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Bill: National Holiday Adaptation Act
Details
Submitted by[?]: Red Eye Party
Status[?]: passed
Votes: This bill is a resolution. It requires more yes votes than no votes. This bill will not pass any sooner than the deadline.
Voting deadline: July 2160
Description[?]:
| Hereby after the potential passing of this bill Christmas will become a national secular holiday of feasting and gift giving on the day of the 25th of every december onwards. This holiday celebrates customs of ancient civilizations who worshiped sun gods and feasted on this week,through history other customs have been added and the date regulated to the 25th.(according to wiki) Proposal I: Induction of Chrismas,aka Xmas,as a National Holiday. Proposal II: A week long peace treaty should all parties in both the war/conflict agree. December 21-28th Proposal III:Crimes of Violence have their penalty doubled. |
Proposals
Debate
These messages have been posted to debate on this bill:
| Date | 06:56:58, December 23, 2005 CET | From |  Liberty Party | To | Debating the National Holiday Adaptation Act |
| Message | We support the first proposal as is. We support the second proposal, although we think 'treaty' is probably a bit unrealistic for a brief cessation of fighting, I would suggest that just proposing an armistice would be more likely to succeed. We can only support the third proposal if it is clarified to extend only to soldiers acting illegally against an armistice according to proposal 2 (i.e., a specific punitive punishment for fighting when officially recognising a truce). We think that other violent crime should be penalised accordingly, and we find it hard to accept that a punishment that is right on December 1 is wrong on December 25, or vice versa. Punishment should always be proportionate to the offence, and a crime occuring on a holiday is not twice as bad as a crime not on a holiday. Indeed, given that people often get a bit tipsy over the holiday season, alcohol-fuelled violent crime actually increases, with no particular malice on the part of the pugilists. Sorry if this makes us seem like killjoys ;-) |
| Date | 20:50:00, December 23, 2005 CET | From | Red Eye Party | To | Debating the National Holiday Adaptation Act |
| Message | by the second prosal i meant an armstice,it is only for the week. And as far as crimes go,people should need not fear dirty streets on holidays especially,it is with the pricipal of the holiday, Its is only for the brutalist of crimes,no ordinary citizen should fear them/ The death of an person is usually tragic,but around the holidays especially soo. |
| Date | 23:26:23, December 23, 2005 CET | From | Liberty Party | To | Debating the National Holiday Adaptation Act |
| Message | "with the pricipal of the holiday, Its is only for the brutalist of crimes,no ordinary citizen should fear them" So you are saying that people should be safe for a week, but go back to fearing crime for the rest of the year? If you think that doubling the punishment would actually reduce violent crime, why on earth are you not suggesting that we double the punishment for the whole year? And why just double it? Surely if doubling the punishment will reduce crime by some factor, quadrupling it will reduce it by even more? In fact, why not just go straight for the death penalty - since the punishment would effectively be infinite and increasing the punishment reduces the occurrence, we could wipe out violent crime by introducing the death penalty, just like in the US. Also, why just violent crime? If increasing the punishment will reduce violent crime, wouldn't increasing the punishment increase non-violent crime? If we doubled the penalties for non-violent crime too, we could enjoy an entirely crime-free holiday! |
| Date | 01:20:58, December 24, 2005 CET | From | Red Eye Party | To | Debating the National Holiday Adaptation Act |
| Message | What i propose for the crime,is taken from Old World Civilizations practices for this holiday. While i know that was then and this now,their murder rates lowered. Im sorry if this offends you enough to suggest that i believe we should kill everyone. Of coarse this will not eliminate crime, but hopefully deter it. Murder rates statistically rise on holidays. But of coarse according to your logic that translates into Introducing a holiday will result Genocide. |
| Date | 05:17:32, December 24, 2005 CET | From | Liberty Party | To | Debating the National Holiday Adaptation Act |
| Message | "What i propose for the crime,is taken from Old World Civilizations practices for this holiday. While i know that was then and this now,their murder rates lowered." Where are your crime statistics for this? "Im sorry if this offends you enough to suggest that i believe we should kill everyone." I didn't suggest that you believe we should kill everyone, but I was trying to illustrate that either increased punishments will deter crime, in which case surely we should increase the punishment all year round; or it won't deter crime, in which case it is simply making cheap politics at the expense of rational sentencing laws. "Of coarse this will not eliminate crime, but hopefully deter it." Well this is where we differ on an issue of political philosophy. Our party does not believe that just hoping something will happen is a sound basis for law, especially when the law is criminal law where the consequences for the convicted are most serious. Our position is that if you can demonstrate that stiffer sentencing will act as a significant deterrant to crime, we will support that stiffer punishment, but only if you make that punishment applicable all year round. However, we consider it highly unlikely that this would be the case. You, after all, are talking about *murder* rates. Now, I'm not sure what the penalty for murder is where you live, but in my experience it is usually life imprisonment (and presumably the death penalty in the US). How are you going to double that punishment? How is a double life sentence going to deter someone who is not deterred by the prospect of one life sentence? We really do not think that murder is one of those crimes where the potential murderer makes a cost benefit analysis before deciding whether to commit the murder, they simply don't think to themselves 'well, I'll kill them if it costs one life sentence, but not if costs two'. Moreover, if criminals *did* perform a purely rational cost-benefit analysis before committing a crime, it would probably lead to crime *increasing* in some areas - statistically crack dealers often have a lower life expectancy on the street than they do *on death row*. They live longer, even after they have been caught and sentenced to a DEATH SENTENCE than they do on the street. And I would bet real money that crack dealers have a far better gut feel for the danger of their profession than either of us. "Murder rates statistically rise on holidays." What do you suppose this means? Is it busy season for professional assassins? Surely it is far more likely that the increased deaths are due to increased alcohol consumption over the holidays. This implies that the killers are not cold-blooded calculating killers (who might potentially be deterred if you change the sentencing) but rather people who make a bad decision in the heat of the moment when they are not thinking straight. Just how carefully do you suppose these people are considering the ultimate sentence in the moments before they commit the crime? "But of coarse ACCORDING TO YOUR LOGIC [emphasis added] that translates into Introducing a holiday will result Genocide." No it doesn't. If you reread my posts I never suggested that anything like adding a holiday would lead to genocide. I suggested that violent crime might increase, to which you seem to have agreed ("Murder rates statistically rise on holidays"). All the other statements I made were to do with the implications of sentencing policy, not holiday policy. |
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Voting
| Vote | Seats | ||||||
| yes |
Total Seats: 370 | ||||||
| no |
Total Seats: 84 | ||||||
| abstain |
Total Seats: 46 |
| Random fact: Large scale RP planning (such as wars, regional/continental conflicts, economic collapse, etc.) should be planned (as best as it can be) and should have consent of a majority of players involved. |
| Random quote: "It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope." - Niccolo Machiavelli |