>> ^raverman:

This definitely needs eia these are the dumbest parents (and the other people on the beach) in the world.
Heaven forbid that a carcinogenic toxic spill should ruin your day building sand castles.

http://www.quicktsearch.com/is-oil-spill-sludge-carcinogenic/
"Direct skin contact with oil leads to skin irritation. At oil spill sites, exposure may cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, abdominal pain, and other unpleasant effects. Certain hydrocarbon components in crude oil are known to be cancer causing. All these evidences show that oil spill sludge is carcinogenic and extreme caution must be employed in the execution of oil spill cleanup."... Or letting your small children play in it...



http://videosift.com/video/Toxic-Vapors-From-Gulf-Oil-Spill-Reaching-Dangerous-Levels

This definitely needs *eia these are the dumbest parents (and the other people on the beach) in the world.

Heaven forbid that a carcinogenic toxic spill should ruin your day building sand castles.


http://www.quicktsearch.com/is-oil-spill-sludge-carcinogenic/

"Direct skin contact with oil leads to skin irritation. At oil spill sites, exposure may cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, abdominal pain, and other unpleasant effects. Certain hydrocarbon components in crude oil are known to be cancer causing. All these evidences show that oil spill sludge is carcinogenic and extreme caution must be employed in the execution of oil spill cleanup."... Or letting your small children play in it...

>> ^imstellar28:
When a state run power planet causes a toxic spill, the community is the victim. When the state pays to fix it, the community is the one who pays. What you have is a criminal who forces the victim to pay for the crime.
THAT is ironic, can't you see?

I agree, there would be some irony in that. But we don't have state-run power plants, or banks.

Feel free to take up my challenge of proving that government is the primary or sole cause of the current economic crisis. I believe the only fault that can be laid at the feet of government is for relaxing safety restrictions on banks.

The fix then is not to say "government is to blame" and oppose the safety restrictions being restored, it's to restore the safety restrictions, and make sure people remember what happens without them.

You claim your system (the current system) succeeds in "...protecting society from individual actions that damage or risk damage to the whole"
Please explain how putting a criminal in jail after assaulting/murdering/robbing someone "protects society from...damage." The damage has already been done and you are doing nothing to fix it.

I don't claim it works 100% of the time. Traffic laws are there to help make the streets safer so fewer people die in accidents. Safety regulations for nuclear power plants are intended to prevent companies from cutting corners on safety in the attempt to make bigger profits, and protect us from the damage such practices could inflict on us. I don't expect it to ensure there is never, ever any kind of accident, but I do expect it to drive the likelihood of such an event way down.

I do think the threat of punishment has a deterrent effect on crime, but it's mostly about prevention.

As far as trying to "fix" the damages caused by violent crime, I think that's a laudable goal, but I don't think it's practical. I don't have a good source of statistics, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and say most violent crime is being committed by people who're at the poorer end of the economy. I also think the monetary value of the damage caused will naturally be very high, especially relative to the lifetime earning potential of such individuals.

As far as the assumption that people who have committed violent acts will do so again in the future, I think that's a valid assumption. But I don't think that's the primary reason we have long prison sentences for violent offenders.

I'd say part of the point of justice is to inflict a sort of karmic balance on people: if you do bad things to someone, bad things will happen to you. Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, to coin a phrase.

I guess I don't understand what your proposal really even is. Is it to just abolish the idea of criminal justice entirely, and make everything into a civil suit over damages?

What would you do with people who would not, or could not pay?

This quote is why it is relevant.

>> ^NetRunner:
Why then at a government level shouldn't we expect the same to be true, and use the same reasoning that excuses what happens in the corporate-level example for the government-level case?

You don't understand the difference between the government and a third party in the context of a criminal-victim relationship.

When a state run power planet causes a toxic spill, the community is the victim. When the state pays to fix it, the community is the one who pays. What you have is a criminal who forces the victim to pay for the crime.

THAT is ironic, can't you see?

If a privately run power plant caused a toxic spill, the community would sue them in court and they would pay some third party to clean it up - at the expense of the owners not the community. That makes more sense in a lot of ways.

Justice is impossible under an authoritarian/statist regime, why is that so hard to comprehend?

I'm sorry but you are still wrong about your notion of justice. You claim your system (the current system) succeeds in "...protecting society from individual actions that damage or risk damage to the whole"

Please explain how putting a criminal in jail after assaulting/murdering/robbing someone "protects society from...damage." The damage has already been done and you are doing nothing to fix it. Putting a criminal in jail in no way attempts to correct the damage done. Your entire system is based on the idea that all criminals are repeat-offenders, which is completely baseless.

Your system makes an assumption (all criminals will repeat their crimes if left free) whereas mine does not. Mine directly addresses the problem with crime (damage to the victim) and yours does not. Almost all illogical arguments start with an incorrect assumption, and now that I have pointed yours out, why exactly are you still advocating an illogical system?

Again, the logic is wrong on so many levels (both of you) its difficult to address in this format. It appears you need much more clarification on this issue than is available in this forum.

NetRunner, you are talking about reducing/punishing crime but you don't seem to understand (or acknowledge) why crime is a problem.

volumptuous, you don't perceive this "tangent" as relevant, which to me, is symptomatic of a fundamental misunderstanding of authoritarianism.

To respond to your example of the Nuclear power plant, if a US controlled power plant had a toxic spill it would be unwise to ask those responsible to clean it up because it was their ineptitude that caused the problem in the first place. Wise would be finding a more responsible party to clean it up, and run the power plant from that point forward.

This is so painfully obvious in so many areas in life, I do not see the difficulty in drawing the connection here. If you pay a doctor to remove your appendix, and he accidentally removes your liver, would you want to pay that same doctor to fix it? NO. you find a new doctor and never go back.

Asking someone who was too inept to correctly perform a job in the first place, to try to correct what they have screwed up (an even more difficult job) is ironic, unwise, and in the case of an authoritarian regime who presents no other option, very unfortunate.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'TN, coal mines, coal, fly ash, environment, toxic spill' to 'TN, coal mines, coal, fly ash, environment, toxic spill, Harriman, Tennessee' - edited by my15minutes