I am not a court of law. I am not asking for them to be killed or even harmed beyond their sentences either, this is purely a moral assessment. The convicts aren’t just petty thieves, all hardened criminals or worse. I don’t have to want them to die, but I also don’t have to care if they do.
Would you lose any sleep if either of them died for any reason?
The notion, that a human life has “no value” is contradictory to all established standards of ethics and morality. And established usually means for them to be written down in such a way.
Also we don’t know which crimes they were convicted of exactly. And the involved German states made a point of hiding it.
Would you lose any sleep if either of them died for any reason?
By that metric almost all human lifes would be worthless, because plenty of “good” people are victims of murder or other crimes every day and you can still sleep.
Just a small correction: the involved German states did not “make it a point to hide” the individual crimes from being published. Instead this happens because we in Germany place a comparably very high value on privacy. And yes, even criminal scum gets theirs protected by neither naming them nor their crimes. Even convicted criminals’ names are never published on principle unless they have become public figures through other means anyway.
And the crimes were not detailed because knowing the specific combinations of crimes and sentences would make it too easy to identify them, given there’s only 28 of them.
The idea of protecting privacy so much is that by having completed their sentences, they should have the same opportunity as anyone else in life and not be “tarnished” forever.
I think being dragged to the first plane flying to Afghanistan since years is much more of a “tarnishing” and much easier identifiable. And as we see, the speculations are running wild, as to what the people might have been doing. You can see it in your own comment referring to them as “criminal scum”. So it is working as intended. By hiding the crimes, the people hearing/reading about it, have their imaginations create an image of some particularly “scummy” people, who must have committed the most heinous crimes, without knowing if that is actually the case. That is also why they gave one example of one case to create the strong framing.
It was announced that they all committed “schwere Verbrechen”. That means it’s all felonies and capital crimes. I do characterize people who commit capital crimes as scum, because those are by definition never small misconducts or accidents. Felony convictions for capital crimes need proof of malicious intent. So there really is incredibly little room left to feel bad for the criminals.
There is no capital crimes in Germany as the capital punishment has been abolished. There exist no term of “schwere Verbrechen” in the legal sense. There is “Vergehen” similar to misdemeanors and “Verbrechen” similiar to felonies. However anything is a “Verbrechen” if the minimum punishment is one year (which can still be put out for probation). And for both “Vergehen” and “Verbrechen” the punishment can both be more or less, depending on aggrevating or mitigating circumstances.
And that is why it is so crucial to actually have the crimes people were convicted for mentioned. All these terms cover a wide range, their meaning is in part subjective or the popular understanding is different from the legal meaning.
Just to give a final example also from the Wiki article:
In Germany lying under oath “Meineid” §154 StGB (German criminal code) has the same range of punishment like sexual abuse of minors “Sexueller Missbrauch von Kindern” § 176 StGB. There might be good processual reasons for the high punishment of lying under oath in order to maintain the power of the state, but i think by most moral understandings sexually abusing children is a more heinous crime.
The notion, that a human life has “no value” is contradictory to all established standards of ethics and morality.
Would you have lost sleep if any of the assassination attempts on Hitler had succeeded? Did you break out in tears, felt bereaved, when he shot himself, proclaiming that his people betrayed him?
You can moral high-horse all you want. At some point you just don’t care whether someone makes it. That doesn’t mean that you want them dead – it means that they’re too much of an assclown to care about: Because either you stop caring about them, or you become a doormat for them. They will exploit and monopolise your empathy, making you lose the capacity to care about and aid people who are, indeed, more worthy of your empathy and support than fucking Hitler.
I am not a court of law. I am not asking for them to be killed or even harmed beyond their sentences either, this is purely a moral assessment. The convicts aren’t just petty thieves, all hardened criminals or worse. I don’t have to want them to die, but I also don’t have to care if they do.
Would you lose any sleep if either of them died for any reason?
The notion, that a human life has “no value” is contradictory to all established standards of ethics and morality. And established usually means for them to be written down in such a way.
Also we don’t know which crimes they were convicted of exactly. And the involved German states made a point of hiding it.
By that metric almost all human lifes would be worthless, because plenty of “good” people are victims of murder or other crimes every day and you can still sleep.
Just a small correction: the involved German states did not “make it a point to hide” the individual crimes from being published. Instead this happens because we in Germany place a comparably very high value on privacy. And yes, even criminal scum gets theirs protected by neither naming them nor their crimes. Even convicted criminals’ names are never published on principle unless they have become public figures through other means anyway.
And the crimes were not detailed because knowing the specific combinations of crimes and sentences would make it too easy to identify them, given there’s only 28 of them.
The idea of protecting privacy so much is that by having completed their sentences, they should have the same opportunity as anyone else in life and not be “tarnished” forever.
I think being dragged to the first plane flying to Afghanistan since years is much more of a “tarnishing” and much easier identifiable. And as we see, the speculations are running wild, as to what the people might have been doing. You can see it in your own comment referring to them as “criminal scum”. So it is working as intended. By hiding the crimes, the people hearing/reading about it, have their imaginations create an image of some particularly “scummy” people, who must have committed the most heinous crimes, without knowing if that is actually the case. That is also why they gave one example of one case to create the strong framing.
It was announced that they all committed “schwere Verbrechen”. That means it’s all felonies and capital crimes. I do characterize people who commit capital crimes as scum, because those are by definition never small misconducts or accidents. Felony convictions for capital crimes need proof of malicious intent. So there really is incredibly little room left to feel bad for the criminals.
There is no capital crimes in Germany as the capital punishment has been abolished. There exist no term of “schwere Verbrechen” in the legal sense. There is “Vergehen” similar to misdemeanors and “Verbrechen” similiar to felonies. However anything is a “Verbrechen” if the minimum punishment is one year (which can still be put out for probation). And for both “Vergehen” and “Verbrechen” the punishment can both be more or less, depending on aggrevating or mitigating circumstances.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbrechen#In_Deutschland
And that is why it is so crucial to actually have the crimes people were convicted for mentioned. All these terms cover a wide range, their meaning is in part subjective or the popular understanding is different from the legal meaning.
Just to give a final example also from the Wiki article:
In Germany lying under oath “Meineid” §154 StGB (German criminal code) has the same range of punishment like sexual abuse of minors “Sexueller Missbrauch von Kindern” § 176 StGB. There might be good processual reasons for the high punishment of lying under oath in order to maintain the power of the state, but i think by most moral understandings sexually abusing children is a more heinous crime.
Would you have lost sleep if any of the assassination attempts on Hitler had succeeded? Did you break out in tears, felt bereaved, when he shot himself, proclaiming that his people betrayed him?
You can moral high-horse all you want. At some point you just don’t care whether someone makes it. That doesn’t mean that you want them dead – it means that they’re too much of an assclown to care about: Because either you stop caring about them, or you become a doormat for them. They will exploit and monopolise your empathy, making you lose the capacity to care about and aid people who are, indeed, more worthy of your empathy and support than fucking Hitler.
“Nazi lives don’t matter.”
“Nazis should follow their leader” (i.e. kill themselves).