[throwaway2016b]

The main benefit of the death penalty is not deterrence, it is eugenic. Remove all of the irrationally violent from the gene pool for a few generations and you will soon have a population so much less prone to violent crime that you will forget why you had a death penalty in the first place. Until, that is, you start importing foreigners that have never had the violent culled from them, and all hell breaks loose in want of a solution that doesn't sound "racist."

To be blunt, this is one of the most fundamental differences between the most successful ethnic groups, and the least.

[JimmyAustin]

In 2014, the US executed 34 inmates. If you think that is enough to remove "the irrationally violent" from a country with a population of over 300 million, you might need to go back to a statistics class.

Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.

[throwaway2016b]

>In 2014, the US executed 34 inmates. If you think that is enough to remove "the irrationally violent" from a country with a population of over 300 million, you might need to go back to a statistics class.

You're right, it isn't nearly enough. I am talking about the effect from the past when execution was an immediate and extremely common punishment, not an ordeal that costs millions of dollars and years of retrials and appeals.

I was not necessarily advocating for eugenic programs today; I think the problem is better solved for most countries by stricter boarder controls and ending the insane policies of unrestricted immigration of violent unassimilable men. But if I were, the death penalty is not the only way to go about it; mandatory sterilization for violent criminals would have the same effect, given time and the willingness to use it consistently.

>Not to mention that if any of those inmates had children, the irrationally violent gene would live on anyway.

Yes, but you will get many of the irrationally violent before they can sire any children. Over generations this compounds and you end up with Swedes instead of Somalians.

I cut this out from my original post, but I'll add it now. Every people came from nothing. Every people had their times of feast and their times of famine. Social capital does not come from wealth, wealth comes from social capital. From being able to trust that your neighbor is probably not going to murder you and your family in your sleep.

And so you see that some groups bounce back from crippling poverty and brutal wars. And others have merely found more advanced ways to kill their neighbors.

[M_Grey]

Well you've made quite a few extraordinary claims... I don't suppose that you have commensurate evidence in support of them?

[throwaway2016b]

http://www.vladsokhin.com/work/crying-meri/

Peoples who have created anything remotely resembling a functioning society don't act with this brutality and frequency towards their own kin and tribes, no matter the circumstance. Either the Papua New Guineans and others like them have gone "backwards" from a common ancestor (insert pedantic comment about how there is no such thing as devolution), or the kin-killing irrationally violent genes were always there and the rest of us eliminated most of the people that carried them because they were preventing us from operating even the most primitive of villages.

[M_Grey]

I asked for commensurate evidence to support your claims, not adding racism to the mix.

[M_Grey]

I didn't realize this needed to be said here, but... you do understand how evolution and natural selection work, right? Beyond that, you understand the death penalty? We don't hunt down your progeny and kill them too. There is no "eugenic" benefit whatsoever, even if the scale were right, which it isn't. Even if eugenic control of violent tendencies were possible, which it isn't.