BeIR/webis-touche2020 huggingface dataset:
Lack of Ethnic Diversity

Barbie also portrays a very specific ethnicity- white skin, blond hair and blue eyes. Not only does it perpetuate a type of very European beauty that simply does not reflect the women of the world who are all sorts of different ethnicities. Even the European stereotype Barbie portrays is not realistic ignoring women who might have brown hair and brown eyes. There are differing statistics on what percentage of the world's population are born blond, but most seem to agree that is under 20%. Barbie isn't exactly representative of the female population of the world and sets unattainable 'ideal' for girls. Pass me the blond hair dye someone....
To only disallow ‘grossly disproportionate violence’ is barbaric

Do not be deceived by the legal jargon. The Tories proposal would not disallow the killing of another in aid of ‘self defence’! They are permitting violence of any sort as long as it was not ‘grossly disproportionate’ to what they were afraid of in their plea of self defence. If you punch a burglar once that’s reasonable. Twice reasonable. Three, four times that’s harsh but a jury might let it go. Five, six times, that’s unreasonable and disproportionate. Seven eight punches, would the Tories state that this was grossly disproportionate the burglar who had only entered the house and showed no violence? Or would it take nine ten punches in the head to be grossly disproportionate? This would be seen by many people as a barbaric and savage attack, regardless of who it is on. What if the burglar had a knife, how many times would you be able to stab the burglar before your violence is grossly disproportionate? To exhibit such levels of violence means you cannot control your anger, and you should have no defence under the self defence rules.
The self defence law works well as it is

Paul Mendelle, QC, chairman of the Criminal Bar Association states that the current law works well and juries understand well the concepts that are involved in the current self defence law. Why would we seek to change the law to different concepts that might not be so easily understood? Whenever the word ‘gross’ is used in the law, people get confused. People have different conceptions and ideas about what gross means. This will cloud the law. People will not know what they can and cannot do. How can you draw the line neatly between acting disproportionately, which would be allowed under the Tories plans for reformation, and acting grossly disproportionate? The law on self defence although not enshrined in statute is widely understood and accepted. If the Tories change the law on this matter then prepare to see a hazier concept of self defence.
This is nothing more than political point scoring

Yes, politicians form part of Parliament, and Parliament sets the laws, but we should not allow them to use the law as a point scoring technique with the public. The law works fine as it is. Yes there are a few unsatisfactory results, but this was decided by peers; members of the jury. They decide the cases based on the facts. The media picked up on these cases and has turned the public against the law of self defence but they are only seeing a snippet of what the law actually does in this area. We should not change the law because there has been one high profile case that the public were disgusted by. If the law gives a satisfactory result 99% of the time, then why change it for the odd case? The only reason the Tories want to change the law is to get the public on their side. But they should not meddle with a law that works just to win votes. This is not justice.
There is already enough leeway in the law of self defence.

When looking at the law of self defence, it already gives people who use this defence a lot of leeway. All that is required is that you believed yourself or others to be in danger and you acted proportionately with the violence that you believed was potential. You need not wait to be struck, you can have a pre-emptive strike to prevent the threat occurring in the first place. There are several elements of leeway here. First of all, you need not suffer any physical harm, or see anyone else suffer physical harm to invoke this defence. You can attack someone before they have attacked anyone; this is classed as a pre-emptive strike. The second crutch offered in this defence is that the fear that you are defending yourself from need not be real. As long as you can prove beyond reasonable doubt to a jury that you believed a threat to be present, then you can invoke the defence, even if you were mistaken. So if you thought someone was going to hit you, you could hit them first, even if they were not in fact going to hit you. In court, you are judged not on what the scenario were, but on what you believed them to be. The third is that the defence must be proportionate to the threat perceived. So if you believed they had a knife in their pocket when it was merely a mobile phone, then you are acting proportionately to defend yourself with a knife. With all these factors taken into account, the law on self defence does offer a large protection to the users of it.
The cases of burglars needs to be dealt with

There have been all too many cases whereby burglars have been able to successfully prosecute people who have merely protected themselves and their family from someone is has broken the law and entered their house. Munir Hussain brought this issue to light when he was sued for beating an intruder. Mylene Klass also brought light to this issue when she waved a knife at people staring through her window and was warned that she could be sued. These are instances of ordinary decent people acting against people who have broken the law. They should not be the ones to be prosecuted. The law needs to be changed.
We should be able to protect our homes from intruders

We are able to protect our homes, but just not in a disproportionate manner. If an intruder has a gun, we can shoot the criminal; we do not have to wait for the burglar to shoot us. However, if they do not have a gun, if we then shoot them for them merely being in our homes, then this is disproportionate. Parliament has assigned 14years maximum sentence for burglary. To allow people to act as violently as they like so long as it is not ‘grossly disproportionate’ would be allowing people to take the law into their own hands. If Parliament has not given burglary a life sentence then neither should the public. This is nothing more than capital punishment executed by the public.
We should be able to protect our homes from intruders

The case of Munir Hussain brought the publics attention to the fact that the law of self defence as it stands offers more protection to the wrong doers than it does to the innocent people protecting their land. This is not a happy state of affairs. We should be able to protect our property from intruders. Upon entering a house, a burglar has invaded someone’s privacy. A home is not just the building; it’s the people inside as well. A man’s house is supposed to be a place of support and security. When that is breached, people feel very threatened. They need to get intruders out without worrying that they themselves will be prosecuted. The law should not protect burglars, it should not punish the victim of the crime.
We should not allow state sponsored revenge

The idea of legally allowing people to attack people who enter their property is disturbing. This would be the state sanctioning violence, this should not be allowed. Legally, you cannot consent to being attacked violently. A person who behaves in this way cannot have as their defence that the victim consented. This reasoning is currently behind the self defence law and that is the way it should remain. By entering some one else’s property, you are not consenting to the consequences if they are disproportionate to your own actions. If you have only your fists you should only be hit with a fist, if you have a knife, you can be hit with a knife, if you have a gun, then all is fair in love and war. But to use violence far greater than hat shown to you, then we are allowing people to take revenge on rule breakers, but this should be left to the courts. Currently the balance of self defence and avoiding vigilantes is struck correctly, to change it would be catastrophic.
The public is at risk from people with known dangerous mental health problems. Two people are kille...

The public is at risk from people with known dangerous mental health problems. Two people are killed every month by Care in the Community patients. Jonathan Zito was stabbed to death by Christopher Clunis in 1992; Jason Mitchell beheaded his father and strangled two pensioners in 1994; Stephen Laudat killed his grandfather in 1994, believing him to be the gang leader Ronnie Kray; John Rous stabbed care worker Jonathan Newby to death in 1995; Michael Stone killed Lin and Megan Russell in a field near their home in 1996. All of these killers had diagnosed mental illnesses but could not be detained under UK law.
Public safety has to be the first concern. If these people are detained on the grounds that they ar...

Public safety has to be the first concern. If these people are detained on the grounds that they are a danger to the public, and their condition never changes, of course they should not be released. This does not mean that conditions in the secure institutions in which they are housed should not be as comfortable or supportive as possible, or that regular assessments should not be made to see if there is a possibility that they should be released.
Currently, people with mental health problems who have not committed an offence may only be detained...

DSPD is not a psychiatric diagnosis, but a legal category – it is not surprising, therefore, that it cannot be treated. It is a convenient label, however, for people whom the government fears and would like to have an excuse to detain, and who are unlikely to generate strong public sympathy. Rather than demonising and detaining people, the government should be providing mental health services which work in partnership with the people they are supposed to be helping.
The stigma attached to mental illness is unfortunate, and efforts should be made to combat it – but ...

There is a strong stigma attached to mental illness, with a widespread public perception that people with mental health problems are “dangerous nutters” – despite the fact that 1 in 7 people will experience mental health problems, almost always without exhibiting violent or dangerous behaviour. Detaining people with such problems will help to feed this false perception, and will be detrimental to efforts to improve the public understanding of mental illness.
The Mental Health Bill is being drawn up to be in line with the Human Rights Act – it is being intro...

Pre-emptive indefinite detention is potentially in breach of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act. Article 5 (Right to liberty and security), Article 6 (Right to a fair trial) and Article 8 (Right to respect for private and family life) are all threatened by the proposals. It is best to avoid making legislation which the European Court of Human Rights will rule to be illegal; it is best to avoid making legislation which breaches human rights in any case.
Currently, people with mental health problems who have not committed an offence may only be detained...

Currently, people with mental health problems who have not committed an offence may only be detained for the purposes of treatment, and may avoid treatment if they can argue that they will receive no benefit from it. There is no known effective treatment for Dangerous Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD). This means that people with DSPD fall through a gap between the criminal justice system and the healthcare system – they cannot be treated, so they never get less dangerous, but they cannot be detained, so the public cannot be protected from them.
The stigma attached to mental illness is unfortunate, and efforts should be made to combat it – but ...

The stigma attached to mental illness is unfortunate, and efforts should be made to combat it – but it is unlikely to be helped by continuing to permit a tiny minority of potentially dangerous individuals to continue to roam the streets unsupervised. When people with dangerous mental health problems commit murder, this tends to generate unfavourable headlines of the “violent loony” variety: stop the murders, stop the headlines.
The public is at risk from people with known dangerous mental health problems. Two people are kille...

People with mental illnesses are no more dangerous than other sectors of the population. Most people with mental health problems commit no crimes at all. There are other, far more accurate, predictors of criminal behaviour which nobody would consider to be sufficient to justify detention. The vast majority of crimes are committed by young men; 51% of violent crime and well over two-thirds of homicides are committed by people under the influence of alcohol. Yet, rightly, the law does not permit the pre-emptive detention of young men, or of alcoholics. Why should people who have mental illnesses be treated differently?
The Mental Health Bill is being drawn up to be in line with the Human Rights Act – it is being intro...

The Mental Health Bill is being drawn up to be in line with the Human Rights Act – it is being introduced partly in order to update the Mental Health Act 1983 so that it conforms to current human rights law. It is inevitable that individuals and mental health charities will attempt to bring test cases to the European Court of Human Rights, but the UK government is confident that its proposals will stand up to legal challenge.
It is not unreasonable to detain people who you have good grounds to suspect could be dangerous. We...

It is absolutely unacceptable to detain people indefinitely against their will when they have committed no crime, simply on the suspicion that they may be dangerous in future, when we are not going to do anything to help them with their condition. Assessing the risk that someone may be dangerous is extremely difficult, and has to be balanced against the harms of indefinite detention – for example, loss of employment and family contact, loss of dignity and self-esteem, institutionalisation.
Public safety has to be the first concern. If these people are detained on the grounds that they ar...

The fact that DSPD is not a treatable condition means that people described as having it will, once detained, effectively be abandoned – they will not be able to be offered treatment which might improve their condition and make their release more likely. Unlike other detained psychiatric patients, their detention has no clear goal and it is difficult to see how anyone could argue for their release on the grounds of improvement.
These proposals will not affect the overwhelming majority of people with mental health problems, and...

The knowledge that certain diagnoses may result in indefinite detention is likely to deter people who know they have a mental health problem from seeking diagnosis and treatment – a survey by the mental health charity Mind in 2002 found that more than 1 in 3 members of the public would be deterred from seeking help from their GP for depression if this proposal was passed. This would mean that medical professionals would not be able to help them. It would also mean that if they really are dangerous, the public would receive absolutely no protection from them.
The financial and human cost of assaults and killings by people with DSPD is enormous, and measures ...

The NHS and the prison system are already underfunded and overcrowded. We already have insufficient resources to deal with those psychiatric patients who want to be treated, let alone those who want to be left alone. We should not add people who are being detained indefinitely without their consent, and who are therefore likely to be difficult and resource-intensive to manage, to the list of people our health system has to deal with.
Duty of state versus rights of citizens

Onto our second point. We don’t necessarily believe that the US movement has a duty to absolutely prioritise benefits for its own citizen over others. It certainly isn’t visible in current policy, we see that the US Government currently spends money on charitable causes abroad that could instead be spent at home. Lets ask a rather basic questions, what is the duty of a government? Lets look at absolute rights. We think do think that the American state has a duty to first and foremost to provide basic rights to its citizens. Proposition said that these included ‘equal opportunity and pursuit of happiness’. We’re not so sure about the pursuit of happiness - should the state pay for my holiday home in the Florida keys? But we can agree with equal opportunities. However when the state has a duty to provide something, it should provide it. What it shouldn’t do is try and force that burden upon individual citizens. Tools such as taxation effect everyone proportionately. However adoption is a choice, one that shouldn’t be artificially limited by the State for its own ends, as this is unfair on citizens, who for whatever reason, need to adopt. Why is this? Well we think all citizens have rights, and that one of the basic rights is that to procreate. I can choose to have a child by normal biological reasons, who will almost certainly share several of my states, instead of adopting. Why, if I suddenly decide to adopt, does my choice become limited. Why do I become a tool of the state? We think placing a higher burden on those who can’t naturally conceive does breach several human rights. Instead we think that state can and should provide basic rights such as equal opportunities through tools already mentioned, such as the CORE initiative. This places the burden upon the state itself, rather than upon a few individuals. Like wise these initiatives are open to all, rather than helping a few lucky more children get adopted. We think the very nature of these fundamental rights is that they should be given to all, something which propositions mechanism fails to do, as it obviously can’t guarantee a 100% adoption rate, something that we shall now look at further in our third point.
Islam is an anti-democratic religion because Islamic fundamentalism is incompatible with the plurali...

Islam is an anti-democratic religion because Islamic fundamentalism is incompatible with the pluralism that is necessary for a democratic state. Muslim societies (such as many of the Arab or Asian states, for example Saudi Arabia) are authoritarian and consequently violently repressive. Authoritarianism is the natural consequence of the legal and doctrinal rigidity which makes a political culture of compromise impossible. Shari’a law is viewed as perfect and divine. Consequently, laws are best made through theocratic interpretation rather than democratic debate. This lends to systems structured around institutions such as the Faqih and the role of the clergy. Shari’a does not require separate legislatively defined provisions. \ The notion of equal citizenship is also absent from Islamic thought because insurmountable inequalities between believers and non-believers are built into Islam.\
The basic features of democratic rule are absent from the Muslim world. There is little evidence of...

The basic features of democratic rule are absent from the Muslim world. There is little evidence of repeated elections without restrictions or of the accountability of institutions to the electorate; nor are there guarantees of freedom of expression. Elections rarely take place and even when they do, for example in Iran, the theocratic authorities may have the ability to veto any party or individual on the grounds of incompatibility with doctrine.
Islamic fundamentalist groups are growing in popularity, in part as a reaction to the extension of w...

Islamic fundamentalist groups are growing in popularity, in part as a reaction to the extension of westernisation via globalisation. The terrorist branches of such groups (such as al-Qaeda) and the much talked of jihad (holy war) are absolutely antithetical to democratic values. Islamic terrorism is different from that of terrorists who fight for nationalist causes: Islamic terrorism is motivated by religious zeal rather than a will for political change and as such cannot be seen as a product of a failing political system.
The Muslim world cannot be democratic until it reforms its position on women. A central Qur’anic me...

The Muslim world cannot be democratic until it reforms its position on women. A central Qur’anic metaphor describes women as complementary to men, but not equal. As such, polygyny is allowed, women are denied inheritance rights and by some interpretations of Shari’a, their testimony in Court is worth half that of men. Some governments (for example that in Saudi Arabia) insist upon the compulsory wearing of the full face veil (niqab) or the headscarf (hijab).
Islam is an anti-democratic religion because Islamic fundamentalism is incompatible with the plurali...

Islam is inherently democratic. Qua’ranic notions such as shura (consultation) and ijma’ (consensus) are indicative of an Islamic version of democracy and the importance of democratic values in the religious teachings of the faith. Some Islamic countries seem capable of reconciling the religion and democracy. For example, Turkey firmly separates the religion of the population from the character of the state. Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country yet has a secular democratic government prescribed by the Constitution. Concessions to democracy are being made in even the most pious nations: the Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocracy which is making significant manoeuvres in the direction of democratic rule (by holding regular elections) and Indonesia (which has the world’s largest Muslim population) has been constitutionally guaranteed the right to elect the president and vice-president since 2002.
The basic features of democratic rule are absent from the Muslim world. There is little evidence of...

Democratic reform is taking place throughout the Muslim world: regular elections have taken place in Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malasyia and Indonesia as well as Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and to the National Assembly in Kuwait. Even Saudi Arabia is beginning to consider limited democratic reforms, and at a popular level, huge demonstrations in Iraq have called for immediate direct elections. Democratic elections are an indication of the compatibility of representation and doctrine and bode well for more extensive democratisation.
Islamic states lack civil society where democratic debate and pressure can be fostered. This is par...

Civil Society is made up of a mixture of professional and student associations and indigenously Islamic organisations. The Iranian Revolution in 1979 is of itself indicative of the power of civil society and the weakness of the state government. The clergy, the traditional bourgeoisie of the bazaars and the urban middle class were able to force change. In Kuwait, discussion groups called diwaniyyans are emerging creating a political space between the state and the individual. Even in Iraq, co-operatives listed nearly 200,000 members. These co-operatives were instrumental in organising access to food and basic medical care in the Iraq war in the early 1990s. In the Sudan, professional syndicates overthrew the government in 1964 and 1985. On a broad reading, civil society can include religious associations, which can represent a consultative and open exchange of views.
Islamic fundamentalist groups are growing in popularity, in part as a reaction to the extension of w...

The Islamic world is not alone in having members who take up arms for their cause: the IRA in Ireland fought for Catholics and the reunion of the North and South and Zionist groups in Israel fight against Palestinian Muslims. Suicide bombings were for years associated with the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka rather than with Islamic groups. Violence is incompatible with democratic values, but it cannot be taken to be an indicator of the character of the faith as a whole.