Cutting off a persons body part, even under anesthetic, sounds barbaric and it is. But you can ask yourself, would you rather have your foot surgically removed or spend 15 years in a miserable prison? I'm sure many would prefer to lose their foot. I would, myself. So as far as human rights go, I don't think there's a good argument to resist surgical punishment, because what we do already to serious offenders is at least as bad. Indeed, suicide is not uncommon in prisons. For many, imprisonment is effectively a death sentence.
So what are the advantages of surgical punishment? The most obvious is that it's cheap. In New Zealand it costs about $100,000 per-year to imprison a single inmate. That's a lot of money that could have been spent elsewhere. Removing a foot might be more like a one-off $5,000.
Also, an amputee can still be productive soon after their operation, whereas we lose the productive capacity of an inmate. So with physically implanted electronic tagging, the violent amputee-offender can be put to work.
The other advantage is that it may prove to be a more effective deterrent. One of the problems with prison, is that for some people prison is almost as good as life on the outside. Inmates are with their friends, are maybe safer, and are often better cared for than on the outside. Indeed, it's well known that some people reoffend specifically to get back into prison.
Cutting off body parts as a deterrent goes straight to the heart. Only a true freak would not be notably deterred with a threat like that, because it only has a downside, not up, and everyone--including the most simple mind--can visualise exactly what amputation means.
Now, if this is so--that is, if the threat of amputation proves to indeed be a more effective deterrent--then amputation might well represent an improvement on human rights, because the rights of victims to not be victimised in the first place is better actualised with a better deterrent.
Imagine for example, if the punishment for violent rape (not questionable "date rape") is castration. Now if this has the effect of dramatically reducing rape, through deterrence first and then impotence to block recidivism, then can we really argue that the surgical removal of the testes is such a bad or inhuman idea? You could argue that it would be more inhuman to not castrate a violent rapist, if the alternative is to stand back and let more rapes happen.
My conclusion is that if we can get past the 'yikes' factor with the cosmetics of surgical punishment, then there's enough of a positive argument behind it to justify exploring the possibility. At the least, we can consider giving prisoners the option. Allow them to trade time for a body part? It could be their choice.
We don't know what we don't know, and the fact of this is inescapable. This is why those who we rely on to inform us--or at least those who might empower us to inform ourselves--have the heart of real power in a democracy. As with incomplete information, you can induce nearly any assumption you like, no matter the intellect you're addressing. --------------------------------------------------------------------------
We say that democracy is power to the people. But observe democracy for a time, and it becomes clear enough that it's mainly power to the propagandist. Those who control what you will or will not know, what you or will not think about, and what your kids think about, etc, will dictate your socialised opinions within a prescribed (safe?) arena. That is power.
This is why democracy on its own is weak as a tool for good governance. Democracy needs an important complement to be truly effective, and that complement is the empowerment of foot-voting.
Your government is forced to do a good job--in spite of the propagandists, be they right or wrong--when you can easily leave your home state for a better one, at the point where your home state comparatively fails.
To illustrate the power of foot-voting clearly, imagine this. Imagine New Zealand was broken up into 10 mini-states, say 500k population each, with domestically governed borders, though unified under a small federal head in Wellington that performs centralised functions only where that makes sense...
This would put each mini-state under strong pressure to perform, because as soon as one state begins to fail, with say stupid policy or corruption, the political pressure for reform would then become intense. It will become intense not only from the locals not wanting to see the decline, but from people--especially the young--leaving too easily for better performing states. They won't waste their time with a loser country if they don't have to - and the vote won't save a nation from that. Hence with responsive competition ideological public policy has no choice but to answer to bottomline reality. Or your country becomes a ghost country.
We see the power of foot-voting in action, clearly enough in New Zealand. Since forever, New Zealand politicians have been worried about losing vital young workers to Australia, due to New Zealand's comparative under-performance. And rightly so. Easy access to Australia is the best thing that ever happened to New Zealand; without it, the country may well have devolved into a socialist state, driven principally by the propagandised ignorance of the common voter.
However, for the power of foot-voting to perform its magic in keeping democracies straight, it needs to be a strong force. And alas, within the western world at least it's no longer a strong force. Using New Zealand as the example again, we can see the housing market has been rigged (by political engineering) to inflate the cost of housing by a factor of 3 or more, with crippling results...
Now how can this happen if the affordable housing demand could have (should have) bled off to Australia? The answer is that Australia has enacted the exact same appalling policies that New Zealand has enacted. Alas, when the competition is just as bad over there as it is here, competition is then of course a useless dynamic. There's no way out, and in turn bad policy festers as opposed to reforms.
The New Zealand property market is, before anything, a failure of competition - a failure of functional foot-voting. In turn the power of propaganda reigns supreme, as it has. Most New Zealanders still support blocking urban expansion (the supposedly dreaded "sprawl") because they don't know that only 0.8% of the nations land is urbanised, that sprawl can promote more garden than concrete, and that as cities spatially expand the result is less congestion per-capita, not more. Hence the propagandists win and the housing market does not get fixed. Yet if Australia were still building good homes for $200,000, the New Zealand housing market certainly would get fixed and no matter what the propagandists have people believe. But again, the natural competition is dysfunctional. Australia's housing market is as tragic as New Zealand's.
Now let's look a little further. It's fascinating that the Western democracies have largely lock-step embraced the same public policies amongst each other over the previous 70 years, or more, suspiciously linked to the United Nations, which has had the direct effect of making all the western nations essentially the same. I can't say where it comes from, but we've seen remarkable centralisation in social and economic policy for even where those policies are highly contentious, or just plain bad. And the result, like with the New Zealand property example, has been the same. We see perverse levels of power to the propagandists, due to weak foot-voting, due to the absence of respectable inter-state competition. Want to tell your politically correct country to go jump in the lake? Sorry. They're all politically correct.
I describe the trend that we see as Globalisation. Or Global centralisation, to be specific. And again, it's effect is not 'power to the people' - it's power to the propagandist. It's power to the mass-media, schools, advertisers, big money, and even hate speech laws, etc. That is what democracy on its own is - and all it is. If I may be crass, pure democracy isn't much more than a sheep herding exercise.
So how do we get out of over-powerful propaganda, to achieve government directly 'for the people'. As indicated, you can do it by aggressive political decentralisation, and that's probably the only way you can do it. You do it by breaking countries up into many more micro-states, similar to the Swiss model, and with the focused intent of empowering foot-voting to the maximum.
Globalisation:
We see creeping globalisation clearly enough, but the question is why exactly do we have it? In whose interest is it to hyper-centralise the world? I can only speculate, but my best 'conspiracy hypothesis' is that it's rooted in the need for global fertility management.
Global population control is an ultimate necessity, and who knows...maybe the powers that be have been working for a long time behind the scenes, to make sure it happens? It may not be an accident that all major culture and policy changes over the last 70 years have had the direct effect of suppressing fertility, throughout the industrialised world. I've written on this before (here).
The threat to Globalisation:
Secession movements are the threat to globalisation - and maybe the only true threat. And secession movements seem to be treated as threats.
For example, the powers that be have done everything they can to resist BREXIT, though some exceptional British talents have allowed Britain to succeed in secession nonetheless. A more awful example is with the attempted secession of Catalonia, in Spain. The referendum to leave was declared illegal (as though greater Spain had the moral right to make such a law), and when the Catalan citizens participated in the referendum to secede, they were met with violent police.
You can see why secession is threatening to globalisation. What happens when a micro-state leaves and makes a better life for itself? Secession becomes a dangerous idea that can quickly catch on.
-Note that secession actually has a strong instinctive appeal to people as well. It's not a particularly difficulty sell. This contributes to the threat.
I myself support the need for global fertility management, and even the need for a democratic world government though with strictly limited powers. Population control is a mathematical necessity. But, I do not support under-handed policy that makes life unnecessarily tough, and I obviously respect the need to establish competition between democracies to make democracy work like it should. We don't have the power of foot-voting like we need it today, and I would like to see that change.
