Britons named world's biggest emitters

[DanaC]

I think the cultural arguement is a "bait and switch" tactic to remove the arguement from a genuine base. If you can't discuss it without assuming that I don't hold a world-view or that it was entirely written within American guidelines then I will have to postpone the discussion until first a different understanding is reached.

That's not actually what I said Cicero. Nor was it a bait and switch tactic, it was a genuine observation.

The problem is not that I believe you to operate within a solely American mindset. The difficulty I have is that both you and I are operating from a different cultural understanding and conception of the world and that affects many of our base assumptions, cultural references and linguistic concepts.

If one of us was speaking in English and the other in French, we would find some concepts simply don't translate exactly between the languages. We are linked by language, but there are differences in emphasis and understanding even of that language.

You say you think harm is a constant. I say the very concept of harm is cultural. For the most part your culture and mine, has a broadly similar conception of harm, but it is not absolutely the same. The principles on which our societies are based are different. That doesn't mean we don't have, again, broad similarities, but there are certain basic concepts which your culture values more highly than they are in ours and vice versa.

When will enough be enough? Again, I ask you, enough of what? I do not percieve the problems you have raised, as problematic. There is much in my country that does concern me, and much of it is about loss of civil liberties and a corresponding rise in governmental rights over individuals. I do not see that publically demanded CCTV, non-mandatory drug tests as a condition of entry to a pub, or tracking and intelligence gathering on suspected criminals, fall into that area of concern.

ID cards, that bothers me. National DNA database where everybody is listed, that bothers me. Keeping a camera trained on a town centre or estate where gangs of youths have made it a no go zone, or shops are regularly targetted by arsonists....that's protection.