The implementation of capital punishment is flawed, both morally and logically. Everyone understands the emotions of revenge, no matter how self-serving and ultimately futile they are. We’re human after all. The problem is that the legal system kills and jails innocent people at staggering numbers. So revenge comes at the price of further innocent death. Ironic vicious circle, anyone?
As many have argued, why would you put the government, who can’t even fix holes in roads, in charge of deciding who lives or dies? The result of course, is that our legal system has put many innocent people to death, and locked many thousands more away. This is the moral contradiction CP supporters just can’t get around. Supporting capital punishment, is supporting a system that has jailed and put to death thousands of innocent people. That’s where the Innocence Project comes in, working with DNA evidence to exonerate the thousands of wrongly convicted. As you can imagine, death row gets priority.
There’s a good and quite emotional documentary on The Innocence Project, called After Innocence. Highly recommended on awareness raising factor alone. It’ll haunt you. It should haunt you…depending on your state, your tax money kills innocent people.
Not really surprising that out of the 2008 Presidential Candidates the Democrats are leading what in my estimation is the most important polling metric, the Myspace friend count. Democrats have always been slightly hipper…or had more time to waste on Myspace.
Barak Obama 113270
Hilary Clinton 50364
John Edwards 40566
Now what is really surprising is that Ron Paul, a libertarian running as a Republican, is nowhere on the “official” polls, but hugely popular on the internet. I thought it odd that McCain was ahead of him but then realized the McCain-Myspace debacle of a few months ago probably got McCain a lot of unintentional “friends,” fudging the numbers. Plus, Paul is smoking McCain on Facebook, which might say something interesting about younger voters, and he has more Youtube and Meetup subscribers than any other candidate, Elephant or Donkey. “Dr. No” as supporters lovingly refer to him, is definitely getting the Howard Dean style grass-roots-internet-monster momentum going. Good thing we all know how that can turn out.
John McCain 37451
Ron Paul 33904
Mitt Romney 25273
Fred Thompson 6070
Rudy Guliani (profile set to private!)
Ron Paul will never win the Republican nomination because he’s too mild mannered and rational to win the Big-Dumb-War-Fox-News-Gay-Hater party nomination. The “conservative” party has come to mean anything but, and they should be ashamed of it. Might I suggest Seppuku, losers? If he had a little more fire in him I think he might have a chance, but I’m afraid that the reality of it is that the presidency is still just another American Idol variant.
Christ, I wish someone would hurry up and remake Logan’s Run. Damn those Wachowski brothers and their Speed Racer!
It occurred to me that Logan’s Run is perhaps little more than the dystopian imagining of the uber-welfare/warfare state gone slightly awry. After all, we may not have Sleepshop, the public sporting-extermination of those over 21, but we always seem to have a convenient war for them. Thou shalt be wary, very wary, of government intentions.
I really want to make a good joke about Deepwater or Blackwater, but it’s just eluding me. Let’s see…Deepwater…What do you get with loads of “free” taxpayer money, no oversight, and several colossal bureaucracies? Nah, just depresses me.
But you heard about Deepwater, right? Part of the program was to lengthen already existing Coast Guard boats to the tune of 10 million per boat. Yes, I said lengthen. Apparently, you can lengthen boats, just like you would, oh, trick out an El Camino. Of course, it didn’t work, and the government is blaming the contractor, and taking the project over, but something tells me only the government could get itself in such a stupid situation in the first place.
Now if we can only take some of this genius technology and widen the planet, we’ll have some more room for all the babies in China.
Traveling through Greece years ago, I met a Swede who spent his summers partying on the Greek Isles…funded by his government’s unemployment program. What was his disability, you wonder? Like every young and able bodied man, it was simply not wanting to work. So he snookered the system and collected his dough, came to Greece where he drank ouzo all night, did a bizarre Jim Morrison impersonation routine at a local bar, and slept on the beach all day. At the time I thought, man, what an awesome government, because I too was young, and didn’t want to work. How fair is it that some get a free ride while others don’t? Sweden, a country often cited as being the poster child for how big government schemes “work,” has it’s share of problems, and lecherous “disability” bums are among them.
Earlier this year, police in Sweden’s capital city Stockholm investigated the local chapter of the Hell’s Angels biker gang for suspected benefit fraud, because 70% of the gang were on extended sickness benefits. The same doctor had certified them all as suffering from depression.
Moral of the story: if the government builds it, someone will abuse it. And who suffers? Everyone not partying in Greece, or riding with the Hell’s Angels.
Before I embraced Jesus, if by Jesus we mean that particular form of free market loving liberty, I too suffered from thinking the problems of the nation and of the world at large were because governments did too little, not too much. This is an understandable position for the political neophyte; when something has “gone wrong” who better to fix it than the federal government, whether it’s the economy, health care, or education. It never occurred to me that these problems may have been caused or greatly exacerbated by government in the first place.
Andrew Coulson in the Washington Post, on the folly of federal “standards” in education:
Standards advocates mistakenly assume that high external standards produce excellence, but in fact it is the competitive pursuit of excellence that produces high standards.
We understand this point implicitly in every field outside of education. We didn’t progress from four-inch black-and-white cathode ray tubes to four-foot flat panels because the federal government raised television standards. Apple did not increase the capacity of its iPod from 5 to 80 gigabytes in five years because of some bureaucratic mandate. And the Soviet Union did not collapse because the targets for its five-year plans were insufficiently ambitious.
Progress and innovation in these and almost all other human endeavors have been driven by market incentives: consumer choice, competition among providers, the profit motive. The absence of these incentives — as in the Soviet Union — has led to economic decline and collapse. Not surprisingly, the link between standards and performance in public schooling is noticeably weaker than it is in other areas, because government schooling is a monopoly, not a market.
Recent Comments