Revenge Between Stations

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You got your apology. The two stations have long fought over guests for the respective teams they broadcast, wanting exclusivity. A great guy who is going too far, MSG owns the Garden and Radio City Music Hall, but has spread the ban on Entercom across the nation, refusing to do business with the radio company in any of its markets, including Chicago and Los Angeles. Entercom bills itself as the top radio company in the country. It has penetration in nearly all markets. Last week, Gray, almost out of the blue, apologized for her Dolan comments.

Revenge Of The Kid | Rock Paper Shotgun

Personal overtures from Gray to discuss the situation with MSG officials have been denied. On Sunday night, Gray declined to comment when reached, but a source said she was genuinely disappointed in herself that she called Dolan names, but not with the content of her rant. In August, she did call Dolan some names, lambasting him and predicting that it might cost her access to MSG.

And then what did you do?

Ultramarathon and Relay

You are a human embodiment of an online troll. Yeah, you should have known. I forgot for 30 seconds just how embarrassing James Dolan is. Take your stupid song and everything you stand for, and shove it up your colossal rear end. Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman loses mind during Lakers br View author archive email the author follow on twitter Get author RSS feed. And there's also - there's a moral failure to Gandhi's wise words, and people can't find that equally morally unbearable.

Most people think that eye for an eye suggests bloodthirstiness. What it really means is exactness. What it essentially means - and we get this from the Old Testament and, of course, in Hammurabi's Code - that when a moral injury is created, a debt is created, and then payback is required, but it has to be specific.

It has to be proportionate. And all an eye for an eye means is a way to prevent disproportionate revenge. Disproportionate revenge are blood feuds, recycling of vengeance, the Hatfields versus the McCoys. Through the natural history of our species, we were able to manage revenge through tribes and individuals because people knew what enough - what was enough to be satisfied.

And that means that when one loses an eye, they're entitled to receive no more than an eye, but also no less than an eye.

Rock Bridge Revenge

And in our system, unfortunately, with plea bargains, we're very often shortchanged, and we're constantly paying back less than an eye. Your calculation would have been disputed by Jared Diamond or Steven Pinker, who say: No, those tit-for-tat feuds get out of control, and, in fact, tribal societies - where honor codes, like an eye for an eye, are the rule - well, the death rates in those societies is a great deal higher from violence than in ours. But your point is nevertheless that in our society, the state has taken on this role of seeking vengeance on behalf of those who are wronged.

But if we can go back to a minute about tribal societies, I mean, I think it's oftentimes distorted that the society spend lifetimes of settling grudges for the same reason. It's rational to only take what's to get you even to settle the debt measure for measure. To go beyond - nobody wants the recycling of revenge throughout centuries and generations.

That's exactly what the ancient Greeks understood with the "Oresteia" trilogy, Aeschylus' famous play. So we've always known to just take enough. You remember "The Godfather," Neal, is very clear. In the opening scene of "The Godfather," he tells Bonasera: I can't take the lives of the people who tried to rape your daughter, because your daughter's still alive.

Now, why would a professional killer care about exactness and exactitude? Because he knows there are rules about revenge.

With respect to your earlier point about the legal system, yes, after the - at the Enlightenment, the governments and states took the position that you pay your tax dollars and we'll build roads and bridges and we'll erect courthouses and fill it with court personnel, and we'll be your designated avenger. We will be your proxy. But we've never really taken it on that way.

We do it in a very dispassionate, impersonal way that we don't really take vengeance on behalf of victims. We simply only settle debts that are owed to society, not debts that are owed to individual victims. Well, because you understand this far better than I as a lawyer and a professor. The state says, we are not prosecuting the crime against this other individual.

We're prosecuting a crime against the state.

If you kill somebody else, it is a crime against the state. But it's absurd, right? We say that but it doesn't make sense, right? I mean, it's very A lot of states has an interest in maintaining a system of justice where people don't go around revenging each other. Yes, but people will go around avenging each other unless the state does its job. I mean, the idea is that if you're taking - if you're not allowing me to engage in self-help - and there are very good reasons why you shouldn't allow me to do that.

But if you think that revenge causes a mess, then I'm prepared to allow you take it for me in return for my tax dollars. But my expectation is that you, too, will represent me as well as representing the interests of the state, that you won't treat me merely as a trivialized player. What we do now in courtrooms is we reduce victims to witnesses on behalf of the state. We sit them in the back of the courtroom. We say to them, we're not your lawyers.

You're not entitled to a lawyer. The - it's a strange to me, Neal, that the victim is the only party in a criminal action who's unrepresented by counsel. And what would be the problem if the state said, there are two debts, the debts owed to all of us and that debt that's owed to the individual. And we want to make sure that the individual feels avenged at the end of this proceeding. Well, isn't that then a case where blood money or, in this case, what we call in a modern society civil court? Well, I mean, civil court - first of all, many people commit crimes that are judgment proof, so it doesn't really mean anything.

Secondly, civil court essentially says that we're seeking merely money from you as opposed to saying, no, you need to be punished on my behalf. That's how I get even. I don't get even if you're writing me a check, especially a check that will bounce. So you're talking - how should victims then be represented in court?

Between justice and revenge

They are present at sentencing hearings and their words are heard. And more and more, we have some new forms of - and again, you know this better than I do. But they come too late, right? I mean, you know, they're not - part witnesses - parties are not - victims are not participants during the guilty phase of a trial, the underlying case. They're really hidden in the back, only reduced to, again, playing the role of witnesses.

And for plea bargain purposes, victims aren't participating at all, largely. In most cases, over 95 percent of all cases are settled by way of plea bargains. And so that is a bargain-down exchanged in which a crime that's committed has now been trivialized and reduced to something less than what the wrongdoer did, and they're ultimately going to be punished less than what they ultimately deserve. With respect to the victim impact statements, no - look, not all crimes allow for victim impact statements, not all parties, not all victims are allowed to speak.

They're only allowed to speak for a certain period of time. And it's not clear how much judges weigh that voice, as opposed to saying, we make victims a partner in these criminal proceedings, and we want them to be true partners, which means that they have a voice in how one is to be punished. And our role here is to stop them from being excessive, but we're certainly not going to punish - under-punish someone without making sure that the victim is - will be able to tolerate and live with that.

Again, under the principle of an eye for an eye, the only penalty for murder is the death penalty. Well, let's say this. We run away from this idea that the death penalty is something that we should abhor. But remember, when someone takes an eye, or in this case a life, they've made a decision to take a life. And there's - one wonders why there's - that there should be a discount on what payback should look like. That why is it that in every other aspect of our lives, we always expect to be paid back in full, right?

Landlords expect it, businesses with commercial invoices - discount - department stores don't like to take discounts or marked downs on items. But when it comes to the worst crimes, the worst violations, we always immediately reflexively say that a discount is appropriate.

Now, in cases where we have the worst of the worst, where there's no question of someone's guilt - heinous murders - why is it that we're so ambivalent about actually providing just dessert? We've asked for people to call and tell us about moments where they considered revenge. This is an email that we have from - I'm not sure the name here.

I consider myself level-headed and calm. I have an outlet.

I secretly sign up an old colleague with as many magazine subscriptions that is possible. Well, that's one form of revenge. Some people - this is from Peter in Boise, Idaho. Some people turned themselves in if they commit crimes, others forced themselves to suffer through guilt and self-penance.

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Could your guest comment on the phenomenon of people punishing themselves for their own wrongdoing, presumably on matters less - of less import than murder? I am - I fear that it doesn't happen often enough.

And also, I'm not sure that the wrongdoer has the right to punish himself without the victim actually feeling avenged by that. It can't be something suffering in silence. The whole concept of vengeance is that there's a direct meeting, eye to eye. Remember in the famous movie, "The Princess Bride," the Inigo Montoya character, you know, you killed my father, prepare to die. The idea that it's a face-to-face encounter, and that it's a visceral experience, and the victim should not be deprived of that experience.

And that means that when there - when we have courtrooms, we invite them into courtroom and so that we can simulate or give them the feeling of a vicarious vengeance. We're talking with Thane Rosenbaum. He's a law professor and director of the Forum on Law, Culture and Society at Fordham University, the author of a most recently of "Payback: Let's go Eric, and Eric on the line with us from Clarkesville in Tennessee. I just wanted to comment on the situation I had in the military, where we - I had been blown - the enemy combatant had put an IE into the ground and it had blown up and almost killed us.

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