Re Israel: I have a hard time to take seriously excuses like "we have harder demands on democracies" together with no criticism of state supported Nazi race ha

Re Israel: I have a hard time to take seriously excuses like "we have harder demands on democracies" together with no criticism of state supported Nazi race hatred. It is just ridiculously large double standards. A couple of more examples: Syria was one of the world's worst police states long before the present turmoil -- many times worse treatment of its citizens than Israel, even with a Palestinian description. Syria is/was a big part of the Israeli conflict, so it is discussed when the conflict is discussed. The criticism of Syria from the left has been almost nil. The Swedish left wing politics have existed for a bit more than a century. During that time, they have never supported a democracy against a dictator. As I wrote, there are many more examples of this insanity. The real reason for this lefty weirdness, is that foreign politics are treated as arguments for internal politics. The problem is: with incoherent arguments, conspiracy theories and disgusting double standards -- why would anyone sane take the left seriously? I seriously don't believe you consider so gigantic double standards as rational -- the modern difference is that they aren't for nobles/kings now... Why do you try to defend double standards of a factor of (at least!) thousands? Do you have no intellectual integrity? Do you identify with the position, like football fans? Re prison: We have too different societal systems and prison implementations. To a Swede, the US 19th century prison system looks both counterproductive and like a crime against humanity. Sure -- you can make a good argument that a country with 30 times the Swedish population is impossible to control and manage; the problem size increases with the square of the population, or something. Also, Sweden didn't have "real" criminal subcultures and organised crime syndicates until quite recently. And still don't have desperate people, except for drug users. An influencing factor might be that the police isn't functioning well (compared to most of the rest of Europe) and punishments are short, so crime-as-profession might be a better deal in Sweden. But in general, if you make extraordinary claims, you need extraordinary proofs. To argue against mathematics (in this case, game theory and evolutionary biology) is an extraordinary claim. Sure, humans have culture -- which is updated when the environment is updated. There is an obvious lag of at least decades, before the cultures change. And it is easy to make proof of concept examples of punishments influencing crime (e.g. see previous re prison/death for jaywalking).