BurnTheShips

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Posts by BurnTheShips

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  35

  Do you agree to disagree?

  by cyberjesus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  sometimes in many conversations or debates, some people try to end it by saying "i agree to disagree".

  if you have an inquisitive mind and critical thinking, are you comfortable disagreeing about factual information?

  i am not referring to opinion.

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  BurnTheShips

  Do you agree to disagree?

  Only if my rights are not forcibly and unjustly infringed upon.

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  63

  Republican Vs Democrat

  by Bangalore in

  1. social
  2. humour

  a republican and a democrat were walking down the street when they came across a homeless person.. the republican gave the homeless person his business card and told him come to his business for a job.

  he then took twenty dollars out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.. the democrat was very impressed, and when they came to another homeless person, he decided to help.

  he walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office.

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  BurnTheShips

  No one wants to see you further embarassed. Self righteousness combined with irrationality tends to kill a sense of humor, it seems.

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  78

  Are You For Or Against The Death Penalty?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i clearly am for it if it's proven without a doubt that a person murdered another in cold blood.

  recently, in connecticut, a man was convicted of killing 2 young girls and their mother.

  the animal raped them and almost killed the defenseless husband/father who could do nothing while these atrocities were being carried out in his own home!.

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  BurnTheShips

  Not what I am reading.

  http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death-penalty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates

  This obfuscates a great deal. States with death penalties may have higher murder rates regardless. According to the data in your link, you could argue that repealing the death penalty reduces murder rates, which I think is an absurd argument to make.

  From your link, we see that the murder rate in some states with the death penalty is lower than in some states without the death penalty:

  

  So we see it is all "over the map."

  What likely happens in many places with high murder rates is that the death penalty is either kept or introduced because of the disgust of citizens with the higher murder rates.

  Here is the other side of the deterrent argument:

  Death penalty is a deterrent

  George E. Pataki, Governor of New York State
  USA Today - March 1997Capital punishment gives killers good cause to fear arrest and conviction.

  Upon taking office, I immediately began the process of reinstating the death penalty. Two months later, I signed the death penalty into law for the most heinous and ruthless killers in our society.....

  Since I took office in 1995, violent crime has dropped 23, assaults are down 22, and murders have dropped by nearly one-third. New Yorkers now live in safer communities because we finally have begun to create a climate that protects and empowers our citizens, while giving criminals good cause to fear arrest and conviction. I believe this has occurred in part because of the strong signal that the death penalty and our other tough new laws sent to violent criminals and murderers: You will be punished with the full force of the law....

  http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_n2622_v125/ai_19217186/

  Ernest van den Haag, a Professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University who has studied the question of deterrence closely, wrote: "Even though statistical demonstrations are not conclusive, and perhaps cannot be, capital punishment is likely to deter more than other punishments because people fear death more than anything else. They fear most death deliberately inflicted by law and scheduled by the courts. Whatever people fear most is likely to deter most. Hence, the threat of the death penalty may deter some murderers who otherwise might not have been deterred. And surely the death penalty is the only penalty that could deter prisoners already serving a life sentence and tempted to kill a guard, or offenders about to be arrested and facing a life sentence. Perhaps they will not be deterred. But they would certainly not be deterred by anything else. We owe all the protection we can give to law enforcers exposed to special risks."

  Justice Stewart held in the Supreme Court in Gregg v. Georgia:

  Although some of the studies suggest that the death penalty may not function as a significantly greater deterrent than lesser penalties, there is no convincing empirical evidence supporting or refuting this view.

  We may nevertheless assume safely there are murders, such as those who act in passion, for whom the threat of death has little or no deterrent effect. But for many others, the death penalty undoubtedly, is a significant deterrent.

  There are carefully contemplated murders, such as murder for hire, where the possible penalty of death may well enter the cold calculus that precedes the decision to act. ( as cited in Carrington, 1978. p. 87).

  http://deathpenaltycurriculum.org/student/c/about/arguments/argument1a.htm

  Study says Texas death penalty a homicide deterrent

  HUNTSVILLE — As many as 60 people may be alive today in Texas because two dozen convicted killers were executed last year in the nation's most active capital punishment state, according to a study of death penalty deterrence by researchers from Sam Houston State University and Duke University.

  A review of executions and homicides in Texas by criminologist Raymond Teske at Sam Houston in Huntsville and Duke sociologists Kenneth Land and Hui Zheng concludes a monthly decline of between 0.5 to 2.5 homicides in Texas follows each execution.

  “Evidence exists of modest, short-term reductions in the numbers of homicides in Texas in the month of or after executions,” the study published in a recent issue of Criminology, a journal of the American Society of Criminology, said.

  The study adds to decades of academic dissection of the death penalty and deterrence. Results over the years vary from capital punishment saving more lives than suggested in this study to no conclusive effect.

  http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6802314.html

  ...a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument—whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

  The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.

  So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey's commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as "inconclusive."

  But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.

  "Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it," said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect."

  A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. "The results are robust, they don't really go away," he said. "I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters)—what am I going to do, hide them?"

  Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory—if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).

  To explore the question, they look at executions and homicides, by year and by state or county, trying to tease out the impact of the death penalty on homicides by accounting for other factors, such as unemployment data and per capita income, the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and more.

  Among the conclusions:

  _ Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).

  _ The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.

  _ Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.

  In 2005, there were 16,692 cases of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter nationally. There were 60 executions.

  The studies' conclusions drew a philosophical response from a well- known liberal law professor, University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein. A critic of the death penalty, in 2005 he co-authored a paper titled "Is capital punishment morally required?"

  "If it's the case that executing murderers prevents the execution of innocents by murderers, then the moral evaluation is not simple," he told The Associated Press. "Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven't given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty."

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061100406.html

  A November 18, 2007 New York Times article [23] reported the following information:

  • One reason that there is no consensus on whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent is that it is used so rarely - only about one out of every 300 murders actually results in an execution. In 2005 in the Stanford Law Review, John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that the death penalty "... is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors... The existing evidence for deterrence... is surprisingly fragile." Wolfers stated, "If I was allowed 1,000 executions and 1,000 exonerations, and I was allowed to do it in a random, focused way, I could probably give you an answer."
  • Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University, authored a study that looked at all 3,054 U.S. counties over two decades, and concluded that each execution saved five lives. Mocan stated, "I personally am opposed to the death penalty... But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect."
  • Joanna M. Shepherd, a law professor at Emory with a doctorate in economics who was involved in several studies on the death penalty, stated, "I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds... But I do believe that people respond to incentives." Shepherd found that the death penalty had a deterrent effect only in those states that executed at least nine people between 1977 and 1996. In the Michigan Law Review in 2005, Shepherd wrote, "Deterrence cannot be achieved with a half-hearted execution program."

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_debate#Deterrence

  This data makes me have to rethink my opposition to the death penalty.

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  78

  Are You For Or Against The Death Penalty?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i clearly am for it if it's proven without a doubt that a person murdered another in cold blood.

  recently, in connecticut, a man was convicted of killing 2 young girls and their mother.

  the animal raped them and almost killed the defenseless husband/father who could do nothing while these atrocities were being carried out in his own home!.

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  BurnTheShips

  not so much because those who commit heinous crimes don't deserve to be snuffed out but because snapping some poor slob's neck prevented only him from recidivistic activity and provided no demonstrable deterrent to others who are similarly inclined.

  Actually, I have to come back around here. It has been statistically demonstrated that execution does have a deterrent effect on murder, at least here in the US.

  ....And what Bohm said, if we could have two standards based on evidence, we could retain execution for murder where the highest quality evidence applies...but we don't. If we did execute murderers in those cases where the evidence is completely clear, I wouldn't have as much reticence. I'd like to add, if that was the case, that it be publically televised would likely multiply the deterrent effect.

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  78

  Are You For Or Against The Death Penalty?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i clearly am for it if it's proven without a doubt that a person murdered another in cold blood.

  recently, in connecticut, a man was convicted of killing 2 young girls and their mother.

  the animal raped them and almost killed the defenseless husband/father who could do nothing while these atrocities were being carried out in his own home!.

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  BurnTheShips

  On the other hand, I don't get very worked up when they decide to execute a monster, like the one in Conn.

  Me neither.

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  89

  Thanks and Goodbye

  by brotherdan in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i really do appreciate all the help you guys have given me in this process.

  but it's time for me to leave.

  it was time for me to leave the wt (at least in my mind) when it became damaging to me.

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  BurnTheShips

  Hi Brotherdan, go if you wish, but many, if not all, of us will miss you. I have enjoyed your presence on this board.

  I find that being exposed to the criticism has been good for me. I have been here for years, and have participated in many discussions with critics of my faith. It has made me analyze it more fully, and understand it better.

  I find that if you have a strong faith, you will not be torn down. Your faith will be strengthened.

  Let those that dislike God attack him if they wish, they sometimes do it out of ignorance. They aren't attacking you. Don't take it personally. God can look after Himself.

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  6

  Atheism: Jonathan Miller - A Brief History of Disbelief

  by whereami in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  for anyone interested in the history of atheism this is in my opinion one of the best presentations on it.

  there's been many debates here on the meaning and purpose of atheism.

  also the debate, especially here in the usa of lately, that this country's founding fathers were relegious and promoted judeo christian beliefs.. even for my religious friends, i'm sure you'll enjoy watching it.

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  BurnTheShips

  Thanks, I will watch it at home. Understanding promotes respect and good relations between us.

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  78

  Are You For Or Against The Death Penalty?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i clearly am for it if it's proven without a doubt that a person murdered another in cold blood.

  recently, in connecticut, a man was convicted of killing 2 young girls and their mother.

  the animal raped them and almost killed the defenseless husband/father who could do nothing while these atrocities were being carried out in his own home!.

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  BurnTheShips

  And I don't understand why we should pay to keep them all in prison for life.

  If we lived in very poor nations where it would be an impossible hardship to jail these people, then I would be much more favorable towards executing them. This, however, is not the case for Canada or the US. Paying to imprison these criminals is a price I am willing to pay to make sure innocent people don't accidentally get executed.

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  63

  Republican Vs Democrat

  by Bangalore in

  1. social
  2. humour

  a republican and a democrat were walking down the street when they came across a homeless person.. the republican gave the homeless person his business card and told him come to his business for a job.

  he then took twenty dollars out of his pocket and gave it to the homeless person.. the democrat was very impressed, and when they came to another homeless person, he decided to help.

  he walked over to the homeless person and gave him directions to the welfare office.

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  BurnTheShips

  Yeah, except the part about the Republican giving him 20 dollars out of his own pocket.

  It is factual that people on the "right" give more to charitable causes than people on the "left."

  The joke is entirely consistent with this.

  http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/conservatives_more_liberal_giv.html

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  78

  Are You For Or Against The Death Penalty?

  by minimus in

  1. jw
  2. friends

  i clearly am for it if it's proven without a doubt that a person murdered another in cold blood.

  recently, in connecticut, a man was convicted of killing 2 young girls and their mother.

  the animal raped them and almost killed the defenseless husband/father who could do nothing while these atrocities were being carried out in his own home!.

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  BurnTheShips

  I think when there have been eye witnesses to a killing then yes the death penalty should be handed down.

  Witnesses can, and do, lie.

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