Your Questions About Morality And Law Uk

Pip answers:

The settlements are a violation of intl law. None of the parts of west bank are legally entitled to israel under int law, they WANT it but they are not entitled to it. The US has never been involved in a ‘peace process’, the US and israel are involved in an appropriation process. Which is illegal under int law, everyone knows int law only applies to certain countries in certain parts of the world. Palestinian people are fu**ed. Obama is no different he’s just another politician him and clinton wouldn’t be that different. Politicians have no morality the only commitment they have is to power.

Http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine

Pip answers:

Cowboys became ‘idolized’ the moment Hollywood ‘invented’ them.
Seriously.
What you know about cowboys are a total invention of the Hollywood movie makers.
And they became hugely popular LONG before Clint Eastwood – Clint grew up watching cowboy westerns.
Cowboy Westerns were the American version of the Arthurian Romances about knights and chivalry or the images of the Ronin warriors in Japanese culture.
The Cowboy Western is a morality tale — early super heroes, the fight between good and evil.
Dime Western novels were the comic books of the turn of the century — full of action.
There is absolutely no difference whatsoever between our “Dark Knight” — Batman and Robin and the Cisco Kid and his sidekick Pancho.

Once upon a time 1 in every 3 films were Westerns.

The first Western film was the 1903 film The Great Train Robbery,a silent film —- Western films were enormously popular in the silent film era.

With the arrival of sound in 1927-28 the major Hollywood studios abandoned Westerns, leaving the genre to smaller studios, who churned out countless thousands of low-budget Western features and serials in the 1930s and made millions doing so.
Then in 1939 a major studio, United Artists, made a movie called “Stage Coach” and made John Wayne an American icon.

Television became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s, TV Westerns quickly became the audience favorite.
A number of long-running TV Westerns became classics in their own right.
Notable TV Westerns include Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Have Gun – Will Travel, Maverick, Rawhide, The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Wagon Train.

Gunsmoke, beginning as a radio show in 1952, was still the number one TV show when I was a kid.
The television version ran for 20 seasons from 1955 to 1975, and was the United States’ longest-running prime time, live-action drama with 635 episodes.
In 2010, Law & Order tied this record of 20 seasons but only 456 episodes —- so, Gunsmoke is STILL the number 1 American tv show ever.

Tom Mix, Whip Wilson, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Bronco Billy, Roudy Yates (a very young Clint Eastwood), Gene Autry, Lash La Rue, the Durango Kid.
These cowboys were once as popular and well known as Batman and Spiderman are today.

Oh, we can’t forget Zorro (1919 to present day) and the Cisco Kid (1914 – 1950 & a movie in 1994)!
Those dashing heroic Mexican caballeros!

African American Herbert Jeffreys, as Bob Blake with his horse Stardust, appeared in a number of movies made for African American audiences in the days of segregated movie theaters.
A famous jazz singer and actor who recorded with Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Jeffries obtained financing for the first black western film, he sang and performed his own stunts as cowboy “Bob Blake”.
Jeffries became known as the “Bronze Buckaroo” by his fans. In a time of American racial segregation, such “race movies” played mostly in theaters catering to African American audiences.
The films, available on video, include Harlem on the Prairie, The Bronze Buckaroo, Harlem Rides the Range and Two-Gun Man from Harlem.
Another first — In 1968, Jeffries appeared in the long-running western TV series The Virginian playing a gunslinger who intimidated the town.
In 2004, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City,

Bill Pickett, a world famous African American rodeo performer, appeared in dozens of early western films for the same audience.
Born to a former slave in 1970 — Pickett was the real-deal — called the “Greatest Cowboy” of his day, in 1905 he joined the 101 Ranch Wild West Show that featured the likes of Buffalo Bill, Cowboy Bill Watts, Will Rogers, Tom Mix, as they traveled across the country and in Canada, South America, and even the UK.
Because of his race, Pickett was forced to say that he was a Comanche Indian in order to perform in rodeo shows.

I grew up as a kid watching The Virginian, The High Chaparral, The Wild Wild West, McCloud, Bonanza and Gunsmoke and Kung Fu (everyone forgets Kung Fun was a Western)

During the 1960s and 1970s, a revival of the Western emerged in Italy with the “Spaghetti Westerns” or “Italo-Westerns” — The most famous of them is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
But virtually every society in the world had their OWN Westerns, believe it or not.
Even Russia had them.
Eastern-European-produced Westerns were popular in Communist Eastern European countries, and were a particular favorite of Joseph Stalin.
“Red Western” or “Ostern” films usually portrayed the American Indians sympathetically, portrayed righteous, kind hearted and charming — as opposed to the ‘bad-guy’ white American cowboys.

Pip answers:

Here’s an answer from an Irish person in Ireland: Ireland is much more socially liberal than the US. We don’t have any strong right wing parties – our most right wing party, Fine Gael, which is in power, I suspect Americans would think was left wing. While most people in Ireland are nominally Roman Catholic, there is not a strongly moralizing element to this. John McGahern, a wonderful Irish writer said of the characters in his novel “The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer”.
Sexual Morality: There is civil partnership for homosexual couples in Ireland which confers the same rights as marriage. There are laws against sexual discrimination
Family: The Irish Constitution vows to protect the family as the unit of the state
Abortion: Tricky one this. It is illegal to perform abortions in Ireland (it’s slightly more complicated, but this is the gist) but it is not illegal to provide information about abortions in the UK or Europe, nor is it illegal to travel for abortion. The effect is that many Irish women travel abroad every year for abortion.
Ireland is joint first in terms of political freedom in the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World so really not morally conservative at all.

Why don’t you come over on holiday and find out? We’d be glad to see you!

Pip answers:

Although many US and australian laws may have originated in the UK, or at least had a western morality, there is no precendence for Common Law in the UK to have any influence elsewhere.

In the UK Common Law originates to Norman times (11th century) or possibly earlier. The UK has always been a nation founded on a Rule of Law since Roman Times, and even their laws were heaviliy influenced by Greek Law.

USA, Canada and Australi havene;t kept any old british laws intact, they may have indentica;ly copied some of them but they would have been approved by their won judicial system. Even the UK has now replaced most of it’s old common laws as new ones supercede them. Murder is perhaps the oldest and most widely used but even that is influenced by rulings made more recetnly in murder cases, which then becomes the precedent.

Pip answers:

It’s the old “all morals come from a god, and specifically my god”.

If you found out tomorrow that no gods have ever existed, would you start killing, raping and stealing? Is your belief the only thing preventing you from doing that right now?

If so, are you really a moral person?

If theists believe they are rewarded for doing good, it’s only atheists who only do good because they are good, not because they believe they will be rewarded.

And let me point out that your god is not somebody I’d consider moral – sending bears to kill kids for making fun of a bald guy, murdering babies, drowning kittens…

And why, do you think, are atheists underrepresented in prison population?

Here’s a hint:

hurting others = bad
helping others = good
no gods needed.

And by that standard, the Christian god is one of the most immoral villains in literature.

Of course, this argument makes even less sense since many christians believe they are not required to actually *DO* anything, since they are “no longer under the law”.

For a more detailed explanation: http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/morals.html

P.S. The bible doesn’t speak against slavery – how did you determine it’s wrong? What about genocide? Is it always wrong, or were the god-ordered genocides in the bible justified?