OK, no worries, you are not obligated to address anything I said and simply repeat yourself. I guess I'm just over here coping now (though I'm not even certain I know what you mean). Hopefully the new world will actually be born (as your tagline seems to indicate you want), but if we continue to give away our sovereignty to other people, I'm doubtful your aspirations will be realized. Back to my coping now.

Please by all means, enlighten me and the rest of humanity.

Until then, I'll leave you with the same response I gave HODL:

You are free to read whatever you like my friend. Anyone who has been paying attention to the scamdemic for the past 4 years understands the varying perspectives of scumbags attempting to rule our lives. You took simple "bait" (it's OK, most do), defended your political saviors by shitting on a regular person who probably has a lot more in common with you than JD Vance, and here we are. You are better than that. You don't have to bow before political "authority" (or any authority for that matter) to establish your human sovereignty. Another man is not your savior. Authority is not real. Be the best person you can be on YOUR terms instead of contributing to our continued enslavement. Seems that plenty of people showed up here to stake some freedom in btc. The price signal shot up and the values underpinning this revolutionary tech has resulted in people searching for the barn doors, trying to get back in. You are better than that.

Peace be in Jesus (I acknowledge your Christianity and respect that)

You are free to read whatever you like my friend. Anyone who has been paying attention to the scamdemic for the past 4 years understands the varying perspectives of scumbags attempting to rule our lives. You took simple "bait" (it's OK, most do), defended your political saviors by shitting on a regular person who probably has a lot more in common with you than JD Vance, and here we are. You are better than that. You don't have to bow before political "authority" (or any authority for that matter) to establish your human sovereignty. Another man is not your savior. Authority is not real. Be the best person you can be on YOUR terms instead of contributing to our continued enslavement. Seems that plenty of people showed up here to stake some freedom in btc. The price signal shot up and the values underpinning this revolutionary tech has resulted in people searching for the barn doors, trying to get back in. You are better than that.

Hmm, I guess I'll just post the same reply to you as I did to the other guy...

Ad hominem is not a good path to intelligent discussion.

There's a meta argument being made in my post. You will have to sit with it a while before it makes sense though. Long time preference is a good thing. Try processing the tension between Joy's post and Vance's post - disengenuous people abound. Such is our murky, shit-stained modern "communication" happening in click-bites while actual things that matter are swept under the rug.

YOUR betters (the authorities you choose to place above you) love you and will act on your behalf not the corporations that are paying them to play.

Now back to eating my bowl of staples whilst drooling incessantly and watching Israel's holocaust on the Palestinian people -something actually supported by both facets of the 2 party political illusion.

Ad hominem is not a good path to intelligent discussion.

There's a meta argument being made in my post. You will have to sit with it a while before it makes sense though. Long time preference is a good thing. Try processing the tension between Joy's post and Vance's post - disengenuous people abound. Such is our murky, shit-stained modern "communication" happening in click-bites while actual things that matter are swept under the rug.

YOUR betters (the authorities you choose to place above you) love you and will act on your behalf not the corporations that are paying them to play.

Now back to eating my bowl of staples whilst drooling incessantly and watching Israel's holocaust on the Palestinian people -something actually supported by both facets of the 2 party political illusion.

People should stop putting themselves below "authorities". But it seems they won't, all we'll keep playing these stupid games and winning these stupid prizes.

Vinny, it is great to see/hear you!

To your first question, I would have to say no, because a threat of violence (even if backed with a promise) is still just words. One step further, if that threat was then followed by the person punching you in the face, I do not think it is moral to kill (disproportionate reponse...one can only morally kill another human if the person is in danger of being killed himself). If a gun is being drawn, now the situation has shifted to life-threatening and one has a right to protect life (so admitedly, we get into difficult territory delineated exactly where the threat against life precisely occurs, I think this area is ripe for debate and certainly different people perceive threats in varying degrees).

To your second question, essentially my answer above applies although now, with multiple people acting with varying threat perceptions the entire situation has become more difficult to summarize (if that makes sense?)

In the rape example, if the person is actually doing the act, witnesses to the act can morally take increasingly aggressive action toward the perpetrator to the point at which the violation ends. Again, the verbiage "raping until death" consitutes a threat, and is not the same as the act of killing, therefore it is not moral to automatically kill a human in the process of raping (even though it may feel like the "right" thing (emotionally) to do). The rapist should be stopped and penalized proportionately (certainly another area of discussion).

All of the above is not to be lenient on violence shitbags that want to harm innocent people. These individuals should face penalty proportionate to their crimes, but I do not think pre-meditated murder by uneffected agents acting on behalf of the state is proportionate. Additionally, given our highly flawed/corrupt legal and political systems, we need to be careful not to use the mechanism of state-sanctioned violence to kill innocents that manage to get caught-up in the someone elses' crime drama. I always come back to the thought, "What is the maximum number of innocent lives lost (to be clear - false conviction ending in death penalty) I am willing to accept before deciding that the death penalty is not a moral choice of state-sanctioned penalty?" I always land on 0 for this question.

I disagree. Murder certainly has a definition. Sentencing another person to die in a premeditated fashion (from the comfort of a courtroom) who poses no threat to you is unjust. It is unjust because the people making the decision are separated from the basic facts of what happened by many layers (lawyers' financial motivations, time, memory, corruption, religious biases, etc) that play out in a courtroom drama. Far too often (and there is a ton of data on this) people are wrongly convicted and either serve sentences or are murdered by the state for crimes they are not guilty of committing.

A group of individuals sitting in a court room completely uneffected by the actions of the human they are sentencing to death are not under threat by that person. They are not protecting themselves. They are bureaucratically murdering another human that has not transgressed against them.

It is moral for a human to kill another human if that human is protecting his/her life or someone elses' life against direct transgression. Likewise, it is moral for a group of people to kill in the same manner.

This is what a highly evolved, sensitive, emotionally-stable, confident and powerful human being sounds like.

If it is immoral/illegal for an individual to commit murder then it is only logically consistent for it to be immoral/illegal for a group of individuals to commit murder (sentence another person to death that has not transgressed directly against them). Groups of individuals do not possess magical powers that provide them with special moral privileges that individuals don't possess.

This is a statement of opinion, not proof that the death penalty is efficacious in any way.

The jury sentencing a person to death is a specific deterence to that individual because that person is dead and unable to commit murder. People in favor of the dealth penalty usually argue that the death penalty is so harsh that is deters OTHER people from committing murder because those potential murderers don't want to die themselves. If one trys to argue for deterence against people other than the person being murdered by the state, then one would need to provide statistics that can prove humans have avoided committing capital crimes so as to prevent themselves from being murdered by the state.

A jury is a group of individuals sanctioned by the state to legally commit murder. If murder by individuals is immoral/illegal, then, by logic alone (unless you can prove those jury members possess some magical powers that an individual doesn't possess) murder by a group of individuals is also immoral/illegal regardless if it is sanctioned by the state or colluded to by a group of individuals.

Again, the original post was changing the semantics of an "evil" to fit political needs. Here, murder is being linguistically transmutted into "protection" or "justice" or "deterence" or any other number of rationalizations produced.

If it is immoral/illegal/what have you for an individual to commit murder, how is it moral/legal/what have you for a group of people to commit murder. Logically inconsistent.

I would require proof that the death penalty "works" before accepting your argument.

Anyhow, this post was about how Democrats (and Republicans) both relabel certain "evils" (in this case murder) to justify carrying them out (protect good people from bad people, or, as you say, deter other bad people from commiting murder).

sustainable

Yes, I think this makes sense. The Republicans do the same. Initiated war is defense (Bush Doctrine preemptive war concept), death penalty is protection from bad people, etc....

oh shit, all of those sound like pretty good options.

Oh yes, THIS!!!! This is not expressed nearly often enough. And, when it is, so few seem to actually understand this. Everyone should feel a moral obligation to study authority, to really understand what authority is at a basic human level, then ponder every power structure you can think of.