aut- entropy

xv

Capital Punishment, death penalty, execution; all of these are terms for describing the legal process in which a person is, through some sort of mediated form of retaliatory justice, put to death by his state or his nation as an intended punishment for his committed crime(s). Today, the crimes society seems inclined to regard as requiring ‘capital’ action are generally murder, espionage, and treason, with the heavy focus really being on murder. Murder is as bad as you can get, and it’s especially those cases of mass/serial murder, terrorism, or child murder which oftentimes cause those great waves of societal uproar that in turn strengthens the general publics approval of, and belief in, the means of death as a deterrent to crime. Many are passionate in their established positions and odd belief that ‘an eye for an eye’ is an inherent moral truth. But we all know the infamous ambiguity of morality. So I think it’s a good position to start off with, that declaring moral truths will lead you no where. What it really does is it vitalizes unsound arguments that ask one to beg the question rather than follow valid premises. So facts are all I wish to present, facts defined not by their conclusion, but by what they mean in themselves.

To begin lets take a look at the simple claim that the death penalty, as a civil threat, actually persuades those intended on committing a crime to not commit that crime. This might be a reasonable assumption, made on the prior assumption that the process is itself frequent enough to be an actual risk to the perpetrator. Really, the arbitrariness of system makes it so that any one person can receive a death sentence while significant amounts of others criminalized for the very same crime, receive only life sentences. The factors that lead one to receive the death penalty are determined by many circumstances, mainly location, and whether or not a prosecutor decides to to seek it out in court or not. Local politics are sometime at play, and often media influence can greatly affect the precedence of some cases, but overall, “approximately 2% of those convicted of crimes that make them eligible for death penalty, actually receive the death penalty.” (Amnesty, 2012)

So right away i’d ask the question, if capital punishment only affect 2% of those committing the crimes, then why do we let it persist on, other than to the feed the pure illusion of justice? I guess it makes sense that over 140 countries, two-thirds of the world, have come to abolish capital punishment in law or in practice (Amnesty, 2012). With China, North Korea, and Iran taking up the rest of the majority of the world’s executions, the United States seems a little too content in being amongst such noble names. But after realizing capital punishment does really nothing to deter the crime, it can’t do anything to promote the crime can it? Of the 14 states not-endorsing capital punishment, all have homicidal rates just meeting or below the national average.(Amnesty, 2012) The crime rate in the 14 top executing states are anywhere from 48% to 101% higher than the national average. How can this be?!

In reality, this is actually a common psychological phenomenon seen throughout modern society in which, the knowledge that something is bad, or punishable, somehow encourages that very action. This natural response alone is what constitutes the end to the drug war, and any abolition, but it more importantly encourages a serious reform of our prison systems, but i’ll talk more about that later. For economic standards, capital punishment is not thrifty. Usually, sealing someones fate with death is something done with care and seriousness, intense analyzations of the evidence, and is generally met with a thorough assurance that ‘justice is being served’. Rightly so, the process of convicting takes years and goes through many meticulous phases, much of the time being spent on special motions or extra time for jury selection. Much of costs are spent on investigations by the prosecutors, and when sometimes the verdict come out less than death, or innocence is proven, all that ‘taxpayer money’ spent on keeping that person on death row now becomes wasted. Not to mention that wrongful convictions for all crimes happen frequently, the best estimation being at a rate of 6% of all crime convictions, and this comes with no exception for the death penalty. Since 1973, 140 people have been released from death row due to evidence that they were wrongly convicted, while 1,200 were executed.(Mentor, 2012) That’s already 10%, and those where only the ones the legal system caught.

So what is there to do? Well the first thing is to realize the irrelevance of the death sentence. It does more harm than good, and it’s perceived ‘justice’ in the public’s eye may only exist for the intentions of masking other failures in our prison system. Even if by some further unconstitutional probabilities, capital punishment was increasingly enforced for crimes like murder. If it became more timely, and was done with a consistency that allowed some actual deterrence towards crime to really develop, it would still do unimaginable harm to our civil liberties, considering wrongful convictions alone. All this leads me to deduce that the key to reducing and preventing crime (which is supposed to be the goal of the justice system) might not be found in the laws or punishments, as serious as they are, that it enforces, but really, in how the system works to change the society.

Resources such as crime prevention, mental health treatment, education, rehabilitation, and drug treatment are already underfunded prison programs that loose even more every time another person is put on on death row. Imagine if the costs attributed to death row went instead to things like educating those in prison; genuinely helping those who have made mistakes, monitoring them psychologically, and actually attempting to understand what social conditions brought them to this point, and then try to change those social conditions. There is really so much the prison system can do to gain insight and to help society, but for so many people, the ‘lock-em-up and throw away the key’ mentality is what prevails. ‘Criminals get what they deserve’, and ‘thats how they learn’. And so like children, retribution dominates our world view of justice as right under our noses, it perpetuates the very crime it fights, while it blocks our access to the source. The scale of justice can only measure in so far, in a world where complexity houses every situation. Down with death penalty. Down with death penalty.

everyones idea’s are so influenced by each others, or more so by the uncontrollable degree to which we choose to seek out and accept opposing ideas.

holy shit say anything. give it up. ‘admit it again’ is HORRIBLE. its true, maturity neuters passion.

do you know what to do

when that chronic is all around you

drippin out yo nose bro that smoke it goes and comes and goes

so fast too fast doesn’t last

like puff n pass, its grass then its gas

a cashed mass of the best catch of the batch

soooooo nigga you wanna match?!>!>??!

but noo.. you ain’t got ish

you bummin off my shit you little bitch -goddamnit!

well we really split it

so i’ll close lips while yr takin yr share of hits

and leavin all yo spit up on the mouth bit,

bitch! you better wipe that shit

so i can finish with this rip

in this rap

and get back on track

up to speed, on the weed

or lack there of that.

looking through old notebooks and posting shit i read and think is cool. I vaguely remember any of this… though It was only a year ago. It Feels like i’m stealing all of these from another person.

Why do we do the things we do? Where do the ideas inside of our heads
come from? In 1899, the author Joseph Conrad wrote in his novel Heart
of Darkness that, “The mind of man is capable of anything — because
everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future”.

This sort of humanism reverberates endlessly within me, and is what
motivates me to try to understand what it really is that makes the ‘mind
of man’ so special; to question just were along in the biological process
of evolution did nature produce the ‘noggin’, with all it’s intricacies in
combining instinct and reason, and making the meme.

As human beings alive in the 21 century, all of us come face to face with
memes daily. In fact, that’s a complete understatement. Really, every second
of our lives are occupied by memes, and marked by a direct interaction with
them on an almost subconscious level. The meme concept is special because
it applies to us all; they are always around us, and they come from within us.

Today I will reveal to you guys exactly what memes are, how they
influence us, and how our awareness of them has and can continue to
change everything from how open sourced technologies are, to how mankind
evolves from now.

So lets begin not by talking about memes, but about genes.

Lets first put it all into context of evolution. More precisely biological
evolution. That is, the replication, mutation, and natural selection of
DNA sequences, or genes. Wholly simplified, the mind was eventually
over a vast amount of time, developed through these complex processes.
Then when the mind could conceive of concepts, or ideas, those concepts would replicate themselves to the tune of man’s necessities and desires, just as the gene replicated itself to the tune of nature.

If it’s still a bit shady what memes are, here are some examples.
1. The music you listen too. The fashion you follow. The art that
fascinates you. The trends that keep you occupied.
2. On a deeper level, the religions we choose to believe in. The
politics we choose to endorse. Even the boundaries that divide
nations, since they do not naturally exist.
3. On an everyday level, the pencil in your hand. The desk you sit
in. The four walls that surround us. You know, why not just 3?

I guess what it all boils down to is an idea. A meme is any and every
conceived idea, but more importantly, the popular ones. Thinking a
little more into it, and you realize the meme concept itself is freaking
meme! Memes end only where nature begins.

So, how do these things exactly, replicate?

The key is in understanding how ideas influence us: both in good ways, and
in terrible ways.
When looking into social evolution, we can primarily see that memes
are born out of necessity. The starving monkey that spontaneously
decides to poke a hanging banana with a stick gets to eat it faster than
waiting for it to fall. Soon all the monkeys go ape and learn to poke
instead of waiting around for nature to do its thing. This is just one
example amongst many others of how memes not only overcome
nature, but how they are transmitted. Transmissions are usually
characterized by memes fighting hard for their survival.

And there are other modes of transmission.

<BR>

There’s cognitive, or passive transmission. Passive because
transmission is almost inescapable. What it comes down to
is the universal human ‘nature’. For example language, gesture,
and communication are all passive memes. These memes
ultimately blur the line between what is innate and what is not,
because if it is innate and part of nature, then it is not a meme,
right?

 Motivational memes are born out of self-interest, just as it
interested the monkeys to poke with sticks. With this, anything
that progresses our wellbeing is properly adopted, shared, and
spread. Well, when other negative factors are excluded.

On a smaller level, we can distinguish four other potential modes of
meme transmission.

1.Parent-to-child transmission, which is defined by the efficiency
of a parent to raise children who adopt the ideas and values of
their parents. This promises a higher rate of meme replication,
regardless of what ideas are in question.
2. Then there’s the core proselytic mode of transmission.
Through this, dominant memes are spread by the simple
exchange of ideas. This transmission dominates the intellectual
sphere, where conceiving and sharing new points of view are
essential. Today, the negative connotation of ‘proselytizing’
usually applies to the ruthless attempts of some to convert
others to particular belief systems. Either way, the beliefs most
accepted at any given time are the ones more likely to survive.
3. Preservational transmission comes in somewhat the same
vain as the fanatic proselytizer. These memes encourage
devotion from their hosts, as well as resistance to other memes
that threaten the ideas held. This resistance not only enhances the
preservation of the meme, but also lessens the influence of other
proselytizers. Notice the dangers of ideas become more and
more imminent.
4. Finally we come to Adversative transmission. The only form of
transmission that promises total advantage to the preservation
of the meme. The way it does this however is by influencing
the holder to fight competing ideas with utmost aggression.
Oftentimes, this includes aggression against those who hold
the competing ideas. In context, whether it be a religious
extremist, or a soldier defending democracy, adversative
transmission exists in almost every society, the pretense being
that some memes ought to be fought for.

So what does this all mean to us?

Well, the study of genetics has now transcended more or less into the
study of ‘memetics’. But, this comes with a good amount of scrutiny.

Without a doubt, using memes to explain and map the patterns
and transmissions of cultural ideas as done with genes, is
groundbreaking. In theory, it is cultural analysis on a scientific
level, and it is opening the doors to so much more. But the question remains, should memes be studied? Can they?

And if so, to what lengths? Obviously the surrounding world
of conceivable ideas cannot be entirely mapped like that of the
world of genes. The enormity is unprecedented. So what hope
do memes have as a science? There is no ‘human meme-nome
project’.

Regardless, the benefits of understanding memes are clear when only
one factor is added. The Internet.
So put on your troll faces, because all your memes are belong
to us, and you still ain’t got no pancake mix. So in the name
of LEEEROY JENKINS, THIS IS SPARTA! uh btw guys, be careful, I
think I heard there was a pedobear on the loose. naahh just

rick rollin. lols.

Really though, on the Internet these days, we try not to get too
demotivated. But one thing is clear. With all this technology,
meme transmission has reached unbelievable speeds. And this
breakthrough, serves not only for our endless entertainment,
but it ensures efficiency in the global dialogue of ideas. No
longer do societies have to live in the dark, wasting their
time on bad memes. We now realize the liberating potential of free flowing information.  This… freedom for all mankind that can only exist when memes are permitted to be shared
globally, without government repression or enforced cultural
separatism. But, this is only a possibility, as long the Internet
itself remains free and uncensored. Some claim censorship in
the name of protecting intellectual property, but the truth is
there is no such thing as intellectual property, when memes
belong to everyone. Unfortunately in some nations, a free
Internet has yet to be established. But here in the U.S it is
important that we maintain what we have, for the sake of
mankind. So SOPA quite frankly, you can suck my PIPA.

Memes, are pretty amazing, and now that I’ve shared with you guys my
interests in them, and more broadly in cultural analysis, the only thing left to
do really is to think about it.

I leave you with this amazing, eerily encapsulating quote from an anonymous
source. It goes, “The moment there was a man to think, nature transcended
dimensions. The gene became the meme.” Thank you.