Look at it this way, remember the old saying "buy a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he'll eat for the rest of his life"?

Liberals are trying to take a portion of the fish that everybody who knows how is catching, then redistribute that to those who dont know how to fish at all.

This fucking metaphor is confusing me, god damn cold medicine.

you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

but you can take bones from the able young dog and give them to the old dog instead.

Education and the military, police, and construction projects like highways, libraries, bridges, parks, waterworks, etc...


And that's it.

Fuck social security. Fuck forced retirement and helping the poor. Religious and charitable institutions already do enough to make sure people aren't going to starve or freeze to death on the street, but there's no reason to pay people to sit around and do nothing.

I'm for social investment. Improve the educational system, offer more educational opportunities, greatly increase government loans and grants for colleges, make it so that anyone who wants to can get a top quality education.

May be a little off the main road but why do you not like the Death Penalty??

You would rather some scumbag murderer wastes away in a prison living off your tax dollars??

We would have lost horribly, just like we're losing in Iraq to a pack of primitive, subhuman savages because we force our men to be nice to them. The idea of "war crimes" is absurd. When the fighting starts, anything goes, and the winner is always going to be the side that gets brutal.

Iraq, both pre- and post-invasion is a great example of all this. Look at those filthy muslims and the way they fight. Half the time they're more busy killing each other, including women and children, than us. This is why Saddam used nerve gas on them, and he was right. Those vermin need a dictator who's willing to use mass murder to keep them in line. We should line them all up and shoot them as a favor to the rest of the world.

Wow, you're a horrible monster. Interesting.



In truth, evil actions are bad for military victory, to a reasonable extent. Assuming that we are willing to kill those shooting at us, about to shoot, and able to imprison or otherwise deal with insurgents and rioters and criminals, it pays off to treat the remainder with civility, including wounded terrorists, for a number of reason.

1) Moral taint. If you indulge in whatever tactics you think help you in the short term, you really do become no better than your enemy. This lessens the quality of your own life, including corrupting the souls of our troops over there. This is true of, for instance, torture- besides every other reason against it, it lessens the humanity of those who have to practice it, and deadens their empathy. It also means that you are effectively stuck in an us-versus-them theology; your only argument at that point for why we're better is that we're us. Not very moral-inspiring.

2) PR. Look at the civil rights conflicts in the South (and other parts of the country, but primarily the South). The authorities, the establishment, had guns and dogs and policemen and water hoses and numbers. By all rights they should have won. The civil rights fighters were largely not even trying to fight back. Why did they win? Public sympathy. You see people who are self-sacrificing and noble, and then you see people who are vicious, morally depraved and ugly, hissing and spitting and screaming profanities, it's a small wonder who you're going to want to side with.

3) Victory. What the fuck have we won if we win Iraq and lose our souls and our way of life, which is based upon freedom and civility and a respect for human rights?


It costs several times as much to put someone to death as to imprison them. Personally, I believe in (humane) prison labor, and I think the entire prison system need to be overhauled with an emphasis on repaying a debt to society and increased isolation that greatly reduces the amount of crime inside of prisons, allowing people to actually come out cleaner when they went in. Even for lifetime inmates, however, doing something to contribute to society over what amounts to sheer revenge is desirable. The death penalty is useless when we have enough resources to maintain the current criminal population and we have a relatively stable society, although it might be justified in places like Iraq. It's bad enough, too, when we discover later that someone was wrongly imprisoned for thirty or forty years. How much worse when we just flat-out kill them? And we know we have wrongly put people to death before. It's not even an effective deterrent- it's been known for centuries that consistency in punishment is far more effective in preventing crime than harshness, due to human tendency to assume one is always cleverer than others and is therefore less likely to be caught.

Really. A bullet is about .50 cents according to what caliber you are using even lower. It costs millions to imprison one for life. I think a bullet is cheaper.

Mistakes happen. If we did not continue regardless of mistakes we would still be crapping in the woods an dliving in caves

I cavedive and crap in the woods all the time :p

I was looking into self-termination methods when I came upon some info about 'Death by police', it explained how hard and gruesome it would be to get death by capitol punishment through the judicial system, but much easier and simple to just go out tricking the police into shooting you, because most of the time when a cop is looking down the barrel of a gun he says to fuck with 'shoot to maim' and caps you in your brain. My point is this .50 cent cure-all to the prison system is legal and actually exists, maybe we should just get more scared, helpless, white cops that will go for headshots.

Having a cheap, swift, readily available form of capital punishment isn't as advantageous as you might think.

Having a great number of barriers placed before the death penalty, if it is to exist at all, is essential to maintaining freedom. Wrongful imprisonment can be lifted, but a wrongful death is impossible to rectify. I can't believe how conservatives, who claim to be against empowering government further, fail to understand what a bad idea it is to make it easy and cheap for a government to remove it's enemies.

Learn to follow your logic through- if we did not learn from our mistakes and try to avoid repeating them, we would also still be crapping in the woods and living in caves.

Irregardless murderers deserve death. Anything else only coddles them. Some folks would find it worth 3 square meals a day to kill someone they hate. Yes there are those who fal through the cracks but we cannot justify imprisoning murderers because of only that. We can however easily justify death for them. Tell me how you feel about it after someone close to you has been ruthlessly slaughtered by some scumbag.

The guy who shot and killed 5 people at Trolley Square which is only 5 blocks from where I live in SLC, Utah deserved his fate. The cops may have shot him over 20 times.

for such a god fearing "in god we trust" and "god band-aid" using country, even swearing on the bible and suchlike in a court of law, i thought such a passage would hold quite high in the law. regardless of human law and civil rights and suchlike. it's my belief that if you take the life of another, then your life is forfeit. by your own negligence, fury, hatred, or suchlike. a reckoning.

Tell me how you feel about it after someone close to you has been ruthlessly slaughtered by the government.

We've been down this road a million fucking times, but once again, If one innocent life is lost to the death penalty, then it is wrong. The "breaking eggs to make an omelette" thing doesn't work. It is state sanctioned murder in the name of revenge.

Why not exchange 1 flawed emotional excuse for another, how about if your mother was murdered by some piece of shit multiple murderer who was released from prison on good time?

I never advocated they should be released.

On the one hand, it's kind of contradictory to have the death penalty at all. You're punishing murder with murder.

On the other hand murder is a question of morality, and morality is relative.

The way I figure it, murder has been around since the dawn of mankind. Execution as punishment has been around since the development of civilizations and the guidelines to structure them.

So what is my stance? I don't know. I'm not much of a humanitarian. But I do have a little bit of a conscience. Then again... I'm an eye for an eye kind of gal. At any rate, why do you people always debate these issues? You all know the other's stance. You all know you won't change that stance. So basically we go round and round the same arguments at least once a month.