GIVE TIL IT HURTS

The continued existence of this site depends entirely on contributions from its readers. If you're able to, please consider donating or subscribing to CF. Thanks!


  

THANKS!

“Cruel and unusual”? Naaaaaah

Bring back the stocks. Among other needful things.

The coronavirus has given politicians new opportunities to project the power of government, and it has given us new opportunities to observe politicians breaking their own rules. Few things are as vile and contemptible as the hypocrisy of the ruling class.

We recall that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), during the lockdowns, had her hairdresser open up her shop for a private, maskless salon treatment. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was photographed at Dulles airport in September without her mask, shortly before she flew out on her husband’s $50 million Gulfstream jet. John Kerry took his mask off on a plane, and he was flying commercial—first class. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was maskless on the streets of New York City last year, where he was gratifyingly heckled by a fearless New Yorker as his entire entourage and the press corps and even the heckler were wearing their masks. Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo (D) wore a mask for the interview in which she tried to explain why she was seen without a mask at a bar after closing bars and telling everyone to wear a mask. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) traveled to visit family in Florida after telling everyone to avoid nonessential travel. Austin, Texas Mayor Steve Adler (D) also told people to stay home—while on vacation in Cabo San Lucas (he apologized, and said he wouldn’t do it again, but there was this wedding he really needed to attend). And over the weekend, photos surfaced of Barack Obama’s lavish, huge, and non-socially distanced birthday celebration on Martha’s Vineyard, as the rest of the country is being threatened with a renewed mask mandate and other restrictions.

After listing several international examples of same, we come to a suggested remedy worthy of serious consideration.

All these incidents serve to remind us what an exceptionally luxurious, frivolous, out-of-touch, one-percent-of-the-one-percent life is led by the politicians who tell us to be patient with losing our businesses or being forced to stay home from work. Their hypocrisy, their abuse of political power, should be a crime. Perhaps not a capital crime. But it does deserve something beyond a fine.

Oh, I’m perfectly fine with making them capital crimes, myself; if nothing else, all possibility of recidivism would be eliminated. But hey, maybe that’s just me.

Politicians who abuse their power should be put in the stocks. Money means nothing to the super-rich and super-powerful, and they will never serve jail time. But Nancy Pelosi would long remember being forced to sit in the stocks for a day outside the hair salon she had opened just for her. Gavin Newsom might learn a thing or two from having to look up at the people who walk by him while he has his feet up outside the French Laundry.

The point of the stocks was to humiliate people—not as an end, but with the intention of reforming their behavior. In 2004, a mail thief was ordered to stand outside the San Francisco Post Office for eight hours wearing a sign that read: “I stole mail. This is my punishment.” The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this sentence, inasmuch as the humiliation served the purpose of making the culprit a better citizen.

Nothing else would be so effective or work so quickly in cutting these political big shots down to the size of ordinary people. It would force power-abusing politicians to do what they hate most—be confronted by their voters. Perhaps any politician who serves more than two terms should be put in the stocks for one day every year as a reminder of the basic loathsomeness of his profession. It might be easier than passing national term limits.

Politicians should be compelled in every respect, as much as possible, to live like ordinary, average, people. When they abuse their power, they should be treated far worse than average people, because their power and responsibility is so much greater. Politicians seem to think they deserve special treatment—and they do: Set them in the stocks. Not for long. Just for as long as it takes for them to learn their lessons.

Again: not harsh enough to suit me, not by a long yard. If “let the punishment fit the crime” is to be our standard, then full weight must be given to the innumerable lives ruined, the businesses destroyed, the human misery created, and the fortunes lost or stolen because of the actions of the career-politician class. That can only mean that leaving ’em stocked and subject to public abuse and humiliation until they’re well and truly broken, in body, mind, and spirit, is the way to go. “Learning their lessons” will never be adequate to the task; they never will, it’s completely beyond them.

Personally, I think even the stocks are insufficiently “cruel and unusual” for such despicable toads. If we truly intend to balance the scales of justice as compensation to the victims for all the harm politicians have inflicted, we should also consider bringing back, say, the Brank:

The device was a metal cage or mask that enclosed the head, often with ridiculous adornments designed to humiliate its victim. In some towns, the Brank had a bell attached to its rear only to announce the presence of the victim who was instantly mocked by the people she “endangered” through gossip.

Many variants of the Brank appeared throughout the Middle Ages, some included spikes that penetrated the victim’s flesh when she spoke.

The duration of this torture could range from a few hours, to months. In some cases, the victim was left to die with the Brank; if she ever removed it, she’d be tortured with another method and sometimes killed.

NOW we’re getting somewhere. Among the many other options which also merit looking into would be the Rack, the Breaking Wheel, the Thumbscrews, and my all-time favorite, the Judas Chair:

Also known as the Judas Chair, the Chair of Torture was a terrible device of the Middle Ages. It was used until the late 1800’s in Europe.

There are many variants of the chair. They all have one thing in common: spikes cover the back, arm-rests, seat, leg-rests and foot-rests. The number of spikes in one of these chairs ranges from 500 to 1,500.

To avoid movement, the victim’s wrists were tied to the chair or, in one version, two bars pushed the arms against arm-rests for the spikes to penetrate the flesh even further. In some versions, there were holes under the chair’s bottom where the torturer placed coal to cause severe burns while the victim still remained conscious.

This instrument’s strength lies primarily in the psychological fear caused on the victims. It was a common practice to extract a confession by forcing the victim to watch someone else be tortured with this instrument.

The time of death greatly varied ranging from a few hours to a day or more. No spike penetrated any vital organ and the wound was closed by the spike itself which delayed blood loss greatly.

Ingenius, and just the thing to instill the proper fear into the malificent buggers. One of these placed in a prominent position in both Congressional chambers, the Oval Office, and the Supreme Court could go a long way towards rectifying our problems. One in every state’s Governor’s Mansion, situated so that every last elected and appointed bureauweasel had to walk right by the thing multiple times each and every working day, would probably fix the whole mess practically overnight.

After that, restore the lost art of pistols at dawn on the Field of Honor to full legal status and we’d have ourselves a civilization worthy of the name again.

4
4

3 thoughts on ““Cruel and unusual”? Naaaaaah

  1. Proper punishment for the political class would certainly be a wonderful thing, and would help a lot of problems. Never happen, of course.

    As far as the long, long list of pols breaking the rules set for the peasants, it is not hypocrisy and they are not “getting caught.” They are deliberately rubbing the peasants’ noses in their power by displaying that they are above the law. To the kinds of people attracted to those careers, doing so is one of the primary draws of being a prominent politician.

  2. Oh HELL yeah, the Brank with the bell attached.

    Welded to a 10 foot length of chain set into a 70 150 pound block of concrete at the other end.

    Mandatory attire for all politicians & bureaucrats, the very second spicy time begins.

    .
    Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Comments are closed.

Latest Posts

Latest Comments

CF Archives

Categories

Comments policy

NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.

If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.

Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.

Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.

Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.

Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle–now with RSS feeds! (where available)

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

Subscribe to CF!

Support options

Shameless begging

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:

Become a CF member!

Correspondence

Email addy: mike-at-this-url dot etc
All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless specified as private by the sender

Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media: A few people worth following on Gab:

Fuck you

Kill one for mommy today! Click to embiggen

Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
Donald Surber

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
Bill Whittle

Best of the best

Finest hosting service

Image swiped from The Last Refuge

2016 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards

RSS feed

RSS - entries - Entries
RSS - entries - Comments

Boycott the New York Times -- Read the Real News at Larwyn's Linx

Copyright © 2024