ironic_clarity wrote: Thu Oct 02, 2025 5:47 am
i'm a leftist, against the death penalty, and against prisons. i believe crime can be heavily mitigated as a social problem with social safety nets designed to make living easier for people. prisons are by and large a form of retributive justice. in a just world, such a thing would not need to exist. rehabilitation is not the goal of prisons, punishment is the goal. in the cases of people who do not want help, something does have to be done, but it doesn't have to be a concrete chamber with iron bars. death penalty and decade-long imprisonment does not prevent crime. social support prevents crime.
doesn't matter what the crime is, rehabilitation is possible without prison cells.
pro-para leftists exist, and i'm far from the only one. also, i'm not interested in debating what a post-prison society would look like (it's a waste of time for me to do so), i just wanted to refute the idea that someone could actually have the views i do.
I think you're missing the point. We aren't criticizing the concept of prison abolitionism, we're criticizing the vast majority of people who claim to have that view yet immediately abandon it as soon as it comes to pedophilia.
i understood that. i'm citing myself as a counterexample: i have the view and do not abandon it for anything. punitive justice is universally never acceptable.
John_Doe wrote: Thu Oct 02, 2025 7:38 pm
I've never understood how some Christians will downplay the idea of loving your enemy, loving thy neighbor, charity, forgiveness, mercy, etc. If you knew nothing about Christianity and heard some Christians talk you would never in a million years make the connection between the religion they're talking about and much of what Jesus said (I'm not explaining myself well but it's felt surreal to me at times when someone would bring this up and the response would be something like, "actually, it's a common myth that Jesus was all about love and compassion etc. etc." No, it isn't. It's true that Christianity can't be boiled down to 'love others' alone, there is the concept of sin and Jesus/God is judgmental toward it, but Christians are supposed to have a 'love the sinner, hate the sin' attitude and leave rightful punishment up to God, who still loves and cares for the people he punishes (or allows to be sent to hell, if you want to frame that as just a consequence of separation from God that they brought on to themselves) because the idea is that justice demands it, but the whole revolution that came with the New Testament seems to imply that he doesn't hate those people, it seems more so that duty calls him to punish them). We will always rationalize away our inconsistencies because we're emotional creatures, so I think that's true for every ideological group.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. These kinds of contradictions aren't exclusive to the left; it's something that happens in almost all, if not all, ideologies.
