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Post by Sentinel on Jul 8, 2003 15:34:30 GMT -5
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Post by expat on Jul 9, 2003 2:35:39 GMT -5
Sentinel,
Thank-you for the link. You are not the idle blow-hard I had thought. You have proven to me a good memory for detail, and I will from this point on consider your claims as based on something more substanial than wishfull thinking.
In short, I now consider you credible and will pay more attention to your Assertions. I cannot promise to always agree with them, of course, but I now see you do not simply blow assertions around like Rush Limbaugh.
The paper you sent, being 37 pages long, seems reputable enough at firt glance, and I plan to read it soon. My work schedule means it will probably take me a few days to get around to it.
I still find that 18 lives saved essentially means that each person executed is a full-fledged mass murderer, which I find disturbing, and not really believable. Thus I will have to read the papers methodology, assumptions, basis for conclusions etc, before I can accept it, skeptic that I am. I'll return to this threads with comments after I have read it. I may even come back and denounce it, but that does not mean that you failed in the slightest at accurately reporting it without exageration. And that makes you a good reporter.
Please accept this appology on your credentials in good will.
We'll discuss other aspects on this topic later. You get to savor your creds fully today without distractions/detractions from me!
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Post by Sentinel on Jul 9, 2003 13:13:26 GMT -5
I had previously entered a long message, so long the forum software wouldn't let me post. I discovered there is a 10000 word limit. So, I hit the back button to edit and abbreviate. After doing so, I tried to re-enter and the message was still too long. So, I hit the back button again, this time the message was lost. So, out of frustration, I just posted the link.
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Post by expat on Jul 10, 2003 4:23:41 GMT -5
I did the very same thing a few days ago and had to break my reply to you into two parts, and even then had to edit away large bits to fit it in. It was frustrating.
Anyway, the link was fine. I'll try to have it read by Monday.
Have a good weekend.
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Post by garrett7855 on Jul 10, 2003 11:44:26 GMT -5
I find that I have have underestimated both of you. I find your discussion of this topic fascinating and informative. I realise that I habitually attempt to keep my posts relatively short-partly because I fear I'll bore people and partly due to just running out of steam, but pray, please do continue guys! I still find myself firmly sitting on the fence on this one and your well reasoned arguments on this topic are the best I've seen in years, bar none. Persuade me, the common man. (OK, not that common) But, seriously, this has long been a dilemma for me. I want to be merciful if possible, but as so many others, if anything happened to my people I very much fear I'd quickly adopt the "hang 'em high" position myself. My sister was in the neighboring dorm room in Florida when Bundy pulled his shenanegans, so I've already had one near miss. Quite frankly, I seriously doubt the world will miss him! At the same time, I find the idea of executing someone, only to later discover his/her innocence to be completely intolerable. So, "lay on, McDuff", convince me!    |
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Post by Sentinel on Jul 12, 2003 13:53:48 GMT -5
I find the idea of executing someone, only to later discover his/her innocence to be completely intolerable. Why intolerable? Doctors mistakes kill thousands of people each year. Cars kill thousands of people each year. How does your simplistic reasoning find this tolerable but not executions where in modern times there is no known innocent person to have been executed? Yes, we should always be looking for ways to reduce wrongful deaths by cars, doctors, and executioners. But, it is stupid (or evil) to trade the greater good and the greater number of lives saved for a relatively miniscule risk. To execute someone, a jury must first convict. Then, the judge and a whole string of judges must uphold the sentence. Anyone in this line, including DP opponents, can veto the execution. And, if there are any special considerations, the govenor can look at the case and veto the DP. Liberals oppose the Death Penalty because they are evil. They don't want guilty people executed (unless the guilty people are guilty of Politically Incorrect offenses). Liberals hate innocent people. Two examples of supposedly innocent people who have been executed, both are indisputably guilt of murder. One of them was even a convicted murderer when he killed again. If he were executed, he would not have killed again. But, I suppose you can wash your hands of that and say you didn't pull the trigger. That makes you no less guilty. Everyone who played a role in that murderer getting to kill again is also guilty of murder. Deterrence saves lives. All murders are commited with premeditation (it's part of the legal definition of murder). There are about 1500 murders ( most by convicted criminals still under sentence) every year and certainly thousands more prevented through deterrence. It's just stupid to think that during premeditation no potential murderer says to himself "Hmmm, I could get life, I could be executed, I could be fried in the electric chair if I pull the trigger." Yes, the electric chair saves more lives than lethal injection. I Posted a link showing that each execution saves 18 lives. But, as long as you don't pull the trigger, I guess you can feel guilt-free for 18 deaths that result because you stopped the execution of a guilty man (if you were in such a position). You are guilty of 18 murders for every murderer you spare from execution. And, God you will answer to. Speaking of God, all truly godly people support the DP. Good people do not want to be guilty of murder. God, Himself, ordered the DP for a whole host of crimes. And, St. Paul re-affirms the pro-DP position by saying certain things "deserve death." On the other hand, there is not one anti-DP statement in the whole Bible. If you want to be stupid, you can say "Thou shalt not kill." But, a more accurate translation is "Thou shalt not murder." And, the given penalty for those who do kill is execution. Executions also reduce the chance of convicting an innocent person (re-read that)! With a lower murder/crime rate, there are fewer people to be tried thus less oppertunity to reach the wrong verdict. Your version of compassion is piss to me if I'm killed by a murderer or if I end up wrongly convicted spending life in prison (where I am at greatly increased odds to be murdered, sodomizes, etc.). I would prefer to die than spend life in prison. |
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Post by expat on Jul 15, 2003 7:32:23 GMT -5
Jeez, Sentinel, you are not an easy to guy reason with, calling Garrett "stupid" twice for saying that he finds the execution of an innocent man intolerable. You also retranslate "thou shall not kill" to "thou shall not murder". What is the original Greek word (I assume Jesus' original language was never recorded directly) that you base this on?
Of course I sign on to not killing or murdering anyone, but here you exempt people from doing so in the name of the state and even God. Here you are saying that it is OK to be an executioner, so long as the state grants its authority. That excuse didn't wash for us at the Nürnburg Trials following WWII, but morality (and even mortality) evidently changes to fit the times and politics.
You also state that the judicial process works to such degree that it is indeed only the guilty who are executed. Perhaps you are correct here. I am aware of innocent persons condemned to Death Row, but not executed, and eventually released, such as in Illinois. The number of innocent still on Death Row is unknown to me, and perhaps to anyone. I grant that the two cases I cited before where taken from the Internet, and that you have presented counter evidence to make me wonder whether they we innocent or not.
But when you say that it is morally acceptable that an innocent person or two might be executed, then call Garrett stupid for having an other opinion, I think you are leaving reason behind and diving into emotion.
Even in the paper you linked to, which I will return to in a moment, the authors say that their findings that 18 murders are prevented still have a social cost, not least concerns the fairness of the judicial process (p28). They too also acknowledge the risk that innocent persons may be executed. Until the day that our system actually becomes truly fair and transparent, the risks remains. You are willing to make what I would call a cold calculation when you compare the additional costs of removing error from systems not designed to take lives (health care and highways), with one that is designed to do so (executions). Since death penalty trials are very expensive anyway, should we just accept police corruption, incompetent public defenders, breaking of exclusion rules and the like? The case can be made that the more laxity you give police forces (inch giving), the more leeway they will take (mile taking). Corruption feeds on itself. Giving police off-the-books power is a ticket to Hell. This is not news. (Your statement that “Liberals hate innocent people” is a Limbaughism that has no place in this discussion.)
That some of us find intolerable the execution of the innocent (and Garret was naming the general case, which you spun by referring to the two specific cases discussed) makes us neither stupid or simplistic. Unless you have a set standard to reach for, you are certain to only slip away from the unaspirated standard you honor only by implication. And when dealing with state power, specifically the police entrusted with weapons and collection of evidence, civilian oversight must never be surrendered for the sake of convenience or fear of the criminal element.
As for what God wants in all of this, I understand that you are religious, and as such, faith and reason in such matters get more than a little blended, and what one calls reason, the other calls faith. We are probably never going to agree on what the Bible says. You will remain certain that I am a fool, and probably call me names too for disagreeing with you. I cannot say I like your style. But our Founder Fathers separated church from state, and while you may normatively believe that in error, the Constitution, not the Bible, remains the law of the land. Thus kindly remove St. Paul from the discussion, especially if your only purpose is to resort to religious justification to ease the conscious of executioners or those supporting the death penalty. As other theologians have argued against the death penalty, and as Biblical inerrancy is a tenet, the fact of which endlessly debatable, and the feasibility of truly knowing God’s will (assuming there is such a God) another theological debating point, entering religious arguments into the discussion takes us into the sort of theocracies that have not historically served mankind very well. As I would not choose to live under the Godless Commies, I would equally not choose to live under the Spanish Inquisition. Actually, if I really had to choose, I make take the Commies, because they never forced anyone to attend party meetings. Thank goodness our society leaves such matter to our private lives and consciences. Great system! It’s enough to have a civilian judge using the legal code sitting over us, please spare me Puritans exorcizing my demons on the burning stake.
The linked article.
Thank-you for the article, which I finally had a chance to read. I found it credible. It certainly has the advantage of being based on corrections to criticism to previous analyses in the same vein. Although I have used multivariate regression analyses myself in other connections, I am not really competent to evaluate how suitable each dependent variable they selected was, or whether they excluded anything they should have tossed in. I will assume that they know what they are doing. That they assign a plus or minus 10 lives error of estimation seems quite legitimate. Thus to the degree that the model is the correct one to apply, I now concede that there really may be a deterrence effect to premeditated murder. I certainly did not expect to be persuaded, but I was.
I am going to have to look for supporting evidence now, as I do not make large swings in belief easily. At one point the death penalty was applied to stealing a loaf of medieval bread or poaching a bunny, and perhaps it was a deterrent for that as well. I am glad that we at least restrict it these days to truly horrendous acts. (This leads me to a side remark. Since you find prison life intolerable, for which I do not call you anything but sensible, what about that third-strike laws that give 25 years for poaching rental videos? For other crimes you are willing to grant the poor inmate a more humane death instead of having to put up with prison life, does that mean 3rd strikers should just be put out of their misery? Just wondering. Or is prison reform another waste of taxpayer money?)
Even if I concede that there is a deterrence effect, I realize that this only refers to premeditated killing, and not acts of passion, fear or panic. These evidently have a separate mechanic. I also do not know how really common premeditated murder is as opposed to killing happening in ugly scenes that got out of hand. That these are more common in America than in other western nations is a thought provoker as well. I live in Northern Europe where folks are not so prone to bump each other off, nor is there a death penalty here to deter them from doing so. They refrain anyway, somehow. These are less violent cultures.
What is going on in America? That it is only countries like China, Iran, (old) Iraq and such that resort to execution ought to be the basis of some serious soul searching. As culturally the bulk of the US comes from European stock, where murder and violence of all sorts have gone down since the colonial era and the height of the Industrial Revolution, with some notable exceptions such as the Balkans, the deeper question may become, are we satisfied to have ingrained violence requiring suppression via death penalty deterrence, or can America too develop a less violent society? Is not having to resort to deterrence actually a poor second best solution? Can we not do better than that?
I would like to see who is committing premeditated murder. Is it like the TV unreality, middle class love dramas or schemers going after insurance claims, inheritance or what have you? Or is it occurring among the down and out, knocked about by a culture of poverty and despair and people no longer having much of a stake, nor much of a damn, as long as that SOB (fill in the blank:___________) gets his/her just earthly reward?
Finally, reading the article I realized that my original comment that the 18 persons saved meant that each convicted murder was a mass murderer was entirely wrong. The figure is better interpreted to mean that 18 single murders, by 18 separate persons, are deterred. My error. It was interesting that the they found that otherwise strong incarceration and sentencing had little deterrence effect, and that having a lot of guns around, as represented by NRA membership was also linked to higher murder rates, although this may only mean that some areas have more violent people, and that these also tend to join the NRA, rather than making NRA members more murder prone.
With best regards,
Expat
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Post by Sentinel on Jul 15, 2003 14:26:32 GMT -5
You also retranslate "thou shall not kill" to "thou shall not murder". What is the original Greek word (I assume Jesus' original language was never recorded directly) that you base this on? I was refering to the Hebrew Ten Comandments and I'm not doing any re-translating. The vast majority of translations use the word "murder" instead of "kill", with the exception of the KJV. And, the greek word used here (ratsach) for unlawful killing is a different word that which is used for lawful killing or just plain killing. But, even if you don't know the greek words here, you know that the Isreali state was instructed to execut those who do kill. Didn't the countries who supported the Nuremberg Trials have their militiries kill a whole lot of Germans (and Japs, etc.)? How do you explain that? The key that you're missing is justice. The winners of WWII considered Germans to have murdered rather than justly killed. As a practical matter, only guilty people have been executed. There are a lot of bad juries (e.g. if you're a white guy accused of killing a black man, you're screwed. If you're black accused of killing a white man, the trial is a formality before your acquittal). As a result, a lot of guilty people go free and some innocent people are convicted. But, those innocent people who are convicted have a number of appeals of in which a judge seing the jury was stupid or bigoted will do away with the DP. What matters is that those innocent people were not executed. Still, a signficant number of those let off of death row are certainly guilty. Don't assume that because the powers-that-be decided a technicality or other evidence changed the situation enough to throw out their conviction that they are innocent (just like it would be ignorant to think an acquitted person is necessarily innocent). So, it's not like that many innocent people actually "came close" to being executed. The argument that the DP should be eleminated to avoid the chance of even one innocent person being executed is an emotional argument riddled with hypocrisy and ignorance. Hypocrisy because the same standard is not held for everything. And, ignorance because the person using that argument has no idea of, or concern for, the relatively huge number of innocent people that the DP could/does save. I think executing murderers is more important than the feelings of some racist black bigot who whines that the justice system if unfair to black murderers. Because something is not perfect is not a reason to do away with it. We should work on lowering the cost to execute murderers. We should fight police corruption. But, we shouldn't release help murderers murder more innocent people. There's another emotional argument. China, Iran, and Iraq prohibit theft. Should we legalize theft? Blacks, about 13% of the population commit the majority of the murders and violence. Mexicans (13 or 14%, up from zero a few decades ago) come in second as the most crime prone. Do you Europeans have lots of Blacks and Mexicans? Our crime rate is largly a result of their cultures and their corruption of our society. |
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Post by markwashio on Jul 16, 2003 0:54:54 GMT -5
Pedophiles, child pornographers should be put to death.
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Post by expat on Jul 16, 2003 5:05:43 GMT -5
Hi Sentinel, Thank-you for the info on the Hebrew version. Learn something new every day. Certainly, the Germans were way overboard on killing opponents, the SA, the SS, the military…even the regular civilian police helped sluice politically undesirables on to their deaths. As most Germans at the time would have told you, “justice” was being served. There are at least two definitions of justice, most commonly relativistic, justice being that which the society defines as justice, and absolute, some philosophical/religious definition that supersedes somehow civil/cultural definitions. Both of these definitions have serious problems. Both are ultimately dependent on human interpretation. Here you are using an absolutist definition; you seem to know intuitively what is just and would impose your definition upon all. I am not necessarily saying that your definition is wrong or right. I am only saying that your definition is not universally held. In a democracy there needs to be at least a majority for a relativistic definition. In the absolutist sense, the Nazi Germans were or were not being just, depending on which definition of God or philosophy (loosely defined) is truly true. And there's the rub. Who in the hell knows, as opposed to having faith in their beliefs. Thus the Allies' imposed justice was that of the victor and may or may not be "real" justice, whatever that is. This is why I say that the relativistic definition is ultimately all we have to practice, (and note I do not say "ideal") and as such it is imperative that it be as fair as we can make it. Certainly the society’s religious beliefs provide guidance, but that includes the totality of the religions’ (there can be more than one) moral teaching, not simply the strictest interpretation of the strongest political sect. Whoa, who is holding a double standard now? Are you now saying that one high standard is the goal for all activities? Were you not just arguing the other side of that above? Of course there are priorities. Everything individuals, groups and entire societies do follows priorities. Resources are not infinite. There is no way that everything could have the same priority; to call someone hypocritical for not giving everything equal weight is a bogus argument. You have also switched from defending the word "stupidity" to "ignorance", the lack of info, which should not carry much stigma. WHOA again! How did we get to "whining" "racist black bigots"? A lot of people on death row are white, red and brown. Their families too care deeply about the fairness of the system. Victims' families too often express concern that the system be fair. They hate it when a trial is so botched on rules infractions that sleazebags and the truly guilty walk free. You have implied that we who question the DP want murderers released on technicalities, as if we are pleased that trials often are riddled with error and conniving. What I want are honest cops, and even higher paid, smarter cops who know how to investigate a crime scene. Do you have any idea what a bad job so many investigators do? The police do not exactly get the cream of the academic crop. Far too often they get folks who like the personal power of being a cop, the picked-on kid growing up to want to settle old scores. Thank-goodness this is not the majority, but the power-trippers are there in numbers. No system can be better than the quality of its components. A shoddy system, and especially one delegating incarceration and life and death powers, needs to have a higher standard than "executing murderers". The convenience of getting rid of shady types should not have a higher priority than doing the thing with as much fairness as we can muster. Oh please, what makes you think that I would ever argue for legalizing theft? We have the minimum wage for that. I name these countries with death penalties, as well highly economically developed places that do not use it, to provide a reminder of where the US stands in the internation scale on this index. In most of the developed world, societies, some with higher some lower standards of living than the US, get by with both a lower murder rate and no DP. Is it coincidence that the countries with the most violent films, from Kung-fu to so much Hollywood stuff tend to also come from DP countries? Perhaps cultures of violence, like ours, which also seem to enjoy watching violence, are less prone to seeing anything wrong with the state as executioner. Fed on a steady diet of violence beginning with US cartoons and continuing on through Rambo, Robocop, (jeez, the list is endless), many Americans see state execution as a logical extension. Killing has been background noise in the US since the frontier days, so why not let the state in on the act? We Americans, as is true in most very big countries that are in little day-to-today contact with the outside world, sometimes contemplate our own navels too much and do not shop around to gain from other peoples' experience. That Canada does not use the DP and has fewer murders is worth examining. AND they too have significant immigrant communities. Once again the question arises, is it genes, culture or poverty? What is the violent crime rate by ethnic group by income level? Is not violent crime more common among, and please excuse the expression "trailer trash" than in WASPy suburbia? Historically, the whites were whipping and executing blacks long before the slaves were freed. American whites killed whites long before the US even made it to Hispanic America or had Mexican immigration. The American Indian was at least free to fight back. Ethnic White Italians fought ethnic white Irish fought ethnic white Slavs fought ethnic white Germans ad nauseum in the US urban slums long before these had significant nonwhite immigration. Your criminology history is highly selective and racially self-serving. Yet back in Europe, from whence these ethnic white communities came, literally the relatives of those who stayed behind, violent crime remained both lower and rates abated. Why? Could it be that frontier societies have less social controls such as the heavy-handed church, state, aristocracy, merchant class, industrialists and all the crap people fled from? And in the absence of “adult” supervision new standards get set that place a higher value on vigilantism, incorporate it, and even glorify it in song, legend and film? Canada retained a strong British steering hand, is that the difference? Did our freedom change us into a slug-happy people? Or was violence the legacy of those who felt left off the gravy train rolling west? One's standard of living, disposable income, has a lot to do with crime. The European welfare state, which I am the first to admit has a lot of problems, focused on raising the wages of the poorest and strengthening the weakest links in the social chain. The US focused on competitive raising oneself by the bootstraps, even if there used to be a strong labor movement, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s, at which time significant gains were made, which are now being subsequently eroded as jobs go overseas, and poverty grows. European Labor survived the union busting that eventually won out in the US. It has never helped US Labor that some of its should-have-been showcase unions were taken over by thugs. Once again, more violence. European unions escaped the mob and have a much less confrontational approach. The European minimum wage can be lived on, even by single-parent families. It isn’t luxury, but doable. Paid vacations, sick leave, etc, the same sort of benefits that the managers get, albeit on smaller scale. If you want to understand crime, understand economics. Don't scapegoat race without understanding the history of economic development, opportunity and aspiration in connection to race. Contented people of any color don't commit violent crime, they cheat on their taxes instead. If our dear Congress is going to jimmy the system, I would like to see them favor the small American businessman/woman for once (all colors, races, genders, hues, religions) and quit giving the megacorporations (mostly male, WASP) all the breaks, the very folks who think so little of bugging out to where the wages are sweatshop low. There is nothing wrong with free enterprise, provided it isn’t hijacked by them’s that’s already’s got. High rates of violent crime are not inevitable, but may be a side effect of something else not working as well as it could. Ah, now there is a rant! |
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Post by Sentinel on Jul 17, 2003 14:23:36 GMT -5
Pedophiles, child pornographers should be put to death. For a complete list, see Leviticus. (As I'm not a Jew, there does need to be some modification to that list, but the immoral do not benefit from any of those modifications). |
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Post by Sentinel on Jul 17, 2003 15:32:26 GMT -5
In the absolutist sense, the Nazi Germans were or were not being just, depending on which definition of God or philosophy (loosely defined) is truly true. And there's the rub. Who in the hell knows, as opposed to having faith in their beliefs. Right and Wrong is a separete issue from the DP. As a practical matter, Right and Wrong is simply what the person with power decides, whether that person is a national leader who dictates laws or someone with a sniper rifle pointed to the head of a national leader. Anyway, we all have our ideas of Right and Wrong, whatever the source. All activities should be judged in terms of benefits vs. costs. If you dismiss the DP simply because of a probablity of an innocent person being killed then you are refusing to judge it in terms of benefits vs. costs. However, any other activity which costs innocent lives (all of them do), you are more than willing to consider the benefits vs. the costs. [quoteYou have implied that we who question the DP want murderers released on technicalities, as if we are pleased that trials often are riddled with error and conniving.[/quote] I do believe that liberals don't consider murder worthy of prison time. To liberals, the crime of the whites who draged the black con behind their truck isn't murder but is anti-black racism. Sorry, whever there are humans there will be human error. I don't think cops do such a bad job with crime scenes. The cops in the OJ case did very good. |
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Post by expat on Jul 18, 2003 5:36:45 GMT -5
Dear Sentinel, Thanks for the thoughtful replies. 1) Origins of Justice: I have no real disagreement. 2) Cost vs Benefit. Here too mostly agree. I only want to add that economic considerations, while very important, are not the sole determinants. Other values, cultural, religious, emotional, philosophical, genetic, etc temper economic considerations. I repeat, were criminal sentences based entirely on economics we would most likely have an entirely different system, where things like the cost of any trial at all becoming a reason for summary execution, while lost tax revenues and consumer spending of an accused factored into the cost of removing him from the job market; etc. 3) Legalized theft = taxation. Clever reply, liked it. But this is an endless topic of political theory, one I cannot prove to you in dozens of postings. Perhaps we should agree to disagree. The classic defense of taxation is that some services (transport, education, defense etc) benefit the entire society who must pay for it. Even the childless benefit from the training of doctors, engineers, sales clerks, etc. If literally everything were out of pocket based on the degree of use, who would pay for an Abrams tank? Ken Lay? (Hmmm, maybe you are on to something ) or I-70 (again Ken Lay!) Seriously, short of hunting and gathering societies, I cannot think of how service provision can work without a means of paying for it. The freebooter problem also enters. Tax gathering is supposed to be justly dispersed so that all pay an appropriate share. So much for theory! Please don’t attack me on the current practice of the US tax code, I am well aware, and more than a little disgusted with, how skewed it is. It’s a gripe I have with our dearly beloved legislators and who they crawl into bed with (mostly figuratively). 4) Crime and race Clearly, we will never agree here either. Twice I’ve suggested the role of poverty, and both times you return to race. The literature of criminology is full of studies finding these economic connections. I do not deny that violent crime is higher among blacks and other minorities. The data are clear on that. The question is Why and What do to about it? You imply some sort of racial, assumedly genetic causation, although sometimes you mention culture. Yet you make no attempt to examine it. Evidently, the fact of the difference is enough for you to condemn blacks outright. What a useful point of view. At the risk of putting words in your mouth, if you seem unwilling to look for remedies to the criminal behavior, why not, uh, “remove the problem”, especially since by demonizing these groups, they become essential “them”, the “other”, a threat? Slobodan Milosovic used similar factual differences to justify ethnic cleansing, but he’s hardly unique. Demonizing is always the precursor to hate crimes. Are you a Christian, as you appear to be? You seem not to care much for Christ. We are at loggerheads. Shall we just let it rest, rather than getting into an endless rant on the issue, since we are clearly not affecting each other’s view on the issue? 6) Violence as entertainment. Glad we agree on something! 7)Canada’s murder rate: Here is an international comparison, which unfortunately only has one African nation, Zimbabwe, whose murder rate is either the same as the US (if you believe the Justice Dept.) or lower (if you believe the UN). Canada’s is much lower. Also note, there are some “white” European nations, predominantly poor, with much higher rates than ours. Genes or economics? Probably both and more. www.llcc.edu/gtruitt/SCJ%20100%20Fall%202002%20Start%20Page/murder%20rated%20compared%20internationally.htmHere is a similar site. Also interesting is that the UK, which has had enormous black, South Asian, Caribbean, immigration still has a much lower murder rate than ours. Some white nations, like in the Eastern European Baltic states, again poor nations, have higher rates than the US, while others like Sweden, Finland and Denmark have much lower, Sweden and Denmark have about 10% immigrant population, Finland less. Poland, with few immigrants, but not rich, also has low rates. There is something complex going on here, simple racial explanations do not explain much. christianparty.net/incarceration.htm8) Poverty and morality. Entire libraries have been written on this! I am not saying that to be poor is to be criminal, or violent. Nor is being rich to be virtuous. In that respect we agree. But I do contend that poverty contributes to an environment conducive to crime, and that meaningful employment contributes to behaving within the law. Money worries do lead to depression, anger, frustration, resentment etc and violence finds an easier outlet, than in situations where money is readily available. (Your comment on “idle” hands is valid, and I tend to agree.) Family structure matters greatly too. Absentee dads create maladjusted children, white, black or other, although some kids are resilient and come out OK, especially if someone can enter to fill that role. Poverty disrupts family structure. Guys (whatever color) in serious money trouble often pack up and walk leaving kids in trouble. That for over 150 years, the economics of slavery broke up families as a matter of policy, did not help to establish the habit of families sticking together through thick and thin, do death do them part. I do not at all claim that this excuses black fathers from fleeing their responsibilities, I only note that this broken family structure did not give freed black society an ideal start. History ought to be paid its due. 9) As for OJ, he grew up in poverty, in the San Francisco's Petrero Hill projects. As the Catholic Church says, give me a child until age five and she is mine forever, (a finding confirmed by neurology). OJ’s violence may have been set by exactly the miserable conditions he came from, which his later riches could not erase. Also, football players are scarcely representative of the general population. I once lived in a Big Ten dorm wing with several white players who went on the pros. One defensive safety, white, used to open field tackle me instead of conceding a lay up after I swiped him of the ball. Another (also white) used to show off nailing random students whistling snowballs at great distances (he went on to pro baseball). These guys, at the pro level, white or black, are not mild-mannered to begin with. Some boys pop out of the womb born for tumbling and rough house, real warriors, others for stamp collecting or chess, real arbitrators. There is a large variance in personal disposition everywhere. Thus comparing violent black football pros with average white guys is a bit of apples vs oranges. Also, how many black pros come from poor backgrounds vs white pros? What I’d really like to see is a comparison of violent crime between black and white pros from similar socio-economic backgrounds. PS (My roommate was a black guy from Cleveland’s inner city. One brother was in prison, the other a lineman for Ma Bell, and he the hardest working student I ever met, who went on to become an anesthesiologist). 10) “African blacks were selling and eating slaves.” Eating? I’ll let you provide the link on that one. But I never defended the Noble Savage myth. Just because Black societies were no more peaceful than American Indian, or Chinese, or White, neither contradicts nor excuses slavery. I think you will find man’s inhumanity to man exempts no race or ethnicity. When it comes to cruelty, we are all brothers. Conversely, all societies have individuals who retain their decency despite all adversity. But mostly the line between good and evil does not run between individuals, but within each. 11) Rising black crime rates. I refer you to www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/fulltext/colorline/115.pdffor my reply. |
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Post by George Moresby on Jul 18, 2003 14:32:26 GMT -5
I was watching CNN recently and I heard this little bit of persuasive environmentalist lore, and I don’t mind telling you, it got me to thinking: “I was walking along a seashore with a friend of mine the other day and he was picking up starfish stranded on the beach. He was picking them up and throwing them back into the sea, where they wriggled and swam back to life. And so I asked him, ‘Why do you do this? It won’t make any difference.’ And he stooped, picked up another one, threw it into the surf, and smiled sagaciously, replying, ‘It made a difference to that one.’” And this made a difference to me and so I thought for a minute about the environment and tried to start my own modest head-nodder: I was walking along a seashore with a friend of mine the other day and he was commanding a firing-squad for murderers, thieves, and traitors. He was taking last requests, giving the order to fire, and tossing the bodies into the surf, where they flopped and floated out to sea. And so I asked him …. But now I’ve got Writer’s Block and I just can’t figure how to end it. Any suggestions? www.themoresbyreport.com |
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Post by remedios on Jul 18, 2003 17:19:19 GMT -5
I suggest you get rid of the seashore bit.
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