There are a few criminals, however, that have made the news during my lifetime that, when someone says they don't deserve to be put to death, I feel my face turning red and I can't stop myself from reacting with my opinion. One such criminal is Timothy McVeigh. I don't believe he did this alone, but his comments, his total lack of remorse, puts him on a whole different level for me. Comments like "there are always civilian casualties in war", said with a smile. And when I saw the photo of the fireman carrying out the charred body of a baby...well, yes...while McVeigh was still alive, I said I would gladly pull the switch on his electric chair. (Actually he died from lethal injection). Why I had (have) such feelings of animosity, such hatred, in this case...well I've questioned myself before about that and have come up with no answer.
You feel that way because you're human, it's totally normal and understandable, I get it and for sure can think of plenty of people I can quite easily make myself feel deserve to die, or worse.
I think it prudent to take responsibility for torture having become part of the discussion though i.e. such deviation from the topic having been triggered, so far as I can tell anyway, from my cruelty to animals post. And, well, it just continued from there. I think I agree that they're two separate issues. Possibly worthy of a separate thread.
There's just so much though (in my opinion) that even if sticking strictly to the topic of this thread that's of interest and of worthy debate.
My only criticism (not even sure I can call it that though) is to not assume that all posting here are addicts or users. I for one am not and have very different reasons for being a member here. My posts here therefore do not discern between the general audience here and the broader topic. I mention this all purely because as some have quite rightly stated (possibly even yourself I believe): certain parts of the debate would indeed, due to unfortunate societal norms (for the most part), be of consequence to the general audience here.
Thanks for your kind comments regarding my post, and fair enough about the assumption that all posting here are drug users, although for the record I wasn't necessarily assuming that. I think that (hopefully) the examples given would be accessible even to non-drug users - I just think there's a special kind of hypocrisy and absurdity in drug users, belonging to a group that is already IMO unjustly criminalised - advocating for excessively harsh legal systems.
And regarding your cruelty to animals post, I can't remember exactly what it was but I can gather, along the lines of people who are excessively cruel to animals deserve to be tortured - and I understand this too and it's hard to disagree with from a purely emotional standpoint.
Meh...I am gonna say I don't feel sorry if a rapist is tortured in prison. Or a child molester.
I would take sadistic pleasure in torturing my rapist personally. Wanna yell at me about it? Go ahead. IDC.
I guess I'm the main one who's been kinda "yelling" in this thread, but I definitely wouldn't yell at you for that, and in a hypothetical where I found out this was happening in a room nearby and had the opportunity to stop it, I'm not saying I would. I'm no paragon of moral virtue myself, and I can't say I'd feel any different had I experienced what you have.
I have fantasised about torturing and killing someone for a good few years after something happened to someone very close to me at the time. It would have been a serious logistical challenge and was, essentially, prohibitively impractical due to distance and some other factors, I don't know if this was fortuitous and I would have really gone through with it if I easily could have done, or if it was just a kind of psychological outlet, but during this time I dd hold onto the idea and believed I was just biding my time until I had the resources and the opportunity to carry it out. Eventually though with the passing of time the intensity of emotions faded and I no longer feel this way.
This obviously was a reaction to a kind of second hand trauma, not to imply that it's all that comparable to first hand trauma or to try to put myself in the same boat as those who have experienced trauma first hand, but just that I get the significance of the influence of powerful emotions. If I could be compelled to feel like this without even something directly happening to me then for sure I get why someone would feel like torturing their rapist. That said - powerful emotions corrupt our capacity to reason, which I believe happened in my case. We all have some capacity to rise above this distortion of our higher selves, but the less degrees of separation there are between ourselves and a traumatic event, the harder it is to do.
My feeling previously has been that sure, it's one thing to want to exact retribution for a specific real life event, but it's another to just dream up a bunch of vague hypothetical scenarios as reasonable excuses to personally torture someone, as has happened in this thread. But, I guess I shouldn't judge, since I don't know what's happening in anyone's internal world really, and anyone with an internal world that can be so easily moved to a desire for violent retribution I guess should be a target for compassion as well, and not harsh words, as easy as it is to do the latter.
@JessFR, have nothing to add to anything you've said but have really enjoyed reading your posts on this topic, your analyses have been admirably rational, compared to my own input where I've really let me emotions get the better of me a few times.
