Voluntary euthanasia for lifers?

[Rodion Romanovich]

I'd not torture someone for pleasure. In fact I'd not bother at all in the "use a drill on his kneecaps" sense. It is not reliable. You'll get a lot of information as most people will say anything when an expert gets to work. Is it any use? Some of it probably is - but what bits? And since you're probably going for nuance the point is lost.

I'm not talking about information-mining either. There, it has already been repeatedly proven that torture is useless compared to all alternatives.

My take would be that although dictatorship do occur, they usually do not occur due to cutting budgets to save criminals for suicide. In fact I can't think of one. So on that score I feel we are safe.

The gist of admittedly a poorly focused post is that it is really IMO a non issue. Sure, save some money, use the pieces when they die; that people can focus on this when there are actions in the world which are definitely illegal, probably war crimes and close to genocide puzzles me. Perhaps it is because they are so obviously guilty we can't be bother to talk about it here.

Handicapped people also cost money to feed even though they don't help society. With your logic it would be acceptable to save money by cutting their funds too. The point is that it doesn't cost much to feed the handicapped and the convicts, it's not a high priority place to save money. I have also previously on many occasions described why modern societies make it increasingly difficult to be certain about who was guilty. There are basically too many people to choose from, too many people look alike, criminals know from movies etc. how to hide their traces and with the DNA technique it's easier than ever to plant DNA that will make someone else look guilty. As for the core question: if one or two criminals commit suicide in a cell, it's not likely to be a case of the government making them disappear. In such a case, there's very little money you could save from letting them kill themselves. However if there are many people committing suicide, it's very likely that it isn't really suicide but something else. Even if the worst case isn't the truth, people outside prisons should be saved the constant deep fear of not being sure what their governments are doing, whether it's necessary to revolt or not. Situations like that make ordinary people go mad, and crime increases as an indirect result. Point in case: the most surveillance heavy places are the places where most crimes are committed - subways etc. Countries with increased surveillance can show statistics of improved number of criminals captured, but the tiny point that crime has also increased is not often mentioned. And a final remark: most severe crimes like rape and murder are crimes of passion, jealousy or similar from your nearest friends, family or relatives. Only a very small minority of such crimes are carried out by unknown people and are of bestialic character. We're talking about some 10 cases a year per larger nation.

But there is precious little action going on elsewhere. No one cares. Countries are killing thousands of people and we don't bat an eyelid. We in many cases sell them "integrated systems" - arms sales has such a nasty ring to it...

Sure, dictatorship abroad is a big problem, but we aren't exactly helping them to defeat it. We sell arms to the dictators that they can use to destroy rebellions, and all educated people then flee from these countries, leaving noone to do the rebellion work. Then fifty years later we come and try to play heroes, deciding we could get a share of their oil in return for saving them from what we took part in creating and gave logistical support to.

There's nothing a maddened dictator drunk with power and privilege can do that can't be replicated by a room full of people with invested interested and private agendas.

Please explain what you mean by this? As far as I know, there are few ways as effective of killing millions than as a dictator (or also democratically elected leader) to say "I hereby declare war on blah". He only needs mention 6 words to have millions of people die in a year or two, a complex hierarchy below him carrying out all the work for him. If you aren't a leader of a nation you can't kill that quickly. The most extreme know cases of murder not carried out by a state would be some massmurderer (a doctor) in the USA who killed around 200 people over his entire career as doctor, or terrorist attacks killing over 1,000 people. I don't have the exact figures but I don't think any country on average suffers from more than some 200 people bestially murdered by unknowns or killed by terrorists per year. So as we can see even in real horrible anarchistic scenarios no non-state sanctioned killing seems to be able to get anywhere near as bad as state sanctioned killing.

My take would be that although dictatorship do occur, they usually do not occur due to cutting budgets to save criminals for suicide. In fact I can't think of one. So on that score I feel we are safe.

Naturally, I'd like to emphasize that you need an entire package of safety measures to prevent dictatorship or constitutional crisis democracy to develop from a democratic system. Alone, each of the points in such a program look unimportant. I compare the package of safety against dictatorship with the package of things we would do to solve other problems if we would completely ignore any risks of dictatorship. The comparison still shows that the damage caused by sacrificing a few things we would like in order to counter the risks of dictatorship is weighed up by the extreme killing speed efficiency of dictatorship or a democracy that has ended up in a constitutional crisis situation.