Thugs slaughter animals and vandalise garden centre

Neutrality is hard to achieve. Language is expressive, in it's very nature. It's very difficult to ask a totally neutral question.

This does not mean that you should pull down your trousers and urinate on the concept, before shoving it off a cliff.

Purposefully emotive language serves to stir up emotion. Do not run to the semantical fortress of the dictionary, for you cannot deny that words have implications. "Paedophile" is merely the term for someone who is sexually attracted to children, yet I would surely be looked down up on if I called you a paedophile without evidence.

This is the issue the Daily Mail exploits here. A simple look at the article: "yobs", "sickening" *

...beheaded too?

What should they use then? Cranially Deprive?

edited 1st Jun '11 7:07:36 PM by Signed

If I were an editor, and the thread title were presented to me as a headline, I would not run it until the headline were changed.

Even if there is no good reason, you cannot demonize the other side through obvious word choice.

Journalists can draw infrences, but not make implications.

I don't support the death penalty at all, and even if I did I would think it was overkill for this case.

But seriously. You have a bunch of teenagers who think the pain and death of living things is absolutely hilarious. That is not going to go anywhere good! Animal cruelty definitely exposes something deeply worrying in a persons mind that might later manifest as abusing humans.

You think someone who thinks cutting up a puppy with secateurs while it screams (another animal cruelty case I read about) is fun is going to have many qualms about torturing humans?

At the very least these kids need to be hauled in for evaluation.

^^^^ Killed? Sorry, that's really obvious semantic banter. There is no need for that detail in the caption.

edited 1st Jun '11 7:19:49 PM by AllanAssiduity

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Ok, y'all have expressed your outrage at what happened, made the internet requisite calls for the perps to be killed, maimed, mutilated, otherwise caused pain, talked about how awful the Daily Mail is, and this thread is going nowhere fast.

Locking, now.

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