this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I've said it before, but every confederate soldier (who couldn't be re-educated) should have gone and their lands and wealth given to their black slaves and Native Americans. Same with Germany and Black, Jewish, and Romani people's that the Nazis targeted. Reparations are never made, moral depravity is never punished, and people are told to just get on with things in the name of 'peace'. Then their legacy continues in different forms.
What is the standard of evidence for this?
Re-educated to the point where they do it voluntarily in reparation and solidarity with those they’ve wronged lol.
That doesn't answer my question. What is the standard of evidence that someone can't be re-educated?
Oh sorry - it wasn’t supposed to. More tongue in cheek to the point that someone could be forced to give up “their” land as punishment; or re-educated to the point where they do it willingly (either in good faith reparations or in abandonment of the concept of “private property”). And so the end standard would effectively be that they embrace anarcho-communism
Also I’m realizing I mis-read your question as what’s the standard that they’ve achieved education; not that it isn’t possible.
If I had to guess for that - I’d say it has to be voluntary to an extent right? Like if they’re rejecting all education- what’s the point? Like if a guy who was extremely anti-miner were forced to work in a mine to develop solidarity and empathy with miners, but after a year they were still extremely anti-miner, it’d be safe to call that a lost cause imo.
But also I have no idea - just wanted to take an actual run at your question
I don't know what you even mean by anti-miner, but I don't think it epistemically makes sense to say that someone who doesn't make progress for a year after a lifetime of being a reactionary cannot be rehabilitated.
My point in asking is that I think you will pretty readily find that there is no useful standard for making such a claim, so the claim should not be made. Keep them in re-education for as long as it takes and if they just live out the rest of their natural lives there, well, that's just how it goes sometimes but you aren't ever going to find a point where "euthanizing" them is the most sensible option because you don't actually know what they will do in the future and that information is also practically useful for other rehabilitation efforts.
Yeah I pulled the “miner” example out of the blue while grasping at straws to try and formulate an example. I don’t really have enough knowledge on it to speak in an informed way.
I agree with your take though. And as an aside, I enjoy reading your thoughts on this site, because you not only challenge posters but provide solid insight. So I appreciate you taking the time to do both!
Thanks. Because I'm so argumentative, it can get really easy to view my relationship with the community here as mostly negative, so I really appreciate it
Nah I’m from the Midwest and a bit on the spectrum so my pet peeve is that no one is ever forthcoming, even when direct discussion is the best course of action. Literally dialectics ya know.
To digress a bit- The best public meeting I’ve held was with a local Indigenous nation in which the agency I worked for operated, but had apparently not held a meeting for longer than I’ve been alive. I lied and told “leadership” that the meeting would go well (I knew it wouldn’t but didn’t want them to cancel) and made sure they were in the room as I got yelled at for 3 hours. I didn’t take it personally because I agreed with all of their comments; but everyone who’d previously stuck their heads in the sand would now be unable to do so at least. People are afraid of confrontation and dialect, but it’s literally what moves society and builds community, even if it requires a more forward approach at times
I don't honestly know in practice and I understand what you mean about presenting such evidence. There's also a difference of this occuring while the situation is still ongoing and after it's over and you have 'won'.
It would have to involve the affected communities because an important part of justice is that the victims feel they were treated and interacted with satisfactorily.
In most case, victims don't want the perpetrators executed. It's usually their families and tertiary people who do. But they must be made to feel safe and whole again to where they would feel comfortable living alongside their former captors. If they don't, you invite vigilantism.
If it were realistically possible to keep every single Nazi in some form of confinement/education indefinitely, that's the most palatable moral action. I don't believe that would be the case in the immediate aftermath of most situations.
I also believe that there is room to say that some people do not deserve the chance of rehabilitation depending on the severity of their actions. To let them live would be to withhold doing what is right now for a benefit that may never come. Nothing the members of Unit 731 could do would make up for their actions, even if they spent their whole lives trying. The only argument for their continued existence is that to kill them would be a waste of a human body that could be put toward productive work, even if by force.
You would start by executing those at the top, then you work your way down until you've reached the cooks and janitors and society would collectively decide if their involvement deserved the same or some lesser punishment.
At the very least, nothing that has been done to those kinds of groups in the past has been enough. They have faced near 0 consequences after the fact.
I am also posting from the state of Minnesota where my emotions are inflamed by the murder of my neighbors, so you can also attribute my bloodlust to be using past groups as a proxy for what I feel should be done here and now, before the 'peace' has been established.
I'm speaking basically in terms of when you've "won," since in for example an insurrectionary situation it's really more of a shifting practical question based on the situation at the moment. I nonetheless think talking about what a dictatorship of the proletariat should do is helpful as a baseline, even if you and I agree that in more desperate situations things like summary execution become an inevitable necessity sometimes. I think this in part because it gives us basically the only really constant bar to have for reference and can be useful for grounding how we're reasoning before applying more complicating variables to it in other circumstances.
We can say that an important part of justice is that democracy is upheld, including by following the protocols established by democratic mechanisms, but that's neither here nor there in a question of what we should be advocating for, i.e. where we are trying to bring consensus to.
I don't really know how to say this more nicely than just speaking plainly, but what you are describing is not a problem with the treatment of the convict, but with the attitudes of these secondary and tertiary parties. A desire for punitive justice, for revenge, is inevitably some combination of sadism and maybe some other forms of counterproductive moralism. We need to start from a place of recognizing that it's a backward social attitude and not pre-emptively buckle to hypothetical threats of vigilantism as though they are just a force of nature, any more than we should buckle to threats of vigilantism over other cases of blatant injustice (as killing someone over such threats would be). The answer here isn't to design the system so that it is willing to kill in cold blood if 2 - 5 people want it to strongly enough, but to have a functional political education so that vigilantism over not killing people enough isn't a problem at a systemic level. This isn't some fanciful proposition either, since there are plenty of countries where the death penalty is abolished either completely or at least de facto, and generally that's not motivating vigilantism for them.
Sure, but that's overwhelmingly a logistical question, which is separate from the aforementioned moralistic distortions.
You are question-begging that executing them is inherently right. That is simply baseless.
There is no such thing as redemption for any of us. The bad things we've done in the past remain no matter what we do, and some hypothetical account of net benefit or detriment when weighing past actions against the positive actions someone can take in the future is an excellent example of why this moralism makes the world worse:
If I spend ~70 years being a terrible human being, like a war criminal or something, and then I perhaps have 10 years left to do positive things, we can say that my existence in the most optimistic case is a net negative for society, sure, if that's a framing you want to talk about. However, killing me at ~70 doesn't undo the bad things I did, it does not reach into the past and make a single thing any less damaging, all you've succeeded in doing is preventing me from doing positive things in the future. In effect, you have made the net impact of my life worse than it otherwise would have been (again, if that's a framing you care about, which I don't).
This invites an obvious counter: "But that's the most optimistic case! You could very well just continue to be a scoundrel."
That's correct. Most people underestimate what you can achieve with rehabilitation, but it's still true. However, the thing to consider is that me being a scoundrel while stuck in a re-education camp doesn't hold a candle to me being a scoundrel in my hypothetical war criminal past. It's overall a basically negligible negative, a much lesser negative than the positive impact if I actually was able to contribute positively in a more optimistic case. The average of these scenarios is weighted very plainly toward living being positive even if you think the better outcomes are much less likely, and I consider the average to be a very important consideration because we aren't really considering an individual case, we are considering the aggregate impact of many thousands of cases.
As you allude to, even the "negative" case of the stubborn war criminal can be viewed as still being positive in many cases if they are doing penal labor in the meantime that economically offsets the costs of their captivity, which can be true when considering the captive population collectively.
There is only one real question in this situation, and that's what will produce the best outcome for the whole of society. We should not let punitive sentiment get in the way of benefiting people.
I'm glad that you see it as bloodlust rather than just self-evident morality. It's understandable why you'd feel that way and I'm certainly not trying to attack you for that, even if I criticize some of your assertions that seem to be predicated upon it.
I don't really have any answer for what you should do over in Minnesota, because that's a very different kind of situation and, as I said before, what should be done depends on shifting logistical concerns more than anything else. I certainly won't cry for any members of ICE winding up lying in the bed they made, even if I would advocate against putting them there in a situation where we had more leeway to choose as we wanted (which is not the present situation).
I'm taking in the rest of what you've said but I do want to clarify that when I described making people feel whole, I was talking about the main victim. Not appeasing their family. As in, the people who were directly impacted must have a say, not necessarily decision making power, but be involved in the process. And when this is done, they usually wish not to enact the most extreme punishment. Pointing in favor of not immediately jumping to that as a main form of punishment if one of the goals is to make the affected feel safe again and not double disenfranchised by the forces meant to protect them.
Essentially arguing against myself and agreeing with the response you made to another user.
I'm sorry that I'm not better at being succinct. I'm sure another person could have conveyed the same arguments in not quite as many paragraphs . . .
My bad here too, I definitely misread it at least partially. I'm sure it won't surprise you to know that it doesn't change the substance of what I would say all that much, but I still should have been more careful to represent what you said accurately.
No worries, I'm just sorting out how I actually feel about what you've said and under better conditions with a cooler head, I'd probably agree a lot more readily. Scrolling the news makes it hard to do though given the flood of new occurrences every day. I'm sure I'd think differently if the people had absolute power over what comes next, ala the original question posed by OP.
It was my bad for not being clear, I was sort of jumping between points while I was thinking about them. I do appreciate the substantive replies though.
In terms of reparations, I don't think how re educated someone is or could be should be taken into account. An act of economic justice via redistribution is not based on any individual's mind state.
Oh for sure. Asset seizure should be a given. Anything else is a separate consideration.