[ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato)

[Mirco Romanato]

Il 13/04/2014 21:47, Tara Maya ha scritto:

> Even Foucault, postmodernist poster boy, noted quite frankly in his
> book Discipline and Punish that the rise of the modern prison came
> because ordinary people could no longer stand to watch public
> torture. Foucault didn't resort to statistics or even logic, so to
> him the fact that the ideal form of justice changed from torture
> for days as a festival of public ridicule to trying to awaken the
> inner conscience of criminals was a terrible step towards
> totalitarianism. His argument (it's quite possible I've
> misunderstood, since he strove at all costs to avoid clarity of
> argument) was that the modern system wanted to change your thinking
> not just your behavior, so it was worse, even if you were
> tortured.

My opinion about jail is simply they substituted a fast and direct
death sentence with a slow and indirect death sentence.

The point of killing killers or highwaymen or other types of violent
behavior like rape (real rape) was to make them disgenic. No need for
the authorities to understand the real effect, just the effect must be
there.

Substituting a jail term to dead or torture (and making jail decent
places), the authorities reduced the incentives to resist arrest and
the reasons to help some of these individuals.
But, from an natural selection point of view, an individual jailed for
a substantial time (one year or more) have a substantial handicap
compared to individuals not jailed in finding a wife and reproduce.
And if already married with children, his family will suffer for the
consequences of lack of financial support. And this give his children
a comparative handicap too. Or would cause the wife to cuckold him
with an available and supportive man. More in a period of time when
people lives were much shorter than now.

Jails continued to select out of the gene pool individuals lacking
enough self restrain and empathy or not intelligent enough to cover
their tracks.

In fact, jail could be a more efficient selector than the death
penalty or torture.

Mirco