Friday, March 14, 2008

Surely what matters is the manner of Mehdi Kazemi's execution? We've already established that New Labour has no problem with handing people over to foreign states which are planning to execute them without a proper trial for crimes which would not be capital offenses in the UK, providing they are polite to them on the scaffold.

32 comments:

  1. Hi Andrew,

    Britain could not afford to pay for all the people in the world who could justifiably claim asylum here - what would you do?

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  2. If the entire gay population of Iran turned up in the UK, then I would allow the entire gay population of Iran to stay here. If that cost us so much money that we had to have fewer Olympic Games, Millennium Domes and Trident Missiles, then I think I could probably live with that. I believe in the 1940s, the Daily Mail took the view that the Jews were probably exaggerating the situation in Germany, and that in any case, we couldn't afford to be over-run with pawn-brokers and psychoanalysts.

    There is a buried assumption that "people who could justifiably claim asylum" necessarily "cost money". How does this work? They might, or they might not. We don't like it when unemployed Anne Franks run away from that nice Mr. Hitler and our government has to find them houses and pay them benefit. But I have noticed that when skilled Polish people come over here and start doing useful jobs at fair prices, we like it even less. But you can't put a financial cost on someone's life; I venture to say that finding houses for unemployed foreign homosexuals might turn out to be more cost efficient than spending £20 billion {Check this - ed) on having a war against Iraq.

    If someone leaves a starving baby on my doorstep, then, at that moment, keeping that baby alive has become my responsibility. It is simply irrelevant to say "But what if all the starving babies in the world were left on your your door step. You might not have room for them. And anyone, if you buy a couple of tins of baby food than all the other unmarried mothers will say 'I don't have to be prudent; if things get difficult, I'll just dump my child with that Mr. Rilstone, who has an open door policy and is obviously a soft touch.' So best just leave it out in the cold to die, and reduce the surplus population.

    Working out a system whereby we could share all the homosexuals fairly among the various liberal western states might be a good idea, of course. Do we know which countries have a shortage?

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  3. Hi Andrew,

    Thank you for the response - and I wholeheartedly agree that if the whole gay population of Iran turned up in the UK, the UK government should let them stay. What I meant in my post was that so much of the world deserves asylum by the criteria that we use that the UK's existing policy only works because it is difficult to get here. For instance, you mention the position of the Daily Mail re: Jews in the 30s. The UK Government could have invited them to stay - could it have done so for every person deserving from the Soviet Union at that time? Similarly, I may be made responsible for a starving baby that I find outside my doorstep. But what if it is a family? Or a village? If I say there is no limit, not only do I take a very large load upon my shoulders which I at least would find impossibly hard to bear - and perhaps many others too - but my responsibility for such numbers would diffuse that responsibility to such an extent I would probably achieve nothing either. And finally, at what point should I say, "I have no food to feed all of the escaped Calormen slaves. Should I not attack Tashbaan, depose the Tisroc and divide his lands amongst the slaves so that they can feed themselves?".

    And IIRC, asylum seekers always cost money because they are not allowed to work but are entitled to certain benefits.

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  4. JWH - then the solution would be to *let* asylum seekers work; although I would note that the money that 'they' 'cost' 'us' is used by them to purchase goods and services, which in turn keeps people employed.

    And of course, we all know that adding more people to a population makes that population as a whole poorer, which is why London is the poorest city in the UK and New York the poorest in the US.

    ". And finally, at what point should I say, "I have no food to feed all of the escaped Calormen slaves. Should I not attack Tashbaan, depose the Tisroc and divide his lands amongst the slaves so that they can feed themselves?"."

    At the point where that becomes more productive than just letting them come here. The current population of Iran is around 70 million - roughly the same as that of the UK (to an order of magnitude). According to the Observer, there are 3.6 million gay people in Britain. Given that Iran's population is about 1/6 greater than that of the UK, call that four million gay people.

    The benefits they are entitled to would vary depending on, for example, if they were disabled, had dependent children and so on, but as a rough estimate let's use the £100 per week (including housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance) I was on when unemployed a couple of years back. That is more than most actually get, but we might as well err on the generous side. That's £5200 per year per person, or call it twenty billion pounds a year total.

    Of course, that's only while their claims are processed - once they're accepted (as we're assuming they are) then they can get jobs and contribute to the economy. But let's say it takes an average of five years to process the claims, that's one hundred billion pounds.

    Googling the cost of the Iraq war brings up the total cost as being in the region of seven hundred billion dollars - roughly three and a half times the number above. Now, most of that has been shouldered by the US taxpayer, but we're assuming here that the UK is operating in complete isolation, and that not one other country will take one single Iranian gay person, so we must assume that only the UK cares enough to go to war.

    So even just thinking in, frankly, inhuman economic terms, it still would be *far* less costly to just let every single gay Iranian come over here than to go to war with Iran - and that's even assuming that the inevitable deaths that would result from such a war have no monetary value whatsoever.

    I notice that no-one argues we should not allow babies to be born into the country. After all, they're surplus population, they don't work, they expect us to pay for their food and education and healthcare without giving anything back, they know nothing of our culture and can't even speak the language. Send the babies back where they came from!

    I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being harsh to you... no, actually I'm not sorry at all. Yesterday I listened to a rather vile little Dr Who audio play called Flip-Flop which seems to argue that if we let all these immigrants in they'll destroy our culture and ban Christmas, one of the nastiest things I've heard in a long time. And then today I read ( the rather excellent) Judenhass, by that nice Mr Sim, which shows very effectively the end result of that kind of thinking.

    The Mail and Express are right in a way - there *is* a war of ideas going on between good, decent, right-thinking people and people who want to destroy civilisation. It is becoming increasingly necessary to take sides in that war, to stand up against the uncivilised barbarians who want us to go back to the dark ages. A simple way to tell which side someone's on is if they think it is in any way defensible to strangle someone to death for liking other men's bottoms, or to stand aside while someone else does that.

    Your comments today have been a final straw for me - you've pushed me to do something I have intended to do for years and never got round to. I've just joined Amnesty International.

    Unlike Mr Rilstone, I am not a Christian. But I do think that you might profit (to use a nice economic term that fits the terms of your 'argument' if it can be called that, rather than speaking in terms of basic humanity and decency) by reading Mathew 25:33-46.

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  5. Andrew H,

    I'm deeply sorry if I angered you or caused any offence to you or anyone else reading this blog. I hope that I have never advocated or sought to justify the killing of homosexuals or advocated that the UK Government aid and abet the same. I do not think I have advanced any argument which resembles this, but clearly you disagree. I aimed to ask Andrew what I think of as a difficult moral question - What to do when the demands on you to succour others outstrips your ability to do so. Your answer (and Andrew's) seems to be that the question doesn't arise - i.e. the premise of my question is wrong, because that ability is never outstripped. Your point of view would seem to make the Government's position incomprehensible - I had assumed that the basis for limiting immigration into a country was economic. New Labour might be accused of many sins, but naked homophobia and racism have never been prominent, at least to my knowledge, so that would rule that out. We have lived through a period of large-scale immigration, so New Labour wouldn't appear to be opposed to this per se either.

    Anyway, I repeat my sincerest apologies and will withdraw from this blog. If Andrew has found my posts offensive I ask that he deletes them from his site.

    Regards

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  6. JWH - I don't think anyone has asked that you withdraw.

    While the current government has not to my knowledge done anything directly homophobic (the area of gay rights being one of the few where clear progress has been made) there have been many, *many* cases of them using racism as a vote-getter (just as one example the whole furore around Straw's remarks about veils).

    Petty nastinesses like making immigrants take a 'Life In The UK' test (which my wife recently had to take, but I guarantee not one single British person I know could pass) have no justification, economic or otherwise, except to appease racists. Nor does more than doubling the cost of a visa, as was done last year and as is planned to happen again.

    In my old job in a psychiatric hospital, I knew (trying here to explain a situation without breaking patient confidentiality) someone who had been raped and tortured and expelled from the African country where he lived after a coup, and been informed that if he ever returned he and his family would be killed. He had become schizophrenic due to the stress he'd been under at this time. The government feel he doesn't have a claim either.

    The regulations about immigration that are currently in place cannot stop immigrants from EU countries, which is where most of our immigration at the moment comes from. And they're not intended to. They're not there for any practical or principled reason - like much of this government's policies, they're about appeasing a vision of 'middle England', consisting of people who wouldn't like a darkie living next door to them and think they're tolerant but this political correctness is really going too far these days and wasn't it better when kids got six-of-the-best and the queers knew their place?

    The current government do not think any of those things, but they have no compunction whatsoever about committing any unprincipled act in order to appeal to people who *do* think that way, and they don't care who gets harmed by their appeasement of bigots.

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  7. No-one is asking anyone to withdraw from anything. If you are going to discuss asylum policy, it's likely that this discussion will become strident and heated; it doesn't do much good to say "Oh, well if I offended you, I shall leave" the minute someone says something heated and strident.

    You'd have to try a lot harder if you wanted to offend me. Like saying Jack Kirby can't draw, or something.

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  8. And without wanting to spam this blog (and if you think this is irrelevant, please delete this) I've just posted a review of Dave Sim's Judenhass on my own blog at http://dccountdown.blogspot.com/2008/03/judenhass.html . I thought you might be interested in this, and the review touches on this post...

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  9. But... but I thought it had been officially announced that there was no homosexuality in Iran!

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  10. Andrew R., I hope you don't mind my quoting your first comment in full on my own blog.

    jwh, comments get lively around here, but if you stick around, you'll learn things. (Lurking also works, esp when you're concerned about getting into something acrimonious.)

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  11. Hello All,

    I'm not bothered about the heat or the stridency. I'm hurt and angered by:

    "I'm sorry if it seems like I'm being harsh to you... no, actually I'm not sorry at all. Yesterday I listened to a rather vile little Dr Who audio play called Flip-Flop which seems to argue that if we let all these immigrants in they'll destroy our culture and ban Christmas, one of the nastiest things I've heard in a long time. And then today I read ( the rather excellent) Judenhass, by that nice Mr Sim, which shows very effectively the end result of that kind of thinking.

    The Mail and Express are right in a way - there *is* a war of ideas going on between good, decent, right-thinking people and people who want to destroy civilisation. It is becoming increasingly necessary to take sides in that war, to stand up against the uncivilised barbarians who want us to go back to the dark ages. A simple way to tell which side someone's on is if they think it is in any way defensible to strangle someone to death for liking other men's bottoms, or to stand aside while someone else does that.

    Your comments today have been a final straw for me - you've pushed me to do something I have intended to do for years and never got round to. I've just joined Amnesty International."

    Just to re-iterate:

    I don't think I have ever argued that if we let in all these immigrants they will destroy our culture and ban Christmas. I asked a question about what to the UK Government should do because the number of people who deserve asylum - I'll say it again I think, so there is no misunderstanding - DESERVE ASYLUM - becomes greater than its capacity to grant that asylum. I really appreciate your hint that 'my way of thinking' - which you can have no idea about and is utterly opposed to such ways of thinking - leads to Nazi Anit-Semitism. Cheers for that. I have never suggested and never thought that it is in anyway defensible to kill homosexuals and I take the deepest possible offence at the suggestion that I do. I suggest in return to your kind reading suggestions for me that you have a think about exactly the consequences of "...or to stand aside while someone else does that"...

    I cannot see where I have positioned myself with the forces of barbarism, written anything that could inspire someone to join Amnesty International. I feel I have been made into a straw man for Andrew H to vent his fury at the current government - useful to him no doubt, but upsetting for me, especially since I think we are in agreement about every aspect of practical asylum policy that has been touched on in this thread. I appreciate both Andrew's and Andrew H's answers to my question - that the question doesn't arise in the first place, because with some relatively easy changes in policy the UK Government will have enough funds for any amount of asylum-seekers that could reasonably be expected to ask for it, and furthermore, it isn't neccessarily the case that asylum seekers have to cost the UK Government anything. I'm frankly sceptical of this last but in a fair amount of agreement with the first - but I don't think either answers my question really. However, there is no particular reason why anyone should answer that theoretical question, so I don't mind about that.

    Perhaps I'm being too sensitive to criticism but I think that a lot of the comments in Andrew H's post were totally undeserved. However, I appreciate that often we cause offence and remain blind to exactly has caused it - therefore I offer him my sincerest apologies again for having upset him, utterly against my intent.

    And thanks Sylvia - you are quite right, it is back to lurking for me...

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  12. I think that the point is, if you don't want to be mistaken for somebody holding unpleasant views, you shouldn't employ the rhetorical devices and lines of debate which have been appropriated by people holding those views.

    It's no doubt terribly annoying when some subject you'd like to discuss is a favorite topic of unpleasant people, and so you can't, safely, but that's life.

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  13. JWT:

    "I asked a question about what to the UK Government should do because the number of people who deserve asylum - I'll say it again I think, so there is no misunderstanding - DESERVE ASYLUM - becomes greater than its capacity to grant that asylum."

    It's really rather simple. That doesn't happen.

    "I really appreciate your hint that 'my way of thinking' - which you can have no idea about and is utterly opposed to such ways of thinking - leads to Nazi Anit-Semitism. Cheers for that."

    As I said, I've just read Judenhass, by Dave Sim. In it, he lists page after page of comments by people making this argument - "we can't take them all - we can't afford it" - while people were dying.


    " I think we are in agreement about every aspect of practical asylum policy that has been touched on in this thread. "

    No we are not. You're saying we can't afford to pay for asylum seekers to stay here. I'm saying that's nonsense.

    " I don't think either answers my question really. However, there is no particular reason why anyone should answer that theoretical question, so I don't mind about that."

    There is also no particular reason why anyone should *ask* that theoretical question, which is worded in such a way as to force the answer "we should stop taking them in", even though the situation it describes has never happened, will never happen, and can never happen. It's exactly analagous to the 'ticking time-bomb' so beloved of people who want to advocate torture.

    If you truly do agree we have an absolute moral responsibility to take in those who need help, then I apologise unreservedly for causing *you* offence - however, I would suggest you try not to ask hypothetical questions that pretty much mirror right-wing anti-immigration talking points. Two seconds googling brings up http://www.refugee-action.org.uk/
    information/challengingthemyths2.aspx (broken so it won't get hidden) which, despite the fudging of the first answer (which mixes in 'migrants' with 'asylum seekers' so it can include a few billionaires to make the numbers swing in their favour) seems to be broadly correct.

    Assuming their figures (which only go up to 2003, but the government has got tougher on immigration since then so if anything they'd be lower) are true, currently 0.28% of total public spending goes on asylum seekers. Let's say the point where 'we' can't afford it is not the point where British people are literally starving to death, but just the point where there's any significant impact on our lives at all.

    I'm relatively low-paid, and I think I could probably afford £10 per week before there was a significant impact on my life (I might have to switch to a cheaper, non-Fair-Trade brand of coffee, but if the money was helping people anyway I wouldn't feel guilty about it). Assuming that other people who earn as little as I do can afford half that if they've got kids or live in an expensive area, let's peg the amount we can 'afford' at £5 per week for someone on my income, and the same proportion of the income for those earning more.

    I pay somewhere in the vicinity of £40 to £50 a week in combined income tax and national insurance. 0.28% of £50 (to use the high end figure) is 1.4p . So for 'us' not to be able to afford 'them' - without cutting any other government spending, without them making any positive contribution at all, and with 'not able to afford' defined as broadly as possible - the costs would have to increase threehundredfold.

    Assuming the cost is directly proportional to the number of asylum seekers, that would mean that we would have to have a hundred million people a year turning up asking for help.

    So when we get to even *one percent* of that, I might start considering such questions worthy of serious thought. Until then, they just look like right-wing trolling, even if they're intended otherwise.

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  14. Sorry, I made a mistake there. 0.28% of £50 is actually *0.14*p. So we could afford by that measure a *billion* people, at least financially.

    Phil - exactly

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  15. Andy H

    "... I think we are in agreement about every aspect of practical asylum policy that has been touched on in this thread...

    No we are not. You're saying we can't afford to pay for asylum seekers to stay here. I'm saying that's nonsense."

    Read what I have written in my posts. I haven't said the UK has reached that point, is reaching that point or will reach that point. I have asked a question about what the UK Government should do if that point should be reached. If someone's answer is that point cannot be reached then fair enough. If someone's answer is that the UK Government would have to stop taking asylum seekers in the event of that eventuality - but that eventuality is so remote as to be not worth considering -then fair enough. If the answer is that a moral absolute is a moral absolute and that aid is offered even to the point of your own death or destruction then fair enough. As you say, it has a deal in common with the ticking-time bomb question - but I, unlike you, think that is a question worth considering - so worth considering I asked if Andrew would write an article on it - and which he subsequently did, and I found fascinating. I am interested in what to do when two moral absolutes are in opposition, or appear to be - is that so wrong?? I re-iterate, on every practical consideration you have mentioned in your posts , I agree with you.

    I don't post on the internet very often so forgive my ignorance, but 'trolling' is where you deliberately try to start an argument by saying things on a forum you know people are going to disagree vehemently with, right? I have not set out to do so and have no such agenda in mind.

    I would have thought that a storm of abuse is the last resort rather than the first, but you live and learn.

    Regards

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  16. If the country was so full of Iranian homosexuals that the addition of one more person would cause it to sink beneath the waves with all its children and its wives and its maidens and its ladies proud then I would be prepared to hand that additional person over to Mr. Dinner-Jacket to be killed.

    Does that help?

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  17. JWH
    If you think what you have experienced here is 'a storm of abuse' you really *haven't* been on the internet much.
    If the Earth was going to be eaten by Galactus in five minutes unless I kicked your grandmother in your face repeatedly, it might be right for me to do so. But I don't consider that particularly relevant to a discussion of the rights and wrongs of kicking your grandmother, and I suspect that if you said "Someone wants to kick my grandmother in the face over and over again" and someone replied "But Galactus eats planets where they don't kick old ladies" you might consider that irrelevant, and might even think the person in question was trying to justify something fairly horrible. You might even suspect they were "deliberately try[ing] to start an argument by saying things...[they] know people are going to disagree vehemently with"

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  18. phil masters said...
    I think that the point is, if you don't want to be mistaken for somebody holding unpleasant views, you shouldn't employ the rhetorical devices and lines of debate which have been appropriated by people holding those views.

    It's no doubt terribly annoying when some subject you'd like to discuss is a favorite topic of unpleasant people, and so you can't, safely, but that's life.


    I suspect I won’t be disagreeing with anything you meant here, but…

    I don’t think there’s any bar on discussing this subject, just that if during that discussion someone employs the rhetorical devices of unpleasant people they can’t expect not to be associated with them.

    I hope I don’t sound too pedantic. But this is an important point, as one of those rhetorical devices has become to “call for a debate” on asylum and migration. This is a strange call, as the tabloids give over their headlines to this sort of thing so often it’s sometimes hard for poor Princess Diana to get a look in. A cynical soul might even suggest their “call” is actually a flag raised for the similar-minded to rally around, and a genuine debate is actually the last thing they want. I’d be happy to have one, but between them the two Andrews have covered everything I could say.

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  19. Well, I had in mind two things:

    1. The number of people who could justifiably claim asylum in Britain (homosexuals in Iran, the entire population of Darfur, members of opposition parties or groups in Zimbabwe, China, North Korea et al., enslaved children in Bangladesh...) is probably already a very large number indeed and the numbers of those people who might wish to claim asylum, if it were possible for them, might also be very large. In his response, Andrew mentioned a 'starving baby' on the doorstep - I thought it might be interesting to read Andrew write about whether his moral responsibility to the baby is greater because it is on his doorstep (or the asylum-seeker has arrived, if you prefer) or because he now has knowledge of the child's plight (knows about the person-deserving-of-asylum's plight regardless of whether that person has arived in the UK or not).

    2. The number of people in the world whose life will become intolerable as a result of global warming - if what the climate change activists is true - is likely to rise very greatly in the relatively near future, and so, the numbers of people who might wish to claim asylum in a rich country less affected by those changes might also be very high.

    I don't myself think of these scenarios as on a par with Galacticus eating the Earth, but I guess we'll have to agree to differ. However, since it is clear that neither Andrew or Andrew H considers these questions relevant or interesting, I propose a virtual handshake and an agreement to move on?

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  20. Andy H,

    "JWH
    If you think what you have experienced here is 'a storm of abuse' you really *haven't* been on the internet much."

    No, maybe not - but perhaps you would you have taken similar accusations against yourself more lightly, or be less upset by them?

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  21. JWH - and that point has been answered. Repeatedly. From a financial point of view, we could afford to support a billion or so new asylum seekers at the level we support those who are already here. Of course, at that level there would be difficulties other than the financial ones you bring up, but I suspect those difficulties would be slightly less insurmountable than the difficulty of assuming that between now and 2014 the entire population of the world is going to move to the UK because of persecution...
    And no-one has actually accused you of anything...

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  22. Andrew H - Sorry, when you write "and that point has been answered repeatedly", I remain sceptical of an economic 'argument' that hasn't taken into account shelter, medicine, mental health care, schooling, interpreting, policing, educating, transport infrastructure etc.etc. - in fact, all of the services that a modern Western democratic country provides - so for me, although clearly not for you, the question remains open. I would also suggest that your posts have made certain accusations about what I'm like, which I consider totally unfounded and quite upsetting. Again, though, I don't think this thread is going anywhere so I offer the metaphorical handshake and will move on.

    Regards

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  23. *Sigh*
    Apologies everyone for having fed the troll. I'll shut up now. I have a tendency to be like this man - http://xkcd.com/386/

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  24. Interesting, I wonder if Mr. Kazemi Had claimed he was innocent and being framed if anyone would care? But because he admits he was guilty and is by definition a criminal people can’t seem to do enough for him.

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  25. Going back to the text of the original blog post, Andrew, you can't possibly be drawing a moral equivalence between the U.S. executing people for facilitating the murder of civilians and the Islamic Republic executing people for where they put their penises.

    Andrew Reeves

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  26. Of course not. I'm drawing a moral equivalence between claiming to oppose the death penalty and handing a war criminal over to a foreign power who you know are going to execute him, and claiming to oppose the death penalty and handing anyone else over to a foreign power who you are know are going to execute him. (OK, the analogy isn't perfect, because Yo Blair did nothing to stop his thanatos worshipping ally from handing the war criminal over to the foreign power, but you get my drift. "We are opposed to the death penalty, but..." Everything before the but is bollocks, as the fellow said.

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  27. Interesting, I wonder if Mr. Kazemi Had claimed he was innocent and being framed if anyone would care? But because he admits he was guilty and is by definition a criminal people can’t seem to do enough for him.

    Don't understand your point. If a country declares that it is a crime to have brown eyes, then it is trivially true that all brown eyed people are criminals. This doesn't effect the right of brown-eyed people to claim asylum in less brownaphobic countries one way or the other. (Unless you are arguing some Hegelian position, where the only possible morality is the law of the state you happen to live in -- so that, for example, the only question we can ask about Godwin's extermination of the Jews is whether due process was followed, according to the law of that country at that time.)

    If a person came to the UK and said "Please don't send me back to Ruritania, because if you do they will kill me for having brown eyes -- although, as you can see, my eyes are actually blue" I think civilized people would still be very sympathetic to him, and uncivilized people would send him back so as not to open the floodgates of brown-eyed refugees.

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  28. As someone who does not think the death penalty is civilized in any circumstance, I do not really see what you are getting at? Some would argue that unchecked homosexuality could be as destructive to a society as manslaughter.

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  30. Some would argue that unchecked homosexuality could be as destructive to a society as manslaughter.

    Some would argue that the sky is pink, the Royal Family are shape shifting telepathic aliens, the world is flat, the earth was creatED in 4004BC and "Torchwood" is well-written. I wouldn't waste my time arguing with them, either.

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  31. Andrew Rilstone - Don't understand your point. If a country declares that it is a crime to have brown eyes, then it is trivially true that all brown eyed people are criminals. This doesn't effect the right of brown-eyed people to claim asylum in less brownaphobic countries one way or the other. (Unless you are arguing some Hegelian position, where the only possible morality is the law of the state you happen to live in -- so that, for example, the only question we can ask about Godwin's extermination of the Jews is whether due process was followed, according to the law of that country at that time.)

    If a person came to the UK and said "Please don't send me back to Ruritania, because if you do they will kill me for having brown eyes -- although, as you can see, my eyes are actually blue" I think civilized people would still be very sympathetic to him, and uncivilized people would send him back so as not to open the floodgates of brown-eyed refugees.


    It was my understanding, (and I may be wrong) that it was sodomy and not simply a homosexual tendency that was actually illegal. If you are saying that persons with such tendencies cannot control their wish to poke people, then for the public safety they should be incarcerated.
    If they can control their urges, (as most of us are expected to do) then how is sodomy any different from smoking cannabis?

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  32. It was my understanding, (and I may be wrong) that it was sodomy and not simply a homosexual tendency that was actually illegal. If you are saying that persons with such tendencies cannot control their wish to poke people, then for the public safety they should be incarcerated.
    If they can control their urges, (as most of us are expected to do) then how is sodomy any different from smoking cannabis?


    When suddenly, as if by magic, the thread came to an end.

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