Peterkin

I don't get this eternal dwelling on how to punish the rare, spectacular crime - after it has taken place, and how to prevent the next one, with no consideration given to preventing the first one. Didn't anybody ever notice anything odd about that boy at any time before he committed that one heinous act? I think this is a large part of what Dimreepr has been advocating for. If there are babies born irremediably evil, we should sequester them long before they do so much damage. If they're not born evil, we should prevent them turning bad. Shouldn't we be paying attention to how our children are developing and what kind of people they're growing into?

No points. Just discourse on the situation. If we can't or don't want to think about what our political leaders face once we put them in office, on what basis can we decide which ones to elect next time?

It's hard to say no to army brass. It's hard to understand very different cultures. It's hard to decide whether a war of choice is a good or bad choice. It's hard to extricate oneself from a fraught relationship of any kind (You've all been there, right?) It's hard to know the most politically advantageous thing to do. When you're in one of the many seats in a great big room full of democratically elected representatives of 30-some percent of the people, it's easy to go with the flow. When you're in that badly designed office, all alone, you make some very difficult decisions. Agreeing, certainly. Taking exception, no. Just wondering what you imagine doing in his place. It's kind of an uncomfortable thought-experiment.

Of course he's struggling. Each new president inherits the bass-ackward incompetence and crappy decisions of the six or seven preceding administrations, and the same brass-bound, uncommunicative, recalcitrant military hierarchy that leaves all the messy splats on the ground and swaggers away. This president is at least doing something, even if he was pushed into it unprepared. Do you know what he's doing behind the scenes? I don't. What do you think he should do that's within his power to do? I have no frickin idea.

I don't know about Beecee. Since retirement, I work as many and whichever hours I want, mostly on the computer. The little work I do is done to an exacting standard.

Both of those are largely cultural matters. Whether people who have been wronged by their fellow citizens desire revenge or restitution or penitence or redemption of the wrongdoer depends on the belief-system of the community in which their mind-set and relationships were formed. Even within a complex and diverse large society, local communities may vary considerably in their attitudes. Society at large is best served, not by validating a viewpoint - that is, beyond its constitutional principle - but by finding the most practical solution to its problems. No solution will consist of a single legislation (unless it's a monster omnibus bill) or a uniform response to the different manifestations of lawbreaking. I do make a distinction between those words, lawbreaking and wrongdoing. To label them all "crime" is to obfuscate the subject beyond any hope of discovering its causes, and without understanding of the cause, there can be no solution. I also make a distinction among different types of lawbreakers and wrongdoers. The legal system does make such distinctions, but doesn't have nearly enough scope even to define, let alone discover the differences and implement the appropriate procedure in each situation. That AAF study is worth glancing at.

Gwynne Dyer's latest column on that subject. (He's written many.)

Doesn't that depend on the work they're doing? I assume that they get satisfaction from completing whatever tasks they've taken on, and doing them accurately - as do I. I assume they would be happy to perform work they consider beneficial and constructive - as do I. There is self-esteem, too, in earning one's wages and pulling one's weight on a team - as I found during my employed life. And, of course, if the work requires the best use of their talents and skills, it's pleasurable in itself. Work for its own sake - I doubt it.

This is from a right-of-center think-tank on public policy, in the biggest of the western democratic nations with a constitution that reveres equality. https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/incarceration-and-poverty-in-the-united-states/ Prison doesn't seem to be working very well.

Never mind. My most important thoughts are the ones I haven't expressed.

I find that troubling and impossible to answer. So I guess you win.

Which others? You made the accusation; I would like to see your evidence. I called your source unreliable, only after checking its reputation with sources I do consider reliable. And that is politically extreme? In what way are unasked questions blameworthy? Okay. Nobody's argued against compassion for victims. Yes. But they're not necessarily all the same people, and you and I might not have the same perception of who fits into which group. No, we have not agreed on prison - at least, not the kind of prison in which we are accustomed to storing, destructive, unpopular, inconvenient and disruptive citizens. No, I didn't miss it. Nor did I oppose it. Some of those approaches might work. And I applaud the Sydney police for their good and proper actions. I appreciate your position, even though I don't share all of you assumptions about our reasonable societies. Please state it succinctly, without embellishments. Again, the crucial question is: Who does the defining, designating and separating, on what basis. I don't see what that has to do with formulating a concept. The Taliban have theirs. You have yours. I have mine. Kamala Harris has hers. Grimreepr has his. It doesn't look as if we'll have any consensus. You're citing Norway? The same politically extreme bleeding-heart softly softly Norway I used as an example on page 1? Doesn't seem fair somehow....

Indeed, the shared value system and basic understanding of how the people in a community are interdependent makes the administration of criminal, as well as social justice relatively simple. But surely, the size, diversity and complexity of our societies shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle to formulating a concept of justice - or even to reconciling social and criminal justice, at least in principle.

What end of which political spectrum has been represented here? Please show "extreme rhetoric" in this thread. I've asked questions, expressed my personal opinion and linked statistics from respectable (mainly government) sources. That's a good reason to try to improve them. I'm not sure we agree on exactly who the "evil bastards" are, or which ones need to be separated from whom. And I don't agree with your notion of the form that 'separation' should take. What I most particularly disagree with in our admittedly imperfect justice systems is the sheer number of my fellow citizens being caged and to some degree brutalized, for a great variety of mundane offenses that bear no resemblance to horrific crimes you cited. I am, have been all along, and continue to be, convinced that different crimes, different criminals, should be treated differently. Not more or less of the same ineffective punishment, but a different approach. PS - The concept of justice extends far beyond punishment for acts deemed unacceptable by those with the power to enact laws.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27924967/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/mr-death-penalty/379858/ Not an entirely unbiased source, that.

It depends.

I Believe justice should be concerned with everyone, not just the extremes. There's a novel thought. At least, it seems to me a departure from what you have been saying. Do you mean that incorrigibles don't turn up at the same rate and in the same numbers in all societies, regardless of social, economic and political organization? Current events are produced by the people living them, just as historical events were. Current, like historical, events play a part in shaping the next generation of people.

Unless "the one" is a ruler. The need of the many are regularly, throughout civilization, subordinated to the needs (wants, convenience, whims) of the few in power. That's how laws are made. (Yes, I remember all about the very bad, very rare maniac who performs some horrendous depraved act, and I also know that that unreachable, incorrigible, irredeemable person is as much a product of his society as the upstanding jurors and venerable judge who lock him up and throw away the key. But he accounts for a very, very small statistical percentage of all the crimes in his society. The crimes - like the mental ailments that engender some of the crimes - are also products of the society. As are the bad laws that criminalize normal behaviour and honest harmless people. There is no Us-good/Them-bad divide: we're all in it together: we sow what we reap.)

Maybe they are, but how closely does a past, in some cases, very long past, experience compare to a present situation? The cities have grown; the infrastructure has changed, the organization of cities and industries, the demographics, generation and distribution of wealth, transport requirements are different from 1910. And in another decade, things will changed again - in some cases, quite dramatically. The only thing we can successfully fish out of that period and keep is the electric car. (In Manhattan, an electric gondola service.)

You're right. I was generalizing too much from the most progressive EU nations. And yet Munich and Hamburg are among the cities banning cars from downtown. Seems the auto industry is being suborned by the bright side.

What I'm afraid of is that I gave you an undeserved -1, which I never meant to - honest!!

Oh yes, Europe is way ahead on this front. Of course, they've had congestion, smog and traffic-flow problems much longer than North America; their available space is much more constricted. But also: their economies are not so closely dependent on the fossil fuel and automotive industries, and their citizens are more powerful - when they're adamant, European governments address their concerns.

Sorry, I made a mistake on the rating: I meant to applaud the video and then I tried to undo it and that just made it worse. I guess I shouldn't try to use that function at all.

Can't. But the headline is nothing new. Why did the US-backed government collapse? It shouldn't have been a surprise! Same reason all Potemkin villages do once they're hit with a single round of ammunition: it was never real. Why did the US trained and armed Afghan army desert? Same reason: it was a make-believe army of men who took the only job they could get - and if they could make points with the bosses they knew by passing along a few American weapons, so much the better. Daddy Warbucks did very well indeed - everyone else lost. Even the Taliban. They got their country back - only it's broken again, with a an economy in shambles, with a lot of citizens who will have to purged or feared, children with a taste for chocolate and bubble gum, women discontent with their place, peasants with no fields to tend, sad people with lost relatives. They won't know how to cope with this complexity of loss, grief and frustration.

It's hard for me to imagine serious, educated men, with serious, important jobs, 1. not knowing that they are ignorant about a country they're deciding whether to wage war on, 2. not consulting insider advisors less ignorant than themselves 3. refusing to listen to knowledgeable outsiders who offer free advice, 4. not knowing that a military intervention always ends, blights and destroys many people's lives, or, knowing, then 5. deciding on a policy of military intervention anyway 6. after repeated bad outcomes in similar situations - all with the intention of helping the nation they've sent their tanks to overrun. I'm just not convinced they all meant well.