The Hall of Fire

For those who are interested, here's the article that started off my most recent train of thought on the subject (posted in the Following the News thread at Manwë) - Crime up after whippings stopped By Lloyd Jones June 15, 2006 THE whipping of adults and children with coconut branches as punishment ...

Seeing as law-related topics are in the vogue around here, and seeing as I’m starting a series of threads related to crime and punishment around several boards, I thought I’d start a discussion on this. We’ve all done capital punishment to death, but what about judicial corporal punishment? For exam...

I wouldn’t put it past her to kill Harry, although I would be very surprised if Ron or Hermione copped it. We do know that at least one death is very serious – JKR told her husband and he found it ‘gut wrenching’. I was guessing Lupin for a while, and Hagrid is a possibility although his importance ...

I don’t oppose the death penalty in principle, I just don’t believe that it can be handled properly. For example, it costs an unbelievable amount to execute one person in the United States today – something like six times what it costs to keep them in prison for life. Not only that, it clogs up cour...

[W]hy do unintegrated immigrants sometimes become a problem to their host country? Language and cultural barriers make finding employment difficult (eg: unemployment rates among young Muslims in France), a struggle to find their own identity can lead people of the second-generation to adopt reactio...

As I think this topic is worth pursuing, I’ll pose a question.

Are communities of unintegrated immigrants a problem to their host country?

I think it was the utterly alien nature of the bomb that gave them a whole new image of defeat. There was no nobility in this sort of death; it presented them with no cultural traditions to call upon, robbing them of their last weapon by throwing them helplessly into the modern world for the first ...

The fanaticism of the average Japanese soldier, or even civilian, was beyond anything else that I can think of. Even Islamic extremists today are much less willing to die for their cause, much more willing to negotiate and much more willing to surrender than the men of the Imperial Army, Navy and Ai...

But I object to the form of the question in general. Justifying things (or its opposite) in historical retrospect is dubious as an intellectual activity, not only because we know things the people at the time didn't, but because we cannot FEEL as they did. That is a good question to ask as well. Mi...

It's also possible that the arms race would not have gotten started at all if we had refrained from using them and pushed immediately for treaties to place this weaponry off-limits forever. The USA might have, but would the USSR, China or the possibly-undefeated Japanese Empire? Arms races have alw...

I take into account that this action set the precedent for use of nuclear weapons in war. It launched an arms race that also caused a great deal of suffering to a great many people on the 'guns and butter curve.' Many of the nuclear weapons created by that arms race are unaccounted for since the br...

There is no alternative that would be worse. The alternatives, as I see it, I either a) leaving the Japanese Empire intact, letting them continue to commit atrocities in China and South-East Asia and leaving them posied to launch another war when they recover b) fighting to the bitter end over year...

I know, I'm just asking around.

This is a topic that happens to really interest me.

For those who opposed the bombs, how else would you have ended the war as swiftly and with as little loss of life, civilian and military, on both sides?

Bought up here because of relevance...

This was mentioned in the Al-Zarqawi thread.

Do you believe that the use of atomic bombs on Japanese Cities by the allied forces in WWII was justified?

It's a really tough one. The problem is that, had Zarqawi got away, he would have killed many more innocent people. Are we justified in killing five innocents to save fifty? Given a choice between killing Zarqawi and some civilians and letting him get away, I would probably shoot. It depends, though...

Both the Iraqi Prime Minister and General Casey, commander of the US forces in Iraq, have confirmed this. His body has been identified. There's apparently still some doubt, though. As usual, froms news.com.au: Air raid kills al-Qaeda's Zarqawi From AFP and Reuters correspondents in Bagdhad June 08, ...

I like the pirate one, which I absolutely have never fallen for. Ever.

The London bombers were all the children of Muslim immigrants as well, as were the Paris rioters, the Lebanese gangs that caused trouble in Sydney, and IIRC the Spanish train bombers and the killers of Theo van Gough. I’ve read that there are serious issues with this particular group in Europe, alth...

You can see how I think this applies to website experiments. Oh, now I'm really interested. :D Internet governance interests me very much. But I don't see how the Hutt River experiment specifically applies to website experiments, beyond perhaps the importance of having a general agreement of purpos...

These things often don’t succeed. Either there are too few people and resources and not enough space to make it sustainable (this is the usual ‘run up a flag in the backyard’ sort of microstate), or the membership breaks down. For example, the United Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands ...