roachboy

depends on what you value, i guess.

if you enjoy the spectacle of an execution because maybe for you personally it serves a therapeutic function--maybe because there's something in the past that happened that triggered such a response--but that's not necessary---but because you can imagine an execution would be therapeutic for you, and you value therapy above other possible words like justice, then you can easily imagine it serving a wider social/therapeutic function.
so process is secondary---so it would follow that in this regard at least, you could be equally happy in a dictatorship or a monarchy or any other system in the context of which procedures like due process are---um---let's say optional. and because the primary value is therapeutic, it wouldn't necessarily matter if the person executed was actually guilty or not--like crompsin says above, utilitarian arguments can be made to justify a few innocent people getting offed. as he so daintily put it:

so long as that person is not you, i assume. then it would be a big deal. but it cannot be you, because it's your therapy that matters. so you are necessarily the spectator and patient and beneficiary. so you can't be in jeopardy yourself. that's why process is secondary. the logical center of this position is narcissism.

but if you value democratic procedures, then the spectacle of the Kill is not the point--the process is. the rationale is not therapy, but some idea of justice. so it is NOT ok to execute innocent people. it is NOT ok to, as the good mister jello biafra once put it, to kill kill kill kill kill the poor in the way the american system does (who gets onto death row? seriously....can you say class biais? look at reality and stop pretending that it is just anyone who gets convicted of capital crimes in the states. jesus.)....and there is something maybe problematic about thinking in terms of justice and the state engaging in acts of premeditated murder: like that it puts the state and the executed on the same level and so undermines precisely the value that the action is supposed to be about.


now that i think about it more, this-->

is entirely alien to everything i understand as even rational.

repeating it--->

just makes it more surreal.

copy it lots of times for yourself.
it becomes more and more what it is.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite