These fools never want to take responsibilities for their heinous actions and betraying their own country! All for their precious "GOD"and SAVIOR!Weak assholes are what you all are.
New diseases affecting Americans: Foxitus and FoxMania
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Weak assholes are what you all are.
The gallows were at best symbolic, at worst woefully unfit for purpose. They weren't hanging anyone from those, at least not successfully. They simply wouldn't hold.
To be fair most people who are hung die of a broken neck, not asphyxiation. As long as they can withstand his weight for a second or two, fall distance + weight = bad neck day. Even if the gallows snap almost immediately, as long as there was at least a second of hold to snap a neck it would serve the purpose of killing if not the display purpose.
Alternately these bastards would have just shot Mike Pence dead on the spot.
Doesn't it have to be done right for that to work, and even with proper gallows it can often go wrong?
Maybe we should give these imbecile some Fox Die. You know what, on second thought, no. That would be granting them mercy and an easy way out. I want them to suffer ultimate despair.
Sort of.
The idea is that people hanged were supposed to die of a broken neck, but it had to be done properly to achieve that: the noose needs to set right around the neck, and they need to fall in the the right way a long enough distance. By the 20th century, professional executors had got it down pretty well. But prior to that there are all too many depressing stories of people having to go under the platform and yank on the hanged person's legs to try to make their vertebrae separate because it didn't happen during the fall.
It's sort of odd to think that executing people was something that was supposed to happen, yet for the victim to take a minute or two to die, writhing and gasping, was just a bit too awkward, unpleasant and uncomfortable for everyone who'd come to see the spectacle.
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What's even more interesting is how squeamish people got as time went on. Just a couple hundred years prior going to an execution and watching someone get tortured to death was a fun day for the whole family that people camped out for and brought snacks.
Hell, the last time the breaking wheel was used in a public execution was in the mid 1800s, so it was only about 2 generations between "make him suffer as much as possible for his sins" and "eww he's turning blue someone make it go faster."
Either that or they would have tried to hang him, failed, and then shot him. I'm not arguing they weren't out there to kill them a VP, Mitch, and/or some Democrats in Congress - merely that they weren't going to hang them, at least not on those gallows.
To be fair I think history has a lot of traumatized people in it. How many millions of men had PTSD after brutal hand to hand battles, gutting another living screaming human being with a sword while your brother gets his skull caved in by a noble with a mace?
I think people were just more used to being traumatized and didn't think that maybe that's not a good way to live.
My suspicion is that this is to do with democracy and civic development. In the old days, the king orders someone killed and the peasants turn out to uncritically condemn the evildoer. However, at some point perhaps when the peasants start wondering whether the king has a right to rule, they start to question whether he should be putting them to death, and whether justice is fair. At that point, executions aren't quite so entertaining any more.
Some stuff happens even faster. Apparently, a duel (like, a proper one to the death) went from being the highest standard of upholding one's honour to a risible practice only the most hopelessly gauche and uncivilised would propose in approximately one generation.
I'm somewhat troubled by you defining "not being into watching people die as spectator entertainment" as "squeamish"
Considering my own personal dislike of watching actual violence/harm/death to real living beings, versus all the people I know and grew up with that are into that kind of thing, I consider myself the more stable and not fucking psychotic example. I remember watching a Faces of Death when I was probably...shit...14 or so? And one of the clips was of some people literally blow torching a live pig/boar, and it was squealing in agony the whole time. And this clip went on for a LONG time. My friends were laughing...I wanted to throw up.
Empathy isn't a bad thing.
Not to most of us. But let's not forget that during a Republican debate, when a moderator asked Paul Ryan if a person got sick without any ability to pay for healthcare should be left to die, people in the crowd applauded and shouted "Yes". One person even yelled "Let 'em die!".
There are people in this country who want to see others die for the "crime" of not being able to afford our ridiculously-expensive healthcare system.
The phraseology aside, back in past times there was a great deal more death. Life, as the saying goes, was "nasty, brutish and short". People will have been much more accustomed not just to human death (intentional and unintentional) but of course animals too. Some desensitisation from this will be likely. As technology and greater civilisation decreased mortality, people probably became less familiar with and more appalled by violence. I would argue that it is this ever-decreasing experience of violence and death that has sparked a lot of protection of animals, as well.
"Squeamish" is a perhaps not the most sensitive way to put it, but in the basic essence, the argument is plausible.
It was genuine entertainment. One of the most disturbing things I have seen in cinema is the John Wayne version of True Grit, where people were singing hymnals as they waited for the hanging to start. It was realistic. They also had dog fights, cock fights for the same reason: It was fun to them, and something to do, and changed the pace of life for a little bit.
There are stories during the American Civil war on the day it started, people would set up picnics so they can watch the fighting in comfort...only to need to runaway as the fighting came their way.
In some ways we still want it today in many regards. Maybe not so literally, but how many people watch NASCAR for the skill of driving at hundreds of miles per hour and how many watch it for the inevitable ugly crashes?
Even before the Rating system in America for films, television, and video games we had violent movies' with swords and guns. As tech progressed and people paying to the Hay's Code waned you could see more and more brutal stuff. Be it in Saturday Morning Cartoons (kids, ask your Parents about blocks of cartoons every Saturday morning on normal TV channels).
The original Doom was one of the big reasons for a rating system in Video Games. Today, one has to ask was it all that violent, especially when you compare it to DOOM 2016?
I thought it was Mortal Kombat that was responsible for that in America.
I'm not sure there was actually "more death" back then, given the population density versus today. But yes, I'm well aware that people were more casual with death. They were also fucking assholes on so many moral and ethical levels that I don't really see how it's at all a valid comparison. If your argument is "well that's just how it was back then", it's not really an argument, they were shitbags back then, I don't care what they felt was just normal.