I’m pro abortion and against the death penalty! Someone ask me! I promise I’m not a troll. I am honestly pro abortion not just pro choice.
My understanding is that they consider it ok to kill someone who committed a heinous crime but not ok to kill someone who is completely innocent.
This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.
And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.
*I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.
It doesn’t work as a deterrent though. In states that have the death penalty people still do bad things.
But should we even punish?
I don’t mean to troll, so let me explain. Why do we punish? I think it’s two fold, we punish to deter crimes and we punish to exact revenge. But the fear of punishment doesn’t deter crime https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence and that leaves revenge as the only both intended and actual outcome of punishment.
Is the current costs of running a complicated criminal justice system really worth it, if all we get from it is revenge? Does revenge make society better? I don’t think so.
I’m not advocating for anarchy either. There should be consequences for criminals. I’m just not sure what the consequences should be, but punishment is ineffective. I get that we have personal responsibility, and free will. And I’m not trying to excuse criminals, I’m just saying that punishment doesn’t work.
I’m all about scientific research, especially when it goes against the grain, but the idea of getting caught being a bigger deterrent than the punishment is just, weird?
If there is no punishment, why would you be afraid to be caught?
One aspect of punishment is retribution for the victims when there is nothing else and another is to keep people that are harmful away in order to keep other people safe.
Here in Sweden we have a current massive problem with organized crime that are now systematically abusing our criminal justice system that is built on humanitarian ideals for rehab and protecting suspects and criminals rights to the absurd. So yes, in those cases I think punishment will do. Cynically abusing protection measures of society deserves punishment. It may not change those individuals for the life they have chosen for themselves but it will keep them out of making even more damage to society and violent crime against individuals and I honestly see no problem in harsh consequences for their own decisions.
They’re both cruel to anyone “below” them (this is a simplistic argument.) They’re easy to cry wolf about in order to draw people over to your side, people who vote and act emotionally
In the end, it’s because they’re told that that’s the way it is.
Abortion makes a an easy political point. Vote for the children.
Being hard on crime and executing people, That’s another easy political point. Vote for the law abiding citizens.
They don’t care that those two things are at odds They don’t care about life or death. They care about their own exact situation, and don’t really give a rat’s ass about anyone else. They believe that the team they’re backing gives them the best advantage, and that’s absolutely all they care about. Beyond that, it’s simply consuming and regurgitating the propaganda, self-perpetuating.
IS it a contradiction? I don’t agree with the death penalty or anti-abortion position, but I don’t see some essential link between either position. You can hold two different beliefs about two different things is how come.
They literally call themselves pro-life and then express support for the death penalty.
I have the same question for the opposite as well. Or for being for abortion and also vegan.
A (human) mother that carries a growing fetus is a living being. A pig, dog or a cow as well. They feel physically and emotionally and can be hurt.
A fetus is, up to a certain point, just a slab of meat.
As a vegan I don’t care about slabs of meat, I care about living beings and I think we shouldn’t hurt them.
Foetus can also feel pain and hurt, though
At which stage in development, since you seem to know this for a fact.
The death penalty doesn’t control women.
It’s a pastime of liberal pundits to point out that the pro-life governor of some flyover state also supports the death penalty and so on and so forth. We get incredulous and infuriated at their blatant hypocrisy. We call them stupid, which really sets them off […] They don’t think of themselves as self-serving hypocrites or idiots who can’t keep their facts straight long enough to form a cogent argument in continuity with the rest of their ideology. We try to describe this as “cognitive dissonance” or other give other armchair diagnosis that doesn’t fully capture what’s going on. I’d like to give them more credit than that. They clearly believe in something, and in that context their words and actions would make sense, but it’s not what they’re self-advertising when you ask what they believe in.
From still the best description of american conservative thought I’ve read: an essay by u/kin7es: https://wiki.dlma.com/belief-system-of-republicans
Everyone has a spot on the big food pyramid of the socio-political hierarchy. Good, smart, and hardworking people of merit make their way to the top. Bad, dumb, and lazy people go to the bottom. For convenience sake, this hierarchy is color-coded. In a zero-sum world, everyone who gets to the top has to knock someone down a rung to make room.
I would argue this is how republican voters think. That they’re in the right because they are voting for the right of the individual. But on the other hand I think Republican policy makers give zero shits about a person’s self worth and actualization but rather they know that they need to feed the machine and we need the poor babies born to do so, and on the other hand they can demonstrate some form of moral high ground by deciding life and death.
There’s no death penalty for defrauding elections, molding the healthcare (or really any corporate) system to work for harm and profit, avoiding taxation through infinite shell companies and offshore bank accounts. Those things are celebrated as “beating the system”
Still to this day everyone that claims “Plandemic” is chasing some invisible elite power structure that somehow only includes democrats, without ever getting mad at the corporations that profited immensely off developing covid vaccines and charging market price for them as a portion of the world was dying.
Because with reactionaries, the cruelty is the point.
Kind of seems like a contradiction
They don’t care. There’s no point in calling conservatives out on hypocrisy. Only a very small number of them will give a shit, and those will be the ones who were already having doubts.
Precisely this. From a philosophical-logical POV, it doesn’t make sense. From the POV of establishing and maintaining power/ dominance/ oppression/ hegemony, however, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Just guessing here, but I’d assume it’s because the unborn have potential and the bad guys had their chance. I don’t agree, but that’s what I assume being around some people like that…
You are a bad man and you should feel bad about yourself
Well, I at least thought it was a little funny.
I’m assuming it was sarcasm/a joke too, but hard to know these days, without either knowing someone, or the obvious /s. Some crazy people out there…
Nobody remembers poor Dr Zoidberg
I think a lot of us remember that line from Zoidberg, and if you’d used that line people might have understood your reference.
They would argue that the “baby” is innocent.
So was the guy they executed the other day right? So innocence might not be it either
They’re obsessed with punishment. A lot of them see unwanted pregnancy as a just punishment for recreational sex.
Because they don’t care about “life”.
They care about punishing people.
An unwanted unplanned baby is punishment for having sex outside of marriage.
Death penalty is punishment for being convicted of murder.
It’s perfectly consistent when you look at it all about punishment.
The cruelty is indeed the point
As someone recently told me, they don’t worry about saving lives, they worry about saving souls.
You need to abide by the quaint rules of the magical sky daddy for that, even if they don’t make sense.
Except clearly any aborted fetus would immediately go to heaven based on what’s written in the bible. In fact, heaven should be absolutely completely full of dead babies based on miscarriages, stillbirths, etc. if you believe that they get a soul at the moment of conception.
So that logic doesn’t really make sense either. Which is par for the course.
Actually, nobody goes to heaven when they die (according to the bible). Everyone must wait until judgement day when all the graves, etc, open and we all face judgement at that point. This surprised me when I first learned it because it goes against all the Christian culture I’ve ever been taught and experienced.
So grandma isn’t currently in heaven no matter how good she was.
I was juuuuuuust about to explain how making sense isn’t a requirement to them, until I saw your last sentence. Then I knew you already get it.
Uhh no? Non-baptized souls go to limbo according to Christian theology.
That depends on which flavor of Christianity you’re looking at, but even the Catholics don’t think they go to Limbo, the pope had an entire study done on it, and the result was “we hope they go to heaven but we don’t know”
A lot of the other denominations don’t subscribe to the original sin shtick, and therefore babies would go to heaven even without being baptized.
I always loved the “do uncontacted remote tribes that haven’t heard of God or Jesus go to heaven?” question. So far everyone has answered yes. And then you realize that Christians could save everyone, everywhere, forever, just by destroying all their literature, not teaching religion, and letting it die with them. One sacrificial generation and everyone is saved forever.
But they won’t do it because of greed and pride, the core aspects of their belief system.
Lots of them believe it is written on our hearts and uncontacted tribes have rejected Jesus.
Catholics
I dont think it really has anything to do with that. A state recently sued due to abortion and teen pregnancy reduction efforts leading to decreased teenage pregnancy rates arguing something along the lines of our populations are going down and it will cost us in population, political representation, and federal resources.
This is about cheap/free labor, disenfranchising women, and maintaining a permanent disabled and poverty-stricken underclasses that keep everyone on up in line with the hierarchy
Stop being right!
sounds left to me
Most people aren’t all that well informed and don’t do a lot of crtical thinking about their political positions on things. Many people are only guided by their emotions.
If your Church says that life begins at conception, then abortion is killing babies. So you’d be angry about abortions happening.
If you hear a horrible crime, you’re angry about that and might want the person that did that crime to be executed. If you never hear about or think about innocent people being execute, never consider the ethical problems with a government killing people, never consider the costs of it, and all the other arguments against the death penalty, then you can go through life thinking there’s no problem with it.
And even if you hear the rational arguments, they get overpowered by emotion the next time someone says “abortion is murder” or you hear about a horrible crime happening that might qualify for the death penalty.
This. People are not that complicated
