TechNoFear said:
Just to stop you looking so ignorant/uneducated in the future....
No murderers, rapists or other serious criminals were transported to the US or Australia, they were executed in the UK.
Even minor crimes like stealing more than 5 shillings, killing an animal or cutting down a tree (and over 220 others) were punished with death (NOT transportation).
Over 60,000 'convicts' were transported to the US and ~160,000 to Australia (after the US revolution stopped the UK transporting convicts to the US).
At the time transportations stopped (1863) Australia had 0 slaves and the US had ~4 million.
BTW "aborigines" is now considered racist terminology, ?Indigenous Australian? is the PC term.
Callate said:
If there's violence in your culture, movies aren't the first place I'd look for solutions.
Do you mean we should have lax gun laws like the US so our murder rate (per capita) multiplies by a factor of 40 to reach that of the US?
Or should also invade other countries for their oil, in the name of democracy of course?
Wow. I'm at awe of your ability to read and directly quote short stretches of Wikipedia. *ahem* Perhaps if you could be bothered to read further than the stretches that support your view before flying off half-cocked:
The Bloody Code died out in the 1800s because judges and juries thought that punishments were too harsh. Since the law makers still wanted punishments to scare potential criminals, but needed them to become less harsh, transportation became the more common punishment.
...
Transportation was a common punishment handed out for both major and petty crimes in Britain from the seventeenth century until well into the nineteenth century.
-Source wikipedia.org, emphasis mine.
Further:
Most of the convicts were thieves who had been convicted in the great cities of England.
-http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/convicts/
A site based off information from the national archives of Ireland entitled "Criminals Transported To Australia 1836 to 1853" includes such notables as:
Brown, Robert- crime "Fatally wounding John Connor"
Crosbie, William- crime "Attempt at robbery and murder"
Dyer, James- crime "Manslaughter"
Fanarogher, Michael- crime "Manslaughter"
Feehely, William- crime "rape"
Glynn, John- crime "murder"
That's from http://www.igp-web.com/roscommon/Criminal/transported.htm, which I'm sure you'll find very interesting in your sincere quest to prevent people from looking ignorant/uneducated.
So:
most of you are the descendants of murderers, rapists, thieves, and other ne'er do wells
...Sardonic, somewhat exaggerated, but basically correct;
No murderers, rapists or other serious criminals were transported to the US or Australia, they were executed in the UK
...Flat-out, provably wrong.
...What else do we have here...
Aborigines: Fair point, one I wasn't aware of, but notably I was referring to ancestry, and I'm certain "Indigenous Australian" is a term of recent coinage. Also the term "aboriginal" remains in use in terms like "aboriginal art and artists", as here: http://aboriginalart.com.au/, a site I note is hosted in Australia, apparently by members of said group. Merriam-Webster online describes an aborigine as
1 : an aboriginal inhabitant especially as contrasted with an invading or colonizing people
2 often capitalized : a member of any of the indigenous peoples of Australia
...Which somewhat causes me to wonder if the "racism" of the term isn't of recent origin as well. But then, I'm not a member of said group, so far be it from me to decide what they may feel is or is not racist to them.
As far as the numbers of slaves in the United States in a particular era, gun laws and their effect upon murder rates, and foreign policies, their motivators, their morality, et. al., I believe I'm missing the segment of my post where I made the claim that the United States is or ever was a perfect country, while you're missing... having a point entirely.
On the very off chance that you're actually trying to suggest that movies play a part in the amount of violence in the United States- the existence of which suggestion is largely without evidence, but unlike some things, may actually bear discussion- I would point to the low violent crime rate of neighboring Canada, which partakes of virtually identical media.
Now, there's nothing wrong with being proud of your country. I don't mean to suggest in any way that all, or even many present-day Australians are criminals; the few who I've met were very pleasant, highly educated, and quite non-violent, both by temperament and by creed. But just as in the United States, and elsewhere, going after violent media tends to be an attempt to find an easy political scapegoat, one few people will go to the wall to defend, that costs the taxpayer very little to censor, restrict, or ban. Not the one that actually lessens the occurence of real-life violence.
