U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey offers death-penalty bill for cop killers

[Tech2]

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey offers death-penalty bill for cop killers

https://www.timesonline.com/news/2019051...op-killers

[Anthony '58]

This would be unconstitutional under the SCOTUS' 1977 Woodson v. North Carolina decision.

[pbrower2a]

The cop-killer is becoming far rarer due to cops wearing bullet-proof vests. The crook shoots ineffectively at the cop's lungs or heart, and the cop gets the second shot at the crook's chest or lungs and then gets off perhaps several more shots (cops do overkill on those who attack them), and the crook dies. The crook tries to aim for the cop's head, and the cop shoots for the crook's lungs or chest...and the crook dies.

People who try to kill cops end up shot to death, and would-be cop-killers never face capital punishment because they are already dead before they can be arrested and tried. In effect, one of the largest classes of people who used to get executed, cop-killers, are fading as part of Death-Row inmates.

[Tabi]

The future looks extremely grim.

There are no more free countries.

No country has religious freedom, free speech, gun rights, or protection from warrantless searches, forfeiture, indefinite detention, torture, or extrajudicial assassination.

You might have slightly more freedom in Ireland or Switzerland, but soon the whole world will look like North Korea.

People in Venezuela, China, Vietnam, and Cuba seem to deal with tyranny by just ignoring it and living their lives, but making plans are difficult because everything is illegal and you can be arrested at anytime.

https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

[Anthony '58]

Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

[David Horn]

(11-09-2019, 05:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

Being equally impoverished is not a good thing, in and of itself.  Gini is a nice way to compare similar nations, but EG is not similar to anything other than Zimbabwe or the like.

[Eric the Green]

I hope Sen. Toomey offers to vote to convict The Donald. Then he would be making himself useful!

[Anthony '58]

(11-09-2019, 06:27 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(11-09-2019, 05:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

Being equally impoverished is not a good thing, in and of itself.  Gini is a nice way to compare similar nations, but EG is not similar to anything other than Zimbabwe or the like.

But the interesting thing is that most Muslim Third World countries have very low Gini indices (Afghanistan has one of the lowest in the world), while most Christian Third World countries have among the highest, in both Latin America and central and southern Africa.

This is proof of a Second Cold War, with the Islamic bloc picking up the banner dropped by the Communist bloc when the First Cold War ended 30 years ago.

[Hintergrund]

(11-09-2019, 05:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

Where's the connection? Gini measures inequality (and not very well).

[Anthony '58]

(11-11-2019, 05:52 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:

(11-09-2019, 05:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

Where's the connection? Gini measures inequality (and not very well).

"Zakat," translated as "charity" or "almsgiving," is one of the six pillars of Islam - the other five being "Shahada" (faith), "Salat" (prayer), "Sawm" (fasting, particularly the dawn-to-dusk fast during Ramadan), "Hajj" (the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is mandatory for all Muslims physically and financially able to do so), and, of course, "Jihad" (violent holy war against "infidels").

And the whole point of sharia law is to deputize government to build these pillars and to keep them standing - linking the Islamic extremism of the Second Cold War to the Communism of the First Cold War.

[Hintergrund]

(11-11-2019, 10:49 AM)Anthony Wrote:

(11-11-2019, 05:52 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:

(11-09-2019, 05:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

Where's the connection? Gini measures inequality (and not very well).

"Zakat," translated as "charity" or "almsgiving," is one of the six pillars of Islam - the other five being "Shahada" (faith), "Salat" (prayer), "Sawm" (fasting, particularly the dawn-to-dusk fast during Ramadan), "Hajj" (the pilgrimage to Mecca, which is mandatory for all Muslims physically and financially able to do so), and, of course, "Jihad" (violent holy war against "infidels").

And the whole point of sharia law is to deputize government to build these pillars and to keep them standing - linking the Islamic extremism of the Second Cold War to the Communism of the First Cold War.

That doesn't have to do anything with what I said. But since we're at it, how much zakat do they have to pay? WP says "2.5% of their savings and wealth". Once per year. Is that correct?

[pbrower2a]

(11-11-2019, 05:52 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:

(11-09-2019, 05:21 PM)Anthony Wrote: Rather interesting that Equatorial Guinea ranks 174th out of 180 countries in "freedom" despite having the highest Gini index in the world (65.0).

Where's the connection? Gini measures inequality (and not very well).

It is good for 

(1) comparisons of countries with similar levels of economic development (let us say France, Japan, and the United States -- or China and Mexico) 

(2) contrasts of regions within a country (New England and "Dixie", northeastern and southeastern Brazil)

(3) internal contrasts between ethnic groups within a country (Mexican-Americans versus Chinese-Americans), and 

(4) contrasts over time (USA 1929, USA 1939). 

Any statistical metric must be applied with due care for relevance.

[Julie]

No one will care that the US is not a free country until more Americans personally become victims of the police state.

Everyone will shrug if an American gets killed by the CIA in Yemen, but Americans might care about the police state when they get tortured for jaywalking.

[ResidentArtist]

I personally think the death penalty carries too great of a risk of wrongful execution in any case. Imposing it on accused cop killers is just a drop in an overflowing bucket.

[Classic-Xer]

(12-08-2019, 08:32 PM)ResidentArtist Wrote: I personally think the death penalty carries too great of a risk of wrongful execution in any case. Imposing it on accused cop killers is just a drop in an overflowing bucket.

I assume that you think they would not receive a fair and impartial trail in today's America before they're convicted and sentenced to death for doing it these days. Is it really a great risk these days? I mean, we've come along since the 80's with DNA testing and other scientific advancements used by modern day law enforcement officials.

[pbrower2a]

Cameron Todd Willingham, convicted and sentenced to death, subsequently executed, in part because a quack psychiatrist had posters by the groups Led Zeppelin and Iron Maiden as evidence of sociopathy and because of self-serving accusations (later proved wrong) by a jailhouse snitch.

[city]

Living in a police state can make you sympathetic. Why shouldn't black people be able to buy guns, billionaires be allowed to cheat on their taxes, and Christians be able to feed the homeless?

If the government is arresting others, why wouldn't the government jail you?

The government doesn't obey the law, why should Americans?

[Anthony '58]

(12-08-2019, 08:32 PM)ResidentArtist Wrote: I personally think the death penalty carries too great of a risk of wrongful execution in any case. Imposing it on accused cop killers is just a drop in an overflowing bucket.

Ever heard of DNA?

And you can always write the law in such a way that the death penalty can be applied only if direct evidence is present (i.e., forensic evidence).  If all the evidence is circumstantial, no death penalty.

[pbrower2a]

(12-09-2019, 10:08 PM)city Wrote: Living in a police state can make you sympathetic. Why shouldn't black people be able to buy guns, billionaires be allowed to cheat on their taxes, and Christians be able to feed the homeless?

If the government is arresting others, why wouldn't the government jail you?

The government doesn't obey the law, why should Americans?

Police state? Wait until you see the second Trump Administration, or the first Pence Administration (aside from a caretaker administration in case the Good Lord takes you-know-who away).

Police states exist to preserve nasty social orders, and our society is going that way in the direction of monopoly and economic inequality. A social order more adept at meeting the nightmares of most people than at bringing happiness needs fear when life is all work and pay -- and no play. Maybe there has been some erosion of plutocracy -- but we will see if the trend toward an order in which the rich do whatever they want and the rest of us exist solely to make them even more rich that has been going two steps forward and one step back since 1981 gets to take its right-wing equivalent of a (I hate to use Maoist terminology)  "Great Leap Forward". 

The difference between monopoly capitalists and Marxist-Leninists is not so much in how they see the world; it is that one excoriates what the other embraces. We have headed toward the class structure that fits a Marxist critique. We do not yet have the fascist police state to enforce it. Most of us simply are overworked, underpaid, and heavily in debt -- and under pressure to endorse such through theatrical smiles and endorsement of bad political figures.

OK, Marx is obsolete whenever the elites of ownership and management decide that people need a stake in the system to feel happy enough to not be a fifth column. When capitalism works solely for supporting the sybaritic indulgence of elites, it is sick and in need of major reforms.

[Bob Butler 54]

We can trivially control retirement age and hours per week. Productivity is way up from the progressive era (New Deal through Great Society). We can measure incomes for the elite, the middle class, and the poor, and roughly change them through taxes.

The progressive approach would be to use the increase in income due to productivity to maintain or somewhat increase what the poor and middle class receive. During the conservative era (Nixon through at least Trump), they instead increased income to the elites, thus increasing the division of wealth. Working class income crashed, and the elites got an ever increasing piece of the pie.

In the progressive era, we were willing to change things like retirement age, hours per week and minimum wage. They seem to have frozen these half way through the progressive era, allowing only minor changes to minimum wage. The average amount of labor done over a lifetime of work should make the income of the poor and middle classes sufficient or somewhat more than sufficient. The increase in productivity is more than sufficient that with the variables we can control things will be more than sufficient.

A large part of the problem is that labor is no longer a rare resource, jacked in price by the laws of supply and demand. It would have to be artificially increase in value by government action. The greedy people have called this socialism.

I don’t mind the elites taking the surplus. It is just that most of us should be allowed a healthy income rate. There would be more than enough to go around if the elites weren’t greedy, controlling the government, and grabbing all the income for themselves. They insist on a system that is not working on a large scale and in the long term. That doesn’t matter if you are looking only at yourself, and only in the short term.

We have to radically adjust the basic numbers we do control. Even the supposedly radical ‘socialist’ Democrats worship too deeply retirement at 65, and the 40 hour work week. To fix the economy, they will have to be open minded about things that have long been frozen.