Oppose Abortion and Support The Death Penalty, Hypocrite Much?
Offline Alrighty, This is my first post since entering this lovley world of fellow atheists. And well, being a youngster with a shitload of questions- I couldn't help but wonder this morning why the fuck are people against Abortion, yet; they support the death penalty? It just doesn't make any sense that these "pro-lifers" are for killing people? It's like being a feminist, and in the NWWL! (Naked woman's wrestling league).
Okay, Ill admit the obvious: These sick fucks who are sentenced to death are rapists and murder's, and at the result at their own actions. and yes the unborn "child" (fetus) dies from the actions of another. Yeah, i'll admit that the "child" (fetus) has done nothing warranting such a harsh penalty, but technically the baby isn't REALLY alive, right Which means it doesnt feel any pain! Correct me if im wrong , because well I'm no smartass docter but; There is no baby to hurt. First an embryo, then later a fetus! First trimester abortions hapen before cells are specialized. Therefore, there can be no pain because there are no nerve cells. Any pain felt after that would be instantanouess. There's never any conscious pain equivalent to what a child would experience.
Here's my take: I'm pro-choice. And I believe that when used for good intentions abortion is a great tool for a mistake, or put it this way; what if it was your daughter who was raped? Abortion is a good solution, when you have no other choice. And a lot of my middle school friends tell me "Dominique, what about adoption!" well, to that I say look at any orphanage, it ain't like one of those tv/movie orphanage where some ginger bitch is singin "tommorow tommorow i love you tomorrow" No sir, it's hell for most kids. The latest UNICEF numbers for 2008 indicate that there are an estimated 132 million orphans in the world. And as for the good ol' US of A; There are approximately 500,000 children in the United States foster care system. So out of those 500k do you honestly, HONESTLY believe that each and every single one will be adopted? No. These kids will never experience a birthday party at chucke' cheese, public school wearing brand name clothing, their first car, etc. Nah, they'll be in there poor run down little orphanage, Waiting. Hoping. Praying to god that isn't there, that maybe, somone will love them and care for them enough to take them home.
As for the death penalty, I haven't much to say... Aside from the fact that these fuckers don't deserve to take the easy way out and die. They deserve to suffer, and rot in jail.
I'm posting this because I wan't to know what you guys think, How you feel about both.
*Keep in mind that this is my first post and im not that advanced in writing and I'm not Mr. intelligence.*
Please feel free to correct mean in any way, and keep me informed, im here to learn! =D
-Curiousty Killed the cat-
-Ignorance Killed the kid-
~Dominique Danger Dorantez~
14 year old, with a lot of questions.
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Offline Whether it's 'life' or 'all life' is irrelevant. The relevant word, and the one you keep dodging, is 'sacred'. That is the claim they are making.
I'm not dodging anything. You're saying that "sacred" means inviolable, but they obviously don't mean that. Religious people always say things are sacred.
They can have as complex a position as they want. More power to them. My charge is to their rhetoric, which does *not* proclaim a complex position, but a very simplified one, and so over-simplified that it makes them hypocrites when they proclaim it. Quit dodging the issue. This is not about me imposing restrictions on them. This is about what *they* say. They don't *have* to claim 'life is sacred'. They could instead claim 'the life of a fetus is sacred'. But they don't! They go for the polemic, sloganeering, *hypocritical* 'pro-life' and 'life is sacred'. You will *never* hear a pro-lifer say, "'Pro-life' is properly understood as 'pro the life of the fetus'." They don't mean it that way. They mean 'pro life', no qualifiers. *That's* why they are hypocrites.
Pro-life people shout their views at others on the street, of course it has to be simple. Maybe when they claim life is sacred, by "sacred" they mean worthy of respect. Retributivists believe that the dispensation of punishment is respectful to the punished. That's one possibility.
You are implying that if pro-lifers are hypocrites, then anyone who holds a pro-abortion-anti-death-penalty position must also be a hypocrite.However, "There are many possible positions, such as mine, that don't involve sloganeering or hypocrisy. And yet, the pro-lifers are still hypocrites."
My position supports abortion and is against the death penalty, but I don't base my reasons on the 'pro-choice' slogans/position, and my position does not involve sloganeering or hypocrisy. There are many other possible positions in the same vein. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, are still hypocrites.
Some people are hypocrites and some are not. Not all pro-life people have a position that involves sloganeering or hypocrisy, but you level blanket accusations that they're all hypocrites.
I never said anything like that. That's your interpretation/straw man. They can have as many positions as they like, for all I care. But if they claim in their anti-abortion rhetoric to be 'pro-life' and 'life is sacred', and later also support the death-penalty, then their anti-abortion rhetoric makes them hypocrites. If they don't want to be hypocrites, they should make their nuanced position clear in their rhetoric.
I'm not trying to misrepresent what you're saying. I'm trying to clarify it. So, you're not saying there's only one pro-life position. You're saying that there are many equally hypocritical pro-life positions, and they're hypocritical because they're unclear as to exactly when and under what circumstances they support life, but pro-choice positions beings equally vague are not hypocritical. That's, well... hypocritical.
They can add whatever caveats or modifying details they like. But they don't! That's the point. You don't hear pro-lifers qualifying their position as "Pro-life really means pro the life of the fetus, but after they're born we don't really care, and in fact we support the death penalty." If that's what 'pro-life' meant as a slogan, then I wouldn't call them hypocrites. But instead they just say "We're pro-life because the Bible makes it clear that life is sacred, a gift from God, innocent babies, yadda yadda yadda." They never qualify it to include things like the death penalty.The fact that the same people who claim to adhere to the 'pro-life' position, without qualifiers, will later turn around and claim to support the death penalty, does *not* make their position 'nuanced', because they don't include any such nuance in their pro-life rhetoric. It's not 'nuance', it's contradiction. It's hypocrisy.
If we were to go along with your defense of their 'nuance', then the worst populist pandering politicians, who will say whatever the hell the particular crowd wants to hear, must be the most sophisticatedly 'nuanced' people in the world. Anyone who lies to your face and bad-mouths you behind your back is not a dishonest prick, they're actually a deep-thinking 'nuanced' social commentator. In fact, no one ever lies or contradicts themselves or commits hypocrisy. They're just nuanced.
Your tactic of 'nuance' elevates the worst above the best. We can't argue against Muslim violence, because Islam means 'Peace', doncha know, and Muslim terrorists are just nuanced in their attacks. Your defense of pro-life rhetoric being compatible with a pro-death penalty stance seems just as ridiculous.
That's just a rant really. I know pro-life people who do qualify their positions so I think you're making some pretty broad brush strokes there. I mean you claim to be on some sort of middle ground but half of what you say is just really blatant sweeping generalizations of people you clearly wish only to malign.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
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Offline Whats worse? A corrupt prison in which prisoners are routienly executed, or a corrupt prison in which they spend the rest of their days in squalid conditions, being tortured? This is why i leave out corruption
There are two important things that you're leaving out of this comparison. First, there is no *policy* of torture. If torture occurs, it's not due to the state sanctioning the torture, it's due to the corruption itself. In the case of execution, the state is sanctioning the execution. That is the policy. Convicted of crime = execution. After the conviction, even if it was due to corruption, the legal result is state-sanctioned death. After a wrongful conviction, there's no legal state-sanctioned torture.
Second, torture can be ended, corrected, paid restitution for, and prevented from re-occurring again in the future. Death is final. There is no 'end' to the death penalty; you can't just say, "Well, he's had enough of the death penalty, turn it off." You can't correct it; when you're dead, you're dead. You can't pay the victim back for wrongly-applied death. And you can't prevent the victim from being dead in the future; you only die once, and that death is final.
So, even if you had state-sanctioned torture, and it later turns out the guy's innocent, you can fix that mistake; not perfectly, but at least the guy's alive to receive reparations. But in the case of death, "Oopsy! Sorry, we killed you. Our mistake. We hope you can forgive us. But actually, you're already dead, so you can fuck off for all we care."
When you have state-sanctioned execution combined with corruption, you get political killings, "Oops, that nasty thorn in our side was wrongly killed. So sorry. But at least he's now dead." You get racist killing, "Oops, nigger's dead. Good riddance." You get Bush's populist killings, "Oops, we killed 20 innocent people, but hey, we're tough on crime, so vote for us." You get lynch/vigilante killings, "Oops, new evidence says we got the wrong guy, but actually I still think it was him, so justice was served." Etc. etc.
If you pull legal execution out of that mix, you may get wrongful punishments, but at least there's a chance that the victims can come back and make something out of it. "Sorry's not good enough, ass wipe, now I'm going to sue/fight for equal rights/kick your ass in the next election/etc." Alternatively, even if they don't make something out of it, at least they get a chance to live the rest of their life how they choose to live it.
Remember, these are innocent people we're talking about. Not murderers and rapists, but law-abiding civilians. The state should be defending them, not the assholes who get away with killing them.
"Life is not sacred, people will get hurt, the world goes on"
I agree life is not sacred. But hurt can be prevented, and killing avoided. It's totally unnecessary, it has no practical benefits. The death penalty does nothing good, and has worthless and unfixable flaws.
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Offline That's just a rant really.
But it's true. Show me a 'pro-life' campaign/organization that takes these kinds of 'nuanced' positions where 'pro-life' means 'pro-fetus-life, but also pro-death penalty', and maybe you'll have something. If you're going to bring up individuals who are merely anti-abortion pro-death penalty, then you're not addressing the issue. If they take up the 'pro-life' rhetoric, they are hypocrites. That is the issue. The whole reason they invented that term is as a rhetorical device to make it look like anyone against them is 'anti-life'. They don't call themselves the 'pro-fetus-lifers' because that undermines the rhetorical device.
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Offline This whole "pro-life vs pro-choice" is just semantics and nonsense.
There are three legal position on abortion: Legal in all, legal in some, legal in none.
There is no such thing as "pro-life" or "pro-choice" as both are just terms to lower the other side's value. It also allows the other side to generalize and compartmentlize the other.
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Offline This whole "pro-life vs pro-choice" is just semantics and nonsense.
There are three legal position on abortion: Legal in all, legal in some, legal in none.
There is no such thing as "pro-life" or "pro-choice" as both are just terms to lower the other side's value. It also allows the other side to generalize and compartmentlize the other.
You cannot ignore the fact that with it being legal, and an option for any pregnant female of our species, the people that want to make it ILLEGAL are trying to REMOVE a viable and safe alternative to their pregnancy going to term.
That is removal of a choice. That is the reason the term is used.
It is legal. For a reason.
Abortion will always happen, as it always has. It is a necessary part of human society. Making it illegal will just force it back into the black market, exactly where it shouldn't be.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
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Offline This whole "pro-life vs pro-choice" is just semantics and nonsense.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending 'pro-choice' rhetoric.
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Offline Cpt_pineapple wrote:This whole "pro-life vs pro-choice" is just semantics and nonsense.
Just to be clear, I'm not defending 'pro-choice' rhetoric.
Mine. 
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
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Offline StrawberryJam wrote:As for curious child. You equivocated perhaps unintentionally when you stated, "Why would you want to fight murder with murder?"
The death penalty is not by definition murder. The state is only enacting a sanctioned punishment which happens to be death.
Honestly, the big words make my head hurt... I had to get the damn dictionary out, like 5 times!
equivocate - to be deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or withhold information
What exactly are you trying to acuse me off here? I haven't withheld any information and im not avoiding anything?
And it doesn't matter if its legal or not, Killing somone is killing somone. All I'm saying is, two wrongs dont make a right(let me guess, your going to quote me on that too?). The death penalty is nothing but an 'easy way out' if you ask me...
Equivocation fallacy is what I was referring to.... you're misusing the word murder in this case for emotional effect. DP is not murder but you equivocated it to be murder for emotional effect. Again, I don't think you're doing it intentionally. The classic example of this is when pro-lifers for instance say abortion is murder. Abortion has a completely different definition. Well, if you look up in the dictionary the definition of murder you're going to find out it's not just killing. The error you're making there is by taking the definition of murder and trying to apply it to the DP which is different.
You're saying this essentially:
Murder is killing.
Death Penatly is killing
Therefore Death Penalty = Murder
I could do the same with this:
Murder is killing
Killing someone is self-defense is killing.
Therefore Killing someone in self defense is murder.
Both are killing it's true. No denying it. But context changes the meaning, motivation, and method of those killings to mean COMPLETELY different things. Important differences are important.
"Two wrongs don't make a right" Thank you, Dr. Pat Answers.
But seriously. This is simply an oversimplification of the situation. You haven't established that DP is wrong other than asserting it is. I will agree with you that murder is wrong. Society certainly agrees that murder is wrong. Society hasn't reached agreement that the DP is wrong or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
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Offline CuriousChild wrote:StrawberryJam wrote:As for curious child. You equivocated perhaps unintentionally when you stated, "Why would you want to fight murder with murder?"
The death penalty is not by definition murder. The state is only enacting a sanctioned punishment which happens to be death.
Honestly, the big words make my head hurt... I had to get the damn dictionary out, like 5 times!
equivocate - to be deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or withhold information
What exactly are you trying to acuse me off here? I haven't withheld any information and im not avoiding anything?
And it doesn't matter if its legal or not, Killing somone is killing somone. All I'm saying is, two wrongs dont make a right(let me guess, your going to quote me on that too?). The death penalty is nothing but an 'easy way out' if you ask me...
Equivocation fallacy is what I was referring to.... you're misusing the word murder in this case for emotional effect. DP is not murder but you equivocated it to be murder for emotional effect. Again, I don't think you're doing it intentionally. The classic example of this is when pro-lifers for instance say abortion is murder. Abortion has a completely different definition. Well, if you look up in the dictionary the definition of murder you're going to find out it's not just killing. The error you're making there is by taking the definition of murder and trying to apply it to the DP which is different.
You're saying this essentially:
Murder is killing.
Death Penatly is killing
Therefore Death Penalty = MurderI could do the same with this:
Murder is killing
Killing someone is self-defense is killing.
Therefore Killing someone in self defense is murder.Both are killing it's true. No denying it. But context changes the meaning, motivation, and method of those killings to mean COMPLETELY different things. Important differences are important.
"Two wrongs don't make a right" Thank you, Dr. Pat Answers.But seriously. This is simply an oversimplification of the situation. You haven't established that DP is wrong other than asserting it is. I will agree with you that murder is wrong. Society certainly agrees that murder is wrong. Society hasn't reached agreement that the DP is wrong or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
Bleach is mostly water. We are mostly water. Therefore, we are bleach.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
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Offline Bleach is mostly water. We are mostly water. Therefore, we are bleach.
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Offline I support abortion (in certain circumstances) and I oppose the death penalty, does that also mean I am a hypocrite? I don't think so...
Here is my view:
The goal in life is to increase one's happiness and decrease one's suffering right?
Say there's a girl who got pregnant by accident, maybe she even got raped.
Say she's got nobody to take care of her and/or her baby and she really can't afford to take care of one herself.
In this case it wouldn't improve anyone's life if she has the baby, they would both have a shit life and if she didn't have the baby, her life would be a little less shit.
Example 2:
A small 15 year old girl is raped and gets pregnant.
She is so young and so little that having the baby would probably kill her.
Now you'd have to choose, her life, or the baby.
I say, kill the embryo/fetus. Why? Well, because it probably hasn't even noticed that it's alive, so it will probably suffer less.
I think it is worse to kill someone who has ambitions, who has plans for the future, who desperately wants to live, than to kill someone who hasn't even noticed he/she is alive...
And beside those 2 examples above (some people are gonna hate me now): in my opinion there are too many people on this planet already, so if it's not an absolute necessity to have a baby, then please don't...
Why I oppose the death penalty, several reasons:
First - I once saw a documentary on that and it showed that there is no humane way of killing people.
Unless you destroy a very small group of braincells in the back of the head (which is hard to aim, even with a gun), a person will suffer a full 20 minutes before he/she dies.
Even if you shoot yourself in the head, if you miss that small group of braincells in the back of the head, you will probably suffer 20 minutes.
Second - If you just kill sick fucks, you will never know how they became sick fucks.
Maybe some people just have an aggressive gene or something, but MOST people are made sick fucks through nurture.
Instead of putting money in the killing of these people, you should put money in research of "Why did these people become sick fucks? What should we change to society to try to prevent that from happening in the future?"
THAT is a REAL solution!
You shouldn't just cut off the cancer, you should also research where the cancer comes from and how you can prevent it from developping in the first place!
"The horrible thing about our species is that it still has yet to put a leash on emotionalism and make the priority pragmatism."
I só agree! We, as a species, have yet to mature...
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Offline The pro-life position has extremely little to do with wanting to protect unborn children, that's just a cover that some of them have even deluded themselves into believing. In reality, it's about controlling what women can or can't do with their own reproductive systems. When the birth control pill first came onto the market, it caused a huge misogynist uproar as well. I've never seen the statistics, but I would bet you a billion dollars that pro-lifers are predominantly men while pro-choicers are predominantly women. That explains it all right there. Women are supposed to bear children when and where men tell them to and shut up about it, that's their sole duty in life.
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Offline Punishment might have a tertiary deterring effect but that's really not my focus and it is not really implied by the defnition of the word.
"The word is the abstract substantivation of the verb to punish, which is recorded in English since 1340, deriving from Old French puniss-, an extended form of the stem of punir "to punish," from Latin punire "inflict a penalty on, cause pain for some offense," earlier poenire, from poena "penalty, punishment of great loss" " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment
Punishment for me is simple. Cause and Effect. The Cause is that you have denied someone else their rights. Therefore the consequence is that your rights will be taken from you. The magnitude of the loss of rights is comensurate with the magnitude of the rights taken.
In the case of premeditated murder you have taken the ultimate rights from the person and therefore you deserve to have all of your rights taken from you. I interrpet that as being death because you have taken away even their biological processes and the same should be taken from you.
That philosophical stance on punishment is called retributivism. You are not in bad company there(J.M. Keynes for one), but as all "pure" philosophies of punishment, it is inadequate to say the least.
I agree that prevention and eductation before such acts occur should be the primary focus and for lower magnitude offenses more education and reformation may take place but always the loss of rights must accompany a convicted crime.
Utilitarianism is on the opposite side of the spectrum and focuses on deterrence rather than retribution. This also is an inadequate position for understanding world's "correctional" systems.
Now, a good academic would tell you that neither of those philosophical positions alone can adequately cover the needs of a just society, but that we have to combine them depending on circumstances. Luckily, I think most academics should eat shit and die choking on it - exactly beacause of this sort of presumptuous theoretical bullshit completely out of tune with reality. I won't bore you with details, but the "correctional" system used both domestically and abroad by the US muscle, has never been more than crowd control, institutionalised slavery and at times terrorism. You can land on either side of the punishment vs. deterrence issue, or pretend to be smart by sitting in the middle, but framed like that you will never discuss the essence of incarceration as imposed by US.
So whay does this matter? Because, if you want to get to a point where you can discuss philosophical aspects of an existing justice system, you first must face the fact that you don't have a justice system to begin with and need to build one bottom up, or at least start transforming the monster you have today into something that isn't obviously made for opression, protection for few powerful and false sense of security for many, in that order of priority. Anyone even trying to argue for the system we have today is either profiting on it, is ignorant, dishonest, or some combination of the three.
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
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And an incredibly painful death awaiting anyone willing to use a doc-in-the-box.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
Yes, and LWOP should mean "LIFE WITHOUT fucking PAROLE"
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
QFT
However to address the rest of your post, a society has the right to 'excise' (or destroy) those (violent, sadistic, and degenerate) citizens of populace which it considers counter-productive and ultimately an inefficient expense of said society. It has been this way for thousands of years, it will easily continue to be so for thousands more. In fact, I would not be surprised if our eons-old inter-species ancestors thought the same way.
edit: survival of the fittest, in essence, in order to ensure survival of the species.
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
Im gonna make the assumption that we're talking about american prison system
in which case 20-25yrs is more then enough time for a prisoner to get an education in the law to his hearts content, become his own fucking lawyer, get his case re-opened, post-pone his execution until long after the end of his re-trial... etc etc
All of which is offered, and pay'd for, by the same government which put him in the slammer
Could you become compitent in american law, given 25yrs? could you become an equivalent of a lawyer? a judge? 25yrs is 1/3 your god damn life... its theirs to waste.
Im just gonna ignore corruption, because it really has no bearing, on right or wrong
What Would Kharn Do?
Whether it's 'life' or 'all life' is irrelevant. The relevant word, and the one you keep dodging, is 'sacred'. That is the claim they are making.
They can have as complex a position as they want. More power to them. My charge is to their rhetoric, which does *not* proclaim a complex position, but a very simplified one, and so over-simplified that it makes them hypocrites when they proclaim it. Quit dodging the issue. This is not about me imposing restrictions on them. This is about what *they* say. They don't *have* to claim 'life is sacred'. They could instead claim 'the life of a fetus is sacred'. But they don't! They go for the polemic, sloganeering, *hypocritical* 'pro-life' and 'life is sacred'. You will *never* hear a pro-lifer say, "'Pro-life' is properly understood as 'pro the life of the fetus'." They don't mean it that way. They mean 'pro life', no qualifiers. *That's* why they are hypocrites.
No. that's not what I mean. This is going back to your first post in this thread. After CuriousChild wrote:
You wrote:
You are implying that if pro-lifers are hypocrites, then anyone who holds a pro-abortion-anti-death-penalty position must also be a hypocrite.
However, "There are many possible positions, such as mine, that don't involve sloganeering or hypocrisy. And yet, the pro-lifers are still hypocrites."
My position supports abortion and is against the death penalty, but I don't base my reasons on the 'pro-choice' slogans/position, and my position does not involve sloganeering or hypocrisy. There are many other possible positions in the same vein. Pro-lifers, on the other hand, are still hypocrites.
I never said anything like that. That's your interpretation/straw man. They can have as many positions as they like, for all I care. But if they claim in their anti-abortion rhetoric to be 'pro-life' and 'life is sacred', and later also support the death-penalty, then their anti-abortion rhetoric makes them hypocrites. If they don't want to be hypocrites, they should make their nuanced position clear in their rhetoric.
To me it is. To you, not so much.
Never said anything like that. That's you straw manning.
I hold them to the same standard as myself. That's why I don't make hypocritical statements about my position. Unfortunately, they do. (If you are unclear on my position, read my first comment.)
They can add whatever caveats or modifying details they like. But they don't! That's the point. You don't hear pro-lifers qualifying their position as "Pro-life really means pro the life of the fetus, but after they're born we don't really care, and in fact we support the death penalty." If that's what 'pro-life' meant as a slogan, then I wouldn't call them hypocrites. But instead they just say "We're pro-life because the Bible makes it clear that life is sacred, a gift from God, innocent babies, yadda yadda yadda." They never qualify it to include things like the death penalty.
The fact that the same people who claim to adhere to the 'pro-life' position, without qualifiers, will later turn around and claim to support the death penalty, does *not* make their position 'nuanced', because they don't include any such nuance in their pro-life rhetoric. It's not 'nuance', it's contradiction. It's hypocrisy.
If we were to go along with your defense of their 'nuance', then the worst populist pandering politicians, who will say whatever the hell the particular crowd wants to hear, must be the most sophisticatedly 'nuanced' people in the world. Anyone who lies to your face and bad-mouths you behind your back is not a dishonest prick, they're actually a deep-thinking 'nuanced' social commentator. In fact, no one ever lies or contradicts themselves or commits hypocrisy. They're just nuanced.
Your tactic of 'nuance' elevates the worst above the best. We can't argue against Muslim violence, because Islam means 'Peace', doncha know, and Muslim terrorists are just nuanced in their attacks. Your defense of pro-life rhetoric being compatible with a pro-death penalty stance seems just as ridiculous.
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Honestly, the big words make my head hurt... I had to get the damn dictionary out, like 5 times!
equivocate - to be deliberately ambiguous or unclear in order to mislead or withhold information
What exactly are you trying to acuse me off here? I haven't withheld any information and im not avoiding anything?
And it doesn't matter if its legal or not, Killing somone is killing somone. All I'm saying is, two wrongs dont make a right(let me guess, your going to quote me on that too?). The death penalty is nothing but an 'easy way out' if you ask me...
-Curiousty Killed the cat-
-Ignorance Killed the kid-
~Dominique Danger Dorantez~
14 year old, with a lot of questions.
Perhaps I could. Not everyone can. Not everyone will even see that possibility. Not every prison will have those facilities. Not every prisoner will be able to afford the additional expenses of pursuing such a task, e.g. getting DNA tests done, paying expert witnesses, etc. Not everyone will have the necessary contacts on the outside. Frankly, not everyone will have the brains to do it. They may not even be fully literate in the first place, and they certainly won't have professors, tutors, teachers, etc. to help them along. Especially considering the American education system... which is yet another fine mess.
Well, isn't that convenient? Ignoring reality as a defense for unnecessary (and easily preventable) harm and suffering. No legal system is ever going to be perfect, especially when humans are the judges, juries, and executioners. And we can never guarantee that a lack of corruption today won't give way to corruption tomorrow. That's why checks and balances are important in the first place. Eliminating the death penalty would be a good example of such a check against corruption and bias.
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No real loss then, right? ;-p
Actually... they DO have "in-house" tutors and teachers... and illiterate inmates are taught to read... better then your average american urban middle school i would imagine ^_^
You know why corruption cant be taken into the equation? BECAUSE IT FUCKS EVERYTHING UP!
Child day care! Awesome idea, unless the provider is a pedophile
Public schooling! Awesome idea, unless the entire schoolboard is creationists
So... now we can no longer have child day care, and public schools because corruption and naughty things may happen!
Whats worse? A corrupt prison in which prisoners are routienly executed, or a corrupt prison in which they spend the rest of their days in squalid conditions, being tortured? This is why i leave out corruption
But oh! what about inspections, and regulators, and rules! ... hmm? all fine and dandy, until... "What if they're corrupt? "
Well... now we need regulators for the regulators blah blah...
Life is not sacred, people will get hurt, the world goes on
What Would Kharn Do?