Dealing with crime

we have a higher crime rate per capita than america... now that is depressing.

however I agree with what you said, our crime rate is massively over inflated by the inane crimes we're prosecuted for... Graffiti is a great example of this, I know a handful of writers that the police have wasted over £50,000 trying to catch.

Surely the police have more threatening criminals to waste that level of money on.

Instead of throwing money at the problem they should be taking camerons advice and hugging them

It seems to me that the whole debate is hijacked by politicians who are terrified to seem "soft on crime" every time I hear the words 'tough' and 'zero tolerance' it makes me depressed.
If all your parents did was 'punish' you and put the fear of god in you then you might act lawfully but you would have no respect for them and do whatever you could if you thought you could get away with it.
It's about respect for others and that can only be earned.
Anyone who is a charva would be law abiding if they had been born into the upper middle classes and gone to public school etc etc.
There are no evil people

bollocks.


other than your closing point you were speaking a lot of sense.

and I'm saying think you can be born inherently evil.

I think you can.

Do you believe we are all born identically? Our bodies all differ greatly - to assume our brains will be identical is absurd... we're are born as individuals and we react to the world in unique ways... to assume that we will react in a positive manner seems a bit of a fantasy.

born evil implies that some people are beyond redemption. Your idea of inherantly evil people leads to the gas chambers. should we weed out and kill the evil babies?

and our bodies don't differ greatly. look at lobsters they have bodies which differ greatly from ours. or carp.

Why would I waste my time answering a question that could never be answered.... what I'm trying to say is that I doubt there would ever exist a technology that could determine ones thoughts, then look into the future to see how his personality would react to events that were yet to happen.

Are you trying to suggest that at birth we are all born with the same brain and that if two individuals were raised in identical conditions they would develop identical personalities?

Is it not different species of lobsters and carp that differ greatly?

And even if you were right, the extent of the difference is inconsequential - the fact that our DNA creates a unique body that will never be reproduced means that we are all born unique.

that's not the question. the question is if there was would you use it?

haha ok if the technology existed and I knew that the person would go onto kill millions - then yes I'd support the killing of that baby... or at best a life behind bars.

what if you were an afrikaans south african and it was Nelson Mandela in the cot. Would your sword of the lord splice him in twain?

we're talking about acts of evil - I don't remember mandela being responsible for a genocide on any scale?

infact his truth and reconciliation was one of the most divinly noble acts of the modern era.

His point was, if if you used the technology to kill evil babies, what's to stop someone using it to kill babies that would have different ideals to them.

but his question wasn't about future technologies that could be used to practise eugenics... it was whether or not society should keep alive those born inherently evil.

if that was the point of his question - its a strange tangent that has nothing to do with the debate at hand

I know, but he's just making you dance.

my point was how do you decide what (and who) is evil. different societies might decide differently.
If the 1000 year reich had come to pass you might have been classed as inherently evil.
my point really is that no one is born evil. only society determines what is evil. there may be some people born psychopathic who you would like to eliminate but the desire to eliminate someone could be seen as evil in itself and who is to say that at some future time (in a war perhaps) a psychopath might not be useful.

Thats a good point...

In Greek society if a male child was to excel it was believed that he needed a teacher/lover - so an older male would take the role as boyfriend and tutor - this wasn't like the camp relationships of today but an overly masculine experience... The child was usually around 11.

Similarly many pagan cultures believed mass sacrifice to be completely natural and saw no harm in massacring millions of humans (ripping their hearts out and offering them to the gods).

Then along came Judaism which taught the world right from wrong; thou shalt not murder, love thy neighbour, thou shalt not sleep with 11 year old boys and so and so forth.... From this point in history man has steadily built upon these ethics creating a strong moral backbone.

Societies aren't evaluated on their individual values (set by say the Nazi’s) but are compared to this moral spine that man developed, humanists within Nazi Germany spoke our against the wrongs of the Reich and had the Nazi’s succeeded eventually they’d start questioning their values as these values were compared to the past…This has happened in every modern society that has supported genocide, slave trades, etc.

If you attempt to argue that evil fluctuates from one society to the next then you are excusing all actions as "human nature".

Just as we now know the distance of the moon from planet earth - we also know right from wrong... We're no longer cave dwellers, history has shaped us into highly developed being and a conscience is one of the most admirable developments of man.

It is this conscience that would enable us to determine whether an infant was born inherently evil.