Verbal

Well, the BBC isn't good enough for you, so I suppose the Guardian (12 September 2009) isn't either. 'Yet at EDL events, skinheads have raised Nazi salutes and other EDL supporters have chanted racist slogans such as “I hate Pakis more than you”. One protest in Luton in May ended with scores of people attacking Asian businesses, smashing cars and threatening passersby.' Your posts are bizarre, quite frankly - really, really, odd, and I'm strongly inclined not to believe a word of your claim that you teach 'outreach' to Muslim women.

I'll give the police the benefit of the doubt on this one. At the Birmingham EDL assault on Asians, there were 90 arrests. How many of those arrested were EDL/BNP? Every single one of them. (Source: BBC)

Bullsh!t Read my post 466. it's not THAT far away.

I'm convinced you have the attention span of a newt. No one is saying people shouldn't be concerned about the Salafists. We are saying that concern shouldn't be channelled into the EDL/BNP's racist assaults on innocent Asians, their homes and their businesses. Understand? Or is that too ****ing complicated for you?

But you should have tried when we were near the end of one of our great escape seasons in the late 90s. Tumbleweed would have passed through undisturbed. Some great bargains though. Still got my especially useless Saints leather passport cover. Cost me £1 I think.

What language is this in please?

Stand down Johnny.

I had no intention of posting on this rancid thread again, but I'll answer the question. If you follow the logic of 'If X, then Y', you can work it out for yourself. If, as has been reported by The Times, The Guardian, Sky News, the BBC, etc, the EDL is presently led by key figures in the BNP, and if, as has also been reported, the EDL is heavily populated during its skirmishes by far-right football hooligans... And if you choose despite this information to support the assaults on innocent Asian families, homes and businesses, then you are either stupid beyond hope... ...or you are a racist. On the balance of probabilities, and given that we know that the Facebook campaign is part of the BNP-led strategy to garner support from football website like this one, I would say that bigtone's original post was racist. There are many other posters on here who prefer to gloss over the ugly truth of what's being done to innocent Asians, in the name of protesting against the Salafists themselves - who in other words prefer to turn a blind eye to the fact that Asians are attacked in the street. That too is a racist impulse. I have no doubt that anyone described as a racist will scream blue murder. But loudly yelling that you're not a racist doesn't actually mean that you're not.

Finally, the truth! The BBC did it. I heard Sophie Raiworth was setting the charges when George Alagiah accidentally sat on the plunger.

This isn't about principles, 19. It's about you gnawing away at something that's become an obsession. And you've been tugging at it so hard and long that you've lost sight of what Le Tiss is to Southampton fans. I don't know how many other ways to say it about this 'controversy': it doesn't matter.

I have no idea, but I've always wondered whether the administrators were somehow more comfortable with someone called 'Lynam' than 'Liebherr' - locals v foreigners.

I just turn my nose up to such things.

Some things just make you laugh. Or me anyway. This is one of them.

I cheated though. And bet on it. I am now rich.

Mornington Crescent. I win.

Troll.

It doesn't matter how many times you say it - you don't get to choose. The way legal systems work is by defining categories of crimes, not by some populist sense of how awful they are. Murder is murder. In the US, they measure this by 'degrees'. First degree murder usually involves intent, the use of weapons, other aggravated factors (it varies from state to state). Second degree murder is non-premeditated, and may even include cases where the accused risked being killed themselves (as in an assault which they too successfully repulsed). Self-defence is not necesarily a defence against this charge. Then there's voluntary manslaughter, which is intentional killing with mitigating cirumstances. And involuntary manslaughter, which is killing without intent. (eg a fatal car crash resulting from road rage). Except for some very special circumstances, you only get the death sentence for first degree murder. These are by no means the cases that attract the highest degree of public approbrium. Since Brady was sent to Broadmoor, it's highly likely, as in the US, that he couldn't have been sentenced to death. As I say, you don't get to choose. 'Evil' is not a legal concept.

I've never been able to master the multi-quote thingy, so bear with me, if you don't mind. First off, Washington DC does not have the death penalty. Having just worked in the South Bronx, let me also tell you that not all of New York City has been Disneyfied - the Bronx is still officially listed as the toughest set of precincts in the US. New Jersey does not have the death penalty. There are plenty of cities in NJ which fall under the heading of 'no picnic'. New Mexico this year abolished the death penalty. And Massachusetts, which includes some pretty violently gun-ridden cities, does not have the death penalty. Of those that do, two - New Hampshire and Kansas - have not sent anyone to the gas chamber (or whatever delectable method is the choice du jour) since the death penalty was re-allowed by the US Supreme Court in 1976.. So you see your division of milk-and-honey states with no death penalty versus violent-mayhem states with it just doesn't hold up. In a way, I'm not worried one way or the other whether you agree; I'm just telling you the facts. There is no credible evidence that the death penalty in the US is a deterrent. However much you state your opinion, you haven't offered any statistics that decisively or even remotely support your position. You can and will of course continue to believe what you will. I don't need to say that I am 100% sure that the prospect of the death penalty has never deterred anyone from killing - I'm saying that when you look at the evidence, the numbers as a whole say that's not the case. The fact that you could find some near-murderer to say he hesitated doesn't alter the fact that the number of families grieving for the loss of their brothers, mothers, sisters or fathers won't be less. In fact, it seems you are MORE likely to be a murder victim in a state with the death penalty. Isn't that horrifying? And doesn't that make you stop and think - that maybe, just maybe, the death penalty is actually an integral part of the degradation of life in those states like Texas which fry people with such enthusiasm? So if you apply your own test, shouldn't you revise your opposition to the death penalty? Because the figures tell the story as clear as day that there are more grieving families in states with the death penalty than not. If you want to save one innocent person's life, and the evidence goes against your beliefs, what's worth more: your beliefs or someone's life? As for BTF's point, I really think you're talking past her. There aren't many POV's, as you call them, in which murder is right. So we're agreed on that. It's virtually impossible to prove beyond ALL doubt, as you say, that the accused committed the crime (even those who've confessed to capital crimes or murders in the past have been innocent for one reason or another). So you're presumably accepting the effective abolition of the death penalty. What you're left with, after all the arguments you've inadvertently trashed, is a peroration that I'm afraid I don't understand, about how a murderer is really a suicide. I think, on this last point, you may have not left room for the complexity of the human condition. Do you ever go to the movies? It's an almost universal narrative - filmmakers are and always have been deeply fascinated by the incredibly multi-faceted circumstances that lead towards a murder. Besides, I could think of lots of reasons for not killing someone who let it be known they choose to die. For one thing, I don't want to be accused of murder.

You're trivialising BTF's point. The question of whether we do or do not have the death penalty is fundamentally a question about what kind of moral codes we live by as a country.

You're just setting up an impossible test in order to prove your point. The simple fact is there is a vast pool of evidence from the 'natural experiments' I've mentioned, that demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that the death penalty is not a deterrent. I assure you gang culture is NOT limited to DC, or South Central LA, or other northern conurbations. It is in fact brutally common in rural areas - if not more so. (I can give you not only chapter and verse on this, but some hideously gruesome photographic evidence of it from something I'm working on right now.) Most murders, wherever they are committed in the US, are related in some way to drugs and gang/gun culture. The demographics on this are simply overwhelming.

You're not following benjii's argument. He's saying there needs to be 'no doubt' in the event that a prisoner is executed. Shipman was not. In any case, laws are not built around single cases, under the old legal adage that 'hard cases make bad laws.'

Well there's a really simple test you can do to see if you're right. Instead of taking the case of New York State, take states which DO have the death penalty, but are not only much poorer than Texas, but have similar 'cultures'. You can look at Mississippi, Alabama, New Mexico (the poorest of all) and many others in the southern belt. They ALL have lower execution rates than the fry-one-a-minute Texas. And lower murder rates. These facts have nothing whatever to do with the feelings of the families of murder victims.

But you can't bring socio-economic arguments into the deterrent question. Logically, either the death penalty is a deterrent or it is not. You can't plausibly argue that a poor Texan, for example, is so mentally enfeebled by his poverty as to not understand - or understand less well - the idea that if he kills someone, he'll face the chop. In fact, if this were true, even in Texas you are actually not allowed to execute people, because by definition, they wouldn't be mentally competent (and this is a national decision, imposed as the result of a US Supreme court ruling.) It's not that I don't believe that the death penalty is a deterrent. It just isn't. This is not 'fiddling the statistics'. They are incontrovertible. (and we're not even getting into the question of why the US has by far the highest murder rate in the western world, despite the death penalty.) In the US, very few people bother with this argument any more because they know the argument is lost. What they focus on is the old frontier idea of justice being an eye for an eye. Which partly explains why more blacks end up on death row than whites.

So here I am looking for some quiet refuge from the rabid insanity of the BNP-sponsored EDL thread, and what do I find? Perfect formation knee-jerking - complete with self-defeating logic. What if those five innocent people a year were convicted of a capital offence? And here's an awkward comparison. Not all states in the US have the death penalty. The most enthusiastic state killer in the US, by far, is Texas. Their murder rate is 5.5 per 100,000. New York state does not have the death penalty. Its murder rate is 5 per 100,000. Texas not only leads the US in state-sanctioned killings, it has executed three times as many people as its two closest competitors since 1976, and four times more than any other state. Yet Texas has consistently had one of the highest murder rates in the country, demonstrating that the death penalty does not have a general deterrent effect. The three largest cities in Texas have murder rates among the top 25 in the country, while none of the largest cities in New York State are in the top 25.

Actually, this is now getting petty. and I feel like this is all going round in depressing circles. I'm out of here. Good luck - those of you who are not all mouth and no trousers - with your support for the racist cowards of the EDL/BNP.