369 réponses à ce sujet

[Nightwriter]

wiggles89 wrote...

Not necessarily. Consider the following. The prisoner lived on a human colony (he was human, right?) which was run by religious fanatics who consider abortion murder. Abortion is illegal on the planet & the prisoner was a doctor who performed abortions. He was caught by the authorities & since the planet's prisons were already overflowing, was sent to the Purgatory. That covers the "massage compared to what he did to his victims" comment because either a) the guard was told he was a mass murderer or the guard considers abortion murder, therefore considering the prisoner a monster.

Or you could have a situation where the prisoner lived on a planet where the government persecutes certain people. The prisoner was either a) a victim of this persecution or didn't like the persecution. Because of this he killed 10 government officials involved in the persecution. This is another action that the guard could consider reprehensible.

There's the option to execute these people, but I'd say that being sent to the Purgatory is a worse fate than execution. Moreover, the Purgatory doesn't really make sense in the first place since execution is cheaper than paying for them to be imprisoned.

So, no, there's no absolute confirmation that this dude is a monster. He probably is, but that's not good enough to justify the beating.

wiggles89 wrote...

Didn't he shiv a dude in the shower or something? If that's what happened, then that's the type of thing that happens in that sort of prison. If people really have an issue with people getting shived in prison they should change the environment of the prison, not the transgressor. Besides, using the principle of many people who advocate the beating, isn't the dude he shived someone of no moral worth? How can the action be considered to have any moral worth if the agents involved have no moral worth?

I'm not making a case for him deserving punishment because he recently killed another inmate. It's not about the other inmate.

I'm putting in perspective what kind of man he is. Of course prisons are like that and people get shanked all the time. I'm trying to say this isn't an innocent man and the guard's aren't beating up a puppy here. Nor are they beating him for nothing.

[AntiChri5]

You cant say he probably knew about illegal activity his friend was involved in and therefore deserves a death sentence.



Thats the "logic" Stalin used.

[Collider]

Nightwriter wrote...

Think about it. If clients don't pay, Warden Kuril responds by threatening to release the prisoner at an unspecified time and location.

Why would this be a threat if the prisoner was not extremely dangerous?

A political dissident could be dangerous with words. Think of the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, or Martin Luther King jr. All of them threatened the established political order. But none of them were violent. I really can't assume that a government is going to necessarily have a just and fair reason to put or keep people in jail. History has had a variety of different, unjust rulers. 

Modifié par Collider, 20 juillet 2010 - 11:04 .

[Christmas Ape]

Nor are they beating him for nothing.

They're beating him because he became more expensive to keep than he's actually worth but not so much so that it's easier just to space him. That's hard to justify however you slice it.

[Nightwriter]

Collider wrote...

Nightwriter wrote...

Think about it. If clients don't pay, Warden Kuril responds by threatening to release the prisoner at an unspecified time and location.

Why would this be a threat if the prisoner was not extremely dangerous?

A political dissident could be dangerous with words. Think of the Dalai Lama, Ghandi, or Martin Luther King jr. All of them threatened the established political order. But none of them were violent. I really can't assume that a government is going to necessarily have a just and fair reason to put or keep people in jail. History has had a variety of different, unjust rulers. 

Collider, most of the people in your examples were assassinated.

It's much cheaper to assassinate a political dissident. That's what normally happens. No one in their right mind would pay as much as clients pay Warden Kuril to house these criminals. Unless they were races or worlds that did not believe in the death penalty, or for some reason did not want the prisoner dead.

Which paints them in a slightly better light than the people they want imprisoned.

[AntiChri5]

What if the death penalty is strictly prohibited not just legally or culturally but even religiously?



Fact is we just dont know.

[Collider]

Dead people are martyrs.

[Inquisitor Recon]

No their not. The guy in my basement, ain't nobody going to remember him.

[AntiChri5]

Thats because he was a teenage runaway.

[Nightwriter]

ReconTeam wrote...

No their not. The guy in my basement, ain't nobody going to remember him.

[Collider]

As I said, Night, if you kill those political dissidents, suddenly they're martyrs. Martyrs = riots, rebellions, social disorder.

[Nightwriter]

wiggles89 wrote...

I don't know what the puzzled face is for. I just showed you a couple situations where even if the inmate has committed some sort of crime it isn't one worthy of being a monster like the guard suggests. There's also the chance that the inmate didn't do anything wrong.

That was not a puzzled face. That was more of a deadpan face.

In other words, you pull a very elaborate explanation out of the air which could magically explain his presence in that prison, but it is still just a very elaborate explanation that could be true but likely isn't.

I'd actually like it to be true. It would be very interesting if we found an innocent man in that prison. How could that possibly happen? The only people who get put there have proven their danger to the greater population time and time again. Most of the people who are there could not be successfully incarcerated on their homeworlds.

It is the guard's use of the word "victim" that catches my ear. And not just victim in the singular, but "victims" in the plural. The use of the word victims puts one in mind of a serial killer, or a serial rapist, that kind of thing. Don't you agree?

wiggles89 wrote...

But the point is you don't know what kind of a man he is. If the Purgatory is anything like the sort of maximum security prisons around these days, the dude could've just been defending himself. That he's guilty of anything in this situation is questionable.

Defended himself more than twenty times, did he? Remember, the guy in the cell down the hall said he'd only killed twenty, but everyone else had killed far more. And the way the guards compare his beating to a massage suggests he "defended" himself very brutally and sadistically against his victims.

wiggles89 wrote...

Also, I know you're not justifying the beating. The thing about the moral worth of the action was directed at other people in the thread.

Oh, ok. My bad.

[AntiChri5]

The only thing we know about Purgatory is that its a prison for hire.

[Nightwriter]

wiggles89 wrote...

I think I conceded that it wasn't likely, but if I didn't now I am. The point is, however, we're still relying on a probability that isn't absolute (nor anywhere close to it) & the word of a thug. Not good enough for me.

I can understand that. It just seemed readily apparent to me personally that it was a place for the worst life in the galaxy. Maybe others don't want to make such assumptions.

wiggles89 wrote...

The reason I used examples involving political dissidents is because the Purgatory, in my mind, is the sort of thing to be used as the ultimate deterrent, something even worse than execution. I can totally see a government using it to keep aspects of the population in check.

Seems like any government powerful or ambitious enough to want political dissidents incarcerated could take care of it themselves.

wiggles89 wrote...

Besides, don't you agree that the idea of the Purgatory is a little nutty? Sure, the aspect where the Blue Suns capture criminals & hold the governments ransom makes sense. The part I don't get is why any government would offer up a prisoner & willingly pay money for their incarceration. A bullet in the head costs far less than renting a prison cell.

That's why I thought that the people footing the bill came from relatively peaceful or benign planets. Planets that are not equipped to handle criminals of this caliber and who may have religious or cultural objections to the death penalty. But I realize that's just my own mind groping for some kind of explanation. So yeah - it seems pretty nutty to me.

wiggles89 wrote...

I agree that the plural evokes that response but, once again, without any cold evidence I'm not sold on this guy being a monster. He could easily be innocent etc.

If he wasn't a monster before he came into that prison, I'll bet he's one now. Not saying it's his fault, if he was innocent - just saying that's unfortunately the way it goes.

wiggles89 wrote...

I seem to remember the "more than twenty" comment regarded what he was originally imprisoned for. However, if I'm wrong & he shived more than twenty dudes in the prison then I retract that particular argument.

I'm actually a little vague on the details - do I recall the man in the other cell saying oh that's just Bimmy, he's always getting into trouble with the guards or something? I could be wrong.

[mr. big-pants]

Well, I usually choose according to what Shepard I create: is he/she a sadist? A "Mother Teresa" guy/girl who feels sorry for the wicked? Or whatever else I might think of regarding my Shep's morality.



Personally, I'd let the guard beat the hell out of him, criminals like him don't deserve human rights. They didn't regard the right for life of those they killed, didn't they?

[Tin Soldier]

The prisoner 780 conversation. 

[Jonesey2k]

I think Zaeed sums this up nicely.

I allways put a stop to it.

[TK Dude]

Depends on my shepards.

For my paragon, I stop them.

For my renegade, I let them continue.

[inversevideo]

Nightwriter wrote...

didymos1120 wrote...

Does anyone know, specifically, what the guy was sent to Purgatory for?  Who sent him there?  Did he actually do whatever it was he was supposed to have done?  Why do all the "let the him have it" people apparently assume that his mere presence on Purgatory is conclusive proof that he deserves to be there? 

What we really have is an unknown guy convicted of an unknown crime (or unknown crimes) on the basis of unknown evidence on an unknown world using an unknown criminal justice system who is incarcerated in a manifestly corrupt prison staffed by mercenary thugs and run by a total bastard who really ought to be in one of his own cells.  Even if you think certain crimes justify such treatment, there's no way to know that this guy is among the deserving.  It's not even known if he really did kill the guy in the showers. And, if he did kill the guy, you have absolutely no knowledge of why he did it  (you can make a decent guess on that last one though:  given what Prisoner 780 has to say about the showers, it's likely someone was looking to forcibly acquire his "pride". Or they'd acquired it one too many times already).

So yeah, I stop it:

a. My total lack of knowledge about the guy makes it impossible to know he even belongs there.  The usefulness or righteousness of corporal punishment doesn't even need to be considered.
b.  I don't particularly need mercs who've acquired a taste for mercilessly beating defenseless people for highly dubious reasons running around my galaxy.  Like I trust them to only beat the truly "deserving" once they've left Purgatory for other duty assignments?  Please.  That's not even why they were beating that guy.
c.  The "justification" offered for the beating p!sses me off.  F*ck Kuril.  Slave-trading, greedy hypocrites should not be indulged, and you don't need to wait for him to order you into that cell to make that character assessment.

While I generally agree, as we've said again and again, the "this is a massage compared to what he did to his victims" comment pretty much cements the certainty of him being a monster.

Combine that with the fact he recently killed a man (which is what he's getting beaten for) and his presence on Purgatory in the first place, and you can safely say the guy deserves it (that doesn't mean it excuses it, but still).

There's really no reason to think this information isn't true. Why else would they beat him? Kuril doesn't like damaged property. Why else would he be in that prison? Just to be clear, these are prisoners whose races don't even want them on the planet. For milder crimes or matters of politics, etc, a prisoner can just be incarcerated on the home planet or killed. It needs to be pretty damn serious if you're willing to pay an arm and a leg to keep this person in Purgatory indefinitely.

I do not believe that torture ever benefits society.
Putting aside, for the moment, the effect on the tortured, the negative affects ,on those who condone torture, can be quite profound.  Not the least of which is loss of humanity. The ****'s were able to commit horrible depravities because they did not see those they wronged as human, but as less than, and deserving of the treatment they received. In the process of torturing others, torturers themselves become monsters. All torture does is produce a skilled cadre of torturers, well versed in sadism.

To your other points, we have no idea why any of those prisoners were in Purgatory.

Some could be captured mercs, some could be political prisoners, some could be guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kuril does not care, and will sell them all. He may sell them to be tortured, by those who have a fetish for sadism, or to someone who needs subjects for medical experiments, or to people looking to hire the baddest mercs they can afford.   In essence, Kuril and his crew are slavers. In different circumstances, Kuril and crew would be the ones in prison.

[Nightwriter]

Inverse, I assume the word that was bleeped out was Nazis, yes?

I agree that the beating of that prisoner should be stopped for the very same reasons - for what it does to the guards.

However what I keep trying to say is that what's going on here is very different than, say, Nazis torturing Jews. The Jews were perfectly innocent and had done nothing wrong. The Gestapo were monsters for what they did. These guards are not hurting innocent Jews for no reason other than racism, they're hurting criminals and convicts in a maximum security prison. They're hurting a man who just killed another man.

We can go round the bend again with the whole they-could-be-innocent thing, but I just have quite a hard time believing they are. They're in that prison because they'd proven time and time again that they were dangerous. They're there because no other prison would hold them.

It makes no difference to me if Kuril is also a crook; it doesn't really change anything. I'm not trying to paint him as the white knight doing the right thing. He's bad, yes. He's a bad man hurting bad people.

[AntiChri5]

Nightwriter wrote...

Inverse, I assume the word that was bleeped out was Nazis, yes?

I agree that the beating of that prisoner should be stopped for the very same reasons - for what it does to the guards.

However what I keep trying to say is that what's going on here is very different than, say, Nazis torturing Jews. The Jews were perfectly innocent and had done nothing wrong. The Gestapo were monsters for what they did. These guards are not hurting innocent Jews for no reason other than racism, they're hurting criminals and convicts in a maximum security prison. They're hurting a man who just killed another man.

We can go round the bend again with the whole they-could-be-innocent thing, but I just have quite a hard time believing they are. They're in that prison because they'd proven time and time again that they were dangerous. They're there because no other prison would hold them.

It makes no difference to me if Kuril is also a crook; it doesn't really change anything. I'm not trying to paint him as the white knight doing the right thing. He's bad, yes. He's a bad man hurting bad people.

Actually, they are in that prison because someone is willing to pay to keep them there. Are most there because their government has put them in for the reasons you listed? Yes. But all we can say without a doubt is someone was willing to pay to put him there.

[Nightwriter]

If we based everything on what we know without a doubt, we'd have so little.

Sometimes you just have to go on what you know is likely true.