There is no utility in punishment. Wanting people who wronged you to suffer isn’t a desire for justice, but a desire for revenge. Dangerous people can be stopped from hurting others without locking them in cages or treating them poorly.
The State of the Art and Excession are the two I haven’t gotten my hands on yet. I’m reading Matter right now and am consistently blown away by how forward thinking the author is. All of his work holds up so well.
My favorite fictional universe is The Culture. I think I’m going to be alright lol.
I had no idea about the AvE thing. It’s wild but not totally surprising. I used to be an avid watcher of his content but a couple of years ago I started getting bad vibes from and stopped consuming his content. The dirty jokes started to feel like they were more than just jokes and his sexism wasn’t ironic. I also started to notice him making statements that felt dogwhistley.
I believe that mandatory military service is absurd. Nobody chose to be born in any nation or under the jurisdiction of any government. No one else should be be obligated to support or fight for the ideology or actions or even the right to exist of a government they have effectively been assigned to by complete chance. It completely ignores the right of individuals to have their own systems of belief about what is morally correct.
For example, I am largely in agreement with Buddhist philosophy and only support violence under strict circumstances. I was born and currently live in the United States, and I would gladly go to prison or be executed over directly or indirectly being responsible for the suffering of others at the request of my government. Everything my country stands for is antithetical to my very strongly held beliefs about what is right, and I would proudly label myself a traitor. I believe that if you can’t find enough volunteers to fight for a cause, then maybe that cause isn’t actually worth shedding blood over.
Replace prisons with compassionate psychiatric hospitals with the purpose of rehabilitating violent criminals who are a danger to the public. People who are not rehabilitatable would still be locked up for the rest of their lives, but they would be treated as humanely as possible. In this case though locking them up wouldn’t be punishment, but rather harm reduction.