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89 points Michelangelo11 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.419s | source
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alwa ◴[] No.44522167[source]
Bizarre that this category of touring show continues after all these years. It seems like such self-consciously guilty behavior on the part of the organizers: you don’t accidentally end up with human corpses (that you’re selling as entertainment on the basis of being human corpses!).

They came by them somehow. If the nature of someplace’s justice system is that a death sentence comes with a “turned-to-plastic-and-paraded-around-for-selfies” enhancement, so as to trouble the offender’s eternal soul as well as their life, then just.. say that. “They’re ’bad guys’ and we as a company believe that’s what bad guys deserve.” Or even, “we weren’t involved in the circumstances of their death, but we figure if we’d had a chance to ask them they probably would be fine with it.”

As morally repugnant as I find the entire endeavor, I bet it wouldn’t even hurt ticket sales: people in the West have, in the not-so-distant past, treated hangings and beheadings as social occasions.

But like, there’s a right way to do informed consent—why not just do it and say “yeah we did it the obvious way”? Come to think of it… the ambiguity sure is a reliable path to free attention. It wouldn’t be the first marketing strategy to rely on provocation…

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1. CGMthrowaway ◴[] No.44522648[source]
Do you think these bodies were really "bad guys"?
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2. g-b-r ◴[] No.44522719[source]
Is everyone executed in China a bad guy?
3. alwa ◴[] No.44523550[source]
I do not. I’m skeptical of the idea that there’s such a thing as a “bad guy” in the first place. Although I’ve met some pretty mean SOBs.

It does seem like one framing that comes up a lot when people try to explain why they support capital punishment.

But I’m more or less with lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, who likes to phrase it “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” (Come to think of it I believe noted nightclub philosophers Sofi Tukker went on to borrow that formulation too...)