That’s ignoring the point. Retributive justice is inherently reactive. It doesn’t improve upon any of the circumstances or motivations leading to someone committing a crime, thereby limiting it to a response only after it happens. Criminals don’t commit crimes simply because they were “born that way”. They do it because their life experiences led them to either a) believing they had to commit the crime to improve their situation, b) believing it’s justifiable in their own warped sense of right and wrong, or c) severe mental illness. There’s nothing in those causes that can’t be accounted for or treated beforehand to prevent the act from occurring at all. All jail time is doing is putting them in a pressure cooker that will inevitably lead to the people sentenced being even further handicapped in their ability to function in society.

Mind you I’m not against separating criminals from society for an appropriate amount of time entirely. It’s just that if the primary motivation with their sentence is punishment, you shouldn’t expect anything greater than a neutral outcome.

We should bring back throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at people like this. Maybe the pillory too while we’re at it.

Jail isn’t what’s doing that, revoking his license does. The jail time is just an added slap on the wrist to make the people close to Perry feel better (which is absurd considering a guy literally died, retribution doesn’t change that.) It doesn’t actually solve anything.

Plants need direct light to grow… most need full sun.

The humble Monotropa uniflora:

You got me, I’m actually Walt Disney’s frozen head on a burner account

Let them eat beans on toast

I mean in theory there could be (not saying there will be) and let’s not forget that until around WWII the Republican party was considered the “progressive” one. I think it’s more about them perpetuating the idea of having principles as opposed to them actually having the potential for any. They are eternal bullshit artists after all, they can just say they have the page without showing how empty the other side is.

It’s baffling how it’s been over twenty years at this point and still essentially no one with influence has ever heard of the Streisand effect before. Like they’re obviously delusional, but it’s like their brains are sucked into vacuums.

This made sense until the insinuation that intelligence and autism are mutually exclusive

That’s the thing though. The US is already a highly fascistic state and has been for more or less over a century. If we go over the standard criteria, there’s relatively centralized autocracy with the President, militarism which has pervaded American culture and politics for essentially its entire existence (especially apparent in globalized media such as Hollywood productions), suppression of opposition through shunning of any political ideologies left of the centre (clear in tactics seen throughout the red scare), belief in a natural social order with the working, middle, and upper classes, along with “undesirables” like the homeless and other marginalized communities, alignment of the economy with the state through the military-industrial complex, and explicit conditioning of individual identity to be aligned with the national one through the pledge of allegiance and US-centrism.

The only thing that’s up in the air is the President’s status as a dictator, but I would argue that’s simply a result of the US government’s focus heretofore on soft power, i.e. focusing on diplomacy and relatively peaceful occupation as opposed to force or violence. The ability of the President to have such drastic effects on the economy and current policy is already tipping the scales against the non-dictatorship argument in any case.

I’m not necessarily trying to make a call to action, that would be narrow-minded. I’m simply pointing out that real change on a societal level doesn’t truly happen until people realize things are getting desperate, and at that point the already long-standing problems were made a whole lot worse by believing they could be managed with less overt means.

This should be in a Mad Libs at this point

“If you ____ I have ____ to sell you”

The problem is that US politicians are not acting with voter’s futures in mind, and the “progressive” ones & their constituents seem to believe that the only way things will get better is if they continue to bend the knee and cater to a constantly devolving status quo. Progress doesn’t happen when you reduce your goals, and change doesn’t happen without force. If reality doesn’t account for you, you need to make it so. I suppose it’s just a matter of it needing to get so bad that you realize the future was never promised to anyone to begin with.

And yet the illegal alcohol market boomed and it gave massive rise to organized crime and government corruption to allow it. It doesn’t “work” in any practical sense, it just concentrates the problem and makes it even harder to control.

They probably think the US prohibition didn’t work because they just didn’t try hard enough

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Hi, I’m Trevor Moore. Did you know that it’s illegal to say “I want to kill the President of the United States of America”?

Completely missed my point. There’s nothing beneficial about a retributive standpoint based on distrusting an entire identity group because of statistical averages. Cathartic I’m sure (on a purely non-thinking and surface level), but then you’re no better than the people you’re criticizing in that regard. It’s entirely emotional, quite like the people in charge of the US right now.