Meet The Creepy-Ass Palantir Bro Who Wants To Bring Back Public Hangings
When your entire personality is a red flag.
Last week, Palantir co-founder and “Paypal Mafia” member Joe Lonsdale announced that, in the event that the nation went even more full dystopia and he were somehow in charge of everything, he would like to bring back public hangings.
“If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law,” Lonsdale posted on Xitter. “We will quickly try and hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”
By “masculine,” I’m pretty certain he means “makes him feel tough/gives him a boner.”
Now, this would be creepy enough coming from anyone, but coming from a guy who helped found the world’s creepiest mass surveillance company … yikes.
The sadistic nonsense was actually part of a response to equally ridiculous Quillette founder Claire Lehmann, who suggested that Pete Hegseth ought to be less “grotesque” about his war crimes. Not that he should stop doing said war crimes, but that he shouldn’t be so tacky about it.
“She’s just wrong,” he wrote. “Leftist schoolmarm leaders cause violence and evil in our civilization. Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals. Killing bad guys is DoW job. He should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.”
People who say things like “killing bad guys” apparently think they are living in a jingoistic cartoon from the 1990s, and should thus never be put in charge of anything.
Of course, literally all available evidence has shown that severity of punishment has practically no impact on criminal behavior, largely because people don’t commit crimes thinking that they will be caught. Violent crime is most often committed by young men under the age of 25, in part because their brains are not fully developed and they lack impulse control. Even our own Justice Department acknowledges this.
Other things shown to actually deter crime? Strong social safety nets, high social mobility, the ability to go to college, access to healthcare, etc. It’s almost like “having actual hope for the future” tends to cause people to make better decisions.
Oh, you know what hasn’t, though? Inuring people to violence and cruelty. A society in which people are accustomed to seeing other people hanged — which, to be clear, is an absolutely horrific and disgusting thing to witness — is ultimately going to be less disturbed by violence and cruelty than they would otherwise. Emotional desensitization has been positively linked to violent behavior for decades now, which is why actually I wasn’t allowed to watch the same cartoons and action movies that seem to have informed Joe Lonsdale’s worldview. Indeed, the fact that Lonsdale would be excited by the idea of hangings instead of repulsed by them is an example of the kind of emotional desensitization that ultimately leads to violence.
The irony is that people like Lonsdale are literally looking to combat a problem of poor “masculine” impulse control with poor “masculine” impulse control. He wants to see people hanged because that is what his “impulse” tells him would work. He doesn’t want to look at evidence, he doesn’t want to look at research, he doesn’t want to look at the fact that places like Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Ireland (yes, Ireland!) are far safer than the US without having to become dystopian hellscapes — largely by doing the exact things I mentioned have been proven to reduce crime.
The only country Lonsdale can name as an example of his dream working out is Singapore. Oh, how these motherfuckers love Singapore. Except what it really shows is that the only way to make this work out is to also have the kind of highly authoritarian society that would make most Americans completely miserable. Sure, they have a low rate of violent crime, but what people have to give up in exchange for that is a whole lot of freedom.
It’s also worth noting that this has not made Singapore the safest country in the world. Indeed, it ranks 19th on the U.S. News list of the world’s safest nations — right behind the United Kingdom. Oh, and they don’t actually even have public hangings there. Nations that do have public hangings include Iran, North Korea, Somalia and Afghanistan, all countries we definitely want to emulate.
But this shit is never, ever about what is effective and always more about what people like Lonsdale would find personally satisfying. It’s why no amount of evidence that torture is more likely to produce false statements than reliable information can convince people who are jazzed about torture that it shouldn’t be used. Ultimately, they like the idea of torturing people too much to give it up.
It’s hard to understand why conservatives are so fanatically hungry for misery. As much as they cry that “socialism” (a.k.a. being a civilized nation that tries to make life nice for people) would lead to misery (which, again, look at the “socialist” countries that are significantly happier and safer than we are), they literally advertise the far more miserable society they wish to live in. A society with no social safety net, in which people are constantly anxious and afraid that one bad thing happening in their lives could cause them to fall destitute, without affordable healthcare, without education, where human creativity is replaced with AI slop, where we have to see our neighbors violently kidnapped by ICE agents, where everyone is forced to at least pretend to have the same religion, and where we all have to watch other human beings getting hanged on a regular basis. That just sounds like an extremely bad time to me and I don’t actually understand why anyone would want to live that way.
I also don’t think too many other people, beyond 4chan edgelords, actually want to live that way, either, when it comes down to it. So yeah, let’s let this creep who co-founded an AI mass surveillance company keep going on about how his fantasy world involves us all having to watch people being hanged on the regular, just so everyone knows what it is they’d be signing up for were people like him “in charge.”
OPEN THREAD.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Monday Bear. He was often very chatty and also a gummy Bear with no teeth that never slowed him down when it came to enjoying his food.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-185542102?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc
"Sinking narco boats publicly helps deter others. As does hanging repeat violent criminals. Killing bad guys is DoW job. He should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.”
The fact that the US has the death penalty is why there are no murders there.