Castration and blinding were punishments for petty crimes like theft

that's the point you dumbfuck, so would rapists and murderers.

So people who commit a crime know they will be caught?

Or do they try and get away with it?

The more intelligent sociopaths would probably kill their victims more swiftly and try to stay as hidden as possible since confirmation of the crime is death or torture.

not even close mate

Are you implying that you're proud to be a third world monkey?

How is that a good thing? You know you could be wrongly accused of rape very easily, right?

And the less intelligent? They are making a transaction, they get this benefit from the crime, and they spend this many years in jail, and they go into the whole endeavor knowing this?

Or do they, in fact, also believe they will get away with it?

Never heard about thieves being castrated.

>In the 11th century, William the Conqueror used blinding as a punishment for rebellion to replace the death penalty in his laws for England; it was also used as punishment for killing a hart or hind in a royal forest. Henry I of England blinded William, Count of Mortain, who had fought against him at Tinchebray in 1106. He also ordered blinding and castration as a punishment for thieves.
>Evans, Michael (2007). The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England. A&C Black. pp. 37, 89–90. ISBN 1852855851.

don't apply your ethics to completely culturally and socially alien people

That's the point, I'm asking why they were so alien.

Before modern forensic science and the invention of recording equipment, theft and petty crime was less risky and probably more common. The populace probably got so fed up with it that they created extremely harsh punishments to deter it.

Or more simply on the basis that it was less risky to do crime in those days, it was necessary to increase the risk of it by the possibility of harsh punishment.

Also, human rights, a notion which grounds our current belief against the practice of "cruel and unusual punishment", was not yet formulated or very widespread in an implicit form.

>Also, human rights, a notion which grounds our current belief against the practice of "cruel and unusual punishment", was not yet formulated or very widespread in an implicit form.

I don't think you need a formal concept of "human rights" to understand that getting castrated is horrible.

I'm not saying it's a good thing but the whole point of severe punishment is deterrent so the post I was replying to was reduntant in saying he'd take the easier option.

>Notice under a dictatorship regime there is zero crime.
I don't notice that at all.

It's fairly obvious that people will by default treat enemies very cruelly, given that this was the norm for thousands of years.

Note how today (or really since the notion of human rights became widespread), in order for someone (usually a group of people) to be treated badly, the perpetrators first need to be convinced that their victims are in some sense not human, that is, not having human rights.

People do not seem to care very much that horrible things happen to enemies, in fact, they want horrible things to happen to them, unless they have some belief system which holds that humans cannot be treated cruelly.

>why they were so alien
Dude, they existed first. We're the ones that seem alien .

You could've phrased it as:

>Better than today where you only get 1 year in jail for rape.

Instead of:

>Better than today where you get 1 year in jail for rape.

If you wanted it to be clear you were taking the view that having a strong deterrent was a good thing and not a bad thing. Without a qualifier like "only" it sounds like you're saying it'd be better to get castrated and blinded than to be incarcerated. I think I'm mostly just confused by why you would take the side of more barbaric deterrents being "better" and not worse. I would ten to assume you meant "better" as in less barbaric unless given a qualifier like "only" to show you're referring to the jail time as less severe yet also less good somehow.

I'm of the opinion that ensuring a certain group of criminals can't reproduce is a boon for society at large

I could agree with that except false accusations.

Even if the chances of getting falsely convicted were only one in a million, I'd still be opposed to a punishment like castration. If you can't prevent false conviction, you need to have punishments that aren't completely horrible.

>>Better than today where you get 1 year in jail for rape.

but user, I didn't make that post. I was just being a pedant about the reply to it.

Make false crime punishable by death so women can understand consequences exist.

Well I'm being a pedant about your pedantry. You can only think it's "redundant" if you assume the person is taking the view that more barbaric punishments are "better." The reply was made specifically because it *didn't* make that assumption and therefore wasn't redundant.

Saying "I'd rather get the one year in jail" would be redundant if you think "better" = "more barbaric," but that's clearly the opposite of what that reply's stance was.

Most false accusations aren't intentional. It's more often a case of witnesses (and all human beings in general) having unreliable memories. A witness can see someone in a lineup and falsely believe they recognize them.

crime wasnt just seen as breaking a rule
It was seen as a literal offense and threat to the rule of the monarch, so they had to be properly punished.

>castration and blinding were punishments for petty crimes like theft

Absolutely nothing wrong with this.

I hope you get wrongfully convicted of a crime one day. Then you can complain about how your punishment isn't severe enough.

And you can't imagine a law you wouldn't follow.

Public execution for public sex when?

>My theory is because they literally had no internet, no TV, and no Coca-Cola.

I haven't had Coca-Cola or watched TV in years

Brutality of medieval justice is overstated, in England at least. Most minor crimes are punished by a fine or time in the stocks with a sign telling everyone what you did. You needed to do something really bad to receive capital or corporal punishment (except in the army, where it's more common in the few surviving regulations).

It made ex cons easier to spot

Interesting. I thought this savagery only existed in the medieval Balkans.

>people did not do detective work.
Romans and Imperial Chinese did.