--Florida is scheduling its first execution in eighteen months, after a previous execution (using lethal injection) was “botched”. This time they’ve supposedly taken steps to ensure that the victim (whoops, I mean convict) is unconscious before the fatal doses are administered. This idea that the state has to prove that the “procedure” used in killing somebody isn’t cruel and unusual punishment, while the actual killing is acceptable, makes me question the entire moral underpinning of our legal system. Here is what I think about capital punishment.
--Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe has declared himself the winner of that country’s corrupt runoff presidential election, after his chief opponent dropped out and sought sanctuary during widespread pre-election violence and threats. I remember back in 1981, when the first (then legitimate) election was held. Mugabe easily beat out his main rival Joshua Nkomo, an election split not by ideology, but rather by ethnic identification, with most of the country’s majority Shona population supporting Mugabe. Now nobody ever reports on this obviously important factor in Zimbabwe politics. I know it hasn’t gone away. It’s just being ignored. I remember how, in an earlier election in Ukraine, one candidate was chiefly supported by the Ukrainian population while the other was supported by the Russians in eastern Ukraine. This doesn’t justify holding rigged elections, but it is still something that the press needs to inform us about. After all, you don’t need to look past the calamities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia to see how strongly ethnic identification means to many people in the world. And the passions, violence, and tragedies that can result from suspicions and disinformation about others.
--Florida is purchasing back 187,000 acres of land, on the south side of Lake Okeechobee, owned by the sugar industry and used for sugarcane growth and sugar refining. The intent is to redirect water overflowing from the lake during the wet season back down through the Everglades in the “River of Grass”. The process of renewal may take many years, especially since Lake Okeechobee is itself very polluted with runoff from refining. Also, with such a large-scale change as this, many in the area who were involved with sugar will lose their jobs. But hopefully, south Florida will once again get their share of fresh water that they need (although I think this area is severely overpopulated).
--Ever since I wrote an earlier article about the “Great Florida Desert”, we in Gainesville have been drenched almost daily in heavy rains and storms. Although it isn’t fun getting caught outside in the rain, this is truly a most welcome development in our area!
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It's not just the legal system, either. How can Those In Power tell us that we can't do embryonic stem-cell research because "every human life is sacred", even the life of a far-from-viable embryo... and then have no trouble with the idea of killing hundreds of criminals who were convicted in a demonstrably flawed and biased judicial system?
ReplyDeleteThey can't have it both ways. If every life is sacred, then so are the lives of those convicts, regardless of the crimes they've been convicted of.
As to the ethnic divisions... this is something that's always mystified me. I've never thought that I was fundamentally any different from people of different ethnic backgrounds to mine, and I just can't comprehend the vehement inter-ethnic hatred that's so easy to find. That people are willing — eager — to slaughter their neighbours by the thousands, just because their neighbours have a different ethnic background (Hutu vs Tutsi, Serb vs Bosnian, and so on) is amazing... and horrifying.