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Oct 31, 2001, 10:49am

I think there are a lot of people who now favor the death penalty, who would
also be find with life sentences that REALLY meant "life in jail", and
didn't mean "life in jail, unless you behave well for 10 years or so in
which case we will let you go".

The problem with some people is that they are pretty well behaved when kept
in a room all to themselves. Such people don't wake up in the morning and
say to themselves "What criminal activity can I engage in today?". This
only happens in cartoons. Sometimes I think young people today have a sort
of "cartoon" version of what real life is all about. I wish it weren't so.

Criminals typically see THEMSELVES as victims. This can take on many forms,
but the net result is that they use their own self image as a victim to
justify doing things that are outside the law to compensate for their
situation, be it out of work, unloved, impoverished, misunderstood, what
have you. So you let a perfectly well behaved inmate/former mass murderer
out of prison after 15 years or so, and chances are, they "injustices" are
likely to manifest themselves again, and soon.

I think if we could agree that some people just can't be "repaired", there
would be a good consensus for true life sentences, and the fervor for a
death penalty would fade.

As for how America compares with Europe on this issue and some others... my
next post.


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Oct 31, 2001, 11:59am

Ooooo ... I couldn't let this one pass...

I like the French. They gave us that nice statue.

I've never been to France, but I picture it as filled with philosophers,
sitting around the cafes, working out the problems of the world all through
the day and most of the night. They gave us such well known phrases as
"Liberty!, Fraternity!, and one other thing that wasn't as important as the
first two so I forgot it!".

We Americans are mostly selfish and self centered I grant you. We didn't
have cafes like the French, so we had to invent Starbucks. Of course no
American can afford to sit at a Starbucks for more than an hour or so, but
that's another issue.

Most Americans think this: "You people over there in Europe and the Middle
East work out your own differences and leave us out of it. We'll just sit
here at our Starbucks, for and hour, and then go home and pour some hot
water over Folgers Crystals for the rest of the day.", Oh and: "Can we buy
some oil off ya?"

I think America, the French, the English, and even the Germans these days
would much rather sit around and work all this out on paper over a nice mug
of coffee / tea / beer. We could all be "well behaved" as you put it.

The problem is that there are people in this world who are not satisfied
with talk. They see themselves as victims (see my previous post). They
think that all the problems in their lives can be traced back to things that
happened before most of them were born (thus they can't be to blame, get
it?). "In 1921 the British did something bad to us. American's speak
English. Lets attack Americans and our lives will be better again. QED".
In 1492 Spain did something bad to us. Columbus sailed for American in 1492.
Let's attack America. QED" Infantile!!!! But the concept sells over
there doesn't it? And that's all that matters.

For these people "The End Justifies the Means". More than any other
statement, that statement summarizes the view of those that end up unable to
resist the need to attack America and thus draw it into conflicts for which
we would otherwise not interrupt our afternoon lattes. I believe the
phrase was used in the Communist Manifesto to let its adherents know that
they need not be bound by laws, treaties, or common morality in their
pursuit of the rule of the proletariat. The Nazi's certainly believed
that the end justifies the means, any debate about that? Examine the
rhetoric of Osama and those like him and you will see that it is the core of
their belief too. They cannot live in a world populated by those who don't
think exactly like they do, and until such a world is achieved, the end
justifies the means.

Unless I am mistaken, you will not find that phrase, or even a similar
concept embedded in our founding documents. America, and modern day Europe
are distinguishable from the rest of the world by their belief in "process"
for lack of a better term. Justice here is codified, and predictable.
Judges INTERPRET the law rather than make it on a case by case basis. Law
is made by people that we elect, and when we change our minds, we have to
wait for the electoral process to change those people who in turn might
eventually change the law. It is a horribly inefficient system. But one
that people my age (old) are not going to easily part with. I hope that
when that system is threatened, those much younger than I will tear
themselves away from TV long enough to defend it. It remains to be seen how
strong our resolve will be.

I can almost guarantee you that if it had been the Eiffel tower that had
been destroyed, us Americans would be more inclined to sit here and think
the situation over for a while before taking any action. A long while.

I suspect that in every workplace there is a big guy, lets call him "Burt",
who towers over everyone else and weighs twice as much. We all do our share
of the work on a day to day bases. But when a huge package shows up at the
reception desk and it has to be gotten to the 8th floor, and it won't fit in
the elevator, everyone looks around and says "where's Burt?".

It may be that there is some heavy lifting to be done in the world right
now. And maybe we are not always so well behaved over here in America, but
I assure you, most of us in America are not too crazy about being "Burt"
right now.


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Nov 2, 2001, 1:39am

Well, I have to admit I don't have "the answer" about what to do about
crime. Statistics, on crime as well as many other things can be as much
fun as those brain twisters that come in the books along with crosswords
etc.

I worked for a health related computer company once and one of the experts
decided to wow me with the following statistic: There is a direct
correlation between shoe size and mortality. Specifically, people with
small feet die younger than those with large feet. Her plan was to roll
that information into the questionnaire that we used to make longevity
predictions for insurance companies etc.

I asked her if the data had been normalized to account for infant mortality.
Lots of people die at child birth and there are all sorts of terminal
childhood diseases, these would certainly skew the data. Also, people who
are sick when they are young often don't grow as rapidly as they would if
they were healthy, not to mention nutritional issues. She got an
expression on her face that screamed "I hadn't thought of that!!" and then
excused herself. (I think she had already passed this great idea along to
her boss).

Anyway... on crime statistics. Stands to reason that capital punishment
numbers would rise after it was reinstated. People convicted while capital
punishment was illegal would not suddenly be eligible for it, only new
convictions. States often changes their laws to coincide with federal
laws, so some states had to re-authorize capital punishment after the feds
did. Capital punishment cases take MUCH longer to finish than lesser
crimes, for obvious reasons. Not unheard of for a capital offence to take
15 and 20 years to litigate.

Am I saying that capital punishment prevents crimes? No. All we know for
sure is that it prevents repeat offences. Does it promote crime?
Possibly so... but I would like to see some arguments for that.

I'm not sure I accept the notion that "enlightened" countries have lower
crime rates. I won't tag specific countries here as being enlightened or
not, but some things to consider: Punishments for crimes are extremely
severe in the middle east. Amputations of limbs for crimes of theft.
Life imprisonment for drug offences. Death by stoning for women who are
too opinionated. I think they have fairly low crime rates. Some of the
European countries (particularly the Scandinavian ones) have lower crime
rates. They also have fairly monolithic cultures. Everyone gets along,
because everyone is pretty much the same (culturally). The US is the most
mixed up mixing pot in the world. That's a good thing in my opinion. But
it does lead to some friction.

And finally, many say that the US being the most capitalistic country in the
world has lead to it being the most crime-ridden. I believe the
correlation, I just don't accept the cause and effect relationship. One
has only to look at the drastically different crime statistics WITHIN the
United States to see that there are other factors that are more important to
crime than anything that can be applied at the federal level.

Wyoming: 16 murders in 1967, population 330,000... 17 murders in 1997,
population 480,000... In 1998 the murder rate zoomed to 23. New York: 1967
996 murders, pop: 18 million... 1997 1093 murders, pop still 18 million, in
1998 murders dropped to 924. I think I worked that out to 20 percent more
murders in New York. Should New York changes all its laws to match those
of Wyoming? Or should everyone in New York MOVE to Wyoming? I'm pretty
sure neither one of those changes would solve the problem. (But if everyone
in New York moved to Wyoming, the murder rate in New York would drop to
Zero, so....I guess that WOULD solve the problem for New York anyway.)

I'm not sure of the old saw that says "statistics can be used to prove
anything". But statistics alone will not provide solutions, only clues.
Determining cause and effect is much more difficult, but that's what is
needed before we can arrive at useful answers to the problems of crime.

[View Quote] U.S. D.O.J., Capital Punishment Statistics
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cp.htm
U.S. trends show that our capital punishment figures have been on the rise
since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.

KCL International Centre for Prison Studies, World Prison Brief (Europe)
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/rel/icps/worldbrief/europe.html

The following numbers represent total inmate populations.

China: 1,427,407 (sentenced prisoners only) at mid-2000 (20th Asian and
Pacific Conference of Correctional Administrators)

Russia: 923,765 (at 1.1.2001 (national prison administration))

United States: 1,933,503 (at 31.12.2000 (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics))


Áine


======MhM 23x20===Coolavin===Áine/AHNya===================
Imagine a moral code rooted in beauty, love, pleasure, and liberation
instead of order, control, repression, and fear.
==============================================================



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Nov 2, 2001, 1:42am

Oh shoot...here is where I got those numbers.... was first crime stats site
that came up on Copernic:

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/

Nov 7, 2001, 1:20am

Just from personal experience...

I tried Redhat 7.1 and Suse 7.2 at about he same time...then both were the
current releases. Doing out of the box installs with no manual tweaking...
Redhat seemed like a cleaner install process. But after I had used both
for a while I noticed that Redhat became a bit flakey. Soundcard, touchpad
and various other devices would work one time, but not the next. Suse
never supported the touchpad on my laptop, but everything else was fine and
always worked.

Suse is done in Germany, Redhat in the US. Suse has a few problems in the
area of documentation. There is a tendency for error messages to be poorly
translated into English. Of course BOTH systems use open source from all
over the world, but I would say Redhat had been more thoroughly "cleaned up"
for English speaking people.

Another MAJOR difference IMHO is that Redhat favors the Gnome user interface
while Suse favors KDE. Gnome and IDE are the "windows" part of Linux that
provide you with a desktop, icons, and the basic toolset for doing things.
Since both use the X-windows as a base, many programs will run under both
KDE and Gnome, but there are also quite a few that only work in one or the
other. Both Redhat and Suse include Gnome and KDE, but to me they each work
better with the one they default to (which might explain some of my problems
with Redhat).

Having used both for a while I decided that I preferred KDE over Gnome (at
least for now... they both are under active development). Since Suse
defaults to KDE, I found that its administrative tools tended to work better
in KDE. The same is probably true of Redhat and Gnome.

And finally, Redhat is the only Linux company coming close to making a
profit at this point. They invented the RPM system that is used to package
applications software distributions. Suse uses RPMs too. Redhat is
slightly more likely to be around in 5 years than Suse if that's an issue
for you. (Wasn't for me).

I am running Suse on an older desktop machine and on a new laptop. The
Laptop is dual-booted with Windows ME (*holds nose*). Using the included
WINE package I got AW running on both systems with a few hours tinkering.
At first only AW 2 would work there since the 3D graphics card support
doesn't work under WINE. With 3.2 I get fairly fast graphics under Linux
in software mode... almost the same frame rate as with windows USING the
hardware 3D!! There are a few minor "bugs" running in this mode, but no
crashes or hangs, just convenience issues. I started it up the other day
and got into a chat and forgot that I was using Linux. I had several
other active programs running at the same time in the background, something
that doesn't work too well for me using Windows.

If you decided to try Linux: make sure you get the new Netscape 6.2
installed right away, it totally replaces all the functionality of Internet
Explorer and Outlook Express. Netscape is BACK ! Also, both products
include Star Office which has the functionality of Word, Excel and a few
other MS office programs. Star office takes some getting used to. Its a
bit slow, especially getting started. Once I launch it I just leave it
running. If those two products aren't enough to worry Microsoft, check out
http://www.lindows.com who's plan is to make just about all Windows programs
run under Linux (without having to pay royalties to Microsoft). If they
succeed (and they only think they need about a year) the most secure jobs at
Microsoft with be the corporate lawyers.

We live in interesting times.


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