trandate j

Now you are off on the same tiresome rant. Different day, same old sh*t. If I may quote, this obtuseness shows how and why you can be so totally wrong on topic after topic. We know your game, we skip over your long-winded, condescending polemics because they never say anything new. Mark ‘n’ Matt tolerate you because you attack liberals with mechanical predictability and without such cover they would stand here naked.

Crime rates are rapidly rising in Europe

Ahh, more fact-free made-up BULLSHIT courtesy of Mark Noonan. Mark, where do you get your information that “crime rates in Europe are rapidly rising”?

It is nororiously difficult to ascertain accurate comparisons of crime rates between countries due to problems with definition (is a stolen car counted if it is merely reported as stolen? if it is the subject of a stolen car court case? if it it is merely reported as missing, etc. etc.).

Every country maintains statistics different ways and there is basically no good way to compare data. However one dataset is pretty unambiguous - the homicide rate. Everyone knows what homicide looks like and since it is such a serious crime homicide levels are kept VERY accurately.

So, what does the homicide rate tell us when we compare America to Europe? Here’s what it tells us - European countries have, on average, less than one third the homicides America has per capita.

Source? (you have heard of something called sources, haven’t you Mark? Cause frankly statements from you without sources don’t have much crecibility):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate

Here are some sample murder rates per 100,000 population:

USA: 5.9 (this may be a reporting anomaly, for most years since 2000 the rate has been above 7)

Finland: 2.75
Sweden: 2.39
United Kingdom: 2.03
Portugal: 1.79
Poland: 1.64
France: 1.64
Belgium: 1.5
Spain: 1.25
Italy: 1.23
Germany: 0.98
Ireland: 0.91
Denmark: 0.79
Norway: 0.78
Greece: 0.76

Also, in terms of incarceration the US has an imprisonmnet level 6 - 10 times that of all major European countries. Hardly the sign that Europe has a high crime rate:

• The United States has the highest rate of incarceration IN THE WORLD at 726 prisoners per 100,000 people.
• The next highest levels are Russia, Belarus, and Bermuda, all with a rate of 500 - 600 prisoners per 100,000 people. (nice company to be in, huh?)
• Western European nations have much lower rates, with England and Wales at 142, Germany at 96, and France at 91 per 100,000 people. Many other large countries have rates which are even lower.

You might also find the following of (depressing) interest:

A record 7 million people — one in every 32 U.S. adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, a Justice Department report released yesterday shows.

Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to the report.

SOURCE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/30/AR2006113000912.html

But of course Europe is a Godless bastion of secular liberalism so it must be worse than the USA in your little world, right Mark? Facts be damned.

Joey, please try to keep up. You whine: “Please point to any of my comments where I complained “that the President, and Congress, have abandoned too many of the basic tenets of Conservatism.”

But you silly silly boy, I never said that at all. What I SAID was that YOU (Joe) have missed “…the years of complaining that the President, and Congress, have abandoned too many of the basic tenets of Conservatism.” The years of complaining BY CONSERVATIVES, Joey, about the abandoment of too many of the basic tenets, etc. etc.

But this obtuseness shows how and why you can be so totally wrong on topic after topic. You are kind of like the Lefty Emily Litella, except you never have the intellectual courage to say “Never mind….”

BTW, FYT, it is true that some people—not many, but some—did say they would never vote for McCain, because he does NOT embody as much true conservatism as we would like to see in a candidate.

Of these, most have realized that the position of “I’m so mad at you I am going to poke myself in the eye” is not a very productive one, and have also realized that McCain could be a whole lot less conservative than he is and still be vastly better than the two socialists running on the Dem side.

You may not realize how far Left a candidate has to be to make Hillary look like a better option—and both of them make McCain look like a knight in shining armor.

Which is undoubtedly why you all are working on slight revisions to your Politics of Personal Destruction manual, going after McCain on the silliest and flimsiest of allegations rather than on issues.

And SteaM is reverting back to his VapoR mentality, trying to act cute but really just illustrating the paucity of his positions—which seem to be snotty, snottier, and plageristic snotty.

In red states in 2001, there were 572,000 divorces, while blue states recorded 340,000.

In the same year, 11 red states had higher rates of divorce than any blue state.

In each of the red states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico, 46.3 percent of all births were to unwed mothers, while in blue states, on average, that percentage was 31.7.

The per capita rate of violent crime in red states is 421 per 100,000, while in blue states, it’s 372 per 100,000. The per capita rate of murder and non-negligent manslaughter in Republican Louisiana is 13 per 100,000, while in Democratic Maine, it’s 1.2 per 100,000.

As of 2000, 37 states had statewide policies or procedures to address domestic violence. All 13 that did not were red states.

The 5 states with the highest rates of alcohol dependence or abuse are red states. The 5 states with the highest rates of alcohol dependence or abuse among 12- to 17-year-olds are also red states. The per capita rate of methamphetamine-lab seizures in liberal California is 2 per 100,000, while in conservative Arkansas, it’s 20 per 100,000.

The number of meth-lab seizures in red states increased by 38 percent from 1999 to 2003, while in the same time frame, it decreased by 38 percent in blue states.

Residents of the all-red Mountain States are the most likely to have had 3 or more sexual partners in the previous year, while residents of all-blue New England are the least likely to have had more than 1 partner in that span.

Residents of the liberal mid-Atlantic region of New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were the most likely to be sexually abstinent, while residents of the conservative West-South Central region (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana) were the least likely.

Five red states reported more than 400 cases of chlamydia per 100,000 residents in 2002 … No blue state had a rate that high.

The per capita rate of gonorrhea in red states was 140 per 100,000, while in blue states, it was 99 per 100,000.

http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=8971

I confronted what you said; others have pointed out that negative social indicators are lower in Europe than in the U.S. You’re too clueless and cowardly to address these things, though…largely because the facts aren’t on your side, so all you have to go on is blind obedience to your uninformed opinion. That is your problem, not mine. I suggest you stop being such an ignorant little chicken and deal with it…but you won’t.

You make much of your vaunted “Judeo-Christian” values. This may be difficult for you to grasp, but for authentic Christians, Jesus Christ is transcendent. It is an insult, if not heresy, to insist on enmeshing Christianity with the very traditions Christ spent his entire ministry battling. The scribes and Pharisees, masters of Judaism, were not his allies but his adversaries.

Perhaps this is why you don’t get the separation of church and state, either. You insist on mixing the sacred with the profane, and in the end nothing is holy. Only hollow tradition remains. Like the scribes and Pharisees, what you worship is vanity, power and tradition. As Jeremiah demonstrates in post 43 it is more convenient to say nice things about Christ but dispense with what he actually taught.

It seems one who fancies himself such a theologian might ponder the deeper reason Christianity is so widely discredited in America today. How facile to blame it on liberals and your political adversaries. I would suggest you look in the mirror sometime and meet your own worst enemy.

An increasingly commonly thing in European cities is the no-go zone. These are places where the police, medical rescue crews, and other government agents will not venture into. The areas are viewed as just too violent and/or risky to enforce rules. Following the rules of ungoverned spaces, anarchy does not reign for long. A group will enforce their own rule set and the no-go zone will become a microstate.

Guess that is the beginning of the end because they (Europeans) don’t have the moral fortitude once they abandoned their Judeo-Christian beliefs for the more secular.