[ExI] More Sand; Better Sand, was Re: free-will, determinism, crime and punishment.

[Michael M. Butler]

I broke my word. I said I wan't going to post on this thread and I've
been popping off left and right. Typical after so much silence for so
long. :)

More thoughts about my current hobbyhorse, taken from some recent
offlist email and lightly amended...

==

There is no question that the "Justice System" is often not about
justice. Legitimized revenge is only part of its problem
//and in my view not the major problem//.
Another part of it is that everybody lies, as the lead character of the TV show
_House_ likes to say. And there is truth to the "Blue Gang" notion, that
cops are or tend to become just the sanctioned wolf pack. All those
tendencies are present.

But not equally, and not all the time -- and we gotta have _some_ system. :)

...snippage...

Thing is, maybe the guy really was just a Salvadoran illegale
political-refugee trying to make his way in the world, and getting
fucked up and talking trash on the street corner while strapped with
his gats and holding drugs was the only way he could feel like a man.
And maybe the thought of going down in front of his friends terrified
him. Maybe he was situationally on the edge of psychosis from speed
use and sleep deprivation, and drunk took the rest of his judgment
away. Maybe he didn't want to do hard time and become someone's bitch
in the joint. Maybe he was a scared little boy inside who saw
"Salvadoran death squad" when he looked at a uniformed policeman
checking his papers.

I can conceive of any of that. I can pity such a poor creature.

Doesn't matter. He didn't stand up like a member of _my_ civilization.
He didn't even have a single spasm of fear and pop one or two caps
into Patrolman Dan and run off. He stood over the guy and unloaded
like some character in a movie or the GTA video game. For something
like half a minute. Long enough to stop sooner. But he didn't. Or "couldn't."
And then he tried to get away with it. And he botched that. Gangsta
just can't get a break.

So, edit him out of the sim. (If Nick Bostrom is right and that's what
this probably is :) )

I hope his defense attorney has a good shrink or confessor. I'd need
counseling if I really put my heart into a leniency plea that way.

Irving "Gotti" Ramirez has (by California averages) at least ten years,
and maybe 30, to think about things. I get no satisfaction out of the
torment and deprivation he will experience sitting on Death Row. But
he did NOT have to do what he did. He could have been a real man in
any number of ways that did not involve executing another human being
during what was basically a freaking _traffic stop_.

//i.e., an encounter with a peace officer over an infraction, not even
rising to the level of a misdemeanor. //

He broke parole at least three ways, and my mind boggles at someone
implicitly saying that his precise molecular makeup constrained him to
carry (say) two guns and not one or three, and dump seven rounds into
the cop and not fewer. Ludicrous even if true. Had he not been
carrying, he would have had to listen to a lecture from his parole
officer. If he was associating with others with criminal records there
on that street, maybe... never mind.

I say he had choice, and it is not an intellectual exercise for me
even if all it does is keep the ship of Western Civilization from
springing another leak by reminding other potential actors-out that
"drunk ain't a good excuse for murder." The contrary _is_ what the
lighter life sentence would have conveyed.

//Cop dies, I live; what's not to like about that?//

If Western Civ is built on sand, and the sand is the myth of free will, fine!

BRING MORE SAND! _BETTER_ SAND! :)