Actually most liberals hate Muslims. That's why Europe passes so many anti-Muslim laws - it's cause Muslims are not liberal enough.

I double posted some how.

I dislike all the free handouts liberal governments, but I'd take all five of those things on that list if I could get just one thing done that only liberals would possibly do, and that is to regulate multinational companies. The are currently for all practical purposes above the law since they just pick and choose where certain aspects of their business can be done within the world so they can rape everyone regardless of their nationality.

Conservatives have already been bought.

Klown, very few liberals hate Muslims - I have never met a single one in fact. They are very opposed to many of the hyper-conservative and repressive aspects of the historic Islam religion, however.

And as far as passing "anti-Muslim laws" is like saying that that the US hates the south because they passed anti-hate crime legislation.

I'm waiting for the "anti=stupid" laws to start up. I just can't wait for that.

Step 1. Eliminate all the warning labels
Step 2. Eliminate all the lawyers
Step 3. Eliminate all the politician
Step 4. Drink a fine cup of coffee that is very hot without burning my hoohoo with it.

Huh? That makes no sense. European countries have passed blatantly discriminatory laws such as anti-burka (sp) laws. The reason is because Muslims are against things like gays, abortion and relativism, all of which are sacred to liberals.

hmmm, wonder why i associate Vasoline with extra "liberalness"?

Some would call that an anti-repression law. I think it goes to far, but it is a female equality issue, not an anti-Islam thing.

It is anti-Muslim though. The burka is part of their culture, and it is not the job of governments to force people away from their culture.

hey look, it's watertowers the racist dragon!

Stoning women for being raped by a guy are also part of their culture, do you agree with that terror?

part of my culture to keep women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. my culture seems to be dying.

*sheds a tear*

no, women should not be stoned for being raped. how you even ask the question makes me question you, as a whole. congratulations, you aussie racist prick. go hate muslim women elsewhere.

women run for congress these days, dibs. just look at arizona. too soon?

i assume you are taking the piss?:p

i can not see Arizona. the Appalachian mountains are in my line of sight. plus, it's also a bit early in the morning to be trying to see a couple of dozen states away. hmm, maybe just a dozen.

I figured someone would counter with that, and the answer is to set laws against assault and murder which would certainly encompass stoning.

Truth be told, I am against any regulation of clothing unless it has an attached health concern--for example it would be appropriate to demand that a person either wear shorts or sit on a towel to avoid contamination of surfaces with bodily fluids.

Back to the main point though, laws should be as few and basic as possible, and that definitely means laws against burkas are not appropriate.

organize religion should be illegal.


GO.

No. Laws should regulate the outcomes of decisions--not their origins.

Origins do matter though

People need to stop deciding that their way of doing things is the ultimate and other people are "backwards". People need to stop lumping individuals into a label and then attacking the label rather than addressing the issue directly.

Conservative Christians often have more in common with Conservative Muslims than Liberal Christians.

5) The problems of the world today are a result of the actions of the past. We face overpopulation in 2011 because we 'solved' global hunger for the most part in the 1970s.

4) Supporting children is proven to have a net possitive revenue for the state. Where a homeless, illiterate child is just a drain on society, enough people want a better life to cover the cost of those willing to dwell in squallor. Crime is as much a result of circumstances as it is a result of contempt for society's rules.

3) Support the rights of all, while realising anyone can use any motivation as a mask for their true actions and desires. Extremism, whether Christian (crusades), Muslim (9/11), or Atheist (Hitler/Stalin/Mao), should be frowned upon.

2) Marriage is a religous and economic observance. It has no merit except the special privledges we still reserve for this minority group.

1) Most people say racist when they mean prejudgist.

One thing we can't always do but should is to ignore the lunatic fringe at the far right.

don't think it's in my best interests to get blown the heck up because they're right.

Is Mapleson really the only sane one here.. or just the only one who has actually met a "liberal"?

In America, saying you hate liberals is almost like saying you hate unicorns. They just might exist, but only somewhere far away and you will probably never actually meet one.

are you really claiming liberals dont exist? or are uncommon?

True liberals in the United States are pretty rare. I think marriage is just discrimination against single people and should be outlawed. I think homosexuality is actually better for an overpopulated society than heterosexuality. I think we need a lot more corporate regulation in the United States to keep big oil companies from raping us. I am for abortion. If you don't want your baby, I sure as hell don't. I am against capital punishment (not because I value life--I'm kinda pro death, but execution doesn't save any money, and I think making prisoners work is a fine way for them to earn some of their keep.) I support public education since an educated society has lower crime rates. I want to legalize drugs. What a person does with their life is their own business.

So I'm pretty liberal right?

Well hang on a second. I don't like aid to dependent children or welfare of any sort. I don't like tax breaks for people with dependents. I am against gun control. (I don't actually like guns, but only an idiot thinks making them illegal will make them go away. I therefore think mandatory education courses in high school so that anyone who wants a gun can safely use it is the best choice.)

So yeah, I'm probably leaning left, but I have enough conservative views that I'd call myself merely moderate, and I think most Americans who are getting called liberal have a list of conservative views as well.

Based on policy, Richard Nixon was more liberal than than most Democratic politicians today. There are not a lot of liberals in the US by any objective standard. People have a natural tendency to think that compromise is a good solution and the right have brilliantly gone super far to the right, such that the center has been pulled to much more closely resemble what they (the right) want. Now people consider Democrats, who truly are behaving conservatively, to be liberal when that is a far cry from the truth.

i agree with you on all those except the death penalty part and the drug part.

kill them if they deserve it. i dont see how you can claim it doesnt cost any less money when it costs $40k/year per inmate and maybe a few hundred for lethal injection or $2.99 if we do it the old fashioned way with rope.

and drugs should never be legalized. marijauna yes, crack/cocaine/heroine etc or anything that is addictive and you can become dependent on. the reason i say this is because drug will turn otherwise good people into criminals and total lowlifes.

I never met anyone who called themselves a "true conservative" that didn't have a screw loose by my estimation, so you are definitely free to sensor them, but the rest of us will enjoy our freedom of speech and say what we want as long is doesn't set off the fascist language filters here.

Pain: They don't execute anyone immediately after sentencing. It frequently takes years to get through the appeals process and lawyers cost way more per hour than the prison guards. I don't feel like researching a number right now, but it's expensive compared to someone who just sits and waits out their time.

Also, I do agree that increasing penalties for committing crimes under the influence of drugs is appropriate, but some people are just losers with or without drugs. Alcohol is legal, but it destroys lives and causes misbehavior just as certainly as heroine--probably moreso. Heroine addicts just lay there and drool. Let people do as they like in their own homes and appropriately designated businesses, and as long as they are not interfering with the rest of society, leave them alone.

what happens when those heroin addicts sitting in thier own homes drooling on themselves run out of money and need a fix (opiates are physically addictive and like alcohol a withdrawl can be fatal). they go out and break into your car/house and steal stuff to sell for a hit. i havent heard of too many alcoholics going that far.

Those behaviors would be associated much more with stimulant type drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine and yes even the quite legal nicotine.

I still maintain that crimes committed under the influence of drugs should be punished more severely, and yes, withdrawal is an influence.

Personally I am an opponent of substance abuse. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't admit to enjoying alcoholic beverages, but I try to be moderate. I actually know a fair amount about it though since I had been forced to take drug and alcohol counseling and classes while I was on probation. Heroine withdrawal may feel like crap, but it does not kill since your body does not require heroine.

Your body does require alcohol, and people who drink too heavily actually cause their body to shut down its nominal natural production. If they then stop cold turkey, their body may not be able to begin producing alcohol in the small quantities it needs right away, and this can be fatal.

Death from withdrawal is usually associated with stage 2 alcoholism. Whereas a heavy drinker (who may or may not actually be an alcoholic--they are not the same) may have a very high tolerance (this describes me), the stage two alcoholic has damaged their liver so badly they can't process alcohol well at all anymore and so become drunk on the first drink. These folks are in a very serious health crisis and need professional help to get off of alcohol without killing them. A person at this stage generally dies of cirrhosis of the liver within a couple years if they continue to drink.

The cost savings in eliminating the Death Penalty comes with the need to provide legal aid to each inmate. The average Death Row inmate spends over 10 years on appeals. In 2008, they killed a man waiting 33 years and there is another who's been on Death Row for 38 years. If they actually killed the offending American within a year or two it would save money, but we're talking decades here.

Making drugs illegal doesn't stop people using them. Making drugs illegal doesn't stop criminals producing them. Making drugs illegal means the purity cannot be maintained, like food or alcohol, the labour production doesn't contribute to the economy, and the drugs produced aren't taxed.

People that want to abuse their bodies will, so why should we foot the bill completely when their health and family life goes to hell?

Pain, how do you know any particular break & enter is related to drug-need over alcohol-need? You don't hear about it because we can't tell them apart and alcohol gets lumped back in with all the other drugs.

so then the problem is the fact that these people are allowed to sit on death row. if you are convicted of a crime serious enough to be given the punishment of death penalty, it should be done immediately (within 30 days). if this was 1985 when there was no DNA and high tech crime solving i would say yea maybe we should be more careful with the DP, but with the technology we have now being wrongly convicted of of such a crime is highly unlikely. hell youre more likely to be acquited of such a crime rather then wrongly convicted (IE casey anthony)

also im not saying you can determine whether or not a specific BE is attributed to drugs or alcohol, what im saying is that drug addicts are more likely to commit a crime (and by crime i dont mean driving drunk or beating youre wife) then an alcoholic. im not going to get into details on why but i would say i have more personal experience with heroin addiction than most likely everyone here, i can assure you of this. im not just guessing what these type of addicts would probably do, i KNOW this is what they do.

just makes it easier to frame somebody. you don't technically have the right to kill people anyway, just the right to keep them from harming people again.

so, basically, you think all drug addicts should be put to death as soon as they fail a drug test because it can be demonstrated that their behavior is guaranteed to be bad.

how did you manange to mix the 2 arguements together?

im just arguing that if drugs were legalized more people might be inclined to use them. and yes im also claiming that doing hard/addictive drugs does also increase a persons likelyhood of commiting a crime tenfold.

i dont think people should be sent to jail for testing positive for drugs (they should be forced into rehab), i think if people commit crimes on drugs they should be punished more harshly, just like terror said.

well, technically, they're already committing a crime by doing the drugs, so why should they stop and not do another crime. i don't believe in rehab, i doubt that it works. i saw some such stat that stated there was only a 15% chance of surviving lung cancer treatment. i pretty much qualify that as the doctors don't have a clue what they are doing.

rehab works, the problem is that drug addicts go back to hanging with the same group of people who got them into drugs in the first place. when youre an addict its hard to resist the urge to do it again so staying away from people associated with those drugs is the key to staying clean.

I'm going to take a wild guess here and guess that Pain is either a law enforcement officer or closely associated with one. His observations are correct but expressed from the narrow viewpoint of what is rather than what could be.

No one can fully predict what may happen if drug laws were changed in the United States. Our social dydnamics are not the same as Canada, Mexico, England, or Australia. Therefore anything I may specualte can not be proven.

Allowing for that, I think it is not unreasonable that legalization of drugs allows for programs that would allow people to fix their drug problems without fear of punishment. I've known a few cops, and they unfortunately see most people as being prone to failure and unable to help themselves. This is unfortunately occasionally true, but I do not agree. Even with legalized drugs, most people will still value their friends, family, health, and productivity above geting high. Governments and their laws can not eliminate drugs, but they might do a better job of accomodating what actually is as opposed to enforcing unrealistic notions on what people should be (but never will be).

Watertowers: I can't run like you, but I cycle 25 miles 3 times a week or so during the summer at least. My running is aweful I just started like 3 weeks ago, and I run 3 miles is 33 minutes. But that is a 20 minute improvement from whan I started. I finished my second run worrying if I could cross a steet without being run over. I'd have been hard pressed to keep up with an octogenerian with a walker toward the end of that run I was so crippled up.

I'm 39 years old, so I guess that does me no favors, but as for my alcohol tolerance, I can't measure myself against American beers. I don't drink it fast enough to build up a buzz. I made some unusually powerful strawberry wine that was around 22% alcohol and finished off about 80oz I estimate with my mom. Probably I had twice as much as she did that evening which concluded after long but interesting discussions at about 3am.

So if I calculate that in terms od 4% beers that would be like having about 30 beers in 7 hours without becoming sloppy drunk. I'm a little smaller than you at 220 pounds for what it's worth. Maybe you have a higher tolerance than me--perhaps. I just know that when I drink, I can drink a ton without much worry that my behavior will change much. I think slower. That is the most notable effect.

Also, I don't drink if I am suffering emotional unrest in my life. Alcohol seems to inhibit my ability to maintain emotional stability, so if I have troubles disturbing my life, i try to get them corrected with action, since alcohol under such a circumstance might inhibit my ability to address reality.

Terror, while i can see why you might assume i come from law enforcement, youre quite far from correct. i come from the other side of the pond so to speak (albiet not personally). again im not going to get into details of my personal life on a public game board. youll just have to take my word for it. :P

Executing someone within 30 days of sentencing would remove their right to due process (appeals, requests for stays, etc) which, whether you like it or not, is a right of every US citizen, and for very good reason. 30 days isn't even enough time to push an initial appeal through to an appeals court in most states, let alone have it tried.

I don't think it's so much a matter of setting a specific chronological deadline for execution of sentence as it is limiting the ridiculous amount of time wasters and delays for sentencing that lawyers can provide to a convicted inmate.

There were approximately 3,254 people on the US death row as of May 7, 2011. Between 30-60 people are executed each year. In the 1990s, 200-300 people per year were placed on Death Row. In the 2000s, it's dropped to 112-160. Since 1973, 138 Death Row inmates have been exonerated, with 3.1 per year from 1973 to 1999 and 5 per year from 2000 onwards. With 4.5% of convictions being overturned per year, it'd be a bit rash to kill someone inside a month. 88% of criminologists believe executions do not lower crime rates. America has the highest incarceration rate in the world, keeping 1% of your populatin behind bars. The system as appled doesn't work. A "Hard on crime" approach removes the immediate issue while avoiding the causes underneath.

Do you think OJ Simpson got the right verdict? Why whould you expect a higher compentence level in other capital cases?

It costs California $114 million per year to keep convicts locked up for life. A single execution can cost more than $250 million. The cost of capital punishment is 70% more expensive as comparable to non-capital punishment.

Finally, Canada has very successfully decriminalized over the last two decades, having more guns per capita and less gun crime than the US, by removing minimum sentencing requirements and allowing judges to apply discression.

You know what a herion addict with do when they can purchase impure herion illegally at very high prices. What would a herion addict do if they could purchase uncontaminated herion legally at a cost conscious price from a legally licensed store in controlled quantities with proof of employment? Would they go out and break into a car, or would they get a minimum wage job flipping burgers, so they could get that next fix? As their prefered hobby isn't already excluded from legitimate society, they have more reason not to transgress against society to fulfill that hobby.

I don't have a single stroke solution to the full ball of inherited social issues, but what we've tried for the last hundred years hasn't worked, as your experiences highlight.

That was quite well-put.

i HIGHLY doubt it costs 250 million dollars for a single execution, did you mean 250 thousand? id love to see where that number comes from (likely from someones ass)

as far as the heroin thing goes, do you seriously believe that? youre going to sit here and try to tell me that you think there would be controlled quantities? i mean in a perfect world your scenario might work. but if you honestly believe heroin addicts would purchase thier products in "controlled quantities" from legitimate businesses youre more naive then i thought.

the other problem with that idea is you assume drug addicts are more willing to go out and get a job to support a habit rather then get it by other means, and thats not even taking into account most places of employment most likely would not employ a heroin addict *legal or not*

I think you would find that taking drugs away from violent criminals would not turn them into upstanding citizens. Some people are just a**holes.

Not every execution in the US costs $250 million, but at least some porportion of them do. The number might have come from someone's ass, but not mine. It's from the "Report of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice (2008)" http://www.ccfaj.org/...ORT%20DEATH%20PENALTY.pdf

I'm not as naive as you might think. I believe no one really wants to be a herion addict. There is always a reason or story behind their fall from grace. So we can either ignore the issue as we currently do, until the grow too brazen and we smack them down, or we can try to reduce the scope of the problem by thinning the herd. Similar to Insite in vancouver, which offers free needles and a medically-supervised safe-injection site, I would attach the condition of counselling and harm-awareness to a purchase with an offer of rehab. Yes, most people will roll their eyes and ignore it, but each one that listens is one less herion addict in the world. I would use price and quality to undercut the crime syndicates, and put that money is public coffers to fund the program, instead of into Hell's Angel's bank accounts.

Looking at the Swiss system, users offered unlimited quantities would, on average, max out at between 300 and 500 mg per day. A stable dose was achieved after 6 months at most; beyond this point, almost no further increases in dose were required. If a heroin addict could consume this dosage for $30-50, they would be able to pay for their habit legally. When they are spending $150+ a day, a minimum wage job isn't going to cut it.

People won't hire drug addicts and other criminals because they are known to break the law. If they weren't criminalized or incentivized to crime, there would be less objection to their rejoining mainstream society. The rejection of this segment is another social issue that needs to be overcome, but I'd try to do that through other means.

Think without thinking points.

Well stated Mapleson. However, Hells Angels these days tend to be quite a bit more upstanding than they once were with many of them participating with the political action group ABATE to lobby congresspeople for the rights of motorcyclists--just FYI.

That's actually false. They stone adulterers, not rape victims. As for rapists, it's the death penalty for them (decapitation). You seem to be getting your information from all the wrong sources. Weird.

As for removing burkas, I totally agree with that. It's just uncomfortable to talk to a pair of eyes and a wall of clothing...and in the most extreme cases, they even cover the eyes up. I mean it's not even part of their religion. Though the ban of headscarves (the non-burka kind, which allows their faces to be uncovered) is just another sign of intolerance and discrimination from Europeans who fear the influx of foreign immigrants into their country.