From today's Filth-O-Graph
Scottish independence 'would be cataclysmic for the world', ex-Nato head warns
Lord (George) Robertson says 'the forces of darkness would simply love it' if Scotland voted Yes in September 18 referendum
Lord Robertson: 'The loudest cheers for the break-up of Britain would be from our adversaries and from our enemies.' Photo: AP
Asked why the official papers on the Dunblane Massacre had been closed for the next hundred years Lord Arseface retorted angrily that this was a matter of the gravest national security, the fact that he had befriended and supported the nonce mass murderer, Thomas Hamilton, and that if people kept asking him about his involvement with Hamilton he would have them jailed under the Official Secrets Act .
What with the numbskull, Carmichael, with Darling and Brown, Cameron and Osborne and now this poxy arsehole, Robertson, one must think that the UK establishment must, behind closed doors, be gagging, as we say, for the independence of Scotland.
Forces of darkness, forces of darkness????
He must mean his old guvnor, Tony Blair; he's the darkest force in the world presently.
30 comments:
"Asked why the official papers on the Dunblane Massacre had been closed for the next hundred years..."
It is time someone opened them.
The parents of the murdered children have been demanding this for years; if MediaMinster won't listen to them they will listen to no-one; same as with the trollop, Millar, they are all in it together.
Hard to tell which side he is on since his intervention will cause many voters to do the very opposite of what he recommends.
The papers relating to the Profumo business are still secret; obviously protecting someone, Phil the Greek being the obvious candidate. Same sort of smokescreen for this business. I had thought some of the Lockerbie poison might start leaking out after Thatcher checked into the boneyard. Silly me.
Hamilton wasn't killing children, he was destroying evidence, under orders.
How come he topped himself with a different gun, with a different calibre?
Hadn't heard that bit, mr rwg, is there a link?
There was an article in News of The World Dec. 28th 2003 by Marcello Mega that had some bearing on the matter.
I wonder what happened to the N.O.W archives??
Tangentially relevant. I try very not to be too drawn in to conspiracy theory but sometimes I simply have to admit that there may be such a thing.
For example, while one may have a very low opinion of Harriet Harman I would not have described her as someone who knowingly colludes with child sexual exploitation. But she is thick enough not to be able to recognize it if it is wearing fancy clothes.
I think that the following website explains a lot. It identifies (amongst other themes) key academics who promoted PIE with considerable success in terms of getting their ideas adopted in social work and related disciplines. The young Harman may simply have been too sheltered and inclined to defer to anyone she regarded as properly qualified, so she thought that if someone with a PhD was saying it, that made it OK.
The conspiracy is in the sense of a handful of academics using their profession as cover to promote their real interest. As the blogger points out, at least one of the articles reads more as if it designed to get like-minded persons to contract them.
http://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/category/academia/
Mrs Woman,
I fear you atrribute to stupidity that which should more properly been seen as wickedness, in regard to Harman's attitudes to child buggery, amongst other sundry and diverse abominations.
She, and her ilk, have deliberately and purposefully set out, and to a very large extent achieved, their aims of subverting and destroying the morality of the nation. Apparently, people are so devoid of wit and wisdom these days that she has managed to succeed by making the people actually desire their own destruction, by believing such rotten abstractions as 'equality, tolerance and non-discrimination'.
Equality now means treating those whom you disagree with in a fashion similar to a sexual deviant, which is a paradox in itself as, apparently, the only deviancy possible nowadays is what used to be called being normal.
Tolerance now means allowing the simply intolerable to dictate terms, and being utterly intolerant of anybody who dissents from this madness.
Non discrimination means to be wholly and solely prejudiced against men, white people, non-muslims and the able-bodied, along with all that is right, moral, lovely or holy, and especially against those few remaining souls that can see this contradiction.
No Mrs Woman, Harman, the multi-millionaire, titled faux-socialist with her arse-bandit, peedo loving husband and her nation wrecking, feminist, anti-marriage, anti-white, christian hating, child brainwashing bullshit is not naive, she is not acting from the best of intentions. She is a horrid, vile bitch. An utter disgrace, who, in earlier times, better times, who have been lucky to have escaped the hangman's attentions for her treason and treachery.
Not her fault who her uncle was, but he was a shit, obsessed with the 'rights' of child-murderers and pædophiles too. Had a thing for Hindley. You would think, wouldn't you, that having seen what an utter cock he was, she might have thought to avoid such monstrous perversions of logic and law, instead of intentionally following in his footsteps, inflicting her shit on us all, and then telling us we're the deviants for squealing about it?
One could argue that she achieved what she set out to do with PIE, by bringing the age of consent down to 16, soon to be 14, thereby enabling old men to bugger children to their hearts delight, with a pat on the head from Harriet.
I'd have her shot. Really I would.
Vincent.
I actually met Longford, the uncle, and he was - and I am sure that you would have found him to be - a genuinely nice man; he was ridculed for his concern about the effects of porbography and even more reviled for his suggestion that a Christian country should practice Forgiveness, the central tenet, do not forget, mr vincent, of born-on-the-cross Christiani towards all, even unto the child molester and killer.
My contact with him was in connection with a manifest injustice inasmuch as the repellent Leon Brittan, then home secretary, to the cheers of a Tory conference had arbitrarily and extra-legally re-sentenced life sentence prisoners to a term beyond that set by the trial judge and in complete contradiction of policies employed by all participants in the criminal justice system who were concerned with the management of lifers, Brittan was despotic and cruel and acting unlawfully, typical Tory cunt, they don't change. I feel confidenbt that in "my" case and in doizens of others you would have sided with Frank Longford against Leon Brittan. That he was an aristi-socialist is neither here nor there, he was concerned about many of the things at which you rail ib your comment.
As for Harriet Soursister, mrs woman on a raft is always more considered than I in her damnations of the unGodly, more footnoted, sourced and annotated, doesn't mean that she is wrong or that she merits correction.
we could differe endlessly about your passions there expressed; I may be against Harriet, for instance and what we might call the celebrity sisterhood of hypocrites such as Germaine Greer whose impulses have proved so deleterious, doesn't mean I think feminism a dirty word, doesn't make it a less urgent cause, unless, of course, we are happy to think that women, too, should abide, still, in Mugsborough.
I agree that Decency's corrosion has been swifter during the years that my generation has had power than in, say, the nineteenth century when we all agreed to the notion of the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate continues....
But then untramelled Decency wrought also child labour, disease, illiteracy, hunger, early death, high infant mortality, we could go on for hours about the bad old good old days; things are better now than they have ever been and one of the things which is better is that we now know - and for the time being, at least - may know of and discuss the hottors of Soursisterism.
Pornograpohy, age of consent, abortion, heterosexism, I agree with you, these are all potentially catastrophic developments, I agree with you that the PBC, the Arts and Mediaminster have a degree of influence way beyond that due their memberships and employees and that it is wielded, loosely conspiratorially, in the interests of degeneracy. I just sometimes wonder if a more measured riposte, like that of ms woar's, might prove more victorious than do the righteous rants of, say, you and I.
Too kind, Mr Ishmael. I'm not being measured - I'm in shock.
It was because I was looking for the old NoTW story as suggested by Alphonse, that I came across an item in the THEs
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/if-no-rules-have-been-broken-perhaps-the-rulebook-requires-some-attention/165893.article
i.e. a 2001 article by Mega which named names.
On checking the names I came across the website I listed above and selected the 'academia' tag.
That website pulled together the information which Mega may not have had access to in 2001, although he was clearly on the track of it. One post in particular takes apart the career of Donald J West, who until 2012 was the Emeritus Professor of Clinical Criminology at Cambridge University. Now, he will have been approaching retirement age anyway but the website says it put its information to the Chancellor in 2011 and what do you know, the prof is out of it and gone very quiet a few months later. The University appears to be removing references to him where possible, although some traces of him exist.
If (IF) Mega is right, there was/is what amounted to a conspiracy by deeply malignant people to normalize their wickeness and to put themselves in a position to influence the next generation of lawyers, social workers etc.
Vincent happens to think Harman was part of that. It is possible but Vincent has perhaps forgotten that pre-internet the worlds of men and women were much more sharply divided. The young Hattie will not even have had much access to pornography - unless she found Jack's stash - despite her uncle talking about it. Her legal practice was never up the sharp end of criminal defence or prosecution so she will not have met it there. It would be very easy to persuade her that it was about decriminalizing consensual sex between 16 year old boys, rather than one of them being six.
She might have known what she was doing, but then again, I will show you all sorts of women who simply did not understand they were being used as cover.
The relevance to the blog post is this: is there a connection between Robertson, via Glasgow Uni, with any of the names Mega mentions? If so, shout Bingo.
Perhaps so, Mr Ishmael, perhaps so. My bile was directed at Harman and the like, I have none for Mrs Woman. I just found it a little difficult to understand how anyone might think that Hattie is merely a little thick, instead of intentionally evil.
Longford may well have been a nice chap, dunno, never met him, but he brought the law of this land into disrepute with his sympathy for mass murderers and child torturers. Hindley and her ilk are kept clean and well-fed. They are not subject to the torture they have dispensed themselves. They have free medical care, housing, clothing, dentistry, etc. Others have noted that we ought to put our old people in prison instead of nursing homes, they would be treated far better. We are in this mess because of two failures of the state; firstly, its refusal to execute murderers. The only argument against the DP is, for me, the untrustworthiness of the police and judiciary, not the DP itself, nor the remote chance of being wrongly accused and then being unable to prove oherwise. Not a realistic circumstance, except for aforementioned corruption. The second failing of state is its betrayal of the public, yet again, in conning them into believing that the DP would be exchanged for the life sentence, and that the LS would allow such as Hindley to be denied ALL possibility of EVER being released. This was a lie. Life now means, on average, 11 years. That, excuse my saxon Mr Ishmael, is a fucking outrage. That Longford should show FAR more concern for the murderer, rather than the murdered, is equally offensive. It is not his place to forgive, nor mine, nor yours. The law is blind, and breaking it's most central edict, thou shalt not murder, should be punished without fear or favour. If that poor woman who died recently, denied even the consolation of burying the son murdered by these animals wishes to forgive, that is her prerogative. It is utterly irrelevant as far as the law is concerned. I am under the impression that Christianity, the real version, not the twaddle the latest AB of C pushes, does not ever envisage forgiveness without repentance, else there would be no Hell, would there? When repentance is found and God grants His forgiveness for sin, this has no bearing on the state's responsibility to punish crime, which is distinct from sin. It's OK m'lud, stop the trial, the prisoner can go free, God has forgiven him, as has Lord Longford?
Brittan was, is, a shit. I dislike him as much as Harman but he was entirey right to seek to ensure that a murderer sentenced to life should die in his cell, not be released after 11 years. If I had my way, I would have all those serving life sentences for murder shot. No exceptions.
Things are better now than the bad old days? Perhaps. We no longer send children up chimneys. Instead we seem to expect nothing from them at all. Men no longer have to go down the pit. Because there aren't any. True, feminism has freed the wife from the kitchen. In exchange for the slavery of a desk, or a conveyor belt, and has so eroded her husband's wages that he most likely could not keep her even if she wanted. She in turn is depriving an unskilled man a job, swelling the ranks of the unemployed. She does help boost employment in the child 'care' sector though, paying more than her mortgage to ensure little Tommy is raised by surrogates - fuckwit teenagers. Better cancer care, true, true. If you have the right postcode, and you're not deemed too old or unproductive to treat. The poor man is still poor. His poverty still kills him early. The rich are richer than ever, and beggars are no longer allowed near his gate, Security won't allow it. We live longer now. But the feel the quality, not the length, so to speak. The old suffer indignities and deprivations that the likes of Longford would bleat on about, if murderers were ever expected to suffer the same.
Literacy is better now than then? Now I know you're taking the piss :-)
Vincent.
Mrs Woman,
Good question. Here's another one: is there a connection between Leon Brittan, William Hague, Patricia Hewitt, Harriet Harman, Lord Robertson and Dolphin Square in Pimlico?
Vincent.
"An academic in Europe had infiltrated Ipce, an international paedophile organisation, and I was being sent their online correspondence each day. It was apparent that many members were academics, driven by a desire to persuade the rest of society that sex with children was acceptable and to influence legislators all over the world to lower the age of consent. Intriguingly, there was a clear link to Glasgow University and a suggested link to Cambridge University."
It is a chilling read, mrs woar, but also encouraging, thank you. Dunno about Robertson and Glasgow, must have a look; isn't the once professionally married for career purposes but now careerless and divorced Charlie Dipso Kennedy the Rector or some such?
Mrs Ishmael, who knows about such things, becoems almost irritating when she rages at the widespread amount of unreported, unprosecuted and thus unimportant paedophile offending in this country. My own knowledge is limited to a childhood molestation from the late Reverend Brian Duckworth of the Methodists and of having worked with a few serial nonces, just a few, enough mind, to convince me that these people keep secrets from themselves.
I knew Ray Wyre a bit, cited in that article, and I must say that I thought he was more showman than clinician. But then I think most of them are. Dunno how people work in that world for any length of time. Hadn't ought to be allowed.
I find the contents of the last few posts extremely enlightening and they seem to bear out my recently drawn conclusion that our political parties have more in common than excessive expense claims.
It seems as though they all feel that they should be "modernising" every thing as proof that they are "modern" and "forward looking". In this day and age this always seems to be the loosening of old moral values and decency, and substituting instead dubious "personal freedoms", along with replacing truth with falsehood and guile.
These "personal freedom" activities are not new they are very old. Moses knew about them...he warned against them.
Basically they, the politicians, are buying votes by allowing (maybe "encouraging" ) activities, most of which are in themselves can be relatively harmless in returns for the retention of power and wealth.
Looking back to my childhood days, in the prewar years, there was less violent crime, more inter-personal respect, more respect for the voter by the politician with less desire by the politician to totally control the population and bleed it dry.
When one looks back at the changes in the licensing laws, the gambling laws, the loosening of moral standards, the myth that the state has a duty to support every citizen etc etc the reason for the present state of affairs all seems to be much more obvious.
My involvement with Longford, mr vincent, was with regard to a lifer, he had killed a middle-aged mother in his teens but was by all the fearsome observations of the home office lifer's unit approaching a time when he might safely be returned to society, after about twelve years. I don't know if you've ever breathed the air in a high security prison but I am sure that if you did, you would reconsider pensionsing off the elderly therein.
The lifer, from the moment of sentence, is observed and reported upon, he is taught how to do a life sentence, in most cases he will have a tarrif to serve before which he may not be considered for release, his conduct must be blameless, his irritating a screw can set him back years, there is a set of protocols and formalities by which a lifer's life is run, he may not step out of line without consequence. Similarly when and if he is released on license his behaviour is strictly circumscribed; sometimes a license will be discharged if the supervising officer and the home office believe beyond doubt that the lifer presents no risk, in most cases it will remain until his death. He can and is swiftly recalled to prison for the slightest enfringement of his license conditions. This system has been so successful that the last time I looked, re-offending stats for lifers showed a rate of 0.06 per cent, and that relates to all and any offences, shoplifting, for instance. A lifer, then, whilst not perpetually confined, is never free and his release is a heavily society-weighted balance of public protection, deterrence and useful rehabilitation.
I have sat in rooms with six or eight murderers, so grant me, please, some insight to the matter. Most lifers whom I have met I would happily have a swift pint with them in the hope of making things infinitessimally better in the world; others, a couple, made my blood run cold, one had been released after twenty five fucking years, yet was, to my mind, still dangerous, a mistake, and the other had yet to commit his murders yet exuded naked malice. I often think of them Victor Heywood, now mercifully dead and Brian Wildman, still, I hope, doing life somewhere and I wonder what arranged their lives so and all I can think is that, at some point, a little judicious love, understanding, intervention might have saved their victims' lives and their own; hanging, shooting, garotting, firing squads would not have kept those three women alive; it doesn't work anywhere else, why should it work here, just because you want it to?
Leon Brittan, anyway, unlawfully re-sentenced dozens of people like Roy Honeyman, just on a whim, just for a self-aggrandising flourish at a gathering of Tory ghouls. The only way in which we can value our law is by sticking to it, not auctioning it off to the loudest, braying hang 'em and flog 'em bidder. continues
continues.....I never spoke to Longford about victims of crime but I detected a man of great compassion who could not but have been moved by the offences - famously of the notorious Hindley and Brady - which had so violated so many lives. That he chose to befriend the friendless is, in my view, quite noble, exemplary, even, somebody must or we are lost.
And consider, for a moment the public face of the victim-lover, people like Kelvin McKenzie, Derek Jameson, Simon Heffer these people made a lifelong career of stoking the fires of hatred in those bereaved by beastly crime, every year they would stoke the outrage, throw salt in the wounds, prolong the agony of the agonised, Kelvin McFilth and his gang simply forbade the victims' relatives from moving on with their lives, keeping them on the end of Rage's string, even until they died. Do not, for Heaven's sake, mr vincent, associate yourself with such wickedness as Kelvin McKenzie.
Few of us are completely beyond redemption - Blair and his crew, Hindley and Brady, may well be outside Decency's pale - but listen, most murderers are first offenders, that's to say they could be you or me or anyone, could be otherwise blameless, just lost it for a moment. Would you really strangle them to death on a rope, because that is what would happen, master executioner Pierrepoint is long dead, God bless his morbid efficiency.
AS for your last paragraph, well some days I believe every word of it - just look at the label on the tin, The chronicles of Ruin - but despite all those ills, things ate better than they were, overall; moer people get more healthcare than ever before, children do not get rickets, successive governements aided by inept parents have suppressed what should be universal literacy, even so, more people than ever read.
And finally, such social reforms on which you and I may agree have been authored far more fluently and effectively by the likes of Frank Longford than by the likes of Leon Brittan, a man who is held by many, for many reasons, to belong in one of your holiday camp prisons.
It's a whaddayacallem, a shibolleth, isn't it, mr alphons, modernising, as though the word itself contained and conferred goodness, virtue; they have used it all my life, I think, apart from MacMillan's lot; poor mad Wilson started it with his WhiteHot Technological Revolution and this gang are still doing it, with The Global Game, always something which we don't know but they, thankfully, can explain to us. It's a priesthood, isn't it, a shamanism, modernism? I think it'd be pretty modernisng if all the children in the world could get a drink of water. Until then they can all fuck off with their modernising, George Orwell's 1940s essay on the The English Used By Politicians is a most worthwhile read, even though he was another public schoolboy without a proper job.
The loosening of the licensing and the gambling laws which you mention are, not to mention the High Street and onlune usury pestilence, in fact, contradictory to, sit uneasily alongside the idea of the benevolent state which is used to justify nthe most despotic interventions. What we need of course is an English Revolution, the seeds of which might just be germinating in the UKIP phenomenon. Not in Fargae, himself, mind, for he is one of them, but in the idea of Otherness which he has prompted.
Mr Ishmael,
I have known 3 murderers in my time, 2 of them more than mere acquaintances. I also had the misfortune to live next door to a family whose son was murdered, and I used to employ a man whose parents were murdered, by his brother. I have seen first hand the permanent, devasting, longer-lasting than 11 years damage it causes, to not just a few of those left behind.
I also used to help in a NACRO scheme whereby prisoners approaching either the end of lengthy terms or parole 'after' a life sentence were allowed day release from the local prison, to participate in, mostly, property maintenence on church buildings, lawn-mowing, painting, cleaning, etc, to attempt to reintroduce them to society gently.
Quite a number appeared to me to be mentally ill and totally unfit to be released, a danger to the public undoubtedly. I do not speak from Mckenzien ignorance, but from some limited experience of these matters, and from what used to be called common sense.
It is a symptom of ruin, a vicious one at that, that the value of a human life is so low it can be reckoned to be worth just an 11 year stretch. Human life used to be, ought to be, is, sacrosanct. Murder is the ultimate crime. The taking of human life without legal authority should be universally viewed as the most heinous of crimes, one which can only be punished with the ultmate penalty, if only to serve to reinforce the notion that murder is the very worst thing a man can do.
I am not concerned with the rehabilitation of murderers, Mr Ishmael, not one little bit. Their stories are undoubtedly, usually, sad. Poor and absent parents, substance abuse, etc, etc. A civil society must do all it can to help those so afflicted, if only so society need not then suffer at their hands, perhaps avoid one or two of these poor unfortunates turning to murder, but there must be a line drawn, a line which, once crossed, the state's responsibilty to protect it's citizens moves irretrievably past reform and rehabilitation to justice and punishment. That line is murder.
We must not let our concern for the rehabilitation of the offender blind us to the severity of his crime, to allow compassion to become a weakness. I'm afraid your 0.06% is just plain wrong. The link at the bottom shows the man in charge of this thinks it closer to one in fifty. Almost 200 people in the UK are dead, murdered by murderers who have already served a life sentence and then been released, only to kill again. Reoffending rates amongst the executed are, not surprisingly, remarkably good.
I think it more cruel to stick a man in a cell for 40 years than despatch him quickly with a shot to the head, not, as you emotively put it, strangled, though if that were the only method available, so be it.
We can be compassionate to the murderer, Mr Ishmael, we can show him a kindness he doesn't desrve, we can love him still, without the need to so offend justice and the families of the victims that we despise their suffering in order to display our own worthiness, without allowing that murderer to get away with, well, murder.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8246989/Sir-David-Latham-Life-reoffending-rates-higher-than-we-think.html
Vincent
Another note, Mr Ishmael.
The DM is going after Judge Adrian Fulford who has just reduced a sentence against a teacher in a case of possession of material.
Fulford says he has no recollection of PIE and that he defended gay men against outrageous persecution by the police. He says all he remembers is that PIE managed to get itself affiliated to the NCCL and that he was uncomfortable with that.
However, there is a press report from 1991 where Fulford defended Steven Smith, a former chairman of the Paedophile Information Exchange, on charges of making an obscene publication.
Fulford said Smith and the others would not have published the magazine if the police had warned them it was in breach of the law. The prosecution offered no evidence on four other charges, which Smith denied, of incitement to commit buggary, to have unlawful sex with a girl under 16 and to indecently assault a boy and girl under 16 in 1982. Formal not guilty verdicts were recorded.
If the judge cannot remember this case, then there must be something wrong with him. If, however, he does remember it but is pretending not to, then he is not being truthful.
http://spotlightonabuse.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/child-porn-man-who-fled-is-jailed-seven-years-later-16-12-91/
Thanks, mr vincent, although I disagree with your almost every word - practically, morally, ethically I believe you to be in passionate error, either the taking of life is wrong or it ain't, your distinction between judicial and private murder is and has always been unclear to me.
Shame what happened to NACRO, Viv Stern milking it for a peerage, Nigel Whiskin for an M or was it an OBE?
We'll just have to differ on the Death penalty and on penology generally, me in my what you might call milky Quakerism, you in your Old Testamentalism. Even so. I could stretch a point and a neck or two in the case of so-called statespersons, like Tony and Imelda.
It has almost slipped from or been polished out of the public consciousness, mrs woar, how degenerate are the judiciary. When there used to be brothel stories - Cynthia Payne - and Call Girl stories -Christine Keeler and charity saint, John-Jack Profumo - and Freemasonry stories -The Brotherhood, it was always just a fact iof life that the more exotic the sex on sale, the more senior and distinguished the judiciary paying for it, closely followed by the bishops, of course. That ghastly old champage socialist, John Mortimer, in his Rumpole series, bold enough only to point at the incompetence of His Honour and not his hypocritical corruption.
Nothing you report about that lot would surprise me. I will follow your link, thanks. Main thing, though, is that we reform the CPS that worthies such as the cock-waving Mr Evans are spared eleven months of exaggerated Hell.
I shall not hog your blog, Mr Ishmael, I know mine is not a popular view and a little comment box is not sufficient for such a large subject.
Just one more point; one thing I have noticed over the years is that the opponents of the DP try to conflate it with murder, as you have done in your latest comment. 'There is no difference between the citizen taking a human life and the state doing likewise' goes the argument. It is fallacious. There is a world of difference. If the state were to appoint it's executioner and then order him to hang around outside the pub on a Saturday night, pissed, waiting any man who looked at him 'funny' to emerge, so he could dash his brains out with a baseball bat or stab him with his Rambo knife, it would be a reasonable argument. If the executioner were permitted to drop a cyanide pill in the curry of a friend who owed him money, or strangle the colleague who refused to sleep with him, after raping her, or kidnap a child at random and torture him before dismembering him, then OK, your argument holds. But this is not what execution is. The accused is subject to months, years of due legal process. He has a trial by his peers. He had advocates and legal representation and appeals and pleas for clemency, but most of all, most pertinently of all, he had the choice to not slit his victim's throat and therefore find himself in such a sorry position to begin with.
He finds himself at the end of a rope entirely out of his own choice, not at random, and not without a fair trial.
Vincent
It's alright, there's no -forgive me - guillotine on debate, here, mr vincent. Say what you will.
I do equate it, the death penalty, to murder because that is what it is; it is the purposeful, premeditated extinction of another human life and it doesn't make one iota of difference that the act is sanctuoned by the sort of filth who have always been parliamentary lawmakers. I think, further, that it is morally more repugnant than a hot-blooded murder in that the condemned is told in advance, to the minute, the date and time of his death, is kept healthy pending his death, is prayed to by some noncing priest, is made spectator at his own killing; it is unspeakably repulsive, anti-human and sadistic beyond belief. Also, it is of absolutely no deterrent purpose, it is cruelty for cruelty's sake. I didn't crawl up out of the sea to do shit like that.
In nealry all instances I am for the preservation of human life, especially with the Debbie Purdies and the wretched scribbler wossisnmane, Pratchett andthe horrid Margo MacDonolad, all of whom want me to help them kill themselves, bless, for their fucking dignity, heedless that they encourage entirely voluntary but compulsory euthanasia of the unproductive; it is a Nazi nightmare, euthanasia. and so is its cousin, the death penalty.
I live in hope of your agreement.
These are difficult questions, Mr Ishmael, with no easy answers.
I have admitted previously that the main problem with DP in my opinion is that the people that administrate it cannot be trusted, but this does not matter for the purposes of this debate, whether the DP is or is not intrinsically wrong.
Cruel is what the murderer is, Mr Ishmael, when he strips an innocent man of all he ever had, all he's got and all he'll ever have, when he murders him. Cruel is recording the pleading and begging of a child for his mother as you torture him, so you can 'enjoy' it afresh later, as Hindley and Brady did. Cruel is hacking the body of your victim to bits and scattering the pieces about the country, in a bid to evade detection. Cruel is the often arbritrary nature of the murder, being in the wrong place and at the wrong time. It is not cruel, not in my book, to hold such people to account. They know the punishment in advance, they make their choice. It is not the state which randomly selects a victim, it is the murderer who willingly volunteers to be executed by choosing to commit a crime for which the punishment is death. Is it not cruel to tell a family that the man that deprived you of your mother is set free after 11 years inside, whilst your mother is still a rape victim and still dead? No parole for her, no early release from death's clutches shall she experience. That's cold. That's cruel.
That priests are often nonces is neither here nor there, neither is the fact that the man is aware of the punishment for such a crime and, after detection, dreads it. I do not care whether the DP is a deterrent or not, that is not the debate. If it is, jolly good. If not, then it is even more of a reason to have those who are undeterred permanently removed from society, If they are unmoved by such a threat.
Equating murder with execution because they both involve the taking of human life is illogical. It is like saying that we ought not fine the thief, as both thievery and fining involve the confiscation of someone else's money, or that we ought not imprison the kidnapper as it involves forced detention.
If the state will not do its duty and execute the murderer, it should at least keep to the deal sold to the British public, which was that the punishment for previously capital offenses was to be exchanged for life imprisonment, and that life meant life. It was never, ever intended that life imprisonment should mean 11 years in prison and then see the Probation officer once every few months, so long as you promise not to kill anyone else.
You'll have no argument from about euthanasia. Just a dreadful idea. Vile.
Vincent.
To realise your preferred position mr vincent, you need to reimagine society and work towards a new, to most minds, alien set of values.
We have not had victims' justice since, when...The Conquest, the Wessex and Mercian Kingdoms, The Romans? I don't know, I certainly don't hark back to a time when individuals took their own revenge; whenever there has been society or shall we call it civilisation, punishment has been determined by the state, balancing the perceived needs of the state, with the needs of the victim for revenge or compensation and of the offender's need to be punished proportionately; you simply cannot have people taking the law into their own hands. The Judaeo- part of Judaeo-Christianity did rail that an eye should be taken for an eye, certainly, but they were and are full of shit and superstition, those people; and the giving and receiving of forgiveness has long - in our culturally Christian society - superceded the Old Testamentalism which you espouse.
All is not lost, though, punitively speaking, for another branch of the Abrahamic religious tree practices the fundamentalist lust for equivalent violence for which you seem to hunger.
It is in Iran, I think, that a court recently sentenced a man to having his eyes gouged out and his nose removed in retaliation for a similar, acid-attack outrage which he perpetrated on a former girlfriend. I don't know if the sentence was carried out but it cetainly does address and must satisfy the need for punishment which you describe, couldn't be better, in fact. I think it is a fucking outrage. By the logic of all of your posts on this subject, however, you must find it proportionate and just; or is that illogical, too?
Savagery begets savagery, please don't try to tell me otherwise, you will be wasting your time.
My view, unlike your own, is unSharian, it is that we should concentrate on preventing people being torured, killed, molested, maimed and all the rest of it. To think, as you seem to, that we can somehow improve our collective condition by doing that which we outlaw, that future victims' lives will be spared by some manly, no-nonsense, self-congratulatory, Job Done, Got What he deserved claptrap, as some other soul dangles from the gallows pole, is, forgive me, not only wrong, foolish, immoral and perverse, it is also alien, in the worst possible way. Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Uncle Sam, these people do that shit. Behold their works.
I deplore these murders no less than you, of course I don't, a non-Theist, though, I believe as strongly in Redemption as I do in the current triumph of Ruin and from my knowledge of you over the past while I suspect that you do, too; maybe Redemption is the wrong word, too spiritual. I just wish I could get you to see that stringing people up, however badly they have behaved, s worse for we, the stringers, than it is for the strung.
For one to have redemption, one must have a redeemer. Perhaps you are not such a non-theist after all, Mr Ishmael? Or shall you be Hindley's Christ?
One must not confuse Christianity with Old Testamentism. Apples and Oranges. The DP is authorised in the New Testament as well as the Old, btw, to be used by the State as she sees fit, to maintain law and order. Towards the back of the book you'll find prophesies of its central character, Jesus himself, wading about up to his ankles in the blood of His enemies, blood which He Himself has shed. Christianity is not pacifism, nor Christ a pacifist, Mr Ishmael. Just as a side note, it seems another token of ruin that Christianity (the kind expounded by Welby and other assorted wets) seems to have been distilled into some strangebrew of 'being nice', mostly to homosexuals and muslims, and 'it'll be alright in the end', which, as far as my understanding of scripture goes, it won't.
I do not need to be Christian to rightly think that a thief should be punished, or a perjurer, or a thug, etc. I am not moved by religious fervour, nor spite, to think a man must pay with his life for taking a life. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.
One must also not conflate Christianity with the bastard, impostor offspring, Islam. The circumstances you describe are, truly, dreadful. The Iranian man's crime should attract a severe punishment, just not that one. Making a cripple of him for GBH is not what I have called for, you are being naughty to imply that my 'savagery' extends to cases like his. I have restricted myself to calling for the execution of murderers. Not as deterrent, not as retribution, but as justice, as the only thing which will rightly impress upon the public's mind the horror of the crime of murder. The condemned man should be despatched as swifly as possible, and the period between conviction and punishment should be as short as possible, but no so short as to induce errors or injustices. Nor have I ever called for family or friends to be avenged, themselves being the avengers. Naughty again, tsk :-) Their calls for blood are as irrelevant as their calls for clemency, as far as law is concerned. Blindfolded she is, Justice, Mr Ishmael.
You have not addressed one of my most salient points. I, and I dare say a fair few others of my persuasion, would be silenced if the State had kept its word and exchanged the DP for a 'life means life' sentence. You have not really explained, much less justified, your belief that murderers should be released from prison, quite a lot after just 11 or 12 years, so long as they are deemed safe, presumably by the same justice system and officials that I admit are not to be trusted with the DP.
You'd be a better man than me if you could permit the murderer of a loved one to go free after such a piffling sentence, and if you could not envisage yourself doing so, God forbid you should find yourself in such circumstances, how can you say that some other murderer, of some person you didn't know or love, should be set free, because you think it's a bit cruel to have them piss their life away in a cell, even though it is they that chose to do the pissing?
I'm afraid that we do indeed disagree Mr Ishmael, perhaps I am too harsh, too keen for justice and perhaps you are a little weak, forgiving stuff that is none of your business to forgive, and perhaps there is a middle ground, although that sounds dangerously like a useless compromise, and I really cannot think what that middle ground may be.
Vincent.
I say the things which irritate you simply because I believe that murder and murderers are wrong and that we should be better; that we should set an example which might decrease homicide; it is not the pissing away of their lives which bugs me, mr vincent, but of ours.
As for theere being a compact between the legislator and the cruel, stupid, vengeful ones, the McKenzieites, I am happy for that never to happen. Lotsa people read the Sun and have what they think are opinions. Fuck 'em and fuck their bloodlust, too.
Nothing which you say will deter, prevent or ameliorate murder and are actually more likely to increase it for savagery it is and savagery it will beget, look at America, I mean, just look at the past few days and weeks; what has the death penalty there done to assuage or reduce Uncle Sam's rage at himself ? Nothing, fuck all, it is a brutish, cruel society and that is reflected increasigly ib its citizenry. Killing people, mr vincent, is either wrong or it ain't. The state should set an example. My arguments at least are a step on the road to understanding and, yours, however deployed, reek of an eye for an eye.
I could stat-porn you Mr Ishmael, with, amongst other things, the indisputable fact that the murder rate in the UK has more than doubled since abolition, but as I have have repeatedly said, it is irrelevant, totally, whether or not the DP deters. If the levels of theft in this country are anything to go by, if we were to follow your line of reasoning the courts had best pack up and go home, don't bother to punish thieves at all, because they are not deterrred, not one little bit, by current punishments. The thing with criminals is that they have a very poor understanding between actions and future consequences; they act in the now, without considerations of the punishments for their crimes nor the well-being of their victims. Such people are not deterred, by anything, they are so selfish and/or stupid. It is to be noted that they obviously are not deterred from killing people when facing the prospect of a 12 year 'life' sentence for their crime. Should we scrap imprisonment as a punishment, Mr Ishmael, because it self-evidently doesn't work? According to your argument on deterrent, we should.
Your assertion that killing people is wrong, full stop, no exceptions, is incorrect, and is not my position. Murdering people is wrong, most certainly, but not all killings are murders, including executions.. To kill the burglar who has a knife to my wife's throat is not murder, though dead he still is. It is entirely justifiable, legally and morally. It is a matter of self-defense, not murder. When a Policeman shoots the bank robber, because he is waving a gun around in the street, after robbing the bank, this is not murder. It is again a defensive action, And the DP is an extension of that, it is a societal self-defense, an action which will prevent further loss of life, as in the cases of the near 200 men and women murdered in this country by life sentence prisoners on parole after already having been convicted of murder, and then released to murder again, just because they promised to be good after their 'rehabilitation'.
It is clear that the British public want a reintroduction of the DP for certain crimes. On every single poll taken over the last 30 years, they have answered 'yes', in a significant majority. That they might read the Sun, or the Mail, well, what has that to do with the price of fish? Your 'fuck them' idea is rather akin to the iknowbestism you rightly rail about in these pages, a denial of democracy, the infliction of an unpopular and failed opinion on those who have repeatedly made it clear they expect the law-makers to do something about the law-breakers, to which the law-makers have also replied, 'Fuck 'em'.
I am no more concerned for the doings of Americans than I am the cost of a canoe in Alaska. They appear to me to be, for the most part, semi-retarded. That they cannot organise a judicial system comes as no surprise, and their failures should not become our excuses for refusing to adequately deal with the murderer.
At the risk of labouring the point Mr Ishmael, all my arguments would be moot if a life sentence meant what the British Government originally promised, which was that the murderer would never be released from prison. You have not explained why this is a bad idea, nor why a life sentence should mean 12 years, on average, which obviously means a great number of lifers serve even less than that.
My arguments may, as you say, reek, but not so much they can mask the smell of the moldering murder victim, rotting in their grave. It's OK if you dont have the stomach for it, there are others who do, there is another Pierepoint out there somewhere.
I'm not irritated, btw.
Vincent.
For now, mr vincent, we must differ, although I will consider what you have said, thanks.
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