they would answer, unimpeachably solemn; they only feel sorry for him. Better, paradoxically, that they should hate him. It's the least they could do, you might almost say. Kill a man in cold blood and claim not even to hate him: that is moral pretentiousness at its grisly worst.
Thank you so much. I'm glad to be alive among the likes of you. If I had any discipline at all, I would try to go through my music and books as you do... But alas, all I can do is pick them up when I do. (We do have a lot of overlap in our musical tastes from what I've seen so far--that's usually a good sign).
Abonilox--jeez, thank you. I like your stuff way more than I comment on it, for which, sorry. As far as the music and books, I wouldn't call it "discipline" so much as obsession, or perhaps fussiness. (Also, I've been cycling through them as quickly as I have largely because I haven't had a job all year.)
antonello--interesting take on Brewer, which in the context of my recent thoughts on capitalism and the state's reliance on oppression (focusing more on the gendered aspect of it, though the racial aspect is intimately tied and overlapped with it) is particularly, well, interesting. James Byrd's murder was an individualized expression of the violence on which capitalism is founded, carried out by individuals themselves victims--in a different way--of that same violence, whereas Lawrence Russell Brewer's murder was...an individualized expression of the violence on which capitalism is founded, carried out by the state (on which capitalism is founded).
(I meant to put the qualifier incomparably in front of the word different.)
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