Violent crimes, including those of passion, could easily be cited as examples.
Treason and drug offences.
Vandalism, malicious non-achievement − also known in vernacular as first-degree leeching–and a variety of property crimes.
In dealing with such serious offenses, the state, by virtue of the moral authority invested in it by its concerned citizenry, claimed through its mature and democratically legitimized institutional structure the inalienable right to deal with perpetrators in the most vigorous manner conceivable. This was one of the most effective means available to the system to assert its natural claim to legitimacy and thereby serve the interests of its constituents.
And there was no question that dealing in a vigorous manner might naturally include the administration of capital.comtainment where this was considered appropriate and necessary to protect the legitimate interests of the state’s vast body of loyal citizens.
Those victimized by crime.
In other words, the innocent citizenry.
More specifically, those innocent victims who had with the passage of time proven themselves willing to abide by the rules and thereby actively or passively enabled the legal system to attain the high level of development it had by now achieved.
What, then, so the argument at its inception, was more fitting than an enlightened society exercising its right to education, entertainment and participation in the democratic process while simultaneously serving justice on those found to be guilty of serious crimes?
There were really no serious grounds for misgivings which might give real cause for objection.
After all, capital.comtainment was indisputably effective.
It freed increasingly scarce public resources by keeping the costs of an otherwise potentially unwieldy penal establishment down to a minimum: hardcore offenders were efficiently and permanently removed from the system, resulting in impressive fiscal savings for society. Lower costs were widely recognized to be an important first step toward leaner government, an objective almost unanimously applauded in modern civilized societies.
Capital.comtainment also reduced the already heavy burden on the judiciary system by handling otherwise unnecessarily lengthy appeals promptly and swiftly. Extensive public participation ensured that justice was applied evenly and without a barrage of exhaustive and expensive procedural delays. A kind of expanded jury, ruling nationwide from the comfort of its own sofa or kitchenette, was made neatly and instantaneously accessible through capital.comtainment.
Finally, capital.comtainment served the purpose of soothing the collective conscience by ensuring that no one person could or should ultimately be held responsible in the event that the ultimate penalty should become unavoidable for an intransigent or unrepentant offender.
Or in the unfortunate event, however unlikely this possibility might actually be, that some form of unfortunate oversight or judicial error made itself apparent afterwards.
Libertyville@Esperantia’s dread.commachine was the entertaining and educational equivalent of a blank cartridge in one of the many guns in the hands of an enlightened society’s firing squad.
It was a truly revolutionary idea whose time had finally come. The long-hedged dream of no-fault justice was finally being born into reality.
And the telly.tube ratings had been phenomenal ever since.
FISHBO.NELLY
Fishbo.Nelly tapped the bill of her cap downward, pushing it a bit lower and squinting her eyes as she sat and peered into the late afternoon haze. The day’s quivering heat continued to hover stubbornly above the beach and over the steely matte surface of the ocean that rippled before her with only a few modest waves breaking lazily at the shoreline with metronomic regularity. Evening was beginning to set in now, she registered with some gratitude as she looked forward to the temperature falling to a more comfortable level. To her right and somewhat behind her, the sun would soon begin its long slow plunge toward the western horizon. Shifting around a bit, she sat up straight for a moment on a well-worn dark blue blanket and allowed her mind the luxury of wandering. As her thoughts streamed freely, she stretched out her legs before her, half-burying her feet in the sand of the dune as she did so. It was warm, white sand, extremely fine and soft, and it felt somehow sensuously heavy as she burrowed her hands and feet into it over and over again while regarding the area around her. Countless irregularly spaced clumps of dry grayish-green marsh grass dotted the crests of the soft dunes for as far as she could see, sharply punctuating the lazy curves of a restless and fluidly changing landscape spreading itself around her.
These bushels of dry marsh grass grew plentifully out here, the only significant vegetation that could be found growing on the loose sand between the waterline and the firmer ground somewhat further away from the beach, upon which a few forms of low shrubbery with thin leaves subsisted nearly in the shadow of the city’s perimeter wall. The marsh grass, although it doubtlessly enhanced the otherwise bland scenery and was arguably even somewhat quaint and picturesque if one were inclined to view it through the eyes of an aquarelle landscape painter, made it a bit of a task sometimes to find a truly suitable spot to sit or lay on comfortably for any length of time. As long as one exercised good judgment, though, and possessed a keen awareness that the knife-like blades of this marsh grass had the discrete charm of porcupine quills, walking through this area or choosing a spot to sit was not really that challenging.
In fact, it was entirely likely that the presence of this marsh grass contributed to the relative solitude of this strip of sand and weeds by latently discouraging some people from making even casual forays across the dunes.
This wind-blown bit of salty sand and water, which Fishbo.Nelly, and probably just about everyone else in the city, referred to as twilight.Zone, was located far off the beaten path, wedged in nearly secretively between the outermost eastern fringe of Libertyville@Esperantia’s concrete perimeter wall and an erratic series of patchy river marshes bordering the river estuary and, a bit further eastward, the oceanfront itself. Because the landscape out here was generally both fairly inaccessible and largely regarded to be rather inhospitable, it was never frequented by any great number of visitors. And even if one might view her assumption as being a tad presumptuous or simply naïve, Fishbo.Nelly had with time come to consider this area to be something like her very own exclusive and private escape hatch, as her privileged emergency relief valve from a civilization that she, with the passage of time, found to be increasingly unappealing.
Although she didn’t by any measure reject the notion of civilization nor urban living outright, she nevertheless judged Libertyville@Esperantia to be so colorless and hypocritical, so uncool and so corrupt that she had long since resolved to try to avoid making any more than the absolute bare essential minimum contribution to its existence, to its underlying order and to its prosperity.
She wasn’t a person who perceived herself or her way of thinking as being anything even remotely revolutionary. She could probably be described as being apolitical, but nonetheless, at some point in her young life, she discovered deep within her heart that she possessed the modestly irrational, and even a tad egocentric, wish that she might one day somehow succeed in rendering the whole system around her irrelevant to her own existence.
And although she couldn’t possibly know it yet as she sat on the beach on this evening gazing into the blur and haze of the maritime distance, she would one day be so wildly successful in her attempts at achieving this objective that the system in its entirety would literally forget anything and everything it had ever known about her.
The entrance which she used to gain access to twilight.Zone on her occasional and very irregular visits was probably the only really significant breach to be found in the otherwise clearly defined and very secure boundaries of the state. This gap was not due to some oversight or omission, however, but was attributable instead to the sporadic meandering hurricanes and tropical storms of varying ferocity which gathered steam as they passed by, usually far enough offshore that Libertyville@Esperantia seldom suffered any significant material damage on their account. But the veritable mountains of water which these storms moved