Tayles- by “…… a lot of it goes on there.”

I did mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagging

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Anyway, give it a go and if you get stuck, shout!

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“It does look like we’ve wandered off topic, but you took us there when you began complaining about the inconsistent and feeble sentencing in this country. I wholeheartedly agree with you that this is a problem and we need to toughen things up. Perhaps we can discuss the best way of achieving this elswhere. “

Glad you agree on that. Maybe, you could start another thread rather than clog up this one anymore.
“your argument is self defeating, since it implies that if tougher sentences were imposed, your reason for supporting capital punishment would cease to exist.”

“Besides, the talk of needlessly trading off the lives of innocent people at home in order to maintain the image of a tough justice system nauseates me. I suppose you would happily be dragged to the gallows in the knowledge that your death is a helpful part of the propaganda war against crime? It just goes to show that your support for capital punishment is nothing to do with the sanctity of human life; it is a fundamentally misanthropic and sadistic desire to see those who displease you expunged from the earth.”

“Trying to get me to soften my stance on the basis that the current prison system is in chaos or by drawing comparisons with deaths in combat simply implies that I am insufficiently tolerant of murder.”

“Try to imagine some issue on which you cannot imagine compromising. For instance, your right not to be tortured by your neighbour. I don’t imagine that’s as issue you see much room for manoeuvre on. I suspect that wre you to contemplate the means of dealing with your sadistic neighbour, one of the options you probably wouldn’t consider is letting him to pop round occasionally with his drill and pliers. And if you had to fork out money to ensure that his power tools never got close to your body, this probably wouldn’t change your mind either. “

“India, China and much of the South East Asia are dragging themselves out of abject misery by embracing capitalism and establishing property rights. Yes, it is not as easy road, but the price is worth it.”

“Considering the wonky logic, argumentative gaffes, curious tangents, hapless question-begging and petulant name-calling that you have displayed here, I don’t think you’d need me to show you up in a proper debate. You’d do that yourself.”

“So you’re calling for my imprisonment in a gulag or perhaps my summary execution now? “

“I’m not sure if you’re accusing me of being a toff, but it’s an amusing accusation if you are. I didn’t go to university, let alone Oxbridge; and I’ve never been on a debating society in my life. “

“I did not go to university, but I was lucky enough to enjoy a private education, which did at least instill the notion of knowledge for its own sake, rather than the ‘instrumentalist’ approach of the modern left.”

Tayles-“Remember those kids that were bullied at school? They’re getting their own back.”

JAQ- Thanks, I ll give that a go.

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No more than I would support house arrest for everyone in Britain to ensure that little or no crime took place. My objections trump any potential benefits. I’m not trying to be some kind of pious prat here and I don’t have some illusion of immortality as Newmania suggested; I just want to live in a country where the government cannot deal out death to its wrong-doers.

Everyone’s principles are for sale. You have to weigh up the pros and cons of any enterprise before coming to a conclusion. I could still have huge moral misgivings about something and acquiesce to it on the basis that its advantages outweighed its costs. However, there would have to be a truly astonishing and demonstrable benefit to the death penalty before I would budge on it. That, despite Newmania’s insistence, is not self-evident in this instance.

If you saw a gang of five people dragging an innocent person off the street (a child, say) to kill them and the only way to stop them was to kill all five of them, what would you do?

I’d kill them without a moment’s hesitation. This is the same situation as the police marksman who takes down a terrorist about to set off a bomb. If he doesn’t have the opportunity to arrest and detain them, there is no alternative. It’s regrettable, but what choice do you have? Contrary to Newmania’s suggestion, I can differentiate between the victim and the wrong-doer.

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Custodial sentencing has a sense of proportion too: murder carries a stiffer term of imprisonment than theft (or it should, at least). You may dismiss two decades in jail as a trip to Butlins, but that is more a call for prison reform rather than a case for capital punishment.

It follows that justice can, on occasion only be served by capital punishment.

You steadfastly refuse to understand my perspective. Let’s try a different angle. Urging me to accept that capital punishment is sometimes the only fitting punishment is like telling a vegetarian that eating turkey is the only way to do Christmas dinner. Does that help? If not how about this: it’s like asking a devout Christian to consider devil worship as a cure for their problems.

In other words, no matter how much of good case you put for the death penalty being a proportional punishment, I ain’t buying it. And don’t expect an epiphany from me any time soon.

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Surely, if you knew that hanging a convicted murderer would deter x amount of other would be murderers then to refuse to implement the death penalty would be knowingly allowing the murders of innocent men, women and children. Surely this would be putting our own morals above the sanctity of human life.

using the sancity of human life issue against the death penalty is a tricky one because it assumes that guilt is not important. If, hypothetically, you were told you had to (you have no choice of refusing, again just humour me) kill either one individual or a group of five individuals then you would, I assume, pick the one individual since this would save the lives of four extra people. However, if you saw a gang of five people dragging an innocent person off the street (a child, say) to kill them and the only way to stop them was to kill all five of them, what would you do? Would you allow them to murder the innocent person in order that four extra lives could be saved, after all the sanctity of life and all that or would you kill all five in order to save the innocent?

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The distinction here is that with murder and execution we’re talking about taking the life of another, as opposed to taking your own life. I’m actually undecided on the euthanasia issue, but if pressed on it I think I’d be opposed to it. On the one hand I support the freedom to do with your own life what you see fit, as long as it does no demonstrable harm to anyone else (outside of the grief it my cause loved ones, I suppose). On the other hand, euthanasia in particular cheapens and devalues human life. Everybody knows that doctors take humane measures to hasten death at the end, and we accept that individuals already are ‘free’ to die, since nobody can prevent a determined suicide. But asking the government to endorse voluntary euthanasia is another matter. This is not only about the individuals involved. However desperate some may feel, we should not give official approval to the notion that death is a solution to the problems of living.

Even the most ‘responsible’ right-to-die organizations advocate suicide as a therapeutic answer to depression. Reports on the issue always confirm fear and depression, rather than pain, as the major role in assisted suicide requests. This is dangerous, but more than this euthanasia destroys the real, if abstract, values that connect us and make us human beings. Cowardice would become lionised as courage and the duty to make the most of what one has would become the duty to throw it away. The meaning of human life would be reduced to the physical, base animal instincts, trapped within the husk of the body. Human dignity would be reduced to bodily aestheticism.

Should we also make suicide illegal, after all committing suicide is taking a life, the differrence is the victim has a choice.

I thought it was illegal, although maybe I’m wrong. I wouldn’t want the government to endorse it by making it legal for the reasons above, but since you can’t legislate people into not attempting suicide it would be a bit pointless either way.

While I disagree with the death penalty for the reasons that newmania stated, I do believe it would solve the problem of deterring a criminal who has already committed a crime against their victim from murdering the victim in order to get away with the initial crime such as rape or sexual assault.

I can see the logic of this argument, but since my opposition to capital punishment is not based on its effectiveness as a deterrent, you will understand that I could never countenance this solution. Actually, overuse of the death penalty causes problems of its own. In the famous ‘Onion Field’ case of the 1960s a couple of guys kidnapped and killed a police office on the understanding that kidnapping was a capital crime.

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Anyway folks – allow yourself to be introduced to BLOCKQUOTE. Remember that: blockquote As some systems just use ‘quote’ (and what’s the betting I get them mixed up?)

Anyway: on this system you have to use the pointy brackets (next to the ‘M’ on my keyboard) but as they won’t show up in text I’ll use curly ones ‘{‘ and you just substitute pointy one’s.

So the string you need to type to enclose quoted text will be:

{blockquote}quoted text{/blockquote}
Got it?

and it should look something like this:

My guess is that you are under the modern illusion of immortality and that the contemplation of death is something about which you are incapable of rational thought. It is simply to large a horror to think about .If you cannot think about it of course you will not be equipped to apply t justice in the caser of murder.

This method can be used for bold: {b}text{/b} or italics {i}text{/i} etc. All you have to remember is to turn the formating on and off.

Have a go but remember to use the Preview button first, before you post.

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