Tough topics

[Fiddlersworth]

Sept 10, 2010 16:01:28 GMT coredump said:

Fiddlesworth: The first quote I listed was yours. Of course, you were initially talking about the 'free society' of letting the imam build a mosque; but offending people works both ways, so it seems to apply.

While it is not a directly analogous, the similarity is pretty strong. Here is someone doing something that is legal, easily within his rights, but is highly offensive to many many people.

I'm actually being completely consistent with what I said before, here's why:

1) What are they doing?

a) Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wants to build a mosque and community centre in downtown New York which happens to be blocks away from a place where thousands of people were murdered by fanatical terrorists who were also muslim. People who cannot see past the religious affliation of the terrorists are appalled yet he doesn't want to back down.

b) Preacher Terry Jones (not to be confused with the Monty Python member of the same name) wants to create a new holiday called Burn A Koran day (tm).

2) What are their motivations?

a) Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf wants to provide muslims who live in downtown New York a place to worship, work out, have meetings, .... okay honestly I really don't know what goes on at community centres but there's stuff like a gymnasium, meeting rooms, maybe a pool or something for the kids... you know family stuff or whatever. I find it extremely unlikely that a motivating factor behind its construction was that it could be a slap in the face to anyone. It appears to have been quite the opposite in fact. He is trying to build something for the community which can be used by everyone and which would be run by a board of muslims and non-muslims (this was the plan before the outcry).

b) Preacher Terry Jones thinks that Islam is of the Devil, at least that's what his new book is titled and what he prints on signs and t-shirts (seriously, he does this). He states that "it's time to send a message to radical Islam that we will not tolerate their behavior." In short, his motivation is hatred.

So one seems to be to building something that can be of benefit to the whole community while the other appears to be trying to insult an entire religion by burning their most sacred text.

One's building bridges; the other is tearing them down.

So no, they aren't really similar at all.

3) What happens if they back down, besides losing face?

a) We find out that muslims can be treated as second class citizens in America.

b) I find out I didn't give that preacher enough credit... and technically there's slightly more oxygen from the lack of that particular bonfire.

You'll note I didn't even address the threat of repercussions.

[Psychichobo]

Personally I think that redneck preacher's just an idiot, but he should be allowed to do it because freedom of speech and religion should be allowed and upheld both ways.

As I mentioned earlier, recently in the UK there was a period (which many still believe is still undergoing) where the government was overly cautious regarding Eastern religions and gave them an excessive leeway whilst being careful to criticise and ban anything that could be seen as even vaguely offensive to said Eastern religions.

Christmas is probably the biggest example. There's not a single Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist in this country who is offended by Christmas, yet the government panicked over it and tried to have any references to the Christian aspect removed. All that did was create a sense of dissent and inequality, and simply reinforced racial tensions.

It's not right. Therefore, you have to be able to uphold the values that the country was founded on, and that means allowing this nutter to burn those books, same as you would allow that mosque/community centre/whatever it is to be built.

HOWEVER...

Having said that, there IS a distinct problem that Yori rightly pointed out - we've got soldiers over in the middle east at the moment. There's a serious risk of those soldiers being attacked and in even more danger if this guy is allowed to burn his books. For genuinely legitimate safety reasons, it's actually best we do stop this guy.

[Jason]

I'm against the burning of books of any kind. Be it colouring books, novels, etc. It is someone's artwork. I don't think you'd appreciate if someone burned your models. "Holy" texts are no different. However, if he really wants to burn a few Korans, he can do it if he really wants to. Unfortunately, a lot of people think they are more than just books. Same with western religions and their Bible. If it weren't for soldiers being stationed over there, I'm sure no one would give a damn, me being one of them.

And that whole "politically correct" BS that has been going around for the past decade. What the hell. In Canada, we can't call people "special needs" anymore. It's like "Intellectually disabled" now :/ Same with Christmas, although that kind of died down.

[Exodite]

That's because political correctness is a constant shift, what was formally acceptable inherits the same stigma as the previous term. It's an inevitability given PCness changes the world and does nothing to tackle peoples attitudes towards it. I'm sorry but someone with a retardation is a retard; however there is nothing wrong with people being retarded; in general the people who I have met with mental or physical retardations are some of the more sincere, kind, and accepting of people I have met given the character they have developed from having had to deal with such difficulties growing up. I'm not pretending that it is always comfortable struggling to communicate with someone who has a retardation. Just that tackling the stigma is the key to getting over most of that difficulty not changing the word for it...

[wormwood]

When people brag about their conquests I tend to think of AJ Rimmer from Red Dwarf telling Lister to tell the women they are about to meet that he has tons of girlfriends.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=psidz_-s00c&p=672EE5FAB520FDAD&playnext=1&index=19

[Thlaylie]

^ Rimmah!

[Fiddlersworth]

^^ Gazpacho soup!

[Fiddlersworth]

Okay, new topic. How about the death penalty. Who's for it, who's against and why?

[Jason]

I remember that one. We went through that a while ago lol.

I have to say I was convinced to go against it. However, I think that there is a point where whoever is going to prison just needs that bullet in between the eyes so we can stop wasting money on them and move on to the next lost cause.

[Thlaylie]

Oh I remember this one!

Send all convicts to the moon!

Seriously, a moon base is needed and it has to be underground due to radiation so we need lots of cheap labor.

The setup would have an airbox that has to have regolith shoveled in it to make air.

If the slackers refuse to work, they die.

Send up replacements and have them dump the previous losers into the recyclers (Soylent Green is the answer)

Rinse/ repeat.

[kingin]

I kinda say yes and no. In this reasoning. No to the fact innocent man dying because he got convected and cause people were all pointing it against him even though it wasn't him.

But yes to people who kill multiple people and do it for fun, and really don't deserve to live. Also lot of money goes into the whole take care of prisioners and everything.

Like said it depends on the Crime for the Punishment but don't throw death penelty left and right you know.

[salamut2202]

there is a big difference between life sentence and death sentence. if they're innocent you can't get them out of a death sentence.

[wormwood]

In the US, in many ways indefinite periods of detention are less humane than a prompt execution. Our prisons are overcrowded, violent, and dehumanizing. Some criminals refer to Prison as graduate school, because they only associate with other criminals who spend countless hours coaching them in crimes they hadn't even considered before being imprisoned. Many imates are murdered and or sexually victimized while in the state's custody.

An example of this can be seen in the case of notorious serial killer, cannibal, and paraphile Jeffry Dahmer. Jeffry Dahmer wasn't technically given a death sentance, but he was sufficiently imperiled by the conditions of his incarceration that he suffered a much more brutal death than he would have been subjected to by the state. I think it's safe to assume that, most people given the choice between lethal injection and being beaten to death with a broken mop handle would choose the needle.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer

Often people released after having been institutionalized find themselves unable to adapt to the changes that have occured since they were incarcerated. Spouses remarry, their children grow up not knowing them, people they knew before will have forgotten them, and they have no job skills anymore. These people generally receive no compensation for the injustice they've suffered either. They have to start over entirely, and often at an age when they should be preparing for retirement.

A criminal justice system of strict corporal and capital punishment makes much more sense than imprisoning offenders.

Lesser offenders can be beaten, sent right back to work, and forced to make restitution to their victims, as productive members of society. The severity of the beating can be tailored to the seriousness of the offense, and in the most heinous cases the offenders could be executed. In this way, society wouldn't have to be burdened with supporting and guarding useless people, and wrongfully convicted innocents would tend not to become alienated from their former lives.

While wrongfully executing innocent persons is regrettable, it is also highly unusual, and is a risk that must be weighed carefully against society's need for deterrance of particularly eggregious criminal behaviours, and the harm done to innocents by decades of wrongful incarceration.

It's been estimated that the average recidivist (a convict who re-offends and is convicted repeatedly) will commit about 100 crimes between convictions. This means that police investigation and prosecutorial plea bargaining is only leading to successful prosecution of 1% of the crime going on in our country. Considering this, what is the statistical likelihood that someone will not only be arrested for a crime they didn't commit, let alone for an offense that'd warrant the death penalty? It could happen, but your likelihood of being murdered by a private citizen is actually significantly higher.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution

Working the kinks out of this process will have more to do with careful checks on prosecutorial misconduct, and better scrutiny of evidence with an eye toward the possibility of it having been fabricated by lazy or malicious investigators. Much of the wrongful conviction in our country has been traced to one of these two factors by the Innocence Project. Meeting the burdon of proof is difficult, but without doing it honestly, the state has no business pursuing a case.

[Hyper Kinetic]

I am vaguely for Death Penalties in economics terms.
I worked it out a while back (early last year?) when we had this discussion. I found that, in the US, the average cost of keeping someone locked down for about 19.5 years after trials is the same as the average cost in legal expenses, injection and so on, for trials where the death penalty is sought.
Economically, if the person is likely to be in prison for longer than 20 years then you may as well seek the death penalty.
(Apologies, I did not keep all of that information saved and I can't be bothered hunting for numbers at the moment... but I distinctly remember coming up with 19.*something* years)

HOWEVER...
It is generally clear that the death penalty is not a good deterrent for major crime... and neither is a life sentence.
Though I am a fan of life, I am not a fan of supported life for those who would otherwise be very clearly unsafe for society.

Though I don't agree with some of what Wormwood has said, the points made about recidivism and long prison sentences are correct.
Some people are capable of being rehabilitated in to the community. Depending on the crime, of course, some really should not be allowed to continue.

[salamut2202]

there is a fine line between if some one can be rehabilitated or not. in fact the line between rehabilitation and punishment is of that between justice and retribution. only one can be carried out with the anger of revenge.