Porn

[Aractus]

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The USA is very backwards in a lot of ways. An awful lot. All the media attention given to the Bali drug smugglers here would not fly there since the USA is one of the only first-world countries not to have abolished the death penalty (China of course counts in its own right as well - I don't want to for a second say they don't, but they aren't a democracy). In the 1970's, the overwhelming majority of Christians and the majority of the general population in the UK supported the death penalty - even as it was being dismantled politically. In fact you could even describe it as political-suicide at the time. Yet now they emphatically say they don't believe in it; it's not until it's actually gone that people realise that they were better off without it.

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At first this paragraph seemed a little out of place considering the main thread topic until I considered your penchant for America bashing. Curious comparison to second world China.

Well to be fair, the USA is the country producing the problem pornography, or at least most of it. They're the modern-day Denmark when it comes to porn. The UK, Australia, even Russia do not produce violent porn - and to my knowledge they can't in any of those places.

Are you aware that 18 of our 50 states prohibit the death penalty? Several other states have de facto prohibitions. Five states are responsible for 65.2% of the executions since 1976; 11 - 86%. This should provide some context for your generalization. The only crime for which the death penalty is allowed is aggravated murder, so even us backwards yanks would find executing someone for drug smuggling extremely odd.

Yes I am but that doesn't change the fact that it's used.

I have two problems with the death penalty; neither has anything to do with some feel good sense of moral superiority suggesting that it is inherently wrong to execute somebody for this crime. The fact that innocent people have been exonerated from death row and the extreme racial bias in death sentencing are the reasons I think the practice should be outlawed. Consider the recent case where a man in NC gunned down three young adults. I think it would be just to execute this man, but still would not advocate for the death penalty in order to render the system as just as possible.

Look as I've mentioned 100 times, the very fact that the USA uses the phrase "racial" or "race relations" shows that they are still stuck in bronze-age mythology. The fact that you've used it shows that you don't get it either. There is not a "racial bias", there's an "ethnic bias" or a "religious bias" or a "cultural bias" or a combination of the three; and then there's also gender bias.