Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 02:18:18 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Milo Hyson <milo@cyberlifelabs.com> Cc: Paul Robinson <paul@akita.co.uk>, Bill Moran <wmoran@iowna.com>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Helping victims of terror Message-ID: <3BA1CB5A.91DDCED3@mindspring.com> References: <20010912215547.98067.qmail@web20806.mail.yahoo.com> <20010913102807.A369@jake.akitanet.co.uk> <3BA0D5EB.6C392A5@mindspring.com> <200109132001.tq2i78.re7.37kbi16@payne.mail.mindspring.net>
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Milo Hyson wrote: > I would have to agree here. Most Americans don't really care about the other > side of things. The last person anybody ever blames is themselves. It's > always somebody else's fault. If you stub your toe on a table leg, you get > angry and yell at the desk. "Ow! God damnit, piece of shit." You never think > to yourself, "We'll that was stupid of me. I should have been more careful > where I was walking." What's the "other side" of murdering 50,000 civilians in New York? You realize that that's around the death toll of the entire Vietnam war, right? I'm all for understanding, but not to the point of the Sabine Women... In general, retribution and revenge are not the same thing; when we punish a criminal, it is not in order to exact revenge, it's as an object lesson to other potential criminals in the larger society. Today, it's common to mistake this punishment for an attempt to reform the criminal, but nothing could be further from the truth: if it were true, and it were a success strategy, the recidivism rate would be lower than the rate of initial commission of crimes. I'm open to suggestions as to how we should go about providing the best possible object lesson for the larger society, without seeming to be attempting to exact revenge, assuming we ever identify an organization or government behind the crime. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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