Hi Elisabeth, In many of your comments, you tend to condemn the (ignorant) past and praise the (intellectual) present. Perhaps you may want to contemplate why past societies did what they did? And they may not be as mean-spirited or stupid as we may think. A good approach is to ask what would be the other options? And what is the success and repercussion of those approaches? With due respects, below are examples of your thinking.
I don’t know how old you were when your dad talked to you about smoking. Is not moral / immoral or good / bad a more benign and better approach to talk to a young asthmatic about smoking? Is not that better than, "You will die from screwed-up lungs from smoking" especailly to an asthamatic? And then he would have to answer, "How come?".:=)) In fact even today the advice given to parents is personal dialogue (speak in the language that you and the kid understand) about smoking and drugs. What is important, whatever approach your dad used, it WORKED. That is better than all high-paid and well researched radio and TV-packaged messages that we have today regarding smoking. And it is not having much of an effect on young girls, where the incidence of smoking is on the rise. Please feel free to forward this post to your dad and compliment him. Prisons in western society for punishment or deterrence may need to be evaluated - yet not by the academics. Economically prisons are expensive. And it makes society pay a second time for the crime of the perpetrator. Incarceration may make the problem worse. Corporal punishment may be a better way to deter crime as seen in Singapore (the case of the American kid who graffiti cars), the Mid-East, and colonial Goa. It also saves society money "to provide the person an opportunity to meditate on his crime." The criminal being free to work will preserve his / her family and social structure. Rather than have society take care of the perpetrator's family while the criminal is in jail. Third time society is victimized for the act of a crime. Now please do not interpret that I am for closing down of all prisons. I am for wahtever works to prevent crime. So far, a court system, prisons, a liberal up-bringing and other innovations of the advanced soiety has not done the trick. Clearly what we in the west are doing now is not working. Singapore does not have a graffiti problem. We in the US send our kids to juvenile detention and psychological counseling. And this does not deter the graffiti. I don’t think the explanation is "They are either the victims of mental dysfunction or cultural conditioning (such as bigotry) that leads to mental dysfunction of sorts." Similarly in the past, it was rare that psychological dysfunctionals in traditional society committed crimes. They were sheltered, cared for and watched by family and society. This, till some intellectuals came along and said that dysfunctionals should be separated from their families, and housed independently with other dysfunctionals as their own society. If you do not believe what I am writing, please come to my city in upstate NY. Here there are remnants of institutions which housed the state's dysfunctionals away from their families. The one place where your theory of "mental dysfunction" works, thus absolving the individual of any wrong-doing, is in the NEW mental illness called IMS (Irritable Male syndrome). :=)) Kind Regards, GL -------------------- Elisabeth Carvalho My father once told me only "immoral girls smoked cigarettes". Growing up, I was a terrible asthmatic. He should have told me the truth. That smoking would kill me. Luckily, I found that out for myself. In the world he grew up in, his version WAS the truth. They are either the victims of mental dysfunction or cultural conditioning (such as bigotry) that leads to mental dysfunction of sorts. The original purpose of prisons is lost on our modern societies. It was to remove the dysfunctional person from society, hence offering society protection from him, and secondly to provide the person an opportunity to meditate on his crime. _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
