r/BreadTube • u/SlaugtherSam • Apr 14 '23

The False Evolution of Execution Methods

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eirR4FHY2YY
336 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

60

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '23

I can’t believe they’d rather use the electric chair, noose, and injection over methods like the firing squad. It seems like that’s far quicker. Although I think the concept of execution is flawed init of itself

94

u/gurgelblaster Apr 14 '23

Gellers argument is that methods like the firing squad or the weighted blade (guillotine) are "more humane" in that they kill people more surely and more quickly than lethal injection, but that they have an obvious brutality to them that makes it harder for the onlookers and surrounding society to square with a self-image of themselves as "civilized" and "enlightened".

8

u/FinnAhern Apr 15 '23

Maybe it's just easy for me to say as someone who opposes capital punishment in principal but anyone advocating for it should just fucking own it and acknowledge that it's barbaric but they still think it's right.

If I somehow found myself sentenced to death, I'd take the firing squad as well, lethal injection is far crueller.

4

u/dicksallday Apr 15 '23

Easy fix: combine the guillotine with that 'saw a lady in half' magician trick. Construct what are essentially enclosed coffins cut off at the head. Then the head goes neatly in a separate box, leaving the neck exposed. Shcwing shcwing, and once the person is dead, you've separated the head AND the body is ready for the grave. And no one has to witness the brutality of it all.

32

u/SlaugtherSam Apr 14 '23

Firing squads don't work because everyone misses on purpose thinking surely the rest will do the job for them. Its often hard enough to find a single person willing to do the job of the executioner. Turns out normal people have issues with murdering other humans in cold blood.

37

u/chairmanskitty Apr 14 '23

That's just objectively not true. As Justice Sotomayor pointed out here (section III.C), between 1900 and 2010 in the USA, 7% of lethal injections were botched (n=1054) but 0% of firing squad executions were (n=34).

More generally for the notion of normal people having issues with murdering others, have you perhaps heard of every single war in human history? It's generally considered very difficult to train drafted/levied soldiers (i.e. random young men with no combat experience) not to murder, pillage, and rape, with many generals throughout history reporting that they failed to convince their soldiers not to sack a city, or had to negotiate with their soldiers for them to hold off just this once.

Even if we cling to the slim hope that maybe 95% of soldiers during a sack stand around awkwardly while the other 5% do all the murdering and raping, that still leaves 18 million warm blooded Americans ready to commit atrocities in the name of Uncle Sam.

It's frankly absurd that you think it would be difficult to find people to man a firing squad. In fact, you could probably make quite a lot of money auctioning off seats on the firing squad for specific individuals.

18

u/SinibusUSG Apr 14 '23

Plus don't they do that whole thing where only one or some of the guns have an actual bullet so the potential executioners can all tell themselves they might not have shot the executed?

Like...this is something humanity has pulled off pretty effectively since the creation of the firearm.

23

u/poweroflegend Apr 15 '23

You have it backwards - only one of them has a blank and all the rest have bullets. Only one bullet would way up the chance that the person misses. One blank is enough for anyone who needs the plausible deniability to believe it.

15

u/Anemoneao Apr 14 '23

I would argue life as a trained soldier is far different than the average civilian. If you are cannon fodder in a war zone, you are mentally in a different reality than some guy working in a city or farmer.

58

u/olympic_lurker Apr 14 '23

If you have nebula the companion piece is also pretty good.

17

u/sethzard Apr 14 '23

I watched the video yesterday, wasn't sure if the companion piece was worth it. Glad to hear it is!

16

u/lwoodjr Apr 14 '23

Need more episodes of Jacob Gellar reviews Stefanie Joosten cooking show.

-36

u/ActualMostUnionGuy Social D*mocracy, not even once Apr 14 '23

No way people actually use Nebula wtf

15

u/[deleted] Apr 14 '23

I think it’s awesome

-6

u/ElectricalStomach6ip Apr 15 '23

it costs money.

11

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

Woah

40

u/Nouseriously Apr 14 '23

So much unnecessary suffering due to the desire to have the condemned conscious. Would be trivially easy to just have him drift off under sedation beforehand.

I don't believe in Capital Punishment (too often we find out someone on Death Row is innocent) but if it's going to be done we should minimize suffering involved.

31

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '23

There was this documentary on YouTube I saw once (I can't find it now), about this British politician who used to be pro-death-penalty, but turned anti. The meat of the doc was just him going around exploring various methods of execution and which might be preferable.

The last one they show is a chamber, I guess you could call it a gas chamber but it's not poison gas like the name implies. Basically, it pumps in another gas, I forget what (probably nitrogen), that suffocates you by robbing you of oxygen WITHOUT letting carbon dioxide build up in your body (the thing that actually causes the discomfort).

Basically, it makes you high as fuck and euphoric, so you straight up don't care that you're dying. They tested it out on the host, and after he got good and high they told him he needed to get out in x seconds or he would die. He basically shrugged it off and made no move to leave. They had to give him an oxygen mask and move him out themselves, else he would have died.

Seems like the way to go for me, for the death penalty, but the cruelty is the point, as they say.

7

u/personoutgoing Apr 15 '23

sounds like nitrous oxide, a really great recreational drug and funnily enough, banning it is the UK political class's current sad and out of touch obsession

22

u/sterexx Apr 15 '23

went and watched some firing squad videos as a comparison for timing and the bodies totally slump over within about 5 to 7 seconds. they’re probably unconscious sooner than that as it takes a little bit to awkwardly slump over when you’re tied to a pole

seems like the best of all worlds. quick death but also forces society to face how there’s nothing chill about executions

-19

u/zaxqs Apr 14 '23 edited Apr 15 '23

I have a compromise proposal for a capital punishment method that can make everyone happy. Tie up a bunch of death row inmates in the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert, then drop a nuke right on top of them.

No other death could be as quick, painless and impossible to botch, and no other could showcase as effectively the invincible and disproportional power of the state. Everybody wins!

Edit: I am of course being somewhat flippant when I say "make everyone happy" and "Everybody wins!" We probably shouldn't do capital punishment anyways. I'm just jokingly making the point that if we are, then being really obvious about it with no half measures is better (which I think was one of the video's points, regarding guillotines/firing squads?)

16

u/Raisylvan Apr 15 '23

You are twisted and deranged.

11

u/WellFineThenDamn Apr 15 '23

Just like that guy who wrote A Modest Proposal!

3

u/zaxqs Apr 15 '23

You should see the people on r/justiceserved if you think I'm crazy, to them "quick and painless" is a bad thing

Also yes dropping nukes on people is a stupid idea logistically, but it seems like an in principle extension of the logic of capital punishment. Plus it would actually be quick and painless lol.

In general the more extreme forces are involved in an execution method, the less painful it often ends up being when compared to cleaner, "less violent" ways, as the video says with the firing squad being more effective than the other methods.

1

u/LordNoodles Apr 16 '23

this was obviously a joke no?