If you like the idea of government-run healthcare, you can't say that I'm off my rocker for bringing up the concept of "life years." That's the metric that the NHS in the UK uses to determine when to withhold certain medical procedures.
With all of the "non-binary" talk, we're spending way too much time dealing within a binary of either being alive or dead, with nothing in-between.
No, if you spend fifteen years in prison, so-far as I'm concerned, we should regard that as fifteen years of life that we've taken away from you.
Sometimes that's justified. If you're a rapist, you probably deserve to have more years of life taken away from you. If you're Anthony Broadwater, the DA and the government stole fifteen years of life from him (arguably forty years).
It shouldn't be lost on anyone that whenever somebody says, "There ought to be a law." they're saying that a person should have a certain number of years taken from his or her life for stepping out of bounds.
We should seriously consider which violations are worthy of that burden.
If we agree that the jury got it right in the Bernie Goetz case in the eighties, which they did by the letter of New York law, Bernie checked all five of the boxes for lawful self-defense when he shot his four attackers. The only law that he broke was having that gun in the first place. In the eighties, that was a misdemeanor, and the city of New York stole a year of Bernie's life for it. In 2023, the same infraction in New York is a felony that could carry up to four years of life stolen.
The ouroboros that is the regressive left is funny until you realize the consequences in these terms.
The philosophy of the police state without the police, and the fetish for Palpatine without the stormtroopers is bizarre.
Still, we can't ignore that these people want a lot of us behind bars.
A man like Bernie Goetz in New York today would have been given a choice by people in government of having his life stolen from him in its entirety by thugs, or having four life years taken from him by the government.
I've met a woman who had thirty life years stolen from her because she dropped off a dime-bag of meth once as a teenager. (That's clearly mostly attributable to the right. )
Governments don't need to be murdering people, and hoarding them into camps, to be stealing lives.
These people in government are responsible for every year of life stolen, and they should be held accountable.
I'm done being fine with agreeing to disagree.
If you're gonna run for office, and vote a bullshit bill into law, that'll send several thousand people to prison for a year over a clerical error, you're responsible for stealing several thousand life years from people. You should be in prison for the rest of your life.