Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: est1895 on May 12, 2012, 06:46:53 pm
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In the handling of Brievik, do you think he is insane or not?
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He's obviously very disturbed, but that doesn't mean he isn't criminally responsible for his actions.
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What Herra said.
I find it disturbing that Norway's maximum sentence without invoking the "continuing danger to society" argument is only 21 years in prison, though.
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varg got out in only 18/19 and is already on his 4th album. i think the idea is that is the amount of time necessary to re-train a criminal to become a functional member of society. they even let you take vacations from prison. to be fair though its probibly a better system than the gang violence and rapes of american prisons.
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20 years is still damn long time. If you have any kids, hell a newborn child, by the time you get out, they'll be adults... and the system *does* allow prolonged imprisonment in case someone *is* a danger to society.
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I dont think he is insane. Life in prison with no chance of parole would be appropiate, IMHO. It is strange that 21 years is a maximum punishment in Norway.
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The bit that makes me awkward is that if he'd have claimed that all his actions were motivated by a support of Islam, rather than a hatred of it, the insanity question wouldn't be half the issue it currently is...
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I doubt he meets the US legal definition of insanity, but I have no idea what Norway does in that regard.
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The thing is, if he is insane, he can spent his entire life in prison (you are only alloewd to leave those institutes after you have been cured, and Breivik will never admit it). Also, if he is declared insane, it kind off invalidates his message, which is his worst fear. HIs worst punishment would therefore be to declare him insane.
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Let him rot away in prison. Something tells me the prison population won't excite him.
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I'd prefer having him executed (in the most horrible way allowed), but since this doesn't appear to be an option, I'd settle for declaring him incurably insane and locking him up in solitary containment till he dies. And if that's not possible, just a normal life sentence.
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I'd prefer having him executed (in the most horrible way allowed)
Execution is not that much of a punishment though. Better to let him live with teh consequences.
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Lifelong imprisonment and obscurity. For someone as driven to publicity as Breivik, being ignored is the worst punishment.
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Lifelong imprisonment and obscurity. For someone as driven to publicity as Breivik, being ignored is the worst punishment.
Agreed. As reasonable a response as the death penalty may be, executing him would just make him some kind of martyr.
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I'd prefer having him executed (in the most horrible way allowed)
Execution is not that much of a punishment though. Better to let him live with the consequences.
I think this case is beyond repair, so punishment is pointless. Termination would probably be the best option for everyone involved (not in the horrible way - it doesn't make up for anything anyway, and the story is sad enough already).
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Execution is not that much of a punishment though. Better to let him live with teh consequences.
That really only works if he regards the consequences as bad.
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Execution is not that much of a punishment though. Better to let him live with teh consequences.
That really only works if he regards the consequences as bad.
Which I think we all agree wont happen any time soon.
For someone who is driven to public statements, invalidating that statement and discrediting them is the worse punishment because they strongly believe something is wrong but they cant try to correct it so the insanity judgement would be the "strongest" result. On the other hand denial of expression could be counter productive if the person is insane/disturbed as this could further exacerbate problem thought patterns, which in a society with a criminal justice system aimed more towards cure/correction than punishment is problematic because the system is impeding rather than helping cure.
all in all I am glad I am not presiding over this case.
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As has been said before, the this guy is getting absolutely all the attention he could have dreamed of. That was his intended goal, and he has and is still achieving it.
Y'See this is a problem I have always had with Media reporting is that I do not think that releasing names of suspects is often a beneficial thing to do. From the media perspective it creates a 'human angle', which has been shown to improve sales by creating a level of empathy, but if Breivik had been known as 'Mr X', and his name held back until the trial was over, then he would have achieved only half his goals. In other words, supply his reasons, certainly, but deny him the right to be truly associated with them, remove the human angle, the Nazi salute and other showmanship and just put him forward as 'someone who committed a horrific act under the following belief.'. At least until the trial is over.
I remember Lowtax speaking at the University of Illinois once, most of the speech was just taking the piss, as you'd expect, but he made some interesting points about the danger of the Internet that would apply here. He stated that, whilst the Internet was an amazing thing, it had a risk that it allowed people with ideas or opinions that would normally exist 'underground' to find other people with the same belief, communicate with them and, in so doing, justify each others belief.
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I remember Lowtax speaking at the University of Illinois once, most of the speech was just taking the piss, as you'd expect, but he made some interesting points about the danger of the Internet that would apply here. He stated that, whilst the Internet was an amazing thing, it had a risk that it allowed people with ideas or opinions that would normally exist 'underground' to find other people with the same belief, communicate with them and, in so doing, justify each others belief.
If a given country truly had freedom of the press, then this kind of speech would not have to be forced underground at all. Not all politically unpopular speech is nazi hate propaganda, but some of it can be quite damaging to the local government if it became widely known.
This is also the reason why authoritarian governments like China try so hard to clamp down on internet freedoms. Many governments in the world today don't like free speech.
Although, one should never have to go to such extremes as to murder dozens just to make one's opinions known. There surly are ways of getting media attention that do not involve harming others...
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That's the theory that most of the western worlds population takes, I think, that you have to put up with the detrimental proponents of change else you risk silencing the beneficial ones (And yes, I know both those words are open to debate depending on personal definition). However, spreading an idea as something separate from personality is hard, it has to be a really good idea. Most religions have 'central' human characters, whether desired by those people or not, the 'cult of personality' is a meme that works.
Now, I'm not saying it should be difficult to get his name if you so desire to know it, my concern is with the saturation of Media with Breivik as a person that stands a risk of raising him to a similar level.
With regards to 'underground beliefs', I think we need to remember we are still human to a certain degree, I don't care if a guy is dating a rubber blow-up doll for example, I think it's a bit wierd, but as long as he's not expecting me to do the same, fine. I do care if someone thinks Slavery should be re-instated however, the difference is that I would actively seek to stop that, whereas I wouldn't consider someone who shagged a rubber doll to be a danger to the world around me.
Society should take care of itself, no-one else is going to do it, the problem is, the guy who got caught shagging a donkey is far more likely to be ostracized than the man claiming that all Gays should be burned at the stake, in fact, he could be local priest. That, for me, is where it all gets a bit silly.
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What shoould be done with Brievik?
Something humorously ironic, like 40 years forced labor being interviewed by Oprah.
There's no indication that he's insane.
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Mustang19, Unicorn20, impala69... anyone noticing a pattern around here?
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Shush, we are currently pretending it isn't him.
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My bad, I missed the memo.
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I was unfortunate enough to stumble upon a local tabloid newspaper's website. And of course, "GIANT DRAMA: PERSON THROWS SHOE AT BREIVIK IN COURT". The best thing is to just ignore him. It's obvious that he's an attention whore, and so I cringe when the photographers start snapping pictures like crazy because he did some fascist hand gesture in court -- It literally makes me feel embarrassed and bad. What I mean is, the actions of people like him really herald how truly stupid we all are; how desperate we are to not only latch on to and feed on the drama, but continually perpetuate it, again with sensationalist news and undue attention. In a way, the media is our whore. We tell ourselves it's bad, biased, and all that, and yet we keep coming back.
I wish my fellow Scandinavians felt this way.