There are different versions of this story floating around. Apparently the sentence was not carried out. Personally I don't find such a punishment particularly outrageous given the crime.
If there is a circumstance in which it is permissible to blind somebody on purpose, this is that circumstance.
2: I'd say that what you said is true, but it's also true that there is no such circumstance.
it's also true that there is no such circumstance.
Probably, but this is way down on my list of causes I intend to do anything to support.
I was thinking about our changing understanding of "cruel and unusual punishment" through history, but on the other hand this probably would have been seen as such even in 1789.
"Cruel and unusual" is one of the many phrases which illustrate that adding more words into a sentence doesn't help make a point more strongly. Unless they really were fine with cruel, common punishment.
Unlike "cease and desist," which is only stupid.
That's true - the phrase sort of presupposes that no cruel punishment is usual.
I saw the headline about the guy getting blinded and was appalled, but now that I actually read an article about it, I want the guy to be thrown into a thresher. What a fucker.
Or at least that no cruel punishment that is usual is unacceptable, I guess.
9: That would be unusual. People use combines now.
7: "Cease and desist" is a legal doublet.
A legal singlet is inappropriate for court room attire in every jurisdiction, but most especially in Iran.
aside from the awfulness of the main story,
"each man is worth two women" under Iranian law.
and
Iran... last year executed more people than any other country apart from China
made me sad and anxious as well.
3
I'd say that what you said is true, but it's also true that there is no such circumstance.
So what would be worse, the guy gets blinded or he goes free?
re: 16
False dichotomies, we haz 'em.
Guys always think they can tell just by looking, but that's just not true.
17: Exactly. Why not just put him to death? Keeping a blind guy around until his natural death imposes a burden on taxpayers.
19: Given what he did to that woman, I wouldn't go around asking that kind of a rhetorical question.
If there is a circumstance in which it is permissible to blind somebody on purpose, this is that circumstance.
Probably, but this is way down on my list of causes I intend to do anything to support.
I take it you would only be pro forma opposed to a massive expansion of the death penalty in the US? I don't have any objection to the woman's desire to to this. If I or someone close to me were the victim of murder or a crime like this one, I hope I'd not support that type of retribution, but I'm far from certain. I am sure that I'd have some pretty gruesome revenge fantasies. However, that does not make it ok for the state to indulge them.
I take it you would only be pro forma opposed to a massive expansion of the death penalty in the US?
This bothers me more than most murders. It was his way of saying, "I like you, thus I own you."
My reaction to this is incredibly mixed and fretful, actually.
Or at least that no cruel punishment that is usual is unacceptable, I guess.
That's pretty much Scalia's position isn't it? And effectively the position taken by the more liberal judges who looked to foreign law to argue that executing minors was unusual, and hence unconstitutional.
Scalia should be offered a diplomatic post. Without the death penalty, we share little common ground with the governments of China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen.
12: It's interesting that legal doublets are often explained as repeating the same meaning in Anglo-Saxon- and French-derived words, but while they tend to look like that, on examination many of Wikipedia's examples, possibly a majority - aid, abet, cease, desist, faith, credit, due, payable, plus cruel and unusual - are actually both from French. It makes me think it's more a stylistic choice than courtroom bilingualism.
26: Like the flight attendants when they say things like "full upright and locked position."
Anyone remember the time when Eugene Volokh was slammed in the liberal blogosphere for his support for the slow strangulation of a murderer in Iran? I think that he deserved the criticism and I don't see the difference here. Why is support for a cruel form of execution for a guy who tortured and raped a kid to death bad, but support for the blinding of a man who crippled a woman who he was obsessed with and who rejected him fine? The death penalty, and especially torture are not wrong because some of its victims are innocent, they're wrong full stop. I'm pretty sure that many of the people who are getting executed in the US are guilty of horrible crimes; I have no doubt in my mind that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a mass murdering radical fundamentalist monster, but that doesn't mean I support torturing him.
Anyone remember the time when Eugene Volokh Ogged was slammed in the liberal blogosphere here for his support for the slow strangulation of a murderer in Iran?
28: I actually don't think the problem is that some guy who tortured and raped a kid was strangled (assuming they had the right guy and a few other caveats). The problem is that those kinds of cases are used to justify the death penalty being used for other reasons and by a very imperfect system causing a whole host of problems even when it isn't used. Somebody like that not being executed is a price I'm willing to pay for a criminal justice system that is marginally less likely to kill somebody innocent or railroad somebody.
Somebody like that not being executed is a price I'm willing to pay for a criminal justice system that is marginally less likely to kill somebody innocent or railroad somebody doesn't kill anybody.
Corrected to own pipe-dream specifications.
28
Anyone remember the time when Eugene Volokh was slammed in the liberal blogosphere for his support for the slow strangulation of a murderer in Iran? I think that he deserved the criticism and I don't see the difference here. ...
According to the article the guy was to be rendered unconscious before being blinded so the sentence is not gratuitously cruel. Anyway I doubt there is much inconsistency, the liberal bleeding hearts generally don't like any form of punishment.
26: Like the flight attendants when they say things like "full upright and locked position."
It made me happy to once hear one say "fully upright and locked position." Finally, it made sense!
28: Just to get it out of the way, let it be noted that no one here has yet opined that the blinding is fine. At issue, I think, is that (some of) our moral intuitions lean, perhaps strongly, toward the blinding being just, and it's difficult to reconcile that with our considered view that such a policy should not be institutionalized by the state (much as you said in 21). Why do we hold that considered view?
Re cruel and unusual: not that I particularly want to put myself in the position of having to make and then defend a particular interpretation of the US constitution, but couldn't the 'and' be taken as an inclusive 'or', and the 'unusual' be taken to prohibit not just cruel but also random punishments, as dreamed up by the more creative members of the judiciary? Being made to walk around town wearing the knickers you stole from T J Maxx on your head, etc.
28
Just to get it out of the way, let it be noted that no one here has yet opined that the blinding is fine. ...
I came pretty close but perhaps I don't count.
If it were up to me the guy would be executed in some reasonably humane way but making allowances for cultural differences I don't have a problem with Iran blinding him instead.
28 38
I suppose I should add I do have a problem with allowing the victim (or the victim's family) administer the punishment which I think is a bad idea (particularly in the Volokh slow torture scenario) for a number of reasons.
Let us clarify the logic of this whole method of compensation--it is weird enough. The equivalency is given in this way: instead of an advantage making up directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation--the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in "de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire" [doing wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the "punishment" of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. Finally he himself for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone "below him," as someone he is entitled to mistreat--or at least, in the event that the real force of punishment, of inflicting punishment, has already been transferred to the "authorities," the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consist of a permission for and right to cruelty.
Let me pose the question once more: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for "debts"? To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury and for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure--making someone suffer--a real celebration, something that, as I've said, was valued all the more, the greater the difference between him and the rank and social position of the creditor. I have been speculating here, for it's difficult to see such subterranean things
from the surface, quite apart from the fact that it's an embarrassing subject.
Anyone who crudely throws into the middle of all this the idea of "revenge" has merely buried and dimmed his insights rather than illuminated them (revenge itself takes us back to the very same problem "How can making someone suffer give us a feeling of satisfaction?"). It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the hypocrisy of tame house pets (I mean modern man, I mean us) resist a really powerful understanding of just how much cruelty contributes to the great celebratory joy of primitive humanity, as an ingredient mixed into almost all their enjoyments and, from another perspective, how naïve and innocent their need for cruelty appears, how they basically accept "disinterested malice" (or to use Spinoza's words, the sympathia malevolens [malevolent sympathy]) as a normal human characteristic, and hence as something to which their conscience says a heartfelt Yes!
A more deeply penetrating eye might still notice, even today, enough of this most ancient and most basic celebratory human joy. In Beyond Good and Evil, p. 117 ff. (even earlier in Daybreak, p. 17, 68, 102), I pointed a cautious finger at the constantly growing spiritualization and "deification" of cruelty, which runs through the entire history of higher culture (and, in a significant sense, even constitutes that culture). In any case, it's not so long ago that people wouldn't think of an aristocratic wedding and folk festival in a grandest style without executions, tortures, or something like an auto-da-fé [burning at the stake], and similarly no noble household lacked creatures on whom people could vent their malice and cruel taunts without a second thought (remember Don Quixote at the court of the duchess. Today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on the tongue--it's almost an ordeal. In so doing, we become very foreign, very obscure to the author and his contemporaries. They read it with a fully clear conscience as the most cheerful of books. They almost died laughing at it).
Watching suffering is good for people, making someone suffer is even better--that is a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle, which, by the way, even the apes might agree with. For people say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great many human actions and, as it were, "act them out." Without cruelty there is no celebration: that's what the oldest and longest era of human history teaches us--and with punishment, too, there is so much celebration!--
War is the health of the state.
The state is that which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence
...
The Law is the spiritualization of cruelty.
28: This was an actual issue we discussed in the liberal blogosphere? Christ we must have had a lot of free time on our hands in those days.
42: I remember subsequent references to Ogged's position on the matter, anyway, but I wasn't around here, or the liberal blogosphere, at the time. It may have been in the aftermath of debates over the advent of the Iraq war, when the liberalish blogosphere was tearing itself apart in hawkish vs. non-hawkish directions.
"Cease", meaning stop doing the bad thing. Then, once you have ceased, "desist" from starting it up again. Perfectly clear.
According to the internet, most definitions of desist contain "cease".
I'm with Charlie in 37 on "cruel and unusual": "unusual" essentially modifies "cruel."
Some might think, for example, that life imprisonment is cruel. Yet we say it is not, for certain crimes, so we need to say "unusually cruel." "Unusual" by itself is obviously not enough, and "cruel" by itself doesn't seem to be enough to rule out what we mean. This is not to say that "unusually cruel" results in a definitive list; but both words are needed to convey the sense.
He was also required to pay compensation to the victim. Bahrami refused to accept the "blood money" and told the court
Compensation should be large enough to hire a hitman and pay the fine for hiring a hitman, according to the pure theory of restitution.
Re doubles, the may be better explicated the Hagy way:
http://thisisindexed.com/2011/04/tinkering-with-ingredients/
Well, there are two things here, the acid, and that the victim was given permission to deliver it.
I can the "state" (us) gaining social control by not allowing the families to do the lethal injections, but I can't quite see yet what we the people and individuals get from outsourcing our cruelty to the state.
It may be something about a higher purpose, an imagined purity that allows us the delusion of not being barbarians and torturers. But why would we want this?
What happened? The Athenians fucking got off on Milos.
Also, on legal doublets: I reckon that if some or all of these are in fact belt and braces translations where the original term is included alongside the translated term, then the inclusive 'or' interpretation of the 'and' in 'x and y' constructions gets traction.
I'm kind of falling in love with James Harden. Query: is he a hipster? Defend your answer.
I'm kind of falling in love with James Harden. Query: is he a hipster? Defend your answer.
Rendered as 'cruel or unusual' in the Articles of Compact for the Original States, as recorded in the Journals of the Continental Congress (via). There are other near-contemporary uses of the same phrase. Your originalist might get out of bed for some of it, perhaps.
The Boston Review piece is good - and a long read. It looks as though 'cruel and unusual' tends to get interpreted as per the temperament of the interpreter. If the supreme justice is up for multiple electrocutions, well, have at 'em.
it's difficult to reconcile that with our considered view that such a policy should not be institutionalized by the state (much as you said in 21). Why do we hold that considered view?
Because innocent people get found guilty in every justice system created by humans, including ours and the Iranian one. At least, that's why I'm against corporal punishment, full stop.
No more masturbating to Dominique Strauss-Kahn's political career.
55: That's the first, best answer, certainly.
Teraz said in 28, though, that The death penalty, and especially torture are not wrong because some of its victims are innocent, they're wrong full stop. LB up in 3 came to a similar conclusion.
56: I'm increasingly convinced that, at some point in the past, Satan offered Sarkozy everything he desires on earth in exchange for his mortal soul, and that Sarko took the deal.
It's all a conspiracy say the... what should we call them, we've got truthers, birthers, deathers?
My favorites are that it was a 'trap' they lured him into a sexual assault (ex minister Christine Boutin) or that it was a right wing conspiracy against the IMF. (according to PS politician Michèle Sabban).
34: Anyway I doubt there is much inconsistency, people who use the term"the liberal bleeding" hearts generally don't like any form of punishment for wealthy white men.
So, if someone lost their sight due to complications of diabetes that they were unable to have treated because they'd been laid off from their job as a public school teacher, and couldn't afford health insurance, would it be okay if we rendered you unconscious and blinded you, James?
60
Actually I have complained on this very blog about the failure of the Obama adminstration to prosecute crimes related to the recent financial crisis. Some of which were presumeably committed by wealthy white men.
And what responsibility you think I have for laid off school teachers escapes me. Generally I would prefer pay cuts to lay offs. But of course the teacher unions often would rather see 10% of their members laid off than all of their members take a 7% pay cut. So perhaps your ire should be directed at them.
It's possible that even in 1789 2011 a measurable minority of the political class would have recognised various punishments as cruel (e.g. flogging, hanging, which involved slow strangulation at that date) but both usual and perfectly defensible. But I suspect that the specification of "unusual" had more to do with ensuring judicial forms and making sure that penalties were applied in accordance with the law.
Because innocent people get found guilty in every justice system created by humans, including ours and the Iranian one. At least, that's why I'm against corporal punishment, full stop.
That's pretty much why I'm against the death penalty but I'm not convinced that imprisonment is necessarily a better alternative to corporal punishment.
63. I think Stanley meant "capital", or it doesn't really make sense. In principle I agree that there are arguments for corporal punishment over imprisonment in some cases, but the whens and hows are too difficult, so I doubt if it's feasible.
59: Fuckers, I guess?
Meanwhile, FFS. It looks like the whole Ile de France fede is going clinically insane. It's always been his power centre in the party, but this is ridiculous. Attali is a crook but I thought he was a clever crook, not someone who thinks the key to the whole story is that Sofitel is a French company.
Like the flight attendants when they say things like "full upright and locked position."
Just to be boring; this isn't a doublet because you fold the wee table back up against the seat in front, and then you operate the latch to keep it there. Two separate actions. So you could have it in the upright position without it being locked.
On the OP, I am unsurprised that Shearer is OK with the introduction of blinding as a legally-sanctioned retributive punishment, but I'm shocked and saddened by how many other people think the same. Moby, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Teraz gets to the heart of it:
"I am sure that I'd have some pretty gruesome revenge fantasies. However, that does not make it ok for the state to indulge them."
If you think that the function of the criminal justice system is to facilitate personal revenge - rather than restitution, deterrence, protection and rehabilitation - then you're several centuries behind the rest of us. In fact, you're several millennia behind the rest of us - see Oresteia for example.
re: doublets
I'm with dsquared above on cease and desist: 'Stop doing that shit, and then continue not doing that shit.'
and yes, re: 66.last and what teraz said.
There are lots of things that are perfectly understandable emotions to feel, and lots of actions that might even be appropriate in the heat of the moment, but where we wouldn't/shouldn't want the state to endorse them.
In principle I agree that there are arguments for corporal punishment over imprisonment in some cases
Well, it's awfully difficult to find anyone offering imprisonment for less than fifty quid in Soho.
I don't think one can rule out a frame-up completely; as Nate Silver pointed out in the context of Julian Assange, the simple fact that it would be very convenient for the kind of people who could get it done means that you have to have nonzero weight on it. But "you can't rule it out completely" isn't really what one might call evidence.
very convenient for the kind of people who could get it done
In the case of DSK, what is the intersection between those who would find it convenient and those who could get it done? Not sure this works for me.
In the case of DSK, what is the intersection between those who would find it convenient and those who could get it done?
(bzzz)
"ajay, LSE."
"The Elysee Palace."
"Correct. Or the Palais de l'Élysée, in French."
"I would also have accepted 'the DGSE', 'any number of parties to the current debt restructuring talks' or 'lots of people who bear grudges from the Elf-Aquitaine affair'".
Meh. Part of the work the conspiracy thinking is doing here is resisting the fact that rape is far too common.
And really, when (like Jacques Attali) you're arguing that he's been framed because Sofitel is a French company, it really is a pathological mode of thinking. Imagine he was staying at the Hilton. It's an American company and therefore presumptively more easily influenced by the enemies of France and French socialists in particular. Would Attali's position be any different? I doubt it.
Just to be boring; this isn't a doublet because you fold the wee table back up against the seat in front, and then you operate the latch to keep it there. Two separate actions. So you could have it in the upright position without it being locked.
This is why there is a locked position, of course - so it stays there rather than falling back down again at some inconvenient moment. Also, lots of aviation stuff has a similar phraseology - wheels need to be not just down but down and locked, etc.
To lock it, it haas to be fully upright. You can have it upright and not lock it, but locking requires upright.
Not sure what the point is 74 is. Having one thing be a causal prerequisite for another doesn't mean that they are interchangeable or that using the terms for both is redundant.
Morning churlishness. But, at the very least "fully" is redundant.
I found the greatest possible comment about DSK imaginable on that liberation site:
En fait dans ce genre d'hotel vu les tarifs pour les chambres, la femme de ménage est généralement comprise. Tout le monde le sait. Sauf que la femme de ménage de religion temoin de jehovah etait tres prude du coup, on l'avait jamais informé de la policy !
Am I reading that right? It says something like "For a hotel that expensive, the cleaning leading is included. Everyone knows that. But the nobody told the prudish Jehovah's Witness cleaning lady the policy. " Like in fancy French hotels, the cleaning lady doubles as a hooker. Really?
77: I suspect that might be an example of le sarcasme, Walt.
re: 78
The problem with the French is they don't have a word for sarcasm.
The woman who said that DSK tried to rape her when she was interviewing him several years ago, and who featured in that bizarre Guardian op-ed I linked to on Saturday night is DSK's daughter's best friend and the goddaughter of his previous wife. Her mother, a low level PS politician, convinced her not to file charges at the time.
77 Sarcasm. But there's no shortage of DSK defenders in that thread. If you approach it in a properly cynical/sarcastic mood yourself it is sort of amusing, otherwise it's just depressing.
That's funny. Apparently I find it easier to believe that the French routinely rape chambermaids in fancy hotels than that the French are capable of sarcasm.
Funny, I can't think of anything to say about the DSK thing that wouldn't feel like a rehash of the other week's rape threads.
82: I had never heard of the guy (or at least, the name hadn't stuck with me) before I watched Inside Job Saturday night, and I likely wouldn't have remembered it even then if they hadn't misspelled his first name during the first five minutes of the movie (Dominque, no more than two minutes after they spelled Volcker without an L). Then Sunday morning, this is all over the news.
Is there a known example of an actually existing false-rape setup designed to take down a powerful figure*? I remember during the Assange affair trying to figure out whether that was something that had ever actually happened, as opposed to a nice idea for movie.
*Garden variety false rape accusations, e.g. Kobe Bryant if you believe Kobe, don't count; it needs to actually be a setup orchestrated by a conspiracy of enemies.
Possibly the Anwar affairs in Malaysia.
82 There are major political implications. He looked like a slam dunk for the PS nomination and was heavily favored to win the general. I was in favor of him being the nominee, partly on electability grounds, partly because I saw him as more likely to be a good president than the other PS presidential wannabes.
84: Hard to tell, but I found the rape/attempted rape accusations against Bill Clinton in the '90s unconvincing because they were stale when they emerged, they stayed away from the criminal justice system where there would have been an evaluation of the evidence, and because of the looniness of the other accusations against him floating around (cocaine smuggling, mass murder). They could have been true, but my guess is that they were political smears.
87.cont: Although the Clinton allegations were sort of half-hearted as an attempt to bring him down, given that they weren't brought to the criminal justice system. A rape accusation handled in a way hoping to actually get the guy arrested/convicted that turned out to be a political hit job, I can't think of a US example (any example really, but I wouldn't be surprised to have missed one overseas.)
Certainly the Anwar accusations are fix-ups, but then the real attack line is the whole sodomy thing, right?
86: Does French Presidential politics work like American Presidential politics? The general election in the US is invariably a referendum on the general status of the country. If half the voters have a stomache ache that day because they ate too many eggs for breakfast, the challenger wins, otherwise the incumbent wins. This is how Bush could win in 2004 -- sure he lied us into a stupid war, but day-to-day life isn't actually shitty yet, so let's keep him. I'd like to think every country's politics work that way, because the alternative is too depressing. It does seem to loosely fit UK politics.
To the OP - I'm sympathetic to the idea of retributive justice on a gut level*, but getting the medical profession involved in deliberately causing injury seems like a very bad thing. Iranian physicians also have to perform amputations, if I recall correctly.
* But opposed in practice due to a host of issues, many of which have been raised upthread.
I see Banon is considering filing a complaint. Toast, I'd say.
I thought I was familiar with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but it turns out that was Dominique de Villepin.
87 gets it right as far as I'm concerned. For both this and the DSK accusation, no matter how true the accusations are, the "What does the accuser have to gain?" argument shouldn't be convincing. I don't know, maybe two million dollars in her bank account from the defendant's political enemies. I don't know what she has to gain. That's not a form of evidence.
That's an interesting reaction -- is what's going on that she decided not to/was talked out of pursuing the matter originally because of the political repercussions, but now that he's politically dead anyway, that's not a reason to keep quiet any longer?
94 to 92.
To 93, I would say that none of my heightened reasons for skepticism in the Clinton case apply here (the staleness of the allegations, the climate of crazy accusations against Clinton, the avoidance of the criminal justice system).
94:
Ms Banon's mother, Anne Mansouret, said the only reason she did not press charges at the time was because 'she was just starting out in journalism' and was afraid of being 'defined by the story' of being attacked by a senior politician.
Mrs Mansouret has now confirmed that her daughter is making a report to Paris police, and may hold a press conference about an ordeal which left her 'traumatised'.
Or, slightly different than what I was thinking -- I was thinking "Terrible as this guy is, I don't want to destroy his political career because I agree with him on the issues. But if his career's over not through my actions, then I want him prosecuted." This looks more like "I didn't want to deal with being the accuser who's destroying the career of a prominent politician. Now that the process of destruction of his career is already in motion, though, I can seek prosecution without the same level of stress."
Which actually makes more sense than what I'd been thinking originally.
According to the BBC, Banon has made the allegation before, so she's not just jumping on the bandwagon:
Ms Banon raised the allegation in a TV discussion programme in 2007, but Mr Strauss-Kahn's name was bleeped out during the broadcast.
98: Talk about a guy who ignores all the warning signs.
99: If by 'a guy' you include him and anyone else who was relying on his having a political future, that's about right.
I've seen a bunch of references to everyone having known he was sleazy, which seem way off to me. Sleazy is Eliot Spitzer, hiring well-paid escorts. Sleazy is cheating on your spouse. Straightforward promiscuity with happily consenting partners can get to sleazy if you do enough of it. Sexual assault, even short of rape, which the coverage so far implies that there were numerous accusations of against him before this, is in a different category than 'sleazy'.
Mum was a low-level PS politician, but *in the regional party organisation that's been his power base throughout his political career*. So a hardcore loyalist who could expect a junior minister slot, a sinecure on a commission, or a place on a national-level electoral slate when they - as expected - won the next general elections.
Sordid, sordid business.
Hmm, Schwarznegger makes a big Edwardsesque move on the consensual (let's hope at least) sex scandal sweepstakes.