Castration?

[Yankee]

You haven't changed a bit, Spencer. And neither has your avatar.
Welcome back.
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Amy
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ESL teacher, and native speaker of American English

[Jamie (K)]

Spencer, no legal system is 100% foolproof, so it's better not to kill any convict, because he may be innocent. When you get so many people involved in a legal process, or any kind of process, there's a lot of room for things to go wrong. Just look at all the people who have been freed by the Innocence Project since the advent of DNA testing.
http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/Browse-Profiles.php
By your standards, they'd all be dead at the hands of vigilantes now. And those are just the people whose cases they've had the time and money to pursue.

And the whole idea is captured in the words of one happy mother whose falsely accused son has been exonerated: "Oh, honey! Now you can live again!" Watch the movie trailer:
http://www.newyorkerfilms.com/nyf/t_elements/innocence/innocence_tr.htm
Innocent people who have been killed by vigilantes can't "live again".

Molly, it's not accurate to equate the level of a people's culture and mores with the monuments built by a previous civilization. The Egyptian civilization that built the pyramids isn't the one that exists in Egypt today, and today's French are not the civilization that created all their great works of art and literature. Besides, the creation of great historical and cultural monuments has nothing to do with the morality of the people who built them. After all, the pyramids were built by slaves. Look at the magnificent things the Aztecs created, and they used to force their subjugated peoples to give up tribe members for live human sacrifices, kill the losing basketball team, dance around in the hides of skinned virgins, and a host of other repugnant things. (Now you're going to present some moral equivalency argument involving the Iraq war, but it won't be valid, so I won't respond to it.)

[Torsten]

[Yankee]

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One of your past statements surprises me then, Torsten. Have you really forgotten that my picture was also posted here for quite a long time?
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_________________
Amy
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ESL teacher, and native speaker of American English

[Torsten]

Nope, I still remember it too.
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Test Of English for International Communication
TOEIC Preparation & TOEIC Vocabulary

[NinaZara]

This vampire bat, this inhuman beast
She ought to be locked up and never released
The world was such a wholesome place until Cruella, Cruella De Vil
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Try your best and damn the rest.

[Spencer]

Hi Amy and Torsten it's good to be back although I'm only a visitor here.
I moved to Ireland and there I don't have internet. I'm on holiday at the moment and I couldn't resist to check on you guys
Amy I liked your previus avatar better
Jamie, I've got your point but I never said these people should be executed officially just like it was done in America some time ago.
I think there is no real solution so far.
Have you ever heard of someone who was let out from the big house and killed again?
Who got thear life back and used it for taking it from others?
What I want to get through here is everyone has reasons to do the things they do, and everyone is right.A country can't work this way and that's the reason they made the law. Your country made a law and authorised some well traned persons (judges)
to decide who's with the law, and who's against it.They protect the ones who obey
-let's call them sheep- from the wolf.
Now some sheep -who never met a wolf in ther life most likely- get the idea like some of those wolfes arent dangerous.
They know of judges made mistakes, and prisoned sheep instead of wolfes and it's a fact that wolfes only need to spend some time in prison and they become sheep anyway.
Ther are other sheep who's friends has been eaten by wolf, they just want to be safe in thear own herd or whatever you call a bunch of sheep in English.
Damn,I have to go now, but I think you already got the point.

[Ralf]

[Molly]

[Ralf]

[Lost_Soul]

[Ralf]

[quote="lost_soul"]

[Molly]

[Jamie (K)]

In the mind of Molly, there are no differences in degree. If Egypt, Mexico or any other country has something that can be labeled corruption, and the US has something that can be labeled corruption, then the US is equal to those other countries.

It doesn't matter, for example, that in the US, if a policeman stops you, and you try to get out of a ticket by bribing him, 99.99999% of the time he will refuse the bribe, and there's a good chance he'll arrest you for trying to bribe him. Meanwhile, in Mexico, it's expected that the traffic cop will take a bribe, and it's considered a standard way for a policeman to supplement his income.

Secondly, if your daughter is murdered in the US, the police will investigate it. In Egypt, the police will also investigate it, but according to human rights reports, if your Christian daughter was kidnapped, forcibly converted to Islam, forced to sleep with her "husband", then "divorced" and returned to her family, and then becomes an "apostate" by going to church with her family on Sunday, and THEN is murdered for apostasy, the police often ignore the case.

On one side of the Rio Grande, you have policemen here and there taking bribes from drug dealers to shut up, and on the other side, you have government military vehicles full of uniformed soldiers with machine guns blasting their way past US border patrol agents to escort drug shipments. I would hardly call the two levels of corruption equal, but in the world of Molly, corruption is corruption.

You can really see the difference when you observe people who have immigrated to the US from very corrupt countries, because their inappropriate behaviors reveal a lot. An Armenian woman told me the first thing her parents told her when picking her up from the airport was, "DON'T TRY TO BRIBE A POLICEMAN HERE!" It had apparently come from personal experience. I had a woman from a similar country try to give me a huge "tip" when I worked as an interpreter for the court, just trying to keep me on her side. Some of them are afraid even to testify in court, because they're afraid of corruption that's not there.

But all this is academic to Molly. If some unidentified person at the CDC goes on a soapbox and sermonizes about the US being (in his or her opinion) more interested in corruption in other countries than in its own (which isn't true), then that's enough for her moral equivalency mechanism to kick on.

Molly can't even make moral distinctions between people who strap bombs onto little girls or retarded people deliberately to have them blow up crowds of civilians, and people who use weapons to protect the civilians.

It's real mush-brained thinking, but unfortunately very typical of some people in Western countries, including the US.

[Molly]