You're right. If I were a parent, I would know that it's important to punish people who need guidance and compassion.

Thanks, I'll pass.

Far as I can tell, everyone who bikes in Seattle is constantly having sex. Even while cycling.

45 seconds? But I want it now!

As far as I can tell, you've presented three scenarios of young adults who, at worst, need some form of help from the more mature people responsible for their care, but you've also portrayed them as somehow deserving of either irrelevant punishment or bribery. Should Billy be punished for poor performance in school, or helped to understand and appreciate his education? The worst case for Tammy's judgment is that she did not understand the consequences of actions she otherwise engaged consensually, should she be deprived of a phone that has literally nothing to do with that? Chris evidently was not driving while getting high, so I'm not even sure why you care unless you're jealous. Or should those privileges be dangled in front of them only if they behave in a way you approve?

If this is truly where you're at, do yourself a favor. Visualize Billy's, Tammy's and Chris's future debt and complete paralysis in the face of it. Don't worry, it doesn't make a difference what they do now or hot their parents raise them. They're fucked, and they didn't get a choice. It'll make your schadenfreude feel better.

In my day, we didn't have friends.

I'm not prepared for anything, that's why I'm asking an honest question. Thanks for answering in the form of hostility.

People like i_ate_god aren't the reason, but points for keeping the discussion honest anyway.

Honest question, since there's a list of nazis up above: if an elderly Adolf Hitler were forced to live in prison for 50 years and released into modern life, what more harm could he do?

I dare say he could produce an astonishingly smelly old man diaper.

Most courts accept it as a given, without blinking an eye. Inertia is the strongest force in systems of power.

That is categorically not what the "social contract" means. The "social contract" is an expression that one must suspend some "natural rights" (i.e. the freedom to "do whatever you want") in order to obtain the benefits of living in a society (i.e. to protect rights that need social defense). Like any contract, it's one that must be entered into consciously, not by birth or decree; the perversion of such a "contract" to mean one inherits it by birth is a road to domination and stagnation. Being born conveys only liberties, not responsibilities. Being a member of a community conveys both. It is up to a person to choose the latter, and it is up to a child's guardians to convey the benefits and consequences of such a contract. And it is up to every person to negotiate the social fluidity of all of these.

Society's rules are also not static, and they typically only change through rebellion. This process can be peaceful or bloody, just or unjust, depending on the rules and the rebellion. The most just and peaceful evolution comes from a confluence of evolving "social contract" that challenges outdated or unwarranted rules; the least comes from the collision of an unflinching status quo with an unflinching reality. Wars are often fought, in either case, and often the "social contract" is discarded wholly in the process.

The people you listed above, had they been freed, elderly and in a different world? They would have little purchase to do any further harm. That isn't to say there is no reason to guard against a resurgence of past monstrosity, and it isn't even to say that the world isn't better absent some of the worst monsters. But the world changes—nay, people change the world—and tossing monsters into a world that was once their own but isn't any longer... doesn't give them a lot of leeway.

Deserve? Deserve what?

Justice is about making wrongs right. What does it mean to deserve? How does it square with justice?

Nobody deserves unnecessary suffering. People who recognize their mistakes will feel punished for that, and people who don't will feel vindicated.

America wants to execute people—more specifically, America wants to punish people—but few of us have the ability to distance ourselves from the process that you apparently do. America does not want to be present and aware of its brutality, it wants to be able to say justice is a balancing of scales and then to wash its hands of the whole affair. And nobody really believes you can balance the scales. Executing a monster doesn't undo their monstrous past.

Your position is grotesque, like the emotions in a lynch mob. It's a feeling that most people can't stomach, and that's why it's been mostly abandoned. Society can surely be manipulated to fervor, to become monstrous, but then the fervor dies down. People cannot be manipulated to face themselves as the monsters they want to destroy. They walk away from the whole thing with regret and trauma.

Restoring the worst forms of execution is the surest way to set execution up for abolition. Which would be commendable, except that the monstrous act still prevails.

They've industrialized the elimination of everyone they can find in a targeted people group?

This isn't really right. The concept of "white" we understand now wasn't what was understood then, and that wasn't what alarmed anyone who wasn't a victim at the time. What set the nazis apart (and may still do in times since) is the clean, industrial approach to destroying peoples and cultures that they employed. It terrified people not for the brutality, but for the complete divorce from human emotion.

Empires have grown and fallen by doing exactly, morally, what the nazis did. But never mechanically what they did. We've destroyed peoples, but not with the efficiency and clarity of the Holocaust. The uniqueness of nazism isn't morality, it's the emotional impact of encountering a distilled rendering of the faults of civilization.

The backwoods also-rans of America and Russia couldn't hope to rise to that level of clarity. Our inefficiencies and flaws are our cover. The same is true of all of the "great empires", which were basically just hicks with guns running the world. Yeah, mostly "white". But bear in mind they were at war with each other most of that time as well. And they employed the same sorts of tactics against each other as they did in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

If you want to be the face of evil, start an assembly line. Everything else is mere humanity.

Just like the nazis did!