On Sep 8, 2006, at 2:52 PM, Alberto Vieira Ferreira Monteiro wrote:
Dave Land wrote:
Brazilian's current drug civil war may have a body count of
this magnitude. If there was a way to trade 100,000 and solve
the drug problem, I think I would accept this price.
Easy for you to say. Make sure you're number 1 of 100,000, if
you want your bravado to mean anything.
Do you know how many people die every day because of the
drug war? Even children are murdering their parents in
order to get drugs.
I don't know, but I could look it up if I wanted.
What I do know is that I reject the facile formula "if we just kill
enough of the bad guys, we will be safe". It's never been true, and
killing more bad guys won't make it any more true.
I'm not talking about capitulation, but the recognition that we are
incapable of killing _just_ the bad guys. I do not accept as lightly as
you seem to the killing of innocents along the way.
Maybe if we just killed _everybody_, the world would be perfect.
During the "three strikes and you're out" debate in the USA a few years
back, as long as it seemed that the rules of Baseball were considered a
sound basis for social policy, I came up with a competing "four balls
and you walk" policy. At birth, everyone goes to jail. If, during
automatic incarceration, you manage to do four things that positively
impact society to the level that crimes negatively impact society, you
would be released.
Dave
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