Good-bye, Saddam.

[Gilby]

Originally Posted by thejdw

No I mean you are douting that saddam was hanged, so I was wondering if you think diana was murdered?

I plead the fifth.

[thejdw]

Originally Posted by Gilby

I plead the fifth.

ok

[BillyTheMountain]

Originally Posted by Mikefule

There are hundreds and thousands of sadistic torturers and murderers in Iraq, in both communities.

In BOTH communities? You mean in the community of Iraqis and in the community of USA and coalition forces?

[BillyTheMountain]

Originally Posted by Mikefule: Try this expanded version of the argument:

Throughout recorded history, most societies that have existed have had the death penalty for murder and certain other offences. All of those societies have had to apply the death penalty repeatedly.



Mike: How many "societies" are there today?

MOST nations do not have the death penalty, and of course no civilized nations have the death penalty. That's a FACT, not just what I think.

[DarkTom]

Here is a working link to the vid on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-OiuHqHPVk


T.

[Mikefule]

Originally Posted by BillyTheMountain

In BOTH communities? You mean in the community of Iraqis and in the community of USA and coalition forces?

No, I mean the Shi'ite community and the Sunni community - two warring communities that are Iraq's equivalent of Northern Ireland's catholic and Protestant communities, but on a more spectacular scale.

[Mikefule]

Originally Posted by BillyTheMountain

Originally Posted by Mikefule: Try this expanded version of the argument:

Throughout recorded history, most societies that have existed have had the death penalty for murder and certain other offences. All of those societies have had to apply the death penalty repeatedly.

Mike: How many "societies" are there today?

MOST nations do not have the death penalty, and of course no civilized nations have the death penalty. That's a FACT, not just what I think.

OK, so I said "throughout history", and you specify today. I am talking big picture; you are talking snapshot.

And your definition of a civilised nation? Or, indeed, of civilised, or nation?

Let's think about some major world powers. America, China, France, Germany, Russia, United Kingdom. All of those have used the death penalty within the last 100 years, but all would have fallen within a consensus definition of civilised. But clearly, you are using civilised in a judgemental sense rather than a literal sense, and it is implied in your chosen definition that a country cannot be civilised if it has the death penalty. This is not a widely held view of what the word means. In effect, all you are saying there is that you disapprove of the death sentence.

[JJuggle]

Originally Posted by BillyTheMountain

MOST nations do not have the death penalty, and of course no civilized nations have the death penalty. That's a FACT, not just what I think.

Here is a list of countries with their legal stance on capital punishment.

I was going to say that the first clause of your statement, Billy, is true but the second open to opinion. I'd have to say after looking at the list that, unfortunately, both are debatable.

[king cutecore]

aye well it looks to me like europe is generaly quite moraly sound (tho the uk pushes it a bit) but yeh id say its the place to be if your looking to not be killed, tho make no mistake i do believe if you go about acting like a cunt you cant expect to be treated well and so tho i dont really believe hanging saddam was the thing to do i would say that he was asking for it as he did all these things knowing that if he was to be tried he would risk the death penalty and thats what he got.

for example i dont belive the death penalty is at all decent but then i dont go about commiting crimes in countries where their gona kill me for it cause their not going to let me off just cause i'd prefer prison.

i dont know if i got across what i was meaning to hear and i suspect i didnt but who really cares.

i suspect most of the comments hear wer made by people wanting a bit of a debate cause they wer bored anyway and why not its a fine subject

[JJuggle]

Originally Posted by king cutecore

aye well it looks to me like europe is generaly quite moraly sound (tho the uk pushes it a bit) but yeh id say its the place to be if your looking to not be killed, tho make no mistake i do believe if you go about acting like a cunt you cant expect to be treated well and so tho i dont really believe hanging saddam was the thing to do i would say that he was asking for it as he did all these things knowing that if he was to be tried he would risk the death penalty and thats what he got.

for example i dont belive the death penalty is at all decent but then i dont go about commiting crimes in countries where their gona kill me for it cause their not going to let me off just cause i'd prefer prison.

i dont know if i got across what i was meaning to hear and i suspect i didnt but who really cares.

i suspect most of the comments hear wer made by people wanting a bit of a debate cause they wer bored anyway and why not its a fine subject

I support the death penalty for crimes against punctuation.

[zfreak220]

http://www.tshirthell.com/store/prod...?productid=798

[monkeyman]

Originally Posted by king cutecore

aye well it looks to me like europe is generaly quite moraly sound (tho the uk pushes it a bit) blah blah blah blah

for example i dont belive the death penalty is at all decent blah blah blah blah

You basically just said two things:
1. There is a universal, one-size-fits-all set of morals
2. You don't like the death penalty.

[BillyTheMountain]

Originally Posted by Mikefule

No, I mean the Shi'ite community and the Sunni community - two warring communities that are Iraq's equivalent of Northern Ireland's catholic and Protestant communities, but on a more spectacular scale.

Probably not nearly so simple...

From the internet: But you will have to know a lot of Iraqis before you meet one who cannot introduce you, usually with pride, to his or her Sunni cousin, or Kurdish auntie, or Shiite brother-in-law, as the case may be. And as for ethnicity and religion beyond our customary categories, you had better be prepared to meet Turkish and Assyrian Iraqis, as well as to bear in mind that in 1947 there were more Jews in Baghdad than in Jerusalem (many of the former of whom had been there longer), that many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are Christian from more than one denomination—Islamic fanatics murdered the head of their Anglican congregation just the other day—and that the spiritual leader of the Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, is an ethnic Persian.

When it comes to Iraq, one of the most boring and philistine habits of our media is the insistence on using partitionist and segregationist language that most journalists would (I hope) scorn to employ if they were discussing a society they actually knew. It is the same mistake that disfigured the coverage of the Bosnian war, where every consumer of news was made to understand that there was fighting between Serbs, Croats, and "Muslims." There are two apples and one orange in that basket, as any fool should be able to see. Serbian and Croatian are national differences, which track very closely with the distinction between Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic beliefs. Many Muslims are Bosnian, but not all Bosnians are Muslim.

[Mikefule]

Originally Posted by monkeyman

You basically just said two things:
1. There is a universal, one-size-fits-all set of morals
2. You don't like the death penalty.

A correct analysis, and not the first time in this thread a similar argument has been used!

If you say that the death penalty, or indeed anything else, is fundamentally immoral, and listen to no counterarguments then you are assuming you know better than the countless good and wise people throughout millennia who have condoned the death penalty.

I am not in favour of the death penalty, but I can see a number of arguments each way on the subject. On balance, I come down on the "anti" side because I find execution distasteful, because I find it serves no practical purpose, because it sometimes makes things worse, and because sometimes innocent people are executed. But I struggle to find any irrefutable moral argument against it. It is not self evidently immoral. Branding it immoral can only come from a particular moral standpoint that killing is never justifiable. We all like to think we think that - until we realise how little effort we put into stopping our givernments killing in our name, or we volunteer to fight, or we buy products from countries with poor human rights records...

Anyone who thinks the answer is simple hasn't understood the question.

[cathwood]

Originally Posted by Mikefule

Branding it immoral can only come from a particular moral standpoint that killing is never justifiable. We all like to think we think that - until we realise how little effort we put into stopping our givernments killing in our name, or we volunteer to fight, or we buy products from countries with poor human rights records...

Thats exactly why we need a scapegoat. Why WE have been so interested in his demise. Why people are so happy that he's dead. We can feel much better about our lack of intervention in anything that doesn't necessarily influence us (and by WE I mean me and don't mean everybody who this doesn't apply to).

(I'd also like to say that I do come from the standpoint that killing is never justifiable, although as soon as I had a child I knew that I would kill to protect my children and probably the rest of my family and myself aswell. It's not something that is logical it's just something that I have always felt and felt passionately)